Oh I would say in the sense it was fucking hjacking the thread to focus on tedious obsessions that you and he share, and had nothing to do with the real meat of the thread. Which is pretty clear to everyone who is not a one track ideologue. I have no idea what it is about water over on that side, but victimhood does seem to come from drinking it over there.
I don’t think pointing out misrepresentations of another poster’s position is a hijack.
It sounds very like you are defining “hijack” as “interfering with a pile-on of an unpopular poster”. This has never been the definition before, and if Miller chooses to start enforcing this as a new rule, it would be a good thing if he could make that clear.
Something like “here is a list of the posters nobody is allowed to defend” and then list them. That way we know who are the second-class citizens around here, that the rules don’t apply to, and who are the members for whose benefit the rules are going to be applied.
OK, so we know that Starving Artist is not allowed to defend Susanann. Is there anyone else who is not allowed to post to certain threads? Who are they, and who are the pariahs that we must ritually renounce?
It would be nice to get some notice when “four legs good, two legs bad” turns into “four legs good, two legs better”.
Regards,
Shodan
I hereby nominate you as Czar of Keeping Pit Threads on Track. Ahhh, to be back in the good old days (prior to that degenerate thread) when Pit Threads stayed on point—ON POINT, I tell you! But I sense this incident with SA (where he corrected another poster’s statement, by the way) could be the beginning of an unseemly trend.
You seem to be the right man for the job. Please tell us you’re on it. Those pit threads MUST STAY ON POINT!
In other words, :rolleyes:
Sorry, you’re going to have to cast a wider net, I’m leaving the sandbox. It’s fun to watch you try though… that’s something.
With favor,
Jain
Actually, the concern is more that the vast majority of Pit threads in which Starving Artist participates, become about Starving Artist. We could populate an entire new forum solely with threads that SA has turned into yet another tiresome political hijack. Far from being the start of an unseemly trend, it was the continuation of one that had been going on too long with this particular poster.
Certainly, there is a lot of topic drift in Pit threads. By and large, that’s not a problem. But when the participation of a particular poster in a thread almost invariably steers the thread into the same hijack, time and time again, then that turns into an issue. The last poster with whom this was an issue was Le Jacquelope, whose politics were about as far from SA’s as you can get, and who received much harsher moderation than this.
That said, I certainly should have been more specific in my initial mod note. I don’t regret the tone, or the content, except insofar as I should have been more elaborate about the problem than I was.
Starving Artist, your first comment wasn’t a hijack, it was fine. Bosstone made a snarky reply back to your reply. At that point, you could have blown him off, having made the point. Or you could have stuck to explaining "all I am doing is pointing out that ladyfoxfyre misrepresented what Susanne said. But you turned it into an elaboration on fiscal policy, and Bosstone helped.
Admittedly there was a bit of a pile on, but mostly it was a pile on of “take it somewhere else”.
Miller was fully warranted to step in, and you were the instigator of the hijack and the one continuing to discuss fiscal issues rather than Susanne. “Take it elsewhere” would have been a bit more tactful, but it was the Pit. Referencing an instruction to stop hijacking would have been more clear, but you kinda already got that point. It might have been better for Miller to address Bosstone and gonzomaz as well for helping the hijack.
—Ring Lardner
Whenever I actually notice a SA post (I normally don’t pay too much attention to names), I find I disagree with him. But not his first post in the Susanann thread. Whatever Susanann’s issues overall, reducing spending is a perfectly valid solution to resolving debt issues and she shouldn’t have been called out on that post. All SA did was point it out. Everyone else brought their SA baggage into the thread, including Miller.
Still not following you. Are you saying that ATMB is not the forum for discussions of mod actions? Or that Miller shouldn’t explain his actions at all?
If it is merely a backhanded way of accusing me of trolling, then never mind.
Regards,
Shodan
Except that’s not what happened. SA could have defended Susanann by pointing out what he felt was a misrepresentation of her position without going into a diatribe about fiscal policy. He then repeated that diatribe and continued to argue fiscal policy on it’s own, far beyond any defense of Susanann. That’s whne it became a hijack into the SA show.
No one is saying he can’t discuss what he wants to, he just can’t inject it into every thread willy-nilly.
I disagree. At some point he stops defending Susanann and starts defending his own views on fiscal policy. That’s a hijack.
Roll eyes away mate, roll eyes away. I feel quite fine about my intellectual integrity here, versus people who excuse terrorism because it doesn’t match their prejudices.
Having a busy day but just popping in to say that I didn’t “devine” what my offense was as my second post appears to indicate. It might have been “turning the thread into the Starving Artist show”; it might have been an alleged hijack; it might have been that Miller didn’t even know himself (this because I had already agreed to back out of the discussion) and was just pissed off because one of the thread’s participants reported me for being a jerk, and, bearing considerable dislike for me in the first place, just jumped in to tell me to piss off without reading enough of the thread to know why he was doing so. I merely picked the “hijack” solution in order to show how I would have expected the instruction to be worded, rather than in the offensive and highhanded way it was.
I continue to maintain that my behavior in that thread did not constitute a hijack, and, as John Mace pointed out, was no different than poster behavior that goes on in threads all the time.
And I maintain that it’s the short fuse Miller has developed where I’m concerned that led him to jump to the conclusion that my postings to the thread were out of bounds, and to issue his rude, condescending instruction in the manner which he did.
I’m pleased to learn that no “formal” warning arose from this incident, and that Miller has agreed to make his “highhanded and condescending moderation more specific”, as he put it. However I’m not pleased to learn that as a moderator, a person may be spoken to in a way that would certainly be considered abusive in nearly any other type of human interaction, and that his order to me to “Shut up” is apparently fine and lies well within the board’s official ruling as to how a moderator is allowed to address the board’s posters.
