I lurk this board constantly and yes mswas acted like a fool with the recent Ted Kennedy nonsense. However, does he really deserve an entire month suspension? It just seems so heavy handed. Does anyone else share my opinion on this?
IIRC this is the second time that he’s been suspended.
For a day by Tom it looks like. I mean when I read over the warning I can’t help but think I should be seeing “This is not allowed, no warning given”.
mswas wasn’t given this “courtersey” by Tom and proceeds to flame out.
EDIT: But perhaps he was given a warning I did not come across. Either way on the whole he just doesn’t seem like that much of a blipp on the radar. After reading yesterdays melt down I agree with Shodan that he was allowing him self to be baited in to a ban.
For my part, I don’t have much to add other than what I said in the announcement thread. twickster and I both told him on Wednesday that he was running the risk of a suspension. We were both hoping he’d take a different tack after his “apology” thread, but that didn’t last more than 24 hours.
Four warnings in three months would always result in, at the very least, a warning that a suspension was imminent. He’d picked up six warnings this year, plus another one late last year. Anybody who got that many warnings in that amount of time would be suspended.
mswas has been on the SDMB since 2000, so it’s not like he has any excuse for not knowing you can’t insult posters outside the Pit. He was suspended for a month in early 2006 and given a final warning for behavior that was pretty similar to what he’s been doing lately. He basically stayed out of trouble for a few years after that and earned some more goodwill. But especially since this spring he’s broken the rules on insults and ignored moderation over and over. He’s out of chances and it’s time for him to change his behavior if he wants to stay here.
No, for a month (I think) for trolling, among other things.
TBH I’m surprised that he was given a second suspension at all instead of a ban. He seemed to be having his own emotional issues though, so I hope he can get his head together a bit and not court the ban stick when and if he comes back.
Me too. How many second chances is he going to get, anyway?
well, if anyone was ripe for taking a little vacation from the boards, it was mswas. Since he couldn’t see that for himself, the Mods pretty appropriately helped him. Hopefully, in a month, he’ll have a bit of perspective and decides he wants to come back and play by the sandbox rules.
As far as I can tell, this thread is mandatory. No matter how many times a man ignores the rules, once he gets slapped down, someone will run to start a thread about how the mods were mean.
He was warned and warned. Calling someone an ass is against the rules, has been and is blatant, yet he did it.
Then, when called on it, said: I’m sorry, but the others are bad too… then added
This, after he had many warnings.
No, I don’t think a month was too much.
Mods: You aren’t perfect, but you do a tough job well. Thank you for what you do - for free.
I’m surprised he was suspended and not banned. It seemed like he was trying to commit suicide-by-mod. Even if not, he was certainly violating the rule about not being a colossal jerk.
One month is not enough.
I did, indeed, rescently suspend mswas for a day. It is a tactic I have used on a couple of occasions, with different posters, to break a cycle of increasing anger so that they do not have the opportunity to commit suicide by mod just because they are worked up in a particular thread. That counted toward any Warnings, but is not considered an official “last chance to reform” suspension. It is more along the lines of letting a drunk sober up in a holding cell with no criminal charges than an official jail sentence. The previous multi-week suspension was a staff decision in which I may or may not have actually participated. (I’m not scouring three-year-old e-mails to see if I commented or voted on that occasion.)
He is listed as BANNED, not suspended. I will assume this is a function of the board software.
Regards,
Shodan
yeah I was about to point that out
Yes, it is. An admin has to go in and manually change the title. Just hasn’t happened yet.
It’s bullshit. Pure unadulterated bullshit.
It’s bullshit, not of the dried up, flaky kind that one may collect in one’s wheelbarrow with a shovel for one’s garden. But the freshly expunged, shiny green pearlescent chocolate pudding kind, still steaming from its own stink and drawing horse flies from the surrounding two counties. That’s the kind of bullshit this is.
The charge of trolling — there could not be a more subjective charge — brought up by FinnAgain who, upon my examining the thread to which he linked, was found to be among many who goaded mswas into his self-destruction, was self-serving and arbitrary. Set aside the misinformation about the month’s suspension, which thankfully Tom corrected for the record, the referenced thread illustrates the entire mentality, modus operandi, and result that occurs over and over and over at Straight Dope — a pile-on full of “I’m not touching you!” posts, that push a poster over the edge, and then a “victory” by the bullies who participated. (Often, these are people who almost never post EXCEPT to join pile-ons and cause other trouble.)
And now this latest fiasco, brought on by nothing more than the political bias of the board’s powers along with the ever-so-delicate sensibilities of a few schoolmarmish posters who just die of the vapors whenever a left-wing celebrity is ridiculed, but who happily dance on the graves of fundamentalist Christian ministers who have died. This wasn’t suicide by mods; it was murder by mods. How DARE a poster mourn the loss of Mary Jo Kopechne upon the death of Ted Kennedy. God knows that mourning the loss of Matthew Shepard upon the death of Jerry Fallwell would have been okay, even though Fallwell was not involved in the death of Mathew Shepard.
