Stop and think, please: is “you’re losing it” a good way to respond to a warning for insults? I attempted to explain to you that your comment about Left Hand of Dorkness was not appropriate for this forum. ‘You are up on your high horse’ is not advice or helpful commentary on tone, it’s an insulting dig at the person - and your post was even more sarcastic and dismissive than that. Saying he’s being priggish is also insulting. Now that I’ve given you a couple of notes and a warning, you seem to have figured out a way to make the point in an acceptable way:
Next time, try making your point this way first, not after half a dozen mod notes and the requisite bit of playing dumb (‘what do you mean I can’t take potshots at people in this forum and call them names?’).
It usually is, yes. Prig: “A person who demonstrates an exaggerated conformity or propriety, especially in an irritatingly arrogant or smug manner.” Priggish: [adjective] ‘self-righteous, smug, stiff, stuffy, prim, puritanical, narrow-minded, pedantic, starchy (informal), self-satisfied, prudish, goody-goody (informal), holier-than-thou.’ Sample: He was a priggish, self-righteous little sneak."
Then you should have said that instead of saying he was a prig and up on a high horse. If you’re capable of explaining your opinion this way, then you’re capable of doing it without all the extra instructions.
Because it hasn’t been enforced so carefully up until now. Of course, I have the worst offenders on ignore so I’m not sure if they are still able to easily get away with what was Modded in that thread, but it seemed to come out of the blue since other comments of that nature pass unnoticed all the time.
For this reason, I see no reason to add a further commentary on my analysis of the situation to take the harsh off the percieved insult, since the equivalent continues to happen all the time. I see the other Modded comment as being only slightly worse, (even though it was of course factually wrong :))
So, either crack down a lot more on all the content free, veiled insults , or let these relatively mild invectives stand.
I am struggling to understand your surprise here. I probably wouldn’t moderate them immediately as insults and go straight to a warning (and I didn’t here), but these are both personal comments that we discourage. By the way, you gave away the game on “priggish” when you said this while signing off:
After everything in this thread, do you really think it stood a chance of being productive? I mean, can you cite a single example in this history of our (or, hell, any other) species in which someone has responded to this statement by saying, “You know, you’re right, I’m sorry, I should be a lot more humble”?
Because I don’t think you can. If you intended it to be given as advice, it was a remarkably incompetent attempt at advice, and again being charitable, I don’t think you’re that incompetent. Which suggests that a sincere offer of advice wasn’t actually your intent.
If you’re happy with where your post has led, that’s one thing. But if you’re not, what can you learn from the experience?
Yes, I did. Perhaps it might have garnered a response from a human being along the lines of: “Yeah, maybe I go to far. But I’d just like GD to be a bit more formal than it is. You get the idea.”
Granted, it would require the person on the receiving end to have a modicum of a sense of humor and not take himself so seriously. Which should have been clear by the “lighten up”.
So, tell me, were you seriously offended by my post?
I see. Let’s review: I told you a couple of times that calling someone priggish was insulting. I showed you a dictionary definition of the word that supported my opinion and you called me and Left Hand of Dorkness “prigs” as an insult when you left the thread, for which (in part) I gave you a warning. Your response to all that is You were/are being priggish?" Does that seem smart to you? Does that sound like it would be effective and would get your message across?
I wasn’t offended, but if we’re being honest, that’s because I considered the source.
Nor did I report it. At the same time, I thought it was foolish and unproductive. When someone phrases advice to me in an insulting tone, I’m pretty likely to dismiss it out of hand–and I think that’s a nearly universal reaction. But even if I were inclined to take advice, I can’t figure out what you think your advice was. I offered two posts that had different tones and suggested that the difference should be clear to anyone. There’s nothing high-horsey about that. I’m not saying I’m a particularly good arbiter of good behavior; rather I’m saying that this thread is silly in failing to distinguish between the two.
I certainly have a sense of humor about myself, but as I suggested, your post to me wasn’t exactly scintillating wit; rather, it was tired recycled potshots from Great Debates that we’ve all seen a hundred times. In order for my sense of humor to be relevant, there’d have to have been something funny in your post.
Again, this is all personal commentary that doesn’t belong in ATMB. I’m giving you another warning. You need to start comprehending this immediately: this isn’t the Pit, and if you have to talk about another poster, it should be related to a moderating issue - not your opinion that he doesn’t have enough of a sense of humor or is a prig. And as a free piece of advice: nobody in human history has ever lightened up because someone said “lighten up” after insulting them. Most people figure that out as teenagers. The ones who don’t wind up having to say “lighten up” a lot and can’t figure out why everybody’s so annoyed with them.
With that, magellan01 and Left Hand of Dorkness, you need to take this discussion elsewhere. The thread was originally about the “gun grabber” mod note and at this point this has nothing to do with that at all.
Actually I was describing his behavior in a very protracted PM discussion. Please run down your logic here: because I told ambushed he wouldn’t get off his high horse when he was burying me under private message verbosity, I shouldn’t have told magellan01 not to snark at Left Hand of Dorkness three years later?
That being said: yes, that’s usually something I wouldn’t say in ATMB for the exact reason I told magellan01 to knock it off in this thread. It’s personal and it’s not constructive. I’ll say that I was exasperated after dealing with thousands of words of complaints from ambushed and that I don’t make a habit of saying that kind of thing here.
It doesn’t matter. He’s a mod and your not. Continuing on this course is not wise.
Back away. Don’t get banned. You are like the guy in the horror movie who’s black, just had sex and is saying “I’ll be right back”. You are doomed if you continue on this course!