Maybe SA can just have his own stickies in every forum to forestall this sort of thing. But I have to go water the lawn now.
I didn’t see a warning in that thread.
I don’t understand the complaint. It was a thread about famous people you dislike, not a debate about the merits of Rush Limbaugh. So your post was off topic. You didn’t get a warning, just a note to drop the topic. You’re free to start a thread on Rush if you want.
Yes, well, that’s because you subscribe to the theory that a watery tart gave the mods their powers and they act out of Divine Right.
Good to see that we have moved from the child-rearing “knock it off” to the dog-training “drop it”.
I don’t know why you should be upset.
Czarcasm repeated your post under circumstances that certainly would increase the number of posters reading that post and not only that, secured for you the precious last word on the subject.
You had won the day and now you’ve blown the victory.
You think it’s a good thing that he stepped in to keep a perfectly civil (and as far as I was concerned, finished) minor discussion between Hippy Hollow and me, a discussion that had nothing to do with my aside regarding the media, from derailing a thread that hadn’t had a post in 9 days, save for the one that I responded to which triggered Hippy Hollow’s question, which in turn led to what seemed to me was a pleasant discussion of intellectual commentators vs. the various and sundry loudmouth pundits of today?
I would point out also that it was HH himself who brought up Olbermann. I would also point out that I made critical remarks about not only Olbermann but Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity (in the post HH asked me about), and Maddow. So there was equal time given to both sides, and this being a message board and all, and given that the forum is given to “frank exchanges” on less than cosmic topics such as this, and since, as aldiboronti notes, the OP expressed no wish to limit discussion to lists, I find it hard to reconcile that with not only Czarcasm’s ending the discussion but his rude, brusqe and obviously irritated tone as well.
I suspect politics played a greater role in his decision and subsequent response to me than did any real or supposed rule violations on my part.
In the cold light of day, however, I can see where my sidebar comment on the media could be viewed as my trying to generate a debate, and even though that wasn’t the case I can see how some may have viewed it that way, Czarcasm included. It would have been nice to have gotten this insight from Czarcasm himself however, instead of the brusque “Off topic. Drop it.” order that I did get. It would also have been helpful if the actual post in which I made that comment had been addressed rather than the more benign one that Czarcasm appeared to respond to in his warning. (And you don’t regard “Off topic. Drop it.” as a warning, Six? It may not have been an official one but it was clearly a warning nonetheless.)Then it wouldn’t have been necessary for other posters over the course of the next 8 or 9 hours to make clear the true nature of the problem.
And you are right Dutchman; in the larger sense I should have just let the subject drop and been content with having the last word, but I was enjoying what appeared to me to be a discussion of the likes of George Will, Christopher Hitchens and Bill Buckley, and was annoyed that that was deemed off topic, especially in light of the moribund nature of the thread at that time. Again, had Czarcasm pointed to what the real nature of my offense had been, I would have known where the true problem was and this thread wouldn’t have been necessary.
It’s because of the geese.
Omigod, Paris Hilton is Cecil? 
:eek:
Wow. I’m a little surprised about the warning/admonition, and I did in fact ask for Starving Artist to expand upon his/her thoughts re: Limbaugh. I mentioned Olbermann because I wanted to make it clear that I didn’t see smart coming from El Rushbo, and that’s not because of partisan reasons. Ditto (ugh) for the reason I mentioned Will and Hitchens.
If you’re put out by Czarcasm’s admonition, I think I’m partly responsible. My bad.
I admit to not knowing SA’s rep well enough to understand if there’s some history that precipitated this… but there was back and forth about choices on the list that didn’t seem to be a problem. I think I even challenged Nzinga about her choices, and we went back and forth a little… no harm, no foul.
No problem where you’re concerned, HH. I was enjoying our conversation. If some of the other posters here are correct, it was the aside I made about media bias in the previous post that was the problem, even though Czarcasm didn’t make that clear (and still hasn’t), so the problem seems in point of fact to have had nothing to do with you or with the conversation we were having.
It was IMHO. Its always been this way. Nothing about your content. There has always been a limit to the back and forth that is allowed.
You forgot cream cheese always wore suits and ties and nice hats to its protest marches.
