[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Stay or go, Lib - no prob either way. Go with God.
Just don’t post any pix of yourself dressed as Carmen Miranda.
If you want to be exposed to conservatism as expounded by conscious, intelligent people and not blathering camp-followers, the 'Dope is a surpisingly good place for it.
Liberal, who is neither conventionally liberal nor conventionally conservative, is, in his range of perspectives, a good example of why the SDMB is a great place. I’m afraid he also is, in his on-board behaviors, a good example of how personal a supposedly impersonal internet message board can be, for good and for bad. People get upset, overly invested, suspicious, embarrassed, furious, deeply touched, etc., on the Straight Dope board often more vividly than they do at work, at church, or even within their families. Then they get upset over how upset they’ve become, or embarrassed at how embarrassed they are, over a stupid message board and they say “I have to leave, this is unhealthy, I’m caring way too much about something that I should not let affect me so much”.
Get past it. This is real life. We are real people. That we experience each other mostly through text and not by seeing each other’s faces and hearing each other’s voices doesn’t make us less so, or detract from the realness of the community.
Liberal, unless you’re comfy with the idea that any time interpersonal communication and relationships get complicates or unsmooth you’re going to just hightail it out of there and ditch the people you were interacting with, get your butt back in here.
Real-life priorities are my suspicion as well, but it doesn’t ultimately matter. The best thing would be for someone to block SDMB access from his computer(s). There are multiple ways of doing this in technical implementation and if he didn’t know which one(s) were used it would be difficult for him to undo if he was tempted.
If he posted his home and work computer setup(OS, browser, firewall software, etc.) we could probably work up a howto that someone could use to thoroughly block the SDMB from his PCs. Then he can go about what he needs to do without falling back into the SDMB as a habit which has been self-destructive to him so often.
I suggest they don’t. Their role, as far as I can tell, is to keep the board running smoothly, not to indulge pleas for attention or martyrdom. If the honor this, then what? Someone says “I really have to study for midterms, please don’t let me post here in the next few days” ? The someone else says “I promised my kid I’d spend more time with him. Please don’t let me post here on weekends.”
What the mods should do is ignore the request, let his membership run out and if it is not renewed, cancel it. No more or less than they’d do for any other member. If Lib needs his hand held, he should call his mommy, not a moddy.
And if he feels the board has become too harsh for him, he’s almost certainly right. Not because we’ve gotten meaner, but he’s gotten weaker. Good riddance.
AHunter3.Liberal’s posted an average of 11 posts a day since November 1999. He has done far, FAR more than the average amount of interpersonal communication of anyone else here. Everyone could use an extended sabbatical, or possibly just retire, if they’ve been here THAT long and it presents a problem. Like a dogged workaholic, he may need the home office to stop him from lurching back in to the job.
Bryan Ekers, you shit-stirrer extraordinaire you. I honestly don’t get why someone asking for help to break a habit MUST be interpreted as “weak”, “weak-willed,” “moddy or mommy hand holding,” etc.
You can’t have a 50,000 plus person community and then fail to recognize some members of that community will warrant, from time to time, special consideration regarding the nature of their posts, how much they’ve posted, irregularities in their posting habits or help to stop posting altogether.
I think that what a lot of people have been saying is that he has more than used up his share of special consideration over the years (and for the record, I am not really for this whole concept in general) and it is time to see him go. Enough already. Ban him, and I for one will not miss him a bit.
Actually, we have, indeed, honored requests to have posting privileges suspended in the past, either for limited or for indefinite periods. There are any number of reasons one might have to make such a request and we are not going to second guess the persons requesting them.
In such cases, we will not suspend privileges on weekends or similar requests because the software does not support it and we are not going to take on the task of manually changing privileges every week for some indefinite period.
I do not recall whether we have changed the user title in such cases, but I would suspect that we would not let the automatically assigned “BANNED” title sit under the name of a voluntary withdrawal.
Lib’s public request has made this a much bigger deal than it needed to be, but I see no reason to throw stones at his retreating form.
[Oliver]
Please, King of Soup, may I have more?
[/Oliver]
I’m guessin’ this, the Liberal thread to end all Liberal threads, will suffer the same fate as that other little conflict. It’d be nice if he stays and contributes but damn if the public spectacles don’t get old and consume an inordinate amount of readership energy.
Name one. No, really, I’m genuinely curious as to what might qualify as a legimate reason for the staff to go out of its way to save a poster from his own inability to just walk away from here on his own. Lib, and in fact almost everyone else here, is old enough to excercise some level of control over their own actions. If participation in the discussions here is too emotionally draining, or interfering with one’s personal or professional life or whatever the reason, well, guess who’s responsible for doing something about it?
I don’t watch either of ‘em. But apparently, Lib is a frequent poster in the AI threads (to give you an idea how little I think about those shows, it took me quite a while to figure out -given that I didn’t read the threads in question- that the “AI” they were talkin’ about was “American Idol” and not “Artificial Intelligence”). that was why it’s the perfect joke. both those shows are pond scum
Sure we can, and I get no sense of “asking for help” in Lib’s farewell. Had his public request taken the form of “I have to cut my SDMB usage to make more time for my responsibilities. I’ve enjoyed my time here. Good-bye.”, I’d have no reason to heap scorn on him. He chose instead a hostile farewell; let it be returned in kind.
While I am as curious as Q.E.D. under what circumstances the mods would accept a request for a self-ban, I would hope that such requests were done in quiet dignity via e-mail (Lib’s claim that “e-mails obviously get misread” is definitely not dignified) and not thrown out as a public “fuck you, I’m outta here” gesture of malice. If you want to make excuses, claiming he’s an addict or something, go ahead. I decline.
Of course, there’s the additional irony in this case that the requester is the poster child for libertarianism on these boards, and is asking for the mod squad/nanny state to save him from himself.
That is a little unfair, no one opened a pit thread to throw stones, but once I and I imagine several others saw Shodan’s little love fest, hurling a few bricks became appropriate.
Lib’s public posting in ATMB pretty much declared open season and yet posters refrained. In light of this OP, if we refrained from expressing our opinion, for good or ill, we would be doing the SDMB a disservice.
Not really. Libertarians eschew external coercion, but in this case the poster himself is asking for help doing something he can’t seem to do alone. And he’s not asking this of the government, but of an organization made up of people who voulntarily joined that organization. It would have been ironic (and hypoctical) had he argued that laws needed to be passed to force other people to quit the board if there was some potential damage to their IRL selves.
Libertarians view voluntary associations very different from the involuntary association we have with out government.
