mswas one month too much?

About This Message Board
81

Schoolmarmish? This schoolmarm, who has obviously adored Ted Kennedy for almost half a century, took the time to commiserate with mswas about Mary Jo. She would be about my age. I worked in political campaigns back then too. No one alive and aware at that time is going to forget her.

Is her death something to ridicule Kennedy for? For what purpose? I believe in redemption. I think when you make an ass of yourself, you can throw in your cards and throw away your life or you can try to atone for it.

But if you want to stereotype teachers because they admire those who feed and clothe the poor and visit the sick, but have less admiration for racists and sexists and other human oppressors, then let me invite you to tell a few Trail of Tears jokes at the next Sunday gathering of the Purity Evangelical Assembly.

You don’t like having your views ridiculed, but your way of handling that is to trivialize other people. Way to go, Lib! Then you try to make it seem as if the liberals are somehow keeping conservatives from posting.

Pssst! Conservatives are keeping conservatives from posting. Their numbers are dwindling. Being poor is no fun. The ones that are left are getting cranky.

82

Duplicate

83

Indeed. One is reminded of that famous scene when Dex sternly laid down the law to the rabble.

Those of us who were there will never, ever forget it.

84

Seconded. I consider mswas to be a friend (we played EVE together for quite a bit) and I am compelled to put in my two cents on his behalf. Yes he probably takes discussions on this board a bit too seriously sometimes, but I don’t know if that is worthy of such a long suspension. I hope he stays with us, I like his posts and miss playing games with the guy.

85

Pointless thread yet predictable due to the very nature of this board as more than a few confuse intelligence with petty bickering.

I also think it is an insult to mswas’s intelligence to decry his suspension. He knew perfectly well the road he was traveling and where it would lead him – despite the copious advise against it.

Lastly I think that mswas, for reasons only known to himself, chose to use this board as a substitute for dealing with his current circumstances. And though I wish him well in that endeavor the answers are nowhere to be found in this message board.

More laundry, less drama.

86

Well played, Carol Stream, well played.

87

Oh, my. Never hire your wife’s nephew to decorate your capitol building.

88

I do want to address the idea of mswas being bated for a minute.

First and foremost, whether people are baiting you or not, you’re still expected to follow the rules. I haven’t read all of mswas’ recent posts - he was posting more than 100 times a day for the last week-plus - but I can’t think of any post I saw that struck me as baiting. It’s true that many people were getting on his case and a lot of people weren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt in terms of his intention with his Kennedy threads or with his apology thread. People accused him of arguing in bad faith, and people accused him of not meaning what he said. None of that is against the rules.

I don’t want to enforce the rules in such a way that people can goad others into breaking the rules with no repercussions. So if people believe that happened, I’m open to ideas and examples of how those cases could be handled differently. (I also don’t want people with minority opinions to be hounded off the site, although that’s a more complex issue.) But even if you believe mswas was provoked into breaking the rules in some cases, I think you have to acknowledge that at other times, he lashed out for no particular reason.

89

Now I haven’t gone through all of mswas’s comments of the past week (especially given the volume), but I don’t think this is really a goading issue. Instead, it seems like mswas has a problem where he’s sensitive to even relatively mild negative comments, but he’s willing rather free with his own harsh words. There’s just a core hypocrisy where he seems to hold everyone else to a standard that he refuses to apply to himself, and it seems to promote these meltdowns.

Take his infamous apology thread, for instance: I am sorry - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board

In it, ElvisL1ves expresses some skepticism over mswas’s apology. mswas responds, and there’s a bit of back and forth. mswas tries to end it by claiming he’s going to start scrolling past ElvisLives’s posts. A bit later, while responding to another poster, ElvisL1ves makes the point that if mswas had insight into his problems, acting on it was merely a matter of stepping away from the keyboard.

Now since mswas is alledgedly just scrolling past ElvisL1ves’s posts instead of reading them like he said, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the case. He, of course, yells at ElvisL1ves for his sense of entitlement in thinking that mswas should be expected not to post, and it should be ElvisL1ves who instead should restrain himself. Remember, of course, that this is in a thread were mswas is supposed to be apologizing to the board at large for all the trouble he caused with his unrestrained posting. He also managed to write individual replies to all 3 of ElvisL1ves’s posts in the thread and, in each one, included commentary about how he’ll try to just ignore ElvisL1ves’s posts.

