That may apply to leaders. But truth-value is not a mere popularity contest.
If you are venting, fine.
If you want to improve the quality of the board, I would recommend that you restate the OP with greater politeness and less rancor. (Feel free to elaborate or modify as appropriate, of course.)
If nothing else, it might be handy to delineate, “Practices that obfuscate”, as well as, “Practices that tend to derail threads”, in addition to, “Appropriate behavior for those seeking to push a particular world-view”. (I suppose that you’ve described, “Alleged attention-seeking acts”.)
Actually, I’ve really been enjoying Lib’s posts of the last few weeks or so. Sometimes I think he’s a real jerk, but not of late. An undeserved Pitting.
Where some people get the notion that Lib is a Knight for Truth on these boards is unknown to me. He seems to me to be an obfuscator, not a clarifier.
But even if we grant that he’s always correct, the fact still remains that there is more to message board participation than correctness. There’s kindness, clear writing, and persuasiveness so that people are actually able to make sense of what you write and use it.
Lib is a value-subtractor on the boards, not an -adder.
And I didn’t write this OP to try him on his behavior in that thread. I wrote it to register my personal disgust and desire for him to stop detracting from the boards.
There is also, “Proper substantiation (my pet peeve, though I don’t think Lib has a problem here), timely explication and elaboration”.
I was just suggesting that if the OP was toned down a little it would advance your POV better (though admittedly it would be less diverting for some of the untargeted).
I respect what you’re saying, and in most cases I would agree. But Lib has been pitted so many times, and I’m not advancing any new material. Others have examined his behaviors and character flaws better than I can here.
The OP, rather, is my personal vote for him to clean up his act, or, alternatively, for the mods to call him on it (no, I’m not calling for a banning, just a recognition of the problem and telling the problem person to stop; I think he would if the mods slapped his wrist a few times).
And that may very well mean it’s a futile or useless OP. In that case, just call it simple venting, as suggested in a post above.
That’s the catch, DrDeth. It’s not like he doesn’t offer some real insights to the board. It often comes from weirdly contradictory directions, rationally and interpersonally, but he stays within the rules. Bends the hell outta them frequently, but he seems to fight honestly, even his most bewildering shifts in opinion.
He just pinballs all over the landscape.
After years of Lib (in all the permutations of the username), I’ve finally settled on viewing his posts through a Lewis Carroll framework: everything’s skewed off-kilter but there’s Jungian fascination, sorting out the underlying symbolism.
Could it not be the case that Liberal’s personal way of “bending the hell outta the rules” has come to be accepted by the Mods as “just what Liberal does” and thus not considered for adjustment? In other words, he’s bent the rules over time, taking inch by inch with the occasional yard, so that he has his own personal bubble outside them? It certainly seems that way to me.
Here’s another point. Which is worse? A poster who flagrantly breaks a rule once a month or a poster who strides right up to the line and pisses on it every day?
I admit the answer is complicated. If you don’t slap down the flagrant rule breaker, then the explicitly stated rules, ipso facto, are not being enforced, and others will be more liable to break them, and disorder will ensue.
At the same time, the person pissing on the line daily will, as a single poster, have a much worse effect on the board than the monthly flagrant violator. And Liberal has just such a negative, disruptive effect. He is pitted regularly, not by people who just don’t like him, but people who complain about his affect on the board. I think the totality of his behavior should be considered and action taken accordingly.
Sigh. Don’t assign more weight than that it’s worth, DrDeth. And it ain’t worth much.
Another analogy that’s occured to me is a Blackberry users’ manual translated from Finno-Ugric. Immediate use is implied, but it may involve close familiarity with Norse sagas, torturous translational quibbles and probably discursions about reindeer herding.
Myself, the image that comes to mind is the Escher print (so cheerfully parodied by The Simpsons) of the bewildering sets of staircases, each seperately rational and functional, but melded in an impossilbe affront to reason and perpsective.
I’d rather have fifty Libs than one Aeschines on these boards. In fact, fifty Libs would be rather interesting, don’t you say? Imagine the discussions they’d have.
Well, I want to visit Japan someday and giant squids are food for some whales, without giant squids the whales would die and I would like to try a whale burger someday.
[sub]I am really kidding on eating a whale burger, but the Japanese are really doing stuff like that![/sub]
