A very good post. As I’ve said before, I’m mostly on the other side of you on this issue, but I can see where you’re coming from.
It depends. I see more science threads disrupted by lekatt than just about anything else; his disruptions almost rival lib’s disruptions of anything remotely related to politics.
One difference, in my opinion, is that lekatt’s meanness is nowhere near lib’s. The latter has an acid, poisonous wit; lekatt, being much stupider, can’t inflict nearly as poisonous a wound.
Also, lekatt is reliably stupid. When he posts, I know what he’s going to say, and I know it’s going to be dumb. When lib posts, he often posts something interesting and on-topic. It makes it much harder to defend myself against emotionally.
I’ve stopped responding to him outside the Pit, and mostly stopped responding to him here, even though he posts interesting things sometimes. There’s just too much risk that if I engage him when he’s being polite, civil, and smart, he’ll suddenly turn around and sink his fangs into me. I’m not willing to chance it.
I suspect it’s because Lib is eloquent and unpredictable, so people can’t as easily dismiss him. I wish more people would give up on him, as I have; it’d mean he’d hijack fewer threads. But when people don’t do that, then his hijacks succeed; and even if I don’t engage with him, the thread ends up going in an ugly direction, a direction that he chose.
Just FTR, Biggirl I wasn’t thinking of you specifically when I wrote that post. And you’re right that your first pit thread was not about Liberal. I was just thinking in general about Lib’s mysterious power to get people so riled up at him. The daily show thread may not have been the best example since there were other issues involved. It was just the most recent and the only one that came to mind. But I stand by my point that the best thing to do with any poster who pisses you off unreasonably is just to ignore that poster. And I still feel that there are people on the board who enjoy being pissed off at Liberal and enjoy feuding with him. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it. These people are as much to blame for the hijacked threads as Liberal is.
Tomndebb, I think you’re disingenuous with respect to** He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Given-Fodder-for-Vanity-Searches**. To me, it seems an enormous stretch to say that many of his posts represent any “worldview” more complicated than “wait’ll they get a load of this,” which is also the philosophy of the guy who flashes kids and old women on the subway. I suppose if you went through all his posts, you could come up with some consistent themes, but you’d also find him often willing to discard them or at least depart from them in the service of derailing a discussion. Besides, I don’t care if he’s the second coming of Spinoza, an intelligent and informed philosophy knows its boundaries and won’t show up in discussions where it’s an irrelevant distraction.
Second, his tactics are often objectionable. He will rarely if ever define a position and then defend it. He tends to post long, throwing out allusions to dozens of arguments without quite making the arguments themselves, or connecting them to the topic at hand, ensuring a response by larding the mess with insults of varying subtlety. Honest but naive posters then waste time and space answering the arguments, which he then disavows and begins the process anew. If by any chance he has managed to draw a hostile response from another poster, he can now happily settle down to exchanging abuse. If he can generate multiple hostile resposes, so much the better: abuse with a dish of “everybody’s picking on me” on the side. His actual arguments sometimes have merit, and sometimes they are convoluted mixes of symbolic logic and obscure cites that may or may not support his position, insofar as he even has one.
Third, he seems to view every discussion as having the same topic. It’s not “Should the U.S. do X?” or “Is this behavior tolerable in our society?” or “Isn’t this movie/tv show/album great or what?” or “What’s the best way to cook a souffle?” Our hero confronts all these questions, and can see only one: “Who’s the smartest one in the room?” It never seems to occur to him that (a) the question might not always have the same answer, or (b) that the smartest man in the room might sometimes be wrong.
For the sake of full disclosure, I should say that my current opinion of the OP was largely informed by our encounter in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=296505 In fact, I think it was Larry Borgia to whom I am indebted for reminding me that confronting what I believed to be a useless hijack merely perpetuated it. It was also in that thread that I was exposed to the OP’s eloquent, biting wit: he informed me that I was probably fat and ugly. For the sake of even fuller disclosure, I should say that I am not fat.
So, looks like we can all change names for the sake of pissing off other people. It seems like trolling to me, but obviously the board’s administration has ruled otherwise.
I could say I want to change my screen name to Republican or, possibly, Carl Rove. Some could say I’m choosing one of those two just to be a dick. However, the fact of the matter is that I’m a big fan of Abraham Lincoln (the historical paragon of the Republican) and I have the morals-free cunning of Karl Rove.
Now I just need to decide which. Just remember that it’s not trolling. Not even a little bit. And for the love of god don’t suggest it - it’ll get you banned. Unless you’re someone I don’t like (or the one person on my Ignore List) - then feel free to accuse me of trolldom all you want.
