For this thread being closed? Apart from the snark about pissing contests, disinfectants, mops, I mean. I thought **Shodan **and I were being remarkably civil, though we obviously detest each other. What was your specific problem that required the thread being closed? If you wanted me to phrase more decorously my reasons for not going on a cite-search for **Shodan **unless he was prepared to offer some deeply abasing apology when I proved him wrong, then couldn’t you have simply made that point, and allowed me to re-phrase? What’s your damage, Heather?
That was mystifying. What went on there that doesn’t happen in every other political GD thread? (Largely the reason I avoid political GD threads in the first place, but there you go.)
I was not even looking at your exchange with Shodan as the reeason for closing the thread. It had 28 posts and over half were either smart-assed remarks, shots at other posters, or criticisms of the OP. Your feud with Shodan was just icing.
Questions of partisanship always descend into examples of blind partisanship on the SDMB (with the usual suspects contributing well over half the bad feelings).
I don’t know that the question is impossible to answer, but that thread was not going to provide an answer.
New memo from on high about “raising the tone”, huh?
I wish I had your kind of prescience. No sense telling people to stick to the subject, or stop doing X or Y or Z–no, sir. Shut it down, that’s the ticket. No sense in letting it get out of hand. In fact, why not shut every thread in GD down before it starts, as long you’ve got a really strong premonitition of how it’s going to become a noxious trainwreck eventually? After all, isn’t that what you’re here for? To close down discussion and debate before it gets started, or after it gets off on the wrong foot?
May I start a similar thread again? Or is that being obstreperous? If not, is there some kind of new rule here I’m unaware of, forbidding a certain type of thread in GD (where a mod moved it, over my objections, by the way) concerning partisanship vs. policy?
Perhaps we should have a forum for pissing contests? Our motto shall be the contest between the rival stationers in Pope’s Dunciad (1742 version).
Is “insult by quoting Pope” cool in ATMB? If so, I got choice zingers if ya want 'em. He was a nasty mo-fo, Alex was. Just gimme the high sign, Tom.
If I had read(carefully) your OP in that thread, and were a moderator of IMHO, which I am not, I probably would have moved it to the Pit, rather than GD. When you said
, you pretty much laid out the tone of the question.
And, yeah, I re-read your whole OP carefully. I DO understand that you were trying to conduct a poll of sorts, but your language(perhaps necessarily) seemed to set up a confrontational situation.
Obstreperous. What a marvelous word!
I wish you did, too.
If you can figure a way to ask the question in such a manner that you are not inviting, indeed, begging, for a whole thread of tu quoque responses and sniping, go ahead.
You say that it was moved “over your objections,” but “your objections” were little more than not so veiled insults and histrionics.
Then, in your next post, you continue the high moral tone with
If you can’t post without belittling “the other side,” then take it to the Pit. The comments you posted gave me no reason to believe you were seeking an “honest opinion” so much as to provide a platform for smug or selfrighteous condemnation of the the political Right. Given the nature of several posters on the Right, it required no prescience on my part to see where the thread was heading and I see no reason to tell respondents to your posts to stick to the topic when the topic appears to be “how many ways can I bash the Right from behind a mask of an ‘honest question’?”