Does Czarcasm have a particular problem with Buckley? If so that would explain a lot. I’ve had a pretty busy day today and a rather choppy one in terms of time allocation, but now that I’ve gone back over the problematic posts and considered what Czarcasm had to say in this thread, I’ve come to the conclusion that this may well be the case. The comment I made about media bias was really nothing more than an observation (El_Kabong’s assertion notwithstanding), and my comments to Hippy Hollow were no more off topic than any number of other posts made in virtually any other thread on this board.
That leaves my so-called attempt to debate the others’ choices, and the only way I can see that as having happened was in my comment to CaptMurdock to the effect that even if Limbaugh did think he was smart, it wasn’t without reason. And given that CaptMurdock didn’t claim Limbaugh wasn’t smart to begin with, I hardly think it’s kosher to extrapolate from that that I was trying to debate the issue with him.
So it looks to me like Czarcasm’s got bupkus to back up his claim that I was trying to start a debate, and that he reacted instead to the content of what I posted rather than to any rule that I broke, and that leads me to believe that it was either the mention of media bias that torked him off, or it was the mention of Buckley. Either way though, he was obviously out of line in both the action that he took and the way he phrased it. A dispassionate mod acting merely to maintain forum discipline would have responded with something more like “SA, please don’t attempt to turn this into a debate over others choices. If you want to discuss the merits of Limbaugh’s relative intelligence you can start a thread to that effect”, rather than in the brusque, rude, cryptic - and, as you say, arbitrary - way that Czarcasm did.
At any rate, I hadn’t given much thought to the Buckley angle till I went back over the thread and saw your post.
Thanks too for your support.
I know that you and Shodan have a fervent love for finding anti-Right Wing bias amiong the staff, but before you get led astray by Shodan’s fanciful interjection, you might want to do a search on target “Buckley” with username “Czarcasm.”
How have you come to be of that opinion? To the best of my recollection I’ve never (or very, very rarely) had anything to say about either the board’s moderation or moderators themselves.
Hey, I’m just casting about for answers, given that the one I got doesn’t seem to add up for the reasons I outlined above. Certainly something set Czarcasm off and caused him to warn me away from what was a very pleasant conversation between HH and me, and to do it in such a rude way and for such an apparently bogus reason, and I’m having a difficult time figuring out what it was. Frankly, I would appreciate a more detailed explanation from Czarcasm himself, though I don’t expect to get one because I also understand that the board’s moderators can’t allow themselves to get dragged into debates over their moderation with posters they’ve displeased. So again, I’m left with having to cast about for the reason, and Buckley seemed as good a reason as any other.
Well, you’re not “left with” any particular reason; you can pick a lot of different ones. I simply noted that you could use a specific action to test the belief upon which you have decided to settle. Have you actually done that?
Looks to me like a wrong forum thingy. The pit is the safest place to talk about all things political. I’ll agree that Limbaugh is not only smart, but very smart. I’ll also point out that he never picks on drug users and gays because he has used drugs illegally and at least used to be gay back in the 70s. I also think that Limbaugh believes very little of what he says and laughs a lot at his audience right in front of them.
That would be the same hippies who cancelled The Smothers Brothers for mocking the Vietnam war? 
(Probably the only time in U.S. history when a network dropped a successful show while its ratings were still high.)
No, I haven’t. I think it goes without saying (or perhaps not, since I’m saying it :)) that you already know better or you wouldn’t have suggested it. I have sufficient regard for you to take it for granted that you know better or you wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place.
I’m going on the assumption that this is a whoosh and letting it go at that.
But there are many times around here when a poster makes a comment that someone might want to comment back on but which comment doesn’t warrant a thread of its own. It happens all the time around here regardless of the forum, and usually with no ill result.
And yeah, Uncle Walter was a leftie alright, as numerous comments he’s made since his retirement demonstrate. Still, it was at least somewhat difficult to spot that when he was on the air. Same with Huntley and Brinkley, John Cameron Swayze, etc., during the early years of television. IMO, anchor bias didn’t really become easy to spot until the Nixon era and reached its zenith during the pre-Fox News era with Rather, Jennings, and, to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Tom Brokaw. CNN was pretty bad as well but learned its lesson when it began to hemorrhage viewers to Fox and backed off to at least a noticeable degree.
Do you have any evidence of this? If not, I think you owe him an apology. Lumping him with someone like Shodan is pretty insulting.