Not saying Coll didn’t do anything wrong, but I didn’t think that example was all that heinous either. I understand that it was the straw the broke the camel’s back and all, but the guy was being pretty cocky when Coll told him to fuck off. Again, not saying that was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t like he said it totally out of the blue.
You got me curious, so I did some searching. Do you mean this thread?
It didn’t happen quite as you remember it. Sue was the first to start the shouting and cursing. Collounsbury was pretty civil before that, and even after she started it, I hardly think “savaged” is an accurate description. And he even apologized later.
(Interesting side-note in that thread: note all the posters, Col included, who asserted that there was no way the US would ever intervene militarily in Afghanistan, and if they did, there was no way they’d succeed. 
)
Sam:
Heh. I love the way your mind works. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
Considering the mincemeat Collounsbury regularly made of your opinions regarding problems in the Middle East, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see you post something along these lines. Nothing like a little ad hominem backstab to fasten the last nail on the coffin lid, eh, Sammy? Especially now that Col can’t reply.
But to begin with, the idea that no one ever “questioned Col’s opinions” in GD is ludicrous. You did yourself, more often than not – and though he usually made you look the fool for it, that’s really your problem.
And in fact, as anyone who has hung around here on the boards for any length of time (such as yourself) should well know, the quality of a person’s arguments should not be judged by the characteristics of his/her personality. They should be judged on whether or not they are based on fact, and build logically to a conclusion. After all, we know that Isaac Newton was something of an asshole, but no one suggests we reject calculus because of his temper.
Yup. Which pretty much sums up the difference between you and him as well, I’d say.
In fact, part of what made Col’s presence so gratifying for many here was that he saved us much time and trouble parsing through the bullshit many people (like you) post regarding the Middle East. We had access to a specialist who could handily debunk misconceptions and errors of fact that would take a non-specialist hours to figure out.
So it doesn’t really surprise me to learn that you’re glad to see him gone, and quick to demean him now that he’s out of the picture. One less worry for the promotion of ignorance!
No, gee, Sam, “we’re” all real stupid out here and that never occurred to any of “us”. Thanks for pointing it out.
Col presented facts, and then argued for a specific perspective on the basis of those facts. I think most intelligent readers are capable of separating the two, and perhaps even developing a perspective contrary to his. I’ll grant you he could be overbearing often enough, and didn’t suffer disagreement well, but I second Abe’s sentiments about the entire situation (although I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion).
Yeah, well not who post on this board.
I agree with many here who’ve pointed out that Col wasn’t the “be all and end all” authority on issues middle-eastern, but nobody could deny that he didn’t have an awful lot of expertise in that area.
While I appreciated the copious and yet concise information Col provided, the whole Erudite-cum-Swashbuckling-cum-Neanderthal persona was quite tiresome. And I say “persona” because I think the condescention and the insults were simply that – part of an image he cultivated here. Whether that had to do with personal frustrations in his work or private life, or whether he simply got a kick out of it, I can’t say. But I very much doubt the off-line Col would come even close to acting the way he did here when his “thunderbolts from heaven” came into question. Because as great a fencer he might be, odds are someone would have gone Indiana Jones on his ass a long time ago. To put it simply, people don’t act that way IRL. And if they do, they’re normally not around for long.
In that sense, he should count the time he spent here in dog-years. Because I am surprised he lasted this long.
Perhaps there is a lesson there somewhere.
Yea, that was what I was refering to. Since that dosen’t refer to you( I’m taking your word for it 
), and I would judge that we’ve been about equally snarky at each other in the rest of these posts, shall we lay this one to rest?
I’ve seen this posted time and time again, over and over. Would you care to tell me what special insight and knowledge Colls possesed, beyond living in the Mid East, that qualify him as a “specialist”? I never got an answer to this when he was here, in spite of asking him directly several times, maybe you could enlighten me? I greatly suspect that much of the Collounsbury veneration comes not from his knowledge, but his ability to insult creatively whilst dancing along the line seperating acceptable from going too far.
Dave:
I believe he worked for some kind of Middle-East investment firm, one that was responsible for large capital transfers. He wrote about it in a thread not too long ago, but didn’t name the specific firm, naturally. In addition, he claimed to speak fluent Arabic in two dialects, and I see no reason to doubt him on that, myself. Finally, his posts displayed an in-depth knowledge of the area, in and of themselves; I’ve yet to see anyone show otherwise, anyway.
See, I don’t recognize myself as a person who “venerates” Collounsbury; I just don’t vilify him, either.
To be honest, I found his writing style, insults, and patronizing grandiosity to be very unappetizing. But he was a wealth of information, as even Sam acknowledges.
And, as I wrote earlier, I have some sympathy for his temper. For my money, Abe is spot-on 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.” I’m sick of it as well; I come here for news and informed debate, but all too often I find nothing other than willful ignorance dressed up in rhetorical chicanery. Whatever other faults Collounsbury may have had, that wasn’t one of them.
Coll unfailingly presented quality cites (including, in the race threads, cites to peer reviewed genetics research, and, in the recent Iraq threads, cites to Coalition Autority publications). When he voiced opinions, he characterized them as such. People that argued against the facts presented, without cites, got appropriately shredded. The true shreddings were reserved for those that did so repeatedly (and there were (are) more than a few of these “drooling idiots”).
It’s too bad that we can’t jointly agree that the verbal shredding of drooling idiots is a good thing. At best, it might frighten them, and make them take the time to be properly informed before they trot out their baseless opinions in the next instance. At the very least it provides for good entertainment, and makes it less likely that any moderately interested person will take their opions seriously.
Treating them with kid gloves (everyone is entitled to an opinion!) clearly is not working, and in fact leads to potentially dangerous societal problems, such as the recent FDA proposal that scientists running clinical studies request that participants be grouped into self-identified racial classifications: As reported in a column in today’s Wall Street Journal, the FDA is working on the premise that physiological response to a drug – complications as well as how well it works – reflects genes, and that those genes can be predicted by which of these 10 racial categories you fall into. The well meaning but horrifically misinformed idiots putting forth these recommendations should be subject to a few pages of Coll’s best put-downs.
Um, how about we just tone down the snark factor a bit? I really don’t want to fight with you, but I’m not quite done…
If you’re now confining your scorn to those who think he should be exempt from the rules, I’ve got no argument. But Abe’s post didn’t do that. He described why he liked Collounsbury, but didn’t question the Admin’s decision. And you accused him of having “bought into the whole Collounsbury cult”, as if he’d been brainwashed or something, rather than having arrived at his opinion on his own.
The attitude I’m getting from you is that anyone who doesn’t dislike Collounsbury as you do is just not thinking. That is what I found offensive.
Quite a hijack, but…
Personally, I still stand 100% behind the comments I made then ;).
- Tamerlane
shelbo: Collounsbury’s failing was not in the shredding of the “drooling idiots,” but rather in the shredding of them in the wrong forum.
Well, what I got from Abe’s post was a bunch of implied buts:
Taken as a whole, Abe’s post strikes me as one long apology for Collounsbury’s behavior. A giant, well written, “He deserves special treatement because he’s such a good poster. Sure he broke the rules, BUT…”
Maybe. I’m not Abe, so I can’t say what he meant, and he’s perfectly capable of speaking for himself.
But can we agree that it is possible to be a Collounsbury fan without being a sycophantic brainwashed zombie cultist? (Say “yes” and I’ll shut up! Promise! )
(Once again, just FTR: I do not have a problem with his banning. In Gaudere’s place, I’d have done the same thing. I’m just kind of sorry it had to be done is all.)
The idiots DO get called on their stupidity on a regular basis-but they get called on in the Pit. All Collounsbury had to do was go to the Pit and roast them there.
Apparently, he was too lazy to do so.
Oh well.
IMHO, this is an example of the collounsbury worship that I alluded to earlier. The reality is that (1) sometimes collounsbury was not able to back up what he said; and (2) sometimes he attacked people who were NOT wrong. (I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “shredded” but I’m going to try to avoid a semantic argument on that point.)
**
Well, one man’s drooling idiot is another man’s Incredibly Knowledgeable Poster.
Anyway, as Guinastasia said, you’re free to shred folks in the Pit. This seems a perfectly good remedy to me.
Humph.
rolleyes like a 14 year old
FI-INE!
Don’t you know that it’s impossible to acknowledge another poster’s strengths or to say that you enjoy reading what they write w/o being a suck-up?
I’m a suck-up to a number of Dopers. I suck-up to, (some among many), tam, tomndebb, and of course, the inimitable Doc Cathode. See I’m hoping that by sucking up to these posters that I’ll get… um, that I’ll…um, er,…
Feel free to believe that. The fact is, I abandoned most discussions with Collounsbury simply because I refused to spend my time ‘debating’ with someone that abusive.
Here’s Collounsbury’s modus operandi: Belittle any source you care to offer. Call you a neo-conservative idiot. Tell you to go fuck yourself. Explain to you that your opinion is worth shit because you don’t have his immense experience. When you provide alternate viewpoints, rather than actually refute your sources, call you a fucking moron for being so stupid as to actually listen to a fucking idiot like that. Repeat until the debate ends.
Now, from your voyeuristic standpoint, I’m sure it just gave you the giggles to see people like having abuse hurled at them. So to you, it’s a devastating blow from Collounsbury. From my point of view, it’s more like, “Oh, to hell with it. I have better things to do with my time than wade through this sewer of abusive rhetoric.”
I never said that no one could challenge Collounsbury. I said that they couldn’t challenge him without getting a giant turd dumped on them. I’m sure it’s hard for you to see the difference.
And here we get to the crux of the support by the Collounsbury cheerleading team. YOU don’t have the time or knowledge to know if my facts are wrong or not. So you just love it when Collounsbury comes along and saves you the trouble of actually having to think for yourself. You can just pull up a bowl of popcorn and grin while he pisses all over the people you dislike.
If there were a neo-con Collounsbury that showed up here and dive-bombed all the liberal threads and told YOU to go fuck yourself every time you offered an opinion on something, I doubt you would be so tolerant of his right to free speech. He could be as smart as could be, and could be very educated in his field - and you’d still be screaming murder if he were even half as abusive as Collounsbury.
The fact is, it’s a lot easier to look the other way when a bully shows up at the playground and starts kicking the shit out of the kid you don’t like.
And yes, Collounsbury had lots of expertise on the Middle East. I learned quite a bit from him, and changed some of my opinions. And lately, we have been agreeing on things much more than we disagreed. Too bad the man has no self-control and a violent temper. Not a good set of traits to carry through life.
Just my two pence, damn shame you didn’t pay attention to which forum you were posting in, Collounsbury, if just for lines like this:
I’ll miss ya, jeeves.
Brutus is still around, ainnhe?
You’re a bloomin’ prophet, you are!
Seriously though, I wasn’t busting on anyone. No one could have predicted the kind of motivating factors we’d have a few short months later. I just thought it was interesting to note how much things have changed.