**Q.E.D., ** I have no respect for Cheney, I wish he had died years ago. If I can feel this about this man, than I have to understand how others can feel that way about Ted Kennedy or Novack.
We just found out that cricetus himself is a hypocrite, I am surprised, but no matter what people claim in this thread, there is someone, somewhere, that you will be happy when he/she dies.
I think I am being honest and so I cannot condemn others that express their opinions on the board.
Why? We are balanced, we have had people celebrate both Kennedy and Novack now. Not to mention some scumbag child rapist that the world will be better off without.
Why? I have never celebrate anyone’s death on this board. I am just be honest enough to admit, that I will be happy when Cheney either dies or goes to jail.
By the way, your extreme snide remark, “It must have to do with my upbringing as a human being.” is also bullshit as in polite society people are also suppose to refrain from talking about God and Politics. So where does this declaring something jerkish end.
That’s great! You can instantly search back over a poster’s entire career searching for that one instance of hypocrisy. You’re that good. But let the boards go down for two days you just sit around uselessly with your thumb up your ass playing title chat.
(I can’t seem to find the appropriate mildly facetious yet slightly sarcastic smiley to go with that post. There is no emoticon for what I’m feeling. I’m going to have to mix and match: + :rolleyes: = the smiley that would perfectly describe my feelings.)
Oh, and since I know from experience how much you enjoy searching for hypocrisy (remember the fun we had when you got the whole board searching for a post by me that didn’t exist?) I will save you the trouble and stipulate that somewhere in my posting history is an instance where I wished ill on someone, and just respond as if you found it:
So what? Big deal. We are all hypocrites and your mama should have taught you that two wrongs don’t make a right.
But you are making up the rules. You also accuse me of being a jerk, when I haven’t actually posted anything as bad as you did.
I know I don’t talk religion at work* or at family gatherings, that must be the second favorite topic at his board.
So why is it OK to talk religion but not what **DtC ** seems to enjoy?
Except with one or two other non-religious friends if they bring it up first. I make sure I don’t have confrontations with the faithful. BTW: I did do this when I was 18. I decided it wasn’t worth it.
It’s as pointless to (1) celebrate (2) mourn (3) discuss.
To do either (1) or (2) if you don’t have a personal stake in the matter displays a twisted psyche of some kind.
As for (3) the subject is no more compelling than the news of that other TV person who died recently amidst much tears and flapdoodle (M.T.). (oddly enough, I can’t for the life of me remember his name, but then I’m a furner).
Listen, I’m sure you can go over my posting history and find numberless examples where I don’t live up to values I espouse.
Does that invalidate those values? Probably not by itself. Does it make me a hypocrite? Only if it can be shown that I really don’t believe in them by making it a pattern. Does it show that I am human and may mess up from time to time? Probably.
You seem like you’d like to duck all of this, though, and just skip right to hypocrisy and avoid answering questions like this. Might be too hard.
This is a moderated board. You are a moderator. Countless times I’ve been admonished by you and your ilk for causing a debate to get too hot, or insulting someone in an inappropriate way, or violating a rule of some kind. Few warnings, but a lot of little nudges to shape up. Frankly, I appreciate this - it helps these debates and discussions to be better ones.
I think you should do your job in this instance as well, and not duck it.
Jim, you’re right that you didn’t participate in the offending thread. Your defensiveness on the issue led me to casually say “you” were being a jerk, which was careless. But I don’t care to argue why gloating over sickness and death is jerkish; either you’re like 99.99% of the population and you think it is, or you think it’s fine and you’ll go on doing it until you get cancer, or someone you care about does, and you’ll feel sick at the very thought of somebody high-fiving others. It’s a gut-check response, not a science.
To compare that mere social propriety is kind of disingenuous. I don’t think for one second you’re really confused about the difference, but merely trying to engineer the “pile on the op” pissing match that often occurs in pit threads*. I feel the best response is to just ask people to address the OP and move on, not assail the five-year perfection of the poster of the thread or go into semantic nitpicking like so many Socratic bullies. I’m not here to get into a critique of morals themselves, I’m willing to make a priori the position that being smug about cancer is a jerkish behavior.
