I haven’t responded in part because I was away for most of this weekend, with limited internet availability, and have been fairly busy since coming back. But I mostly haven’t responded because Sapo is very obviously just trying to stir things up, as he usually does, and I don’t feel that I owe him any response. He’s just trying to milk the limelight as long as he can.
Some other people have expressed some interest in my opinion, however, and it is for their benefit I am posting this.
With regard to Sapo’s post that got him the warning, it’s more offensive than it may appear at first sight. Here’s the post:
Sapo starts off with “Butthurt much?”, with the implication that he has fucked me up the ass. This might not seem that bad to an American audience. However, Sapo is latino (as indicated by his very appropriate name, meaning “toad” in Spanish). I myself have lived in Latin America for 18 years. Culturally speaking, these are very much fighting words around here, and Sapo perfectly well knows this. I would not say anything like that in a bar in Panama unless I was deliberately looking to provoke a knife fight. Sapo no doubt will claim he meant something else.
Now “mopping the floor with you sorry ass” may not have been a realistic physical threat, but Sapo certainly chose to frame his entire response in violent terms. He was definitely upping the ante compared to anything I had said to him, and deliberately trying to get in my face. His remarks were both obnoxious and abusive. They were certainly not meant as “friendly banter”; Sapo was genuinely angry about what I said to him. The fact that he is now pretending that this was all a big joke is the oldest trick in the book - say something ugly and then when you get called on it back away and say “Can’t you take a joke?”
Lest there be any mistake, my reply in turn was not meant as friendly banter; it was also hostile. My intent was to express my complete disdain of him. (I’m not sure why he’s claiming it was made “two days later”; his remark was posted in the early AM, after I had gone to bed; mine was posted the same calendar day as his, after I got back from work.)
Ed has expressed his intent of restricting the amount of abuse that moderators have to put up with. When I agreed to be a moderator, I was well aware that taking random crap from pinheads came with the territory. Those who are familiar with me know I’m not particularly thin-skinned. But being abused in the Pit has never been my favorite part of the job. If Ed wants to make our job as moderators a little bit easier, that’s fine by me.
With regard to my original remarks that set Sapo off, my main intent was to try to embarrass him by pointing out how childish his behavior was. But some people are impervious to embarrassment, and thrive on negative attention. Sapo’s general attitude towards the boards, including the administration, was demonstrated in the post I was responding to. His remark about “playing with a cat with a laser pointer” describes how he behaves with us as well as when he’s teasing a troll.
This is nowhere more clear than in this post in this very thread;
Sapo here indicates he is knowingly baiting me. When he behaves like an asshole to me he is just playing to the crowd, he doesn’t actually mean it. By this admission, Sapo has forfeited any further consideration from me. I know he’s posting dishonestly, and I wash my hands of him.
We now return you to the long running serial, The Persecution and Assassination of the Noble Sapo by the Foul Tyrant Ed Zotti, still in progress.