But he’s probably not going to find it.
Why does this shit have to be so damn predictable?
However, he also stated that he was posting in part get attention, and implied that he might be misrepresenting his condition, so he was at least aware of that. He was also discussing his ongoing use of illegal drugs. It was fairly clear that he was not getting, and not even inclined to seek out, effective treatment for whatever mental problems he had. Obviously, none of this was good.
I can’t speak to the accuracy of this statement.
What I can tell you is that a few years back we were advised that due to the high cost of litigation – even if you win a lawsuit you still have to bear the costs of defending yourself/your company – the cost itself is so prohibitive that the Reader was not willing to take it on and would simply close the site to avoid further unpleasantness. I would think today this is more true than ever.
Huh. I thought KGS was banned a couple years ago. Musta been a suspension.
Bear in mind that a disgruntled ex-member can still file a lawsuit after being banned. The purpose of banning is presumably just to cut off any additional interactions that might escalate or broaden the situation.
Of course, whether such a lawsuit has any merit is another question entirely.
(This is not legal advice, nor should it be considered the basis for an attorney-client relationship. This is just anonymous musing).
It’s like when you happen across someone lying face down on the ground, sticking his penis into a hole filled with pistachios.
The guy’s fucking nuts. That pretty much explains it.
Regards,
Shodan
This was always my thought. That if you had someone disgruntled enough to consider a lawsuit, banning him might just push him to it as he is left with nothing to lose (well, you know what I mean). That plus keeping him around lets him post all kinds of stuff that can be used against him in said lawsuit.
In the past, the Reader has been incredibly skittish about getting dragged into lawsuits, either as a defendant or some other participant, and IIRC, they’ve said they’d shut the boards down without a qualm rather than get involved with anything like that.
Aware of what? That saying something like that might be just the right thing to say to get attention or piss someone off or be clever or witty or relieve the pain in the gut? Who knows? If he’s not misrepresenting his condition, the judgment centers of his brain are fucked up. If he is misrepresenting his condition, he is a troll and probably a little more responsible for his own judgment being so fucked up.
I think if you reread his thread and those from the past, you will find that he has been under treatment. The therapy that he has been given may have been appropriate. There is no cure for bi-polar disorder. According to what he said, which seems highly possible, he has not been following the treatment which his doctor ordered in that he is not taking his medications as prescribed. That is a very common especially during the manic stages of a bi-polar disorder.
I don’t know what illegal drugs he is doing, but the legality isn’t the defining characteristic of how bad it is for the disorder. Alcohol is a depressant. So is weed. They may both may you temporarily feel better but in the long run they add to depression. It is really stupid to take illegal prescriptions if you don’t know how they mix with other medications you are taking and even the food you eat.
I am not a doctor nor do I have a bi-polar disorder. I take no position for or against his banning.
I am opposed to making exceptions in his case and leaving threads open to discuss him without his being able to reply. (Yes, that’s rather contradictory.) Speaking of his being “nuts,” “fucking nuts,” and having a “meltdown” is not a “good” way of discussing mental illness. He has not been given the same protection as other posters who have been banned. Why?
And the funny thing is that it’s not the people who malign mental illness that would get his goat. It’s the people who claim that he needs to be on his meds and seeing his doctor again. But…
When a poster threatens a lawsuit, it’s usually part of an attempt to force the moderators to give them something board-related (close a thread, delete some posts, ban another poster). That’s what happened here. I think I’d ban someone for extortionate tactics like that even if the board ownership was far more litigious.
I have no problem understanding why the mods and administrators chose to ban him. I’m just wondering why there are threads open allowing us to talk about him after he has been banned. (Naturally, I can’t resist posting here since the opportunity presents itself.)
No one is SUPPOSED to be talking about KGS. The thread is supposed to be about why the banning occurred.
I’m of several minds regarding the issues raised here, and I’m not trying to be witty with that comment (not that I’d ever succeed if I were so trying). I have a great deal of intellectual and moral sympathy for the mentally troubled and for those who feel so deeply aggrieved (within reasonable bounds, if that concept is not too oxymoronic for this kind of situation) that they feel compelled to threaten legal action against ostensibly “anonymous” posters or administrative message board personnel (for no one’s truly ever anonymous online, given sufficient access and resources). In this regard, I find myself much more closely aligned with Zoe’s and even the banned individual’s views than with the moderators and administrators, etc.
