It never ceases to amaze me how many posters get worked up over the opinions/behavior of other posters particularly when there is absolutely nothing personal about the “offensive” behavior. I will get upset when attacked personally, but for the life of me I can’t understand why the perception of a poorly presented view, or a poorly allocated thread or even a down right falsehood should ellicit so much negative energy. Am I weird?
Nah… just smart…
Well, don’t get all worked up about it. Nobody directed it at you.
Believe me, I’m not slamming you personally if you have no problem with S_A’s tactics, but I should mention one thing. I’m pretty passionate about model railroading. Therefore I hope you won’t mind if I jump into three or four threads in GD, and explain at great length how model railroaders are the only people who see things the way they really are, that they are on a much higher moral plane than those who fly radio-controlled aircraft because they build whole miniature cities, while the R/C “people” (and I use that term loosely) just take up valuable public space with their noisy, pointless machines; that the model railroaders’ little created worlds exhibit a perfection that the R/C’ers can never even aspire to, that the president of my local model railroad club has just got to be the most perfect and infallible person in town, because, well, not only is he a model railroader, but he’s President of the frickin’ model railroad club, and if the trains tend to derail a lot on operating nights, it’s only because some R/C’ers once got into the club under false pretences and managed to comepletely screw up the tracks before we threw them out, and anyone who claims to disagree is actually just a disgruntled R/C flier who’s jealous of the perfection of the little world we’ve created upstairs at the fire hall.
Oh, and by the way, some of what I’ve just written may not be entirely correct, but who needs fact when we’ve so clearly got morality on our side, and it’s just like you R/C’ers to nitpick us to death because you really haven’t got another leg to stand on, being R/C’ers as you are and thus forever shut out of the perfection that is our model railroad club. Got anything to say against any of this? No, of course you don’t. Please come back when you’ve grown up a little and can run with the big dogs, you, you *R/C’er, you.
Or I could just do all that right here, if that’s better for you 
The only time I’ve responded is in this thread (already posted above), where he did attempt to personally attack me (not that the attack hurt) and personally attacked Aldebaran, with a bit of racism, as already noted.
He engages in personal attacks, derails threads (see the above example) and posts meaningless “debates”. He may not be a troll, but he’s definitely a tool.
OK, what the hell is wrong with calling somebody a troll?
Seriously, what’s the problem? Is that a real insult? If so, then, Man, I been called worse. Even deserved it, on occasion.
Perhaps he’s trying to become the next december?
I see you got up on the right side of the bed today.
Look, don’t be a godda…errr, I mean, hey, thanks for noticing! 
Zoe, thank you very much for your words of support and testament as to my sincerety. I appreciate it very much. 
::addresses everyone else::
Frankly, I am very surprised at how thin-skinned and insecure a couple of my opponents from GD have revealed themselves to be. In the threads in question, I’ve been called an idiot, a rube, a liar, a dolt, a mindless tool of the Bush propaganda machine, and as someone who wouldn’t feel shame or regret over raping Iraqi women with the barrels of M-16 and would indeed claim the rapists were angels claiming they were doing good deeds. My words have been misconstued and complete and utter fabrications have pretty much been the norm in these threads about what I really was or was not saying. And I’ve twice been ordered not to speak again to certain posters unless I had something more palatable to say, and this was after responding only to questions they asked me, or in regard to statements they made about something I posted to someone else.
As usual in these forums, I was pretty much one lone voice trying his best to hold his own against a barrage of liberal scorn-mongers. I am absolutely astounded that my honest and sincere attempts to explain my own reasoning on the issues being discussed have so shaken a couple of these posters that they then come in here whining and complaining about how I mistreated them and made them think I was superior to them, yada, yada, yada.
And by pretty much equating me with Milum, and since this is a thread in which an attempt is being made to ban Milum, I can only assume they would like to see me banned as well.
Many of the posters to those threads are accusatory, beligerent, immature and insulting. If you or anyone here would like to see how I respond to intelligent, mature and reasonable posters, just take a look at my responses to such posters as Mr. Svinlesha and SimonX.
I will admit my posts show up a great deal in these threads as, with the exception of a brief post or two by Milum, I have been the only conservative voice in the debate…a debate involving usually 12 to 15 liberal posters. I would be more than happy to share the load with other conservative posters, but as we all know, there are only about 7 or 8 of us in the entire SDMB who are willing to come out and post our points of view, and rarely do we all wind up in the same thread at the same time. So it has been pretty much me against everyone else. So for them to come in here and complain about how I’ve been mistreating them and once again misstating my words and points of view is absolutely astonishing to me, particularly since they claimed in the other threads that I had been “demolished,” “eviscerated,” and “destroyed,” and shown without question to be a complete and utter fool. And yet they come on here and complain about how they don’t like what I say or how I say it. I mean, come on guys (and in this case I’m speaking primarily of El_Kabong and Hentor the Barbarian, two of the more impotent and ineffective of my opponents), it is supposed to be a debate, right? If you only want people posting who agree with you, and whose comments don’t anger and frustrate you because they are in keeping with your own, where is the debate? And if you continue to misconstrue, reword, and put words in the mouths of your opponents to try to make them appear to be saying something much more outrageous than they’re really saying, where is the opportunity for debate there?
