How is it moderators are entitled to insult posters? Does this have anything to do with dogma and trolls?
I confess I am dense.
I confess I have been called worse.
Yet still I find I simply cannot understand why some repeatedly brag of their ignorance;
brag they are unwilling or incapable of even considering other;
enforce their ignorance and dogma on all others.
I confess I am dense.
I still am amazed by hostility released as dogma is even gently pricked.
GQ is for questions that have actual answers, or at least very close aproximations. It would have been an appropriate topic for Great Debates - as the question “What is gravity?” calls for a great deal of speculation and is factually largely unanswerable. One can hope to gain a consensus, but not a conclusion.
Putting it in MPSIMS was probably a reaction to your way of writing, which seems needlessly obtuse - making your entire thread seem like a rhetorical question. Your replies were mostly divertive in effect, if not intent, largely leaving the questions asked of you unanswered.
Oh, please, get a grip already. Most of us were entirely civil as well, with only one or two, maybe three, exceptions. Honestly, you don’t do yourself any favors by casting such broad aspersions and even less so with the “us vs. you” mentality you’re so fond of displaying.
As the guilty party, I have to admit I don’t see much cause for complaint here. I suggested you might be being dense, rwjefferson, only after two pages of repetitiveness in which either you couldn’t make your question clear, or the other posters couldn’t make their answers clear, or else something completely confused was happening. It seemed to me you asked “What is gravity?” and were told “We don’t know.” You responded by asking the same question over and over and calling everybody dogmatic and so on, and ultimately took it over the line by calling everybody “trolls.” So if my post was a tiny bit indecorous, I think it was called for at that point.
I can vaguely see how he interpreted the lock post as an insult, Marley was a little bit harsh (“I don’t know if you’re being dense on purpose” “whatever the hell you’re posting” etc), but by that point in the thread it actually struck me as a legitimate question.
No offense rw, but you were writing very cryptically, not to mention with strange grammar (which was probably the major factor in the feeling of it being cryptic). I don’t know if English is your second or third language or what, but even though it’s fine you weren’t accepting the answer, you’re entitled to your beliefs as well as entitled to argue them, your strangely worded responses were only frustrating us trying to figure out what exactly you were trying to get at and I think it led to bad feelings and/or anger on both sides.
And I think he was just quoting the rule saying “I’m here complaining about this moderator because that’s what the rules say.” Not sure why he felt he needed to justify it, but whatever.
Now wait. Did he look upward, his body surrounded by an ever growing anvil-shadow, accompanied by whistling sound of descending large object, before pulling out a pocket sign reading: This is gonna leave a mark! Did he?
The OP’s communication skills aside, he does have a point. There are certain mods who frequently are obnoxious, and they get away with stuff that would get an ordinary member a warning at the very least. If an ordinary member were to say to another member “I don’t know if you’re being dense on purpose” then the mods would at minimum be telling him to knock it off, maybe even issuing an official warning. I’ve seen a lot worse than that from mods too.
A few months ago I had occasion to report a certain mod to the administration for breaking a fundamental rule of these boards. The admins had words with the mod in question, and then PM’d me to say that the matter was resolved and would not happen again. Now moderator warnings to ordinary members are public matters for all to see. When the admins have words with a mod, that should be public too, but it isn’t.
I just think that mods should be subject to the same rules as the rest of us, but sometimes they seem to be above the law.
There is a long-standing tradition here of mods occasionally using similar comments to make a point, and I think you could make a fair case that what I said was actually less harsh than what several other posters said or implied in the same thread.
If there weren’t a rule against similar statements, somebody else would have said it long before I did. As it was, other posters were implying rwjefferson was on drugs or off his medication and so on. What I said was, “I don’t know if you’re being dense on purpose or if you’re really struggling with the very simple answer to your question, which has been posted many times already.”
Which it inarguably had. By the time he repeated his question yet again and called the other posters “trolls” to boot, I decided I didn’t care.
That may well be the general case, Peter Morris, but I don’t read that as the case here. Marley23 appeared politely in the thread, as did Gfactor, and the OP would only chant his mantra of “dogma” and “truth” and ignore the moderators. No insult from the moderators, however mild, came flying out of the clear blue sky against a blameless innocent.
I don’t want to make this hostile, rwjefferson, but I think you are off-base in criticizing the tone of my post when your previous post (the last in the thread before I closed it) insulted several posters in less ambiguous terms.