And I agree that if there is to be some sort of rule against interrupting a pile-on, even if it’s in order to correct an erroneous OP or address off-topic comments made originally by other posters to the thread who haven’t received warnings for their posts, then somebody in an offical position needs to make that clear so that we’re all on the same page with this new rule. This is not the first time I’ve been accused of hijacking a thread simply because I’ve challenged off-topic posts by other posters, but which nobody objected to because they were not offensive to the board’s hive mind. In other words, it isn’t the off-topic nature of the other posts that is the problem, it’s the fact that I chose to challenge them. Thus its obvious that going off-topic isn’t really the problem, but rather is nothing but an excuse to hamper me from posting an alternative view.
And on preview, I see that Miller is posting that I attempt to make the threads I participate in “all about me”, and this is falacious too. Had no one said another word to me after my first post, which I don’t think even Miller would have had a problem with, I would have said no more. In many of the other threads that he’s alluding to, if posters weren’t saying things to me or - as gonzomax did in the thread in question - making dishonest and politically-biased insults that deserve to be challenged, I would say nothing more. This is especially the case lately as I’ve been busier than usual and posting far less than I normally have during my time here.
I have no particular desire to bring attention to myself, on this board or elsewhere, and the accusation that I do is once again nothing but an attempt to stifle me from challenged statements and accusations of a left-wing nature here on this left-leaning board. I’m certain that a review of my posts will show that for the most part, my participation in a thread does not in fact constitute a hijacking or “making the thread all about me”, and in those that allegedly are, roughly 98% of my posts are responses to things that have been said to me. I don’t go into a thread with the intention of taking it over, or anything close to that. I simply see something that I this is dishonest or insulting and I challenge it. I don’t give a single thought to how much I’m likely to become enmeshyed in the thread when I do, and I don’t care either. If people want a fight, I’ll give 'em one. If they want to let it lie, then that’s fine to. I have never in all my time here deliberately tried to “take over” a thread, and the notion that a separate forum might as well be created solely for my supposedly intentional hijacks is not only laughable but indicative of the bias that Miller has toward me. He has become so outraged at my challenges to the board’s hive-mind that he can’t view me in anything approaching an objective manner, despite the fact that my posts are drop in the proverbial bucket when compared to the number of left-wing comments made on this board aimed at denigrating conservatives.
What this is really about is that people have grown tired of having their self-congratulatory left-wing gabfests interrupted and the lies they tell challenged, and Miller has chosen to be the black knight riding to their defense.
Is this right? No. Is it to be allowed? Apparently.
So in light of Miller’s last post, I’m in something of a quandry. Am I no longer allowed to challenge anyone’s post for fear that other posters will turn it into the “Starving Artist Show”? Am I being ‘disappeared’ - essentially forbidden to post but without a formal banning? What? This is the problem that arises when you have a moderator taking it upon himself to quash a specific poster rather than simply following the board’s rules, which should be the same for everyone. Given that this is a public message board open to anyone, I should have the same right to post as often and on as many subjects as I like, just like everyone else.
Not if it’s in response to the notion that reducing federal spending is a laughable position, which ladyfoxfyre obviously felt it was. A post outlining why reduced spending is good and continued borrowing against the future is bad is a perfectly appropriate response to her OP. As was challenging Bosstone’s posts to me. And it was perfectly appropriate for me to have challenged gonzomax’s statement that selfishness is the motive for opposing tax increases. If people are going to post inflammatory statements impugning the character of wide swaths of the populace, a person should most certainly be able to challenge that without being accused of trying to make the thread “all about him”.
I think better moderator action would have been to explain that future discussion about specific fiscal policy should be taken to another thread. “Shut up” is pretty vague. It seems to imply that **SA **is no longer allowed to participate in that thread.
That being said, I that **Miller **is generally an excellent moderator, and I usually just ignore SA’s posts, so I don’t have much first hand knowledge of him making threads “all about him”, in the **Dio **sense of that phrase. I have, though, seen many other posters behave similarly in threads w/o being asked to stop. It didn’t seem very unusual to me, but if we want that to be more SOP around here, clarifying that in a rules note would be helpful.
Then the hijack begins when someone else brings SA’s views on fiscal policy into the thread. His first post (the one I referenced) had nothing to do with fiscal policy. It had to do with misrepresenting the pitee.
Exactly! As I said above, approximately 98% of my posts are in response to something someone has said either to me or about me. I find it hard to believe that on this board full of adults, an enforcer is required to stop people from making a thread “all about them” because the other posters in it are apparently utterly incapable of not responding to him.
I don’t think his first post was out of line. It’s the continuation that’s the problem.
He may have had some help but he was certainly the catalyst.
And if he’d left it at his first post, he wouldn’t have gotten that mod note. The problem is, he made a bunch of posts after that, which had nothing to do with the thread, and which were part of his continuous pattern of injecting of his personal politics into threads that have, at best, only the most tenuous connection to politics.
If his first post was not out of line, how was SA the catalyst? Why wouldn’t Bosstone, who obviously read much into SA’s post and brought previous baggage with him, be the catalyst? SA was reacting, and he had to react after bringing up a perfectly valid point in that thread.
For the record, I’m doing the same thing he did…defending someone that one, for the most part, disagrees with. It is why I try not to read names when I go through the board (or at least read the name after I’ve read the post). It allows me to form an opinion on the post, not the poster.