Finally, in regard to Milum, I’m tempted to start a “Save Milum” thread to see if this reprehensible attempt to get him banned when he is always vastly outnumbered and reviled every time he posts can be thwarted. Milum is very satirical and biting in his considerable humor, but what is wrong with that? Many of you here are very aggressive and beligerent and biting in your posts but no one is trying to get you banned. If anything, **Milum **is the conservative version here of Al Franken to the right. He has every right to express his point of view and to ridicule the nature of this board’s left wing posters as they do to those of us on the right all the time. This is not trolling. Trolling is more like what we see when someone new comes on and posts nonsensical words or types in all caps and dares anyone to do anything about it, or insults the SDMB and/or its moderators, etc. Simply posting satirical comments about the ideas and behavior of posters on the other side idealogically does not constitute trolling, or else most of us all over this board would be trolls.
To those of you who think it’s a bad idea to set the precedent of banning someone for what is essentially posting adverse political opinions in an unusually humorous and effective way, I thank you. Many people in this forum have expressed hope that other posters such as lekatt won’t leave because generally it’s a bad idea for the pool of SDMB posters to be reduced. We’re supposed to be celebrating diversity and fighting ignorance here, not banning people whose opinions or style we find offensive.
My apologies for the misspellings and tortured syntax. I was racing the clock as I still have much to do tonight.
Except when “celebrating diversity” is done at the EXPENSE of fighting ignorance, which in Milum’s case, it is.
He doesn’t want to debate, he wants to bait people because he disagrees with their political views.
And from your behavior in GD, lately, it looks like you do as well. (Your whole thread on "liberals and the war in Iraq thread, where you just keep sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling LA LA LA LA LA!!!)
At the **expense **of fighting ignorance? This is a bannable offense? Without (so-called) ignorance, the SDMB wouldn’t exist. Like I said, if you ban all those deemed ignorant, there would be nothing to debate and there would be no purpose to the SDMB.
Sounds like a pretty good way to get a debate started to me.
You mean where I don’t give in and say, “Oh, yes, Guin…thank you so very much for enlightening me. I was completely wrong. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
I’m hardly the only one in GD holding to a point of view he held all along. I thought the idea was to express one’s opinions and why it is one holds them. I wasn’t aware it was expected that I capitulate in order not to be offensive.
I also find it interesting that the most troublesome exchanges involve such posters as Zagadka, rjung, Hentor the Barbarian, El_Kabong, RTFirefly, blowero and other hot-headed or nonsensical posters like them, while posters such as Mr. Svinlesha and **SimonX **seem to be able to carry on a mutually civil and open-minded conversation with me without running into your silly LA LA LA LA LA dead end.
Not all of us have the saintly patience needed to deal with your record-breaking levels of ignorance, SA.
(Personally, it seems to me that many of the SDMB Bush-apologizing conservatives have been getting more and more hysterical lately. I guess the imminent release of Fahrenheit 9/11 is freaking them out. )
Undoubtedly.
What, Klan meeting and Bund meeting scheduled on the same night?
(I keed, I keed)
No, you’re right on target. There are a hundred hand-wringing, knee-jerking, bleeding-heart Leftistas for every one busy-body, self-righteous, war-mongering Rightista, and a hundred of those for every reasonable, tempered, objective thinker. What one would expect as a result is a predominance of “our lying politician is better than your lying politician” rah-rah discussions, each more interesting than the next.
SA. You’re an imbecile.
I win!
I think you’re working under a delusion, RT, if you start interpreting our “rules” as if they were a legal code. We specifically do NOT want to try to write up a law code – we want guidelines, that give us flexibility. If we find someone acting like a jerk, we don’t want them to argue that the dot over the i was missing so it wasn’t really being jerkish.
We don’t want members publically calling other members a troll: that’s a Moderator decision. Plus, before we had that rule/guideline, every time Poster A disagreed with Poster B, we had troll-calling. It was getting to the point that calling someone a troll was just an offensive way of saying, “I disagree with you.” Hence, we said explicitly, not to call each other trolls.
We want to respect the privacy of our members. If we get lots of reports of trollish-behaviors about a member, we usually first contact that person via email to explain the problem as clearly as we can, and to call for their repetence. If the problem gets solved that way, privately and quietly behind the scenes, we’re all happier and better off.
A public thread calling someone a troll, or asking that someone be banned, is a hinderance to the person repenting. It’s tough enough to say, “Oh, yeah, sorry, I was wrong and I’ll try to do better in future.” It’s almost impossible to say that when you’ve got a herd of posters screaming for your blood.
That’s why we discourage troll-pointing and we discourage threads calling for someone to be banned. If you feel that strongly, send a note to the Moderators.
That’s something that it took me a long time to understand about the Dope. It’s not a government. There aren’t laws. It’s a community of volunteers, and the interest of moderators is to make it run smoothly. That’s why the rules are intentionally vague and flexible, so that mods can go by a gut feel when it makes sense to do so, and so that members in good standing can make mistakes without having to be banned because the rules say so. I think it was when I became a mod myself at Philosophy that this all dawned on me.