MPSIMS is the most eclectic of all the forums, featuring everything from announcing the deaths of longtime members to announcing the hairball of someone’s cat. It is a ridiculously designed forum in the first place that is nothing but a catch-all for things that (in someone’s mind) don’t belong anywhere else. And that is the place where mswas put his rememberence of Mary Jo Kopechne. The sheer cruelty and thoughtlessness of forbidding a poster to mourn her upon this event is as deeply ill-conceived, contrary, and damnable as the cruelty and thoughtlessness of Stormfront forbidding the mourning of Matthew Shepard.
Mswas was rightly pissed off about the matter, and took his complaint to ATMB, where it belonged. But as usual, the membership could not wait for a mod to come by and rule upon an ATMB question, but instead began the same sort of pile-on procedure that’s found everywhere else on here. And so Mswas tried to host a Great Debate. Another pile-on there. Finally, he tried to host an IMHO, which was closed by a mod whose judgment I had theretofore respected greatly. But this event has damaged even that. Not that he cared anyway.
Finally, of course, his thread was relegated to the Pit. Mourning the passing of a goddamn innocent girl who was in the car of a drunk philanderer was pushed off into the Pit by a bitter and shriveled up staff with a few torch-bearers, all of whom brought on the full blown snark for no reason other than to derail his simple effort to mourn this helpless and tragic woman. And lo and behold there were those who had the balls to say that mswas was trolling. Fucking trolling, just because Mary Jo Kopechne was not on par with Matthew Shepard, as far as they were concerened.
Yes, I know one or more of you will rip the analogy apart. Knot-headed bits about how one died tortured for his sexuality while the other died smothering by lungs filled with water. But goddammit, that would be an idiotic breakdown of the analogy. The point isn’t how they died — everyone dies differently or under different circumstances. The point isn’t how they died, but THAT they died. Needlesssly.
I know that mswas went over the top. I tried to stop him, and he wouldn’t listen to me. I wanted him to shut up — not because he did not have a legitimate grievance, indeed he did — but simply because I knew that this would be the end result. It is a travesty. It reflects extremely poorly on our moderation and on our membership. We make it next to impossible for conservatives to post here unless they carefully toe the line, writing tortured prose that won’t offend too many of the boards authoritarians, while people who call themselves “liberals” — daming the very term, as far as I am concerned — are allowed to flame and lampoon any group their heart desires, from people who oppose gay marriage (including gays who oppose gay marriage) to leaders of Christian churches and publishers of Christian pamphlets and hand-outs.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, though I know most of you won’t. And yes, before you turn this into a question about my mental health, I have taken my morning medications — two Tranxenes and a Lyrica. This whole fiasco is the fault of the moderators and members who participated in gang-smashing mswas. He posted something controversial? Oh, my stars and bars! I feel faint! No one has every posted anything controversial before. Whatever will we do?
I promised TubaDiva, privately, that I would not participate in the speculations about the board’s demise, and so I won’t say whether I believe it will or will not make it after the recent acquisition. But I will say that I hope it doesn’t. Losing this left-wing version of Stormfront will be the best thing that has happened to the Internet. The Kos can absord those whose sensibilities will not allow them to face views contrary to their own. And I will follow SenientMeat and Indistinguishable and other people interested in hearing from all points of view to wherever they go. Not that niney percent of people give a shit, but still. (I do have a pretty impressive friends list.) And don’t bother telling me to love it or leave it. I will post here until I’m banned or the board disappears.
Bah. This suspension and everything that led up to it was bullshit. Pure unadulterated bullshit
For what it’s worth, from my point of view, it looks like mswas had accumulated most of the ill-will against him (and the warnings, which as far as I understand the system were what ultimately led to the suspension) before and independently of the whole Mary Jo Kopechne-disaster, which I only was aware of tangentially, not being American. To make this about the politics of the board, left-leaning though they undoubtedly are, seems a bit far fetched to me.
Quick lib… DRAMA!!!
No, actually he admitted that his purpose was to piss people off.
Truly, it is a tragedy that Dopers so often strap other Dopers into their computer chairs and forcibly staple their fingers to their keyboards. I apologize for my part in that.
I also apologize for him choosing to Pit me. Also for responding to him Pitting me by not agreeing with him. I feel very bad about that part and you are right to take me to task. Obviously, when I am Pitted and I respond as an adversary it is my own fault and I was not goaded into it. Equally obviously, by responding as an adversary I can goad the person who Pitted me into melting down instead of taking a walk and gardening. Admittedly, I find that the whole hand-stapling thing helps to set this up, as they can’t get away if they’re stapled down.
Clearly, many of us must bear the great shame (shame!) of allowing this epic catastrophe to take place.
Man, you are so right.
Once, I found this hornet’s nest. And I discovered that if I kicked it, hornets would sting me. And then I figured out that if I pushed my entire face into it, the hornets would string me right in the face.
And some idiot was all like “Um… why don’t you walk away from the hornet’s nest? A bunch of us were gonna go swimming and watch a movie. There are cute girls there and we’re gonna order a pizza.”
And I was all like “Fuck you!!!”
Then I stuck my face into the hornet’s nest some more.
Man, that was awesome.
Thanks for illustrating the point.
Maybe in general, you are right. But if I open a thread in MPSIMS in remembrance of Mary Jo Kopechne — and there are no outstanding warnings against me, of which I am aware, or which appear on my user profile — will it be closed? And if so, why?
You still taking clonazepam too?