Ed: 2 things. 1) You win! Congrats. 2) One last try

About This Message Board
81

I saw such an error and most certainly did not see an admission of the same (nor apology, I might add). Remember in this thread when, in response to my comment that I was taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Obama, you came charging in to declare:

*"No you are not.

You continually post this tripe, followed, immediately, by some sophomoric rejection of a position that Obama has not really taken, couched in the language of Hannity and Beck.

Opposing Obama is fine. Continuously pretending that you are “trying” to “wait and see” when you repeatedly condemn him simply exposes your disingenuous remarks for what they are."* Link

There is a veritable cornucopia of wrong in those three short paragraps. To wit:

  1. You were wrong when you said I was not in fact taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Obama.

2 & 3) You were wrong when you said I “continually post this tripe”, and in characterizing what I said as “tripe” (for as was proven to you numerous times in that thread, what I said was correct).

  1. By claiming I consistently post sophomoric rejections of a position that Obama has not really taken, when this is demonstrably not so.

5 & 6) My comments were not “couched” in the language of Hannity and Beck. In the first place because I was not guilty of the comments you accused me of, and secondly because I don’t listen to Hannity and/or Beck.

7 & 8) I have not repeatedly condemned him, nor do the remarks you fictitiously attribute to me expose disingenuousness on my part.

In subsequent posts to that thread, you were shown to be in error about each of these claims. Link and link.

You blatantly and unashamedly refused to acknowledge and apologize for these errors. Your excuse was that I had treated you shabbily in the past and therefore didn’t deserve an admission of error or apology. Now, while ignoring the fact that in each instance you quoted where I wronged you, I was able to show that it was indeed you who uttered the first insult, the fact of the matter is simply that you made false claims as to my posting history. You were wrong! That is all there is to it. It has long been the practice and culture on this board for a poster to acknowledge, retract and apologize when he is proven to be wrong. I have done so myself numerous times, as any seach with my name in the poster field and “apologize” in the keyword field will show. It doesn’t matter if you resent my behavior toward you in other threads and it doesn’t matter who threw the first or the most insults. What matters is that you made a verifiably false claim and you refused to acknowledge it and/or apologize for it.

This is pretty shabby and characterless behavior on anyone’s part, but especially so given that you are a mod. And then for you to come in here and act like you rarely make errors and acknowledge them on the rare occasion that you do shows you to be disingenuous and manipulative at the very least, and deliberately dishonest at the worst.

82

Your claim that I have ever insulted you first in a thread is a complete fiction–modified from your earlier claim that you simply had to insult me because so many other posters were insulting you. As to your other claim, I did not bother to prove my position because I knew it would deteriorate into a game of whether you wanted to pretend your anti-Obama statements were really just “wait and see.” You did, indeed, post links to several posts I had not previously seen where you made tepidly favorable remarks about the president. OTOH, what I had seen was your your condemnation of him for his nomination of Clinton for Secretary of State and for his audacity in actually not wearing a jacket every moment in the Oval Office. If you want to pretend that those were part of your conditional approval, I would simply place them in the same category as your “liberals have ruined America” spiel. As to sounding like Hannity and Beck: it is hardly false to note that you sound like them, (which you do to me), regardless whether you have actually listened to them. Perhaps particular types of Right-wing advocates all sound alike, just as many Left-wing types do. (If you really have never listened to them, then you can hardly claim to know that you do not sound like them.)

Since you have, indeed, decided to be the type of poster who resorts to name-calling even toward posters who have not engaged in that behavior toward you, I have recently made an effort to refrain from engaging you and riling you up for more name-calling.

83

The only thing I “came in here” to do was to note as false the claim that I censure or censor posters with whose opinion I disagree for violations that I would ignore if posted by those with whose opinions I agree.

The rest is simply the same old “let’s kick a Mod” game that certain posters enjoy. It does not bother me, in that the posters are the same reliable few who have already demonstrated grudges in the Pit in the past. It is also notable that in every case in which I have been accused of terrible things, my actions were those of a poster in the Pit and not as a Mod in Great Debates.

As to manipulative, I think that better characterizes accusations posted against a Moderator in regards to his activities when not acting officially and not even in the Forum he Mods.

84

IIRC, every link you posted to that thread which was alleged to show my abuse toward you was preceeded by an insulting remark you made toward me, which I found I posted in my rebuttal. I don’t have time tonight to research it but if you want to deny it I’ll research it tomorrow.