Not that I hold that the decision that was ultimately reached was truly excessive, which I was most happy to learn had at least involved extensive intramural discussions.
No, I’m troubled by these issues for the very straightforward and candid reason that I’ve been in almost the identical situation myself. I, too, underwent a degree of mental breakdown here on the SDMB some time ago. And on another board, I felt compelled to issue legal warnings, if not outright threats. And I’d like to explain why, so I ask for your forbearance as I attempt to do so…
I was the recipient of a certain – though comparatively rather minor – degree of abuse here as I foolishly continued to post as my brain proceeded to swerve upwards into what I only later learned was a hypomanic state (I don’t dare to review that thread for fear of serious self-humiliation, which is yet another reason I’m deeply concerned about what happened with the banned poster in question). I had never experienced anything even remotely similar (and I still have never been diagnosed as bipolar or the like), but, of course, the overriding symptom of hypo-mania (which is distinct from mania/hyper-mania, though similar in this respect) is such that one experiences undue self-confidence and an often***** illusory sense of extreme clarity of thought, which of course strongly encourages one to post and to keep posting! R.D. Laing was wrong about a great many things (imo), but he was certainly dead-on regarding these Gordian, self-tightening knots!
I need to quote directly from knots’ chapter one in sympathy with the banned one:
Hell, even the BBcode parser couldn’t cope successfully with that! (Or maybe I’m just too stupid to get the nesting right.)
Let me try one:
The reason
that
[indent]mania and posting
[indent]don’t mix
[indent]is because
[indent]posting manics
[indent]don’t realize
[indent]that
[indent]mania and posting
[indent]don’t mix
[indent]because
[indent]they’re manic
[indent]and they’re
[indent]posting
[indent]while they’re
[indent]manic
(ad infinitum…)
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
[/indent]
As for the legal (well, legalistic anyway) warnings/threats I issued on another board, what set me off is that one of my debate opponents began to reply to my posts with nothing but an exact duplicate of my previous post! You know, one likes to imagine oneself an adult capable of simply walking away for a time (which I eventually did for about a year) when one is faced with such utterly childish taunting, but that’s just when one learns that thinking oneself an adult can often be equally childish (there’s one of those knots again!)
It didn’t take too much of that to start me issuing copyright threats (of all the most juvenile responses, legalistic ones such as I employed are probably the worst of all, but at least they look suitably mature from a distance).
However, no one in authority made any attempt to prevent me from thusly making an ass of myself, which I strongly contend was precisely the right and correct thing to do! The thinking of TPTB was either exceptionally wise or they didn’t give a damn, which was equally wise in the final analysis. I understand and respect the sooth logic of stopping the legal melee in its tracks, but banning the plaintiff irrevocably? I’ll need substantially more persuasion before I’ll agree to the merit and proportionality of that decision!
Perhaps paradoxically, I think it would have been much wiser and much more humane to lock the thread much earlier than was done in this instance in order to help prevent the kind of long-lasting or even permanent embarrassment I cringe with as I recall my public spiral up to madness here (well, madness lite, anyway). I will always feel exceptional fondness and gratitude towards the individual who intervened in my meltdown thread to try to stop the carnage by correctly pointing out that I was clearly not well and that abusing the mentally ill is, shall we say, unseemly at best.
In that regard, I was profoundly distraught by the only genuine example of an ad hominem attack I’ve ever personally witnessed, which occurred on another board and was directed exclusively at myself (I know what some of you are thinking – that I’m engaging in the indecorous sport of self-pity – but please hear me out). I was engaged in a friendly and entirely detached, intellectual debate regarding the merits of one part of a highly respected fellow poster’s sweeping academic thesis. This poster also happened to be a good personal friend as well, one of several on that board who had openly lauded my intellectual acumen and insight and later publicly solicited my participation in a sort of informal “peer-review” process, alone among all the other posters there (on the other hand, I’m a very small frog in a very large sea here at the SDMB!)
But this poster held and still holds truly exceptional scientific academic credentials, and believe me, he earned them. However, he was far too busy developing and testing his hypothesis to participate in the online message-board debate on that particular point at that time. So when I contested that one point there, I was roundly accused of being mentally ill for daring to dispute even part of his argument! I shit you not!
And the worst of it was that these fellow posters pointed to my own admission on that board from years earlier that I suffered from clinical depression to “justify” their vicious ad hominem attacks – and not one person stepped up challenge this verbal and emotional abuse, not even the ulttra-pedant of the group, who admitted that this was, indeed, a classic ad hominem, but that apparently I “deserved it”. What else can it possibly be when an argument is not deemed worthy of consideration solely because it comes from a “self-allegedly” insane person?
I was a close geographical neighbor and intellectual comrade of a psychological therapist that I first met professionally (we struggled – together – to evaluate the so-called “fine tuning” / “anthropic” argument for the existence of “God” in a wonderfully warm and simultaneously intellectually honest manner), so I asked him to compose and send an email directly to the board’s administrator to verify that it had not come from myself. This email criticized in a gentle manner the online “diagnosis” of mental illness by non-professionals who had never even met me face-to-face and advised that in his professional opinion, they were way off base and far out of line.
This only served to ratchet up the pissing contest to insane heights, of course (if you’ll allow me to employ that particular cliché in this context).
Anyone see any echos of that kind of thing in this instance?
I don’t wish to push that very hard or far, as the circumstances are certainly not at all equivalent, but I encourage another round of intra- and extra-mural discussion regarding these very complex and difficult issues in any case.
Thank you for listening. I’ll now step down from my soap-box.
*****: Such clarity is not always an illusion, I assure you. For just one relatively minor example, when in that state I could – and did – recurse easily through a considerable number of the kind of interpersonal “knots” that Laing wrote of so sagely. A much more significant degree of insight and self-knowledge was recorded in writing from within that state in a 50-page email I composed which even my critically acclaimed artist friend insisted should be expanded to book length for immediate publication (he is not given to such effusive praise, I assure you). I still find it quite astonishing that I am its author.
(p.s.: I apologize for the extra-wide page, at least as shown by Firefox. I thought it was due to my own nested “knot”, but the same thing happened even before I added it. Advice on how to repair that is eagerly sought…)
Please do not copy entire poems or songs or short stories or novels or any other complete works that are still in copyright.
You may use excerpts that are relevant to the discussion at hand but you may not republish in entirety copyrighted works.
I have removed all but the first stanza of the poem – that may not be exactly what you wanted but I have no way of knowing what you wanted.
Sorry.
Because the Teeming Millions are not slamming him, that’s why, which is usually the situation in threads involving banned people – they turn into flamefests. The banned poster is not able to defend themselves and it’s really unfair so we close those threads.
This has not been such a thread and so it has remained open. It does seem to be more a case of sorrow rather than anger and there is some thoughtful discussion. That’s not a bad thing.
“Entirety”, you say? That is not even 1% of that work! It was barely a small fraction of the first chapter! I am not so ignorant of “fair use” as you so clearly believe, or at least presume! I am quite insulted.
And where do you think I obtained even that small portion? Do you honestly think I typed or scanned in that text myself? Of course not! It’s already posted online in a much larger “fair use” sample – at least 700% longer than what I originally posted here with full attribution on my part!
If that’s all you have to say on this extremely troubling issue, at least you’ve confirmed my own “presumptions”.
Please. The position of this Board has always been to limit the posting of copyrighted material to a bare minimum. This is no different.
Thank you Mr. Junior-Mod. That clarifies the Board’s position without them even having to post it!
And thank you for your moderation assistance, too, kind sir!*
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Our fair use guidelines are narrower than what the fair use doctrine permits. Compare http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/usc_sec_17_00000107----000-.html (codifying fair use doctrine) with http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7696968#post7696968 (guidelines may be more conservative or stringent than the law in your jurisdiction).
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The fair use guidelines are guidelines, not rules, and we don’t usually discipline posters for over-long excerpts. We just edit the post, which is what happened here.
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One of the guidelines says: “If you want to refer to long passages, provide a hyperlink to a site that has rights to reproduce the material.” http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7696968#post7696968
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While percentages are sometimes helpful, there is no safe percentage or “five percent rule” which is part of fair use law. Our *guidelines *do say, “If you are going to quote something from an article, quote less than 5% of the source. Include a link to the article if the article is available online.” While that guideline is helpful, it’s not a promise that we won’t cut a long excerpt, even if it’s only .01% of the entire work. We might. What we won’t do is take action against a poster for merely posting an excerpt that is too long.
**
Gfactor**
Moderator
- To be clear, this is not a warning. I’m just pointing out that it often takes one to know one.
So we can only talk shit about someone if nobody wants to talk shit about him?
That’s a good catch, that Catch-22.
-Yossarian