I’m reluctant to get further involved in this exercise, but after reading a few more posts I simply have to.
I can handle the morons slithering forth from the slime, passing simplistic knee-jerk judgements, their feeble intellects sagging under the weight of words such as “sycophant”, their output serving the same purpose as always: plumbing the depths of human stupidity and ignorance. I can handle all that, because I expect it from the many that Collounsbury slammed for their assorted bigotry, trolling, willful ignorance, partisan debating, and so forth. Certainly Coll has many enemies bearing (often ideological) grudges, though it would be nice if these people had the rectitude and mental cohesion to meaningfully support their nasty little indictments before Coll was banned and thus helpless to defend himself.
(Sam, you’re the exception here: although I don’t feel you ever made a strong case with your complaints, you usually said what you had to say straight up. Kudos)
What I can’t handle are silly platitudes and simplified explanations such as the following:
Cute, but nonsense. He was banned after he lost his temper with yet another microcephalic fool who was trying to discredit him with unrelated personal attacks and hand-waving devoid of any meaningful content (that not against the rules?). And Coll’s transgression was (for the nth time) a distinctly minor one, the various pundits who have graced us with their snappy unsupported judgements notwithstanding.
True. It’s also true that Coll was in a difficult position himself: released back on to the boards but watched closely while a number of other idiots did as they pleased – he certainly was not the only one infuriated by stupidity. Coll’s temperament is foul, but even fouler IMO is doing nothing about the legions of idiots who do nothing but troll or heave bigotry around on a site with such a noble mission as this one. Revolting.
This isn’t even cute, it’s just tiresome and (deliberately?) oversimplified drivel. The don’t be a jerk rule is regularly broken by a large number of posters, many of them trolls, many of them bigots, many of them adherents of debate styles such as deliberately misrepresenting opponents’ arguments, most of them people who Coll did us the favour of putting down and parceling away so that more respectable information could be given prominence. I’ve never seen Coll deliberately misrepresent or misquote another poster’s argument. Never seen him go trolling, spread hateful bigotry, or substitute cheap propaganda for arguments, techniques many of his opponents are especially fond of and which as far as I am concerned are dire problems. Never seen him tear someone up without good reason and in a manner at the very least oblique to the rules if not in loose accordance with them.
But, most especially, Collounsbury brought a net benefit to these boards. People may justly complain that he is acerbic and unpleasant in style, but just look at his body of work: for every indirect (or even direct) insult he posted there are reams and reams of highly informed and informative arguments on several important topics over which the posters on these boards are largely and embarrassingly ignorant (or, worse, biased). His record speaks for itself – if the particular vermin rejoicing in Coll’s banning had one-tenth the ability to produce informed and balanced arguments there would be no need for the drastic techniques Coll sometimes employed.
Funny, that’s how I feel about your posts sometimes. Doesn’t stop me from appreciating or seriously evaluating what you have to say, and if I purposely don’t read your posts then I make damn sure I keep my trap shut about material that I deliberately skipped over.
More platitudes. Do you think there are any two or even three or four posters whose work combined approaches the level of information and penetration delivered by Collounsbury? Let’s take the Middle East or Islam and look at the contributions by Tomndebb and Tamerlane, two distinguished and knowledgeable posters who are without fail polite and informative. Much as I enjoy reading their posts, I don’t believe they made a fraction of the impact on the fight against ignorance that Collounsbury achieved with his high volume of take-responsibility-for-your-words, anti-weaseling, direct, no-shit, vaguely Cecilian style.
If I may provide a platitude of my own, sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. It seems to me Coll did a lot more good around here than bad, which is more than I can say for a large number of other posters.
