We’ve got a new, shall we say, empassioned poster, Ray Heller. Obviously made of stern stuff, as his premiere thread in Great Debates already involved flames, an apology, and being closed (and hopefully he’ll open a new one as promised with more civility and less hostility). But there were a few gems I couldn’t resist poking fun at (hence not a flame, just a jibe):
This has absolutely nothing to do with the argument presented, but is it just me, or are others getting strong whiffs of our dear, demented FriendofGod? :eek: (No, I’m not implying anyone is a sock or a troll, but goodness, the similarities are astouding!)
After being lambasted for the ferocity of the OP and lack of finesse in technique (not the least of which was the fact that abortion is debated just about every other hour or so), Ray asks a few pertinent questions:
Each and everyone one of these shows a profound ignorance as to how this board operates, from basic coding to how this board is moderated to the way this “community” operates. Hey, I know first-hand what it’s like to jump in feet-first onto a message board and get roasted, so methinks it would behoove Ray to take a few days, poke around a bit, and get a lay of the land a little better first - no doubt it will make his (hopefully continued) presence on the board easier on him.
But kudos to him for this:
That’s the spirit! Bully for you for the apology and for sticking with us and looking for a reasonable debate.
Obviously the title of the thread should be “an observation.”
And, like FoG, I might suggest you go back and re-read Ray’s OP as William Shatner. “Here are a few FACTS as to WHY it should be kept. ANTI CHOICERS take note… you Klingon BASTARDS! You KILLED my SON!”
Sometimes I think the guidelines for the board should insist that everyone who joins come to ATMB and make their first post a practice post, so that they gain some familiarity with basic coding.
Then again, there are buttheads like me who have been doing it for years and still manage to occasionally leave out a closing tag. <sigh>
And anyone who is remotely familiar with using e-mail should know right off the bat that CAPS=SHOUTING. Let me relate a somewhat funny anecdote…
I have a media biller who works down the hall from me. She recently sent me an e-mail in all caps, not intending to shout. Five minutes later, I get a follow-up e-mail from her, again in all caps, saying something to the effect of “I HOPE YOU DIDN’T THINK I WAS SHOUTING AT YOU.” I walked down the hall and asked her why the second e-mail was all in caps, too. She said that one of the archaic systems we use here for billing doesn’t recognize lower-case characters, so she tends to leave things in all caps, implying that it was too much of a pain in the ass to disengage her caps lock key before sending off an e-mail to me. Is that lazy or what?
Um, could we give the “caps = shouting” thing a rest already? It seems like a convention that has long outlived whatever usefulness it had; in five years of Internet use, I have never seen anybody deliberately post in caps because they intended to convey that they were shouting. What I have seen, time and again, is somebody new to the Internet innocently posting in caps (because they always type that way, or because they don’t know how to bold or underline things yet) and large numbers of regulars chewing them out for it. It’s practically a hazing ritual, and it seems like the main point now is to let those who know the conventions feel superior to those who haven’t yet learned them.
And please, please, stop saying cutesy stuff like “All this shouting is hurting my ears!” Typing styles cannot hurt your ears.