It’s this sort of behavior that seems to make any negative interaction with mswas come across like goading. He’s overly reactive, and he refuses to back down over his own irrational belief that it’s always the other guy’s fault. Even in a thread where he’s trying to admit fault, he almost immediately slips into his “blame the other guy” schtick.

90

All I can say is that I was so happy when mswas said he was going to ignore the posts (even using the software) from the people that made him mad. I was so sad when I found out he didn’t do it. I was worried about him when he started getting mad in the apology thread. I am also happy that he wasn’t banned completely. But that’s because I’m a softy who thinks nobody doesn’t deserve a second chance.

Oh, and I do think there were some people goading mswas, at least in his last thread. It wouldn’t normally count as goading, but those people knew about his bad temper. Still, I’m not sure it was a bad thing, as it was a chance to check the veracity of his apology.

Oh, and I am conservative (well, not financially). I have a bad temper and OCD. And while I’ve only posted in a few threads about my ideology, I have never once been warned, or even received a mod note. Do you know why? I try not to read things that bother me, and I don’t when I’m angry. So, it is totally possible

91

mswas, take a breather and don’t let them win by getting yourself banned

92

One of the facts about moderating here is that we are unpaid volunteers, and we’re often pressed for time. Analogous to when a teacher comes out into the playground and finds two people fighting, he/she doesn’t usually have the time or energy to play police detective to find out who “started” it. “He hit me back first” is usually hard to unwind.

Hence, if someone is goading you into breaking the rules, or if someone is breaking the rules (say, by insulting you), DON’T strike back. Then you’re both to blame. Instead, REPORT it and let the mods sort it out. It’s pretty easy when the offense is all on one side. And, of course, one problem is that it’s possible for the person doing the goading to be technicaly inside the rules. Even so, the mods will try to tell you that, and the process of reporting should (we hope) allow you to vent to the mods without losing your temper on the boards.

And, yes, I’ve been travelling a lot and Marley’s been pretty much single-handedly doing Cafe Society for the last month or so, and a splendid job, too.

93

There’s a mentality that some people have — I used to have it myself — that every post needs to be responded to. It’s hard for people sometimes to tell that they’re being goaded. (And why goading isn’t against the rules is a mystery — what could be more jerkish than to goad another poster into breaking a rule?) Anyway, I tried to stop him, but in his rage, all he could see was the need for justice, as though justice applied here. Some posters look to the mods as “protectors” of a sort, and when the posters perceive that even the mods don’t care, they can tend to go off the deep end. That’s what happened here.

Now, some mods do tend to serve as protectors. Like Tom, for instance. Or Giraffe (may Allah bless his name). But others, like TubaDiva, usually just follow the crowd — a sort of path of least resistance — and poot out a warning or equivalent after absorbing little if any content, but only responding to what appears to be an avalanche of consensus. Them’s the breaks.

94

Because how are the mods supposed to infallibly tell the difference between “goaded into breaking the rules” and “legitimate debate and disagreement that goes off the rails because someone has a hair-trigger”? The onus is always on the one who ultimately loses their shit, IMO. Just …don’t lose your shit. Or do it in the right forum for losing your shit.

And how can we say mswas was goaded, when he was the one starting most of the recent threads that got him into trouble? Seems more like looking for a fight if you ask me.

95

I’m sorry, but when you open four threads about Mary Jo Kopechne over forty years after the poor girl died (and, admittedly, Kennedy behaved very badly), but oddly, the exact week that Ted Kennedy dies, you’re obviously looking to spread some bile around. I can hardly consider any responses that he may have gotten to be goading him.

96

The mods can’t “infallably tell” anything, least of all the very cardinal rule: “don’t be a jerk”.

But I do agree with you about the “hair trigger” thing. The only problem is that from my perspective, being neither Democrat nor Republican, the hair triggers seem to be all over the people who call themselves “liberals”. They just get the vapors when something offends their delicate sensibilities, and they feverishly peck out something designed basically to push the offender’s buttons — sort of returning what they feel is treatment in kind. Escalation ensues, and from my perspective, its seems that, more often than not, the scythe falls on the neck of the person who is the target of the pile-on.

