Wow. It took until post #53? The rage seems to be fading. Snoopy-dance
I will now and forever allow the boost to my self-confidence to wash over me in glorious splendor when you take me to task over some of the stuff I post that you don’t agree with. At least I know you’re engaging me. Yay for me!
I have no idea of Graham’s fate nor reasons for his beliefs. Nor do I know if any of us has the qualifications to diagnose him while not able to lend suggestions of dealing with detox for another poster. He seemed to switch from post to post between complely rational, lucid and valid, to living under the sea and trying to get us to understand the aliens that have been farming us for years are coming soon and what kind of hubcaps the wheels would have. (Damnit, now we’ll never know). He never seemed to hit that “middle” that most of us have been in from time to time (some more than others) where you’re not benign to the board, but you’re also not coming across as a squirrel that happened to run across a keyboard in just the right way to form English sentences.
Count me in with those who saw it coming. It was pretty obvious that sooner or later, he’d get himself banned. I’d call this one a “Mercy Banning”, if anything.
Just trying to point out he wasn’t a raving lunatic. Besides you allow someone to show up and post Revelations every few month and he actually scares me a little.
I don’t recall his name, but some of you must know whom I am referring to.
I loved the irony that Graham had little or no respect for psychiatrists and yet demanded that we read a book written by one. Further, that particular psychiatrist violated the ethics of his profession by becoming sexually involved with his patient. (He eventually divorced his wife and married Michelle Smith, his patient and the subject of his book.)
I don’t like to see people excluded for that reason either, but I honestly don’t think that happened in this case. It may be that Graham was incapable of following SDMB rules or maybe he chose not to.
Assuming he had a condition, one could equally well argue that it might ameliorate it. As far him as becoming “a subject for public mockery” and cruelty, that problem would seem to lie with the mockers, not the mockee: I know which I’d invoke the “don’t be a jerk” rule for. Kudos to jrfranchi for linking to his “sane” posts: the whole “Graham’s a loony so he should be banned” momentum sprang from one thread.
When his name suddently showed up with BANNED in the childbirth thread, I looked back at past posts. In this thread he makes numerous angry comments about women. He does a fair amount of backpedaling, but always ends up asserting something offensive. I was really surprised by it, since he’d seemed to caring in the childbirth thread.
Case Sensitive, I think it’s safe to assume he was mentally ill. The whole mission from Jesus, Satanists are out to get him, hidden messages in movies, etc.
Suffice it to say that he was being discussed among the staff prior to his earning his specific warnings.
As noted, he seemed to swing between odd lucidity and raving lunacy. This suggested either a true loon, (with a very real possibility that he would invite truly hurtful responses–although the TM were pretty kind to him after his apparent mental disability appeared in the Castaneda thread), or a troll. Racking up multiple wrnings in a short period might have served as an “excuse,” but the writing was already drying on the wall.
As to refunds, the staff discussed that issue in light of the possibility of mental illness, but we do not publicly comment on our conclusions or actions in that regard.
tremorviolet posted some links to quotes of his (early in this thread) which I had not read before. Given their tone, I can see why GW was banned. Any one of those posts might seem and actually be innocuous (well, one of them was pretty obvious) but taken together they present evidence of racist assholery. This is a condition that can be ameliorated, true, but it sure takes a lot of work (ask Left Hand of Dorkness about that).
It’s also true that many of his posts and OPs seemed sane, rational, friendly, and open to learning. But I think the mods called it correctly here.
Get yourself a Get out of Hell Free card, of course. Or I could send you one—I bought a whole box of them a while back and have been having tons o’ fun passing them out.
He seemed to me to be both a bit unbalanced and a determined stirrer of shit. I find it odd that people look at it as an either/or dichotomy when they encounter such behavior. “Well, either the guy was sincere, or he was yanking our collective chains in a major way just to get rise out of us.”
Having worked with these types for a long time, my Mom would tell you it could easily be a bit of both. That’s the problem with some species of troll: They probably do view the world through a seriously-distorted lense; but they also somehow get off on the consternation they cause when disseminating the content of their insanity. They may sincerely think on some level they’re misunderstood, but assuming the position of the outsider sage, however facetiously, is food for the twisted emotions of the needy manipulator. It’s a sadomasochistic dance they engage in, allowing them to gain the sick affirmation that comes with playing the victim of some larger oppressor, whilst eliciting apoplexy and other generally obnoxious “negative attention seeking”.
I don’t know either, but besides the other things mentioned here, there was something odd about him. It seemed to me that he was trying too hard to come up with topics to start threads about. It was as if he really hadn’t thought about the things; he just wanted to begin as many threads as possible. I can see why some thought he was a troll or a returning bannee. He just didn’t seem genuine, except when he said crazy things.
