But shall the man of rubber walk free and unfettered whilst others are flayed and cast out, merely for their skin of glue? Nay, good sir, nay!
Nope, not being deliberately obtuse, but we were definitely talking at cross-purposes – sorry.
As Baal Houtham suggested, someone responding to a full-fledged insult with a “likewise” is not escalating things. Yeah, technically there was an insult there, but it’s not exactly blatant.
I don’t think a “likewise” response deserves a warning, but, in retrospect, I could have mod-noted Czarcasm for it. At this point, though, that water has not only flowed under the bridge but the stream has joined the river and the river has flowed into the sea.
[quote=“Shodan, post:89, topic:636142”]
[li]Expecting not to suffer some kind of sanction when you sending abusive PMs to the mods, and [*]That it came from mhendo, who struck me as a fairly reasonable poster.[/list]FWIW, namely, not much.[/li][/QUOTE]
These two points sum up my first post in this thread. Sending abusive PMs or being abusive to the Straight Dope Staff is absolutely assholic, and I’m on-record as advocating zero tolerance and outright banning for such. But I was trying to recognize that mhendo has been a good poster in the past. So I attempted to make a non-denominational post about a situation which was just bad overall.
Apparently that message didn’t get through to some people who contacted me off-thread, who chose to think the worst of me, despite all evidence to the contrary. Folks think that Cecil’s own assistant was posting to support ANY abuse of the Straight Dope Message Board Staff? Really? That is not only disappointing, it’s directly personally insulting to me. 
I don’t know who said what to whom in your montage, and I have zero interest in going back and autopsying a thread that has died a natural death, so, no, I can’t.
I will, however, remind you that all moderation of this board is done by a group of volunteers on an incident-by-incident basis, and the fact that something happened in X case doesn’t necessarily mean that it should happen in Y case, no matter that you personally consider the situations exactly equivalent. Different situations, different participants, different timelines, different moderators = different results. We make an effort to act according to the rules and guidelines of this board, but 99% of the time moderators are acting on their own initiative in unfolding situations. We don’t consult each other to present a voted-upon response to every incident, so, yes, different people make different decisions in different situations.
I think I can sum it up.
Poster A, “you’re a buttnugget.”
Poster B, “you’re a buttnugget too.”
IMHO, Clearly 2 violations.
Poster A, “you’re a buttnugget.”
Poster B, “so are you.”
IMHO, Clearly 2 violations.
Poster A, “You’re a buttnugget.”
Poster B, “Pot” (meet kettle)
Why is that not any less a violation that the previous examples?
What does “is not escalating things” have to do with it? Do you mean we now score insults and if the second insult doesn’t score as high as the original insult, we get a pass on it?
However mild, It was an insult of the type that is not usually allowed in this forum. I have seen many late mod notes on this board and I thought mod notes werent a big deal anyway. But thanks for putting in print the excuse for letting him slide again. You know good and well had that been a rank and file poster, that poster would have been noted.
Nah, that rule only applies to special posters.
…are you serious? Without context: do you think this sentence would deserve moderation in ATMB?
" It’s clear that you can’t get by without it; at least then you’d have some institutional justification for your unwarranted sense of superiority."?
How about this one?
I didn’t ask you to go back and moderate that thread. I asked why they weren’t moderated. Is that second sentence worthy of moderation or not?
Can you check with the other moderators and ask why they didn’t moderate those comments? The thread is only five pages long and moderators participated in that thread: surely someone can answer why mhendo’s insults were worthy of a warning but not the others in that other thread.
We don’t need reminding that you guys are volunteers. This is the appropriate forum to ask questions of the moderators and I don’t think my questions was either particularly taxing, vexing, rude or time consuming. If you can’t answer it: can you find a mod that can?
Seconded.
And I hope nobody takes this as expressing an opinion about the suspension. I’ve got better things to do with my time than critique the people who do a job I wouldn’t take if they paid me.
I am still confused by the warning. The rule is no personal insults. Very clear no problem with it. Being insulting is an entirely different matter and is mostly in the eye
of the beholder. Calling someone condescending is not an insult even though you may insulted by the implication. It is calling you out for your behavior. It’s the difference between saying, “Your argument is illconcieved and your thought process is shallow” to “You’re an idiot.” Name calling derails the conversation and adds nothing. Calling someone out for their behavior without name calling should be allowed. Otherwise just shut down GD right now.
And yes, the fact that there was a warning to one and not the other makes me feel that some posters are more equal than others.
Mhendo is one of my favorite posters here. Definitely in the top 10. I’m saddened to see him suspended, and I hope he’ll be back.
Having said that, I don’t see how you could not see his post in the ATMB thread as insulting. And the comment in the other thread was indeed jerkish. I don’t know what the history is with the warnings he’s gotten, but I hope it’s a lot more than just those two to merit a suspension because I think of a dozen posters right off the top of my head who are much worse.
It was the comments plus the PMs that got him suspended. But I definitely second your first sentence.
I don’t think this is the right thread for this conversation, but you’ve been here since 1999 and I think you have a pretty good idea what jerk means (for SDMB purposes) and how we moderate it.
The new [Feb. 2009] rules have nothing at all to do with this situation. At no time have you been allowed to respond to a warning by messaging the mods “fuck you.”
In a way, they do. Don’t get me wrong, I reluctantly have to agree that according to the rules here, a suspension has precedence but perhaps this all wouldn’t have happened if we could still Pit Moderators.
I do know what it means to be a jerk, which makes it difficult to understand why the board allows the worst kind of jerkiness (racists, Holocaust deniers) but not another (a negative comment on a poster’s behavior).
It’s schizo. And it must make moderating quite difficult.
Because we want to allow discussion of the broadest possible range of topics (within reason, and I admit there are times we’ve stretched that further than it can reasonably go). It can make moderating trickier in a sense because it means we have to step into arguments to tell people they can’t insult someone who is saying something ridiculous, but it makes it easier in a sense because we don’t have to figure out which opinions are inherently jerkish and which are OK. There’s no perfect system for these kinds of situations and I think the one we have is pretty good. No matter what set of rules we have (or even if we had none), people would find a way to push the boundaries.
The “being a jerk” warning was for the second offense in the OP, not the first. Telling someone to “get a blog” after they post about the anniversary of his child’s death.
Frankly, I think mhendo is very lucky to have gotten off with only a suspension instead of a banning. I can hardly think of any more jerkish behavior than PMing “Fuck you” to a mod in response to a warning or a ruling on a warning. He should consider himself fortunate and start to work on learning how to rein in his typically abusive behavior toward others. He has stated to me in the past that he “is an asshole” and that he willingly “owns it.” Perhaps if it were not so in keeping with his overall posting style, mhendo would not have responded as he did.
But you would have been allowed to do that in the pit, right?
In terms of the overall situation, it’s just another acorn.
For reference in case there is still doubt over this:
If a forum member received an abusive private message and subsequently reported it, then the action taken accordingly by the mods should not be subject to any expectation that the offending message is to be reproduced in public as evidence to support the action. The fact that the recipient also at the time happens to be a mod should have no bearing on the situation.
I don’t doubt there is legitimate grievances here somewhere, well certainly over the domain of modding in general as it is invariably contentious. However the lack of acknowledgement on valid points made by “the other side” is really not helping the cause, assuming the goal is to convince the mods to change the way they mod. It also tends to turn the neutrals unsympathetic and take everything else you say on the issue with a grain of salt.
Now that I think about it, posting the accusation that another poster is “junior modding” in their own post is a bit… ironic.