This regards the recent Cesario business, and loathe as I am to add yet another thread to this, I thought the staff may appreciate another defence of how they behaved from someone who initially thought them crazy.
See, when I first saw this post by Ed, I must admit my first thoughts were that the staff were being bloody idiots. There was no way that Cesario could comply. It was quite obviously a ban in all but name, but as though for some reason they refused to, as other posters have said, put their balls on the line and made the decision explicit.
But slowly it struck me and it has become clear to me what a work of genius it actually is. Firstly, it’s a “reverse trolling”, “reverse manipulation”, whatever you want to call it - the arch manipulator/troll Cesario is made to flinch like a bug that you didn’t quite hit with enough Raid. He knows he’s in his death throwes and yet his bugginess becomes even more pronounced in them. The tables are turned and he thrashes out with a thousand times more twitches per second until rapidly being silenced, mercifully, by the moderator fly swat.
Secondly it shows beautifully what the true nature of the rules here, and everywhere, are. Common Law and Due Process are wonderful things, but partly only because they can be bent to human will if we really need it. And then we get case law! This is, and say it without any exaggeration, the SDMB’s Roe V Wade. The more I think about the way this was handled, the more impressed I am.