It is important to note that not all (and maybe not even most) pile-ons are spontaneous in nature. It is a well known fact that certain people gather at the snark boards (including at least one former mod) in order to coordinate attacks on people whom they consider to be vulnerable. There is also the occasional “distress PM”, something along the lines of “Could you come help me out, please? PosterX has offended my sensibilities, and I need affirmation.”

Once again, as I’ve said twice before now (why have you ignored this?), I believe that mswas went over the top, and I tried my best to warn him. I even told him to shut up flat out. But rage has a way of filtering what it sees.

Still, to repeat so that it isn’t missed somehow, the mods should be able to tell goading from legitimate debate if they are also capable of telling jerkdom from, say, an elucidator drive-by. One of Der Trihs’s (paraphrasing) “The Christian God is an evil coward,” is a goading remark. There is nothing intended to debate about that, unless the debate is about the Christian God. That sort of thing is just inserted seemingly randomly in any thread remotely having to do with religion, unless, like the series we are conducting, everything is so over his head that he simply doesn’t know what to say.

But people ignore Der Trihs (not in a formal, CP setting sense, but in an informal skip-over-it sense) because he is a lone wolf crier — possibly the worst apologist for atheism the world has ever seen. Goading comes with pile-ons, which, as I said, are often planned ad hoc by a gathering of posters who goad for entertainment. I personally can tell when this happens, just by reading the snark board. The mods read it too. Maybe not all of them, but certainly some of them, and they communicate with the others.

So, sorry. But the mods being too dense or stupid or whatever failing is required to tell goading from disagreement just doesn’t hold water. Look at FinnAgain’s recent postings for examples of goading. That’s what goading is. “Oh, looky Lib… DRAAAAAMA!” or some such idiotic snark. It just doesn’t work on me anymore is all.

97

He began a thread saying, ‘here you go do your worst!’

He repeatedly warned people who took him to task for his nonsense, ‘they were pushing their luck’.

There was goading to be sure, but it was going both ways, so I’d call that a wash.

He’s a grown man, he appeared to be perfectly aware of what he was doing, and the ramifications, through it all.

Totally deserved it, don’t know why it took them so long.

98

We covered this before. Pay attention this time. The only reason he opened four threads is because he was forced to do so by the mods, who closed the MPSIMS one with a warning (later rescinded) and the IMHO one (with little or no informative explanation). It isn’t as though he opened four simultaneous tabs and typed four separate OPs at once and submitted them all a minute apart, which is the way your description makes it sound.

99

How can you when the rules are made up on the spur of the moment, never to be mentioned again.

Lynn got butthurt that someone posted something she didn’t like about planned parenthood and invented a magical new rule (which, please note, hasn’t been enforced one single time since she invented it) that all threads in The Pit must have 100% factually accurate thread titles. And the invention of this magical new rule and it’s retroactive application (“I’m going to warn you for breaking this rule that didn’t exist when you posted”) caused a meltdown.

Now Twickster (who I like, and I very much appreciate that she recinded the warning) invented another new rule: no celebrity snark in MPSIMS despite the fact that it has always been allowed before. And as a result we have yet another poster meltdown.

Just a yesterday, Tuba point-blank invented a new rule that you can’t be snarky and sarcastic in ATMB and warned Leander, despite Dex point-blank posting (close quote–I can’t find the thread yet) “It is and always has been fine to post snarky, sarcastic comments in ATMB. Just not direct insults.” Which Mswas didn’t. Dex’s rule was less than 5 months old. And Leander just started another thread about this new insta-retroactive rule.

Guys, I’m happy to follow the rules here, but I can’t follow them if you keep pulling them out of your collective asses and applying them retroactively.

C’mon–I know there’s posters that piss you off. But making up rules that apply retroactively is neither fair nor appropriate nor conducive to making posters want to obey rules.

100

Yes, dear, I did pay attention. The point is, he opened one thread intended to provoke, and when that was closed he opened another. And another. And finally one in the Pit, where he apparently decided he had sussed out the Liberals’ secret agenda to kill Mary Jo Kopechne and dance on her grave, or to blame her for her own death or something.

My point is, he was being remarkably persistent, even though his clearly expressed views were already present in the earlier threads to anyone who might be interested, even though they had been closed. Looks to me like someone spoiling for a fight.