*I’ve tried that myself recently in a Scylla thread and failed miserably, so I guess I’m a hypocrite, and if that disclosure saves samclem some time from combing my posting history that he can spend actually moderating, I’m happy to be of service.
I am honestly not trying for a pile on the Op. In fact as most of the posters in this thread agree with you, I would be rather foolish to think that was possible. I think you have me confused with some other poster.
I honestly don’t agree with your mini-campaign to restrict what other posters are allowed to do in the pit over this issue. You raised a concern, I feel I would be a hypocrite to agree with you. I am expressing my disagreement. This is no different for me from the fact that I would like to see pot legalized despite the fact I have no desire to use it again and I gave it up when I was young.
So while we might disagree, please don’t assign ulterior motives to why I am doing it. You posted a thread demanding a change, I am challenging your reasoning.
As I do sometimes when it’s late or early, I breezed through a thread little too quickly and missed the serious point here.
[Geoffrey Rush]It’s more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules[/GR]
I don’t think this is where we want to take the capital-J Jerk rule. It’s identified in the rules as a “guiding principle” and should be understood as such. Basically, the other rules we have are supposed to be extensions of that principle.
Short version: I think EJsgirl summed it up properly. The rules here apply to what you can say about fellow posters.
There are uncountable instances in which a post here would get them called a jerk or worse in real life. But this isn’t your office or the dinner table. If everything that would get you called a jerk (or any similar name) in a real-world conversation was against the rules here, there would be no Pit and disagreements with anybody would either be mild or verboten. How would we either fight ignorance or have fun if it went that way?
I don’t approve of gloating when people are sick at all, but the rule basically is that you can say what you like about people who aren’t on this board. They are basically fair game. With very rare exceptions, what right do we have to regulate what people say about people who don’t post here?
Nobody’s talking about “everything that would get you called a jerk in a real-world conversation,” but something that is clearly being a jerk, in any context or situation, that isn’t fun and isn’t fighting ignorance. It’s creating ignorance, and moving the mission of the board towards re-creating the kind of nauseating low-brow bullshit that is simply everywhere on the Internet.
You know what keeps this board from being low-brow bullshit like everywhere else on the Internet? It’s not the moderators. It’s you guys. If you take exception to something someone posted, you can call them out on it like you have in this thread, and start a community-wide discussion.
I’m not saying this to duck responsibility, I’m saying it because I think it’s the strength of this board. Instead of us rigidly controlling and shaping discussion from on high, we throw out the spammers and the obvious troublemakers and let debate and reasoned arguments from you guys handle the rest.
You know we have no more access to the technical and administrative parts of the board than you do, right?
I dunno. I’m a pussy-assed liberal, and even I suspect (although I haven’t thought it through, and could be persuaded otherwise) that hatred is a morally okay emotion sometimes. I don’t have a problem with hating someone who is evil, like Phelps. Hatred is my recognition of that person’s abandonment of all moral decency, which is (almost by definition) the worst thing you can do and the worst kind of person you can be. Oh, I suppose in an ideal world nobody would hate anyone. But in any ideal world, nobody would be like Fred Phelps. Just like in an ideal world, nobody would kill anybody in self-defense; but in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be violent attacks requiring defense in the first place. In the real world, hatred has a place.
But Novak doesn’t quite cross the line to hatred and gleeful dancing on his grave. I think he is a morally disordered piece of shit, but I don’t hate him.
I think you’re right, per the actual rule. But what it says to me about the person posting it is that they are very young in an emotional sense. Once a person has experienced real loss or tragedy, it’s hard for me to believe that they could wish that on someone else, or happily celebrate loss or tragedy for someone else.
But I guess I’m naive enough, even at my age, to want to believe the best of people, including Dopers.
+ :rolleyes: = the smiley that would perfectly describe my feelings.)