Kindly point to where I said any such thing. You know as well as I do that this is a total distortion of what I actually said, which was in regard to my overall posting style vis-a-vis my frequent opponents here and had nothing to do either with you as an individual or the relationship between the two of us.

In other words, you did not bother to perform the search that I described which would show that you were clearly in the wrong. And now you are using the puny excuse that to have done so would have been to ‘play my game’. The only game I was playing was to illustrate the truth, which was that you were wrong in what you said about my posts regarding Obama.

And I won.

Tepid or not is debatable; still, they fall far short of “sophomoric rejections of a position that Obama has not really taken”, do they not?

This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my opinion of Hillary Clinton and her lack of honesty. I hardly think it’s an unjust ‘condemnation’ of Obama to question how he expects any foreign leaders to believe anything she says.

More dishonesty. I never said he was being audacious in not wearing a jacket in the Oval Office. Nor did I make meniton of ‘every moment’. This are more dishonest attempts on your part to mischaracterize what was a very minor point and had no bearing whatsoever on Obama’s capability as president.

Apart from the fact that I have no idea what you think you’re saying here, perhaps you could show where I said anything about ‘conditional approval’.

And perhaps Hannity and Beck simply sound like most other conservatives. The point is that you deliberately tried to cast me as parroting H & B when such is not the case. Thus you were wrong, just like I said.

The fact that you post your insults sans name-calling makes them no less insults. And insults - whether couched in name-calling or not - have absolutely nothing whatever to do with the fact that everything you said about me in the post I quoted above was wrong, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you should recant and apologize.

Or do we have a new standard here at the Dope, where one is free to cast erroneous aspersions about other posters and then be excused from recanting and apologizing simply because they either bear a grudge from previous arguments or because they misconstrued what was said in the first place?

85

Tom, you made what is to me a very outrageous claim in this thread. So I ask you again:

Where did I state a belief that Mods should also (simply) accept attacks on yoursellves, offering no defense against calumny (lies). You say that my belief is “apparent.” How did this belief become apparent to you when I hold no such belief and have stated no such belief? Like anyone else, you, as a Moderator, have a right to defend yourself from attacks if you choose to. I would think that defending one’s self from damaging lies would be a point of honor. (You might want to check my signature elsewhere.)

Would you address this please because I think that is part of the problem between you and me and also between you and other Dopers. You may be projecting onto us something which is simply not there. In other words, you are mistaken and you ignore any attempts to reason with you about what is really on our minds – what our real intententions and motivations are.

Do you think what you are doing is just offering a defense when attacked? You didn’t just explain to Shodan in a straight forward way why you didn’t respond to all of his “Report This Post” submissions. You could have said, “I just can’t keep up with that many reports.” Or since your reasons held the potential for being a relevation of too much private information and too much of a personal attack on him, you could have answered that particular question in private email or PM. But your “defense” turned out to be a harangue of Shodan.

You used to be, in my eyes, the best Mod at Straight Dope. I saw you bend over backwards to be fair and your knowledge and/ or research was incomparable. I have no idea what you are feeling now, but you seem to me to be obtuse about somethings that I don’t think you really are. I could be wrong, of course. It doesn’t tear me apart to me wrong.

One example is that you said that you weren’t aware that the expressions “You need to get back on your meds.” or “Are you taking all of your meds?” are commonly used as insults to the mentally ill. You denied that that is so. You also, in another conversation, said there was a distinction between mental illness issues and mental health issues.

I think you had rather argue than arrive at some insight.

There is always the possibility that we won’t talk again. I’m never sure. If we don’t, I wish you well. I hope that you can find some measure of peace.

86

You recall selectively, as usual.

You found places where I expressed the opinion that you were completely, occasionally startlingly, wrong, but where I did not resort to name-calling or personal attacks to make that point. That you chose to be insulted, (in the Pit), that I would have the effrontery to challenge your statements, (without calling you names), because I expressed the idea that your opinions were silly is fine. That you then rationalized personal attacks on me based on those remarks indicates a mindset with which I disagree.

The rest of your post is just more of the same.

87

Yep. I think it is apparent. There is a rancorous discussion in the Pit, and you decide that I am at fault for defending myself in that exchange. A public accusation is posted about me, hardly for the first time, and your response is that I should take it to a private medium for resolution.

88

Oh, the glorious fun of impugning the motivations of everyone you dislike, and acting the injured innocent when they point it out.

