You know, the main rule is “don’t be a jerk” and it means just that. There is not an underlying set of criteria, no Lemon test to describe jerkish behavior. It’s a subjective thing. But when everyone else thinks you’ve been a jerk, shouldn’t that be enough to convince you that yes, your behavior was out of line?
You keep asking for some specific set of factors or something to determine what “being a jerk” entails, and given how argumentative you’ve been over this whole thing, I think we can rest assured that your intent is somehow to argue your way out of jerkhood. That’s the point of this subjective rule, though. You can’t worm your way out of it with some legalistic interpretation of the circumstances. You’ve been a jerk, and everyone except you can tell that.
What the fuck is up with people who can see that everyone else is upset with them and still try to maintain that they’re somehow RIGHT[sup]TM[/sup], rather than looking at their own behavior and trying to understand why everyone else is pissed? Do you honestly not understand the concept that you are sometimes wrong? Everyone is wrong sometimes. When everyone else disagrees with you, it should be a strong suggestion that you’re wrong. A certainty? No. But a strong suggestion.
If you want to know why you were a jerk, here’s why. You witnessed what may be - though the issue is as yet undecided - a violation of the forum rules. This is perhaps the most minor violation of all, since no one is ever warned for it, and the mods cheerfully move things from place to place. So posting in the wrong spot is a crime on the order of, say, jaywalking on a street completely devoid of traffic. Your response entailed hijacking a thread about an immensely painful personal subject, and redirecting the focus of the thread upon yourself, and telling the OP that you didn’t give a shit about his father’s cancer in the process. Your response was so bizarrely out of proportion to the OP’s possible-misdeed that even folks who might agree in principle lose all sympathy for you.
If you jaywalked, on your own street, with no cars in sight, and your neighbor decided to seize upon your minor violation of the law and try to start a picket line in front of your house, holding up a sign and screaming obscenities, you’d decide he was a jerk. When your response is so absolutely out-of-proportion to the incident, you won’t win any sympathy.
So you posted something, expecting to get flamed and pitted? Wouldn’t that make you an attention whore? Any attention is good attention, huh? Taking one thread, focusing the whole thing on yourself, and getting a second pit thread out of it wasn’t enough - you had to start a third? Look, if your own life is so pathetic that this is what you have to resort to in order to feel validated, well, you don’t really have my sympathies because I have no doubt but that you brought it on yourself.
Why do people ask us to believe something that is contrary to what the evidence has told us? Not only did you do a jerkish thing in the thread in question, but you continue to insist that you were right, and whine about everyone being upset with you, days later. I’d say you are quite obviously a jerk. You already did stalk the pit and trainwreck a thread because you felt it was MPSIMS-style, and you admitted above that you had planned to do so before the OP even posted that thread. So why should anyone believe that you’re not a jerk? Because you say so? We have plenty of evidence to call you a jerk, and just your word to defend you. I told you what I truly think you are in the pit thread about you (you pathetic fucking attention whore - how many threads do you need at a time?) but rest assured that we can all see what you are. You most assuredly are a jerk.