I’m not sure what motive I would have to be disingenuous, or we may be using that word in slightly different ways, but we’ll set that aside.
More to the point, I have not made any claim that Lib’s posting style is not often infuriating. However, having watched him for several years, and having also watched the words of those with whom he clashes and also those who defend him and those who have mentioned off-board encounters with him, I will stand by my assessment that he really does not see the world in the same way as others do. I genuinely believe that he is not trolling and that he does not deliberately attempt to confuse issues.
I do not perceive malice–although I do perceive an irascible nature with a hairtrigger–and I suspect that many of the arguments over the years have arisen because he uses language differently (i.e., far less casually than others), on the one hand, and because he has rather less gray and far more black and white in his world than most of us.
I could be wrong. I am not prepared to offer a psychological profile or claim that I read people well. I simply note that on many occasions, posts of his that evoke torrential responses in anger are quite similar in nature to posts by others that are shrugged off or ignored.
tomndebb, I suspect we are both educated people and can both find roughly the same definition of disingenuous: mine, just to be sure, connotes a Panglossian well-intentioned insincerity. In your case, I mean a willingness to disregard facts and logic in the service of a larger goal. I think your goal, peace in the SDMB, is a noble one. I think your means, defending the OP from charges of jerkery and worse, tends toward an unreasoned repitition of a dubious thesis: that our hero has a strongly held philosophy that excuses him from both civilized discourse and the obligation to discuss the topic at hand. I think there’s a lot of tension between your goal (peaceful, productive discussion of various issues) and your actions (defending an especially contentious and unproductive poster). I feel somewhat vindicated by your answer, which ignored pretty much all of what I said. Apparently there’s no particularly valuable philosophy, represented nowhere else, that obliges us to tolerate the chaff for the sake of the wheat.
But as I said, this disagreement extends only to the imminent issue. I’m not calling for anyone’s exclusion from the board. And, it’s only for purposes of self amusement that I present this coded message to the anti-YOU-KNOW-WHO cabal: Hey guys: send me the secret discs right away, okay? I need to know the next step in the plot against you-know-who.
Well, we agree on the definition of disingenuous, but you are wrong that I am employing it.
I simply do not see the evidence that Liberal is deliberately trying to hijack threads or stir up anger on the board, particularly with the intention of portraying himself as a martyr. As I noted, I have looked at his words and at the words of his foes and his friends. I do not claim that he is an easy person with whom to deal and I think that a lot of the problems associated with his posting can be laid in his lap. However, on the particular charge most easily described as trolling, I do not find persuasive evidence. There have been a couple of “devil’s advocate” threads, but they are a tiny number of his rather large posting experience. Outside of those, his basic philosophy remains unchanged. (I would actually be more likely to characterize it as rigid rather than shifting.)
I have also made no claim that he should be forgiven or excused for poor behavior. I have simply noted that much of that behavior has been the result of a dynamic between him and others who would prefer to fight on his turf rather than ignoring him until he comes to theirs.
If I simply wanted “peace on the board” (as a higher goal than anything else), I suspect that my job would be easier if I rooted around looking for excuses to ban him. Once he was gone, we could then move on to the next person that a large minority of people choose to dislike. (I could, for that matter, simply avoid any thread in which he participated or was mentioned and let other staff members deal with the situation, giving me a measure of peace. I seem to find that neither of those solutions matches my temperament.)
For what it’s worth, Tom, I think that you are damn near spot on. I would add a couple of insights from the King of Soup’s second and third paragraphs, but with a little more objectivity and a little less judgment.
Yes, you do have the right. I can’t say that I blame you. That would be my impulse. And that would be Lib’s impulse. And that’s why Lib is not doing this by himself. You also have the right to choose not to let someone jerk your chain.
He has the power to make you call him by his old name? You are going to blame him for the words you type on your keyboard?
Why are you giving away so much of your control over yourself?
Nah, he just has the magical power of Special Treatment.
Anyways, Zoe you should go easy on Biggirl - I have it on good authority that she will, someday, die. And if you don’t leave her alone you’ll be a bad person for picking on someone who is dying.
Just imagine a board filled with libertarian Liberals. Or, just look at a non-moderated board. Same thing.
Sometimes I wish I could be that special - but if I was, from what I’ve seen, I’d wake up screaming for mommy every time I had a dream about someone being mean to me after I spit in their face.
Waaah! Mommy!
Actually, come to think of it, if you were to replace every other one of libertarian Liberal’s paragraphs with “Waaah! Mommy!” I bet things would read about the same.