Regards,
Shodan

89

I appreciate your thoughts and agree that the SDMB is a resource. The difficulty is making use of that resource in a way that brings in revenue. Producing more Staff Reports would be a logistical challenge even if most of the labor were donated. But the real issue is that more content wouldn’t mean appreciably more revenue. Most of our ad inventory is sold at low rates - our users aren’t demographically distinguishable from the typical Internet audience. If we could demonstrate that TSD users bought, say, more anvils than average, we could market the site to anvil makers. But so far we haven’t been able to make that case.

The other complication is that, while the SDMB has a loyal following, it accounts for a small percentage of visitors to the site. According to Google, the column archive attracted 954,000 unique visitors over the past month, most of whom found us through search engines. The SDMB drew 91,000 visitors, most of whom presumably are lurkers. We think the archive and MB audiences are largely separate; knowing more about one probably wouldn’t tell us much about the other.

If all 91,000 SDMB users were in one city, that would be an enormously valuable asset, since our company’s sales force is set up to sell in local markets. This was the impetus behind establishing Straight Dope Chicago. SDC has a small but growing audience, currently about 25,000 unique visitors per month. Nonetheless we’ve had good success in marketing it to advertisers - it’s accounted for a disproportionate percentage of the ads we’ve sold at rate-card rates.

One way to generate revenue would be to sell more TSD-related products. We’ve been talking about offering TSD e-books, and hope to have something available this spring.

To get back to your point, the simplest way for us to take advantage of the SDMB is to make the accumulated content - something like 14 GB - more readily searchable by Google et al. We’ve discussed using some free vBulletin add-ons to make MB content more easily digestible by Google spiders. That would be an effortless way to increase our Web presence; we’ll see how it works out. In the meantime, the most useful thing the SDMB community can do is to keep making witty, knowledgeable posts.

90

What is blindingly obvious is that none of this has anything to do with the issue at hand.

You were wrong! That’s all there is to it. You made claims about my posting history that were proven to be wrong and you have refused to acknowledge that and to recant and apologize.

Thus your lack of character and honesty are on display for all to see.

91

Years ago there was a suggestion that the SDMB have a click-thru link to Amazon. Nothing came of it.
But wouldn’t that prove to advertisers that the SDMB users buy specific stuff?

92

Good point. It’s only a small income source – but any is better than none. Amazon pays – cash – for any referral from a website that’s gone into some sort of agreement with them and uses a referrer link instead of a SOP URL (www.straightdope.com) or URL coded as synonym (SD homepage) type link – it’s just that the member recommending a book or an editing moderator has to modify link coding to a format they specify that identifies the SDMB as the referrer. Internet Infidels makes enough from it to make it worthwhile for them; Diogenes the Cynic is on staff over there, I think, and could probably get you the name of the guy to talk to for information about the program. (So, by the way, is David B.)

93

I’d like to buy the books because they are not commonly found in this country (and have done for a good while before I joined the boards) but I’ve been put off by the following on the product page:

A quote? Really? OK, it’s a pain in the arse to integrate and set up a proper payment and shipping gateway, but it isn’t all that difficult - millions of other sites have managed.

94

We’ve been giving this more thought lately. As you say, the money you make from Amazon itself is modest, and maximizing it means adding lots of links and whatnot that can be intrusive. OTOH, we’re into books here, have sold lots of our own and hope to sell more, and aren’t averse to touting other books we like. The sales department tells us that if we could demonstrate that our visitors (and that means the whole ~million, not just SDMB visitors) bought more books than average, that would open some doors. We won’t get rich selling 500 books a year through Amazon, but it would demonstrate what kind of an audience we’ve got. So it’s probably worth an experiment at least.

95

Maybe, but at a cost. In case you didnt’ see TubaDiva’s post about Amazon yesterday.

96

I think this is the best self-assessment you have ever posted. :wink:

97

That’s a beautiful analogy, and I basically agree with you. I basically don’t report posts anymore because of tomndebb’s biased moderation.

I’ve noticed this tendency too. I really hate to see people abuse power, even if it’s rather inconsequential power, such as being a message board mod.

98

I’m assuming this is tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise it’s just kind of sad.

That’s a good start.

99

‘I know you are, but what am I’? What are you, five years old?

If anyone pulled the shit on you that you are pulling on Zoe and Starving Artist, you would be gibbering about dishonesty and flailing about for reasons to warn somebody. You’re wrong , and you are stonewalling. Just like you always do.

Regards,
Shodan

100

Will you two just get a room, already? :dubious: