OK I understand there’s an election coming up and all. Blood and tempers are running high, etc. I’ve come to expect sniping from the right and left at just about every opportunity available. However I am getting really goddamn sick of it when you do it to deliberately derail a thread onto your pet peeve. Some poor schmuck asks a question about what bands are conservative, without any indication of wanting to get into a debate about whether such is good or bad, and you all storm in to piss on the cordial information gathering. FUCK YOU. I’m sick of it!
Life does not revolve around you and your little axe you wanna bury in someone else’s head. This BOARD damn well doesn’t either. Knock it off, asshole! You want to attack the other side? Make your own thread. Don’t fuck over someone else’s. We all paid the same amount of money to access and post here, and you don’t get special rights to fuck over my thread or anyone else’s. People get banned for that shit, you anal cavity dwellers. Fart yourself some fresh cool air and think next time before you start swinging the torch around.
[Whinging Tone]But you just don’t understand! If my candidate doesn’t win, then we’re all going to be rounded up, put in boxcars and shipped off to Area 51, where they’ll sell our organs to space aliens. Can’t you understand, the other guy is just evil![/WT]
Allow me to crib some thoughts from someone who expressed it more succinctly than I ever could
Frankly, I don’t give a shit who wins the fucking election, I just hope that they do more than squeak by.
I read a lot of political threads. I do a lot of eye rolling as I do it. I don’t care to contribute to them, since my urge is to knock the heads of partisans together and shout, “Wake the fuck up! It’s not all about your distorted world view!” This doesn’t go over too well, since partisans see things through a terribly limiting filter.
I do, however, cherish those posts in political threads that pay attention to facts.
The really pathetic part of it is if we were able to banish just a a dozen or so Dopers, the signal to noise ratio in threads like that would increase a hundredfold. It’s almost always the same hacks over and over and over again.
Priam is my hero! Him/her along with CK Dexter Haven who, with this quote, has gained immortality, “(The only politicians who aren’t hypocrites are the ones who have died, and can’t be hypocrites any more, God bless 'em.)”.
Actually, when I saw lissener’s post I almost pitted him right there. I could see where it was going, and knew it was going off on a tangent. Thankfully, I saved my shins an outright beating.
Sometimes you just get a fruitcake that thinks it’s all about conservatives being evil. And he wants to tell you the* TRUTH*.
OK, on the serious side: when the thread was side-tracked by political comments, one of the members reported the offending post to the moderator. That was good, since otherwise I almost certainly wouldn’t have read it. (I wouldn’t have a clue what modern bands were doing, but ask me about Benny Goodman sometime.) So, serious point #1: when you see such political comments that are de-railing a thread, please report the post! (The little exclamation button in the upper right corner.) That way, the moderators can react.
Second serious point: so I issued a stern decree that the thread must get back on topic, and it didn’t. At that point, I took the easiest route (for me) and simply closed the thread. There was an alternative: I could have spun off the offending posts into oblivion (well, OK, into the Moderators’ secret dungeons) and allowed the thread to continue.
I’m curious as to what y’all think, whether that would have been better (although much more work for me)?
Third serious point: thanks, Uzi, I was kinda quietly proud of that line, if I do say so myself.
I think that the PTB should implement a “post-election” ban for anyone that deliberately derails a non-debate thread with partisan garbage.
It’s just getting silly around here and someone needs to start swinging the banhammer around until people get the point that political thread crapping is just next door to trolling.
