Reeder has been banned

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41

Gosh, then it’s certainly too bad Reeder didn’t even try to do so. Posting contentless links just to watch the fighting that results is not something to be rewarded. If his manner had become so irritating to the board populace that it prevented us from having productive threads about relevant issues, that’s his own damn fault for refusing to change his behavior after the Mods warned him several times.

Every special Reeder rule - one pit thread at a time, a suspension around the time of the election, no content-free Bush posts - was an effort to make up for the fact that he refused to exercise any self-control. His behavior has been problematic for a very long time, and he refused to change it, and it’s to the board’s detriment if it prevents us from examining the very real problems created by the Bush administration.

If Reeder’s obnoxiousness made it harder to have interesting discussions on the boards, he deserved to be banned. In my opinion, it did. This message board is not here for self-expression; it’s here to give members a chance to discuss interesting things and if one person’s style continually obstructs that goal, and if after multiple chances to conform to the board’s expectations he refuses to do so, he deserves banning. There are some places where his style would be welcome. But this isn’t one of them, and I don’t think everyone else here should have to make special concessions to his obnoxiousness - if in no other way than by ignoring him - rather than him changing his own behavior. The rest of us are better off without him. I like the fact that this place doesn’t have some overriding principle that self-expression is paramount; I get enough of that everywhere else. Here, there’s standards. Reeder knew what they were and decided, with just about every post, not to adhere to them. The only problem with this banning is that it took way too long.

42

I agree with most of what you say. I still find it problematic, though, that the final thread that led to the banning was one that, if started by any other Doper, probably would have been allowed to stand, or maybe moved to MPSIMS.

43

You’re missing the point here.

It’s not that he transgressed in some huge way THAT time, it was the overall pattern of behavior. He showed to us, very clearly, that he was not willing to listen to any direction from management; that he was going to post what he wanted when he wanted regardless of what anyone else thought about it; that he had an unhealthy obsession with one topic and he was going to beat that topic into the ground over and over again until we did something about it.

We warned him many times to modify his behavior.

We closed a multitude of these threads all singing the same song.

We gave him time off to think about why this was a bad idea.

We sent him email cautioning him about his behavior.

I talked to him personally on the subject on more than one occasion; I wouldn’t be surprised to hear other staffers did the same thing.

He continued.

He always returned to sing his same aria.

It was all useless. What more could we have done?

There was an element of “the straw that broke the camel’s back” here as well; we had just reached the “no more” place. He took us there.

It’s too bad.

your humble TubaDiva

44

And handy’s posting in a medical thread would have stood if it had been anyone else. What’s your point?

45

tuba didn’t include a link to a warning we gave Reeder which led to his suspension last October.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=5357240#post5357240

[Administrator Hat ON] note–by Gaudere

Reeder has been put on an enforced suspension of not less than one month, based on this comment, his previous Pit thread posting, and prior warnings. Please take any discussion of this to the Pit. Thanks.

[Administrator Hat OFF]

[/QUOTE]

46

I do not rejoice at reeder’s banishment.

But it should be pointed out that, while dung may have a role in cooking (used as a shell around a baked item in some cultures, for instance), it is not considered a spice.

47

I should have said that this post led to his being suspended. Not banned, but suspended. We actually worked with the guy. He just couldn’t help himself.

48

i’m sure you’re smart enough to work it out.

49

Not if any other doper did the same fucking thing over and over and over after being warned several times.

Haj

50

What I was going to say.

De extorris nil nisi bonum

51

I’m getting a “TPTB are jack-booted thugs who had it in for Reeder” vibe but I was wondering if there was something I’m not getting, seeing as how “if X was posted by anyone other than Y there would have been no problem” applies to everyone who has been banned after being warned. Especially those who had a standing warning not to post X ever.

52

I was actually considering pitting him a couple of months ago, when I was foolish enough to open one of his threads to find yet another link and one line OP.
So I started checking out his OPs (“Find all posts by poster”), thinking this would be a slam dunk.

It wasn’t. Sure, there were quite a lot of these OPs, but not enough to make a good case. After going back a couple of hundred posts, I realized there wasn’t all that many of them. And if you take away his stupid OPs in the pit, he wasn’t all that bad in the other fora.

When I studied marketing, we learned that “perception is reality” and once people have made up their minds about something, it’s almost impossible to change thatperception, no matter how much money you pour into the campaign: Howard Dean is that Democrat that screamed, Kerry married rich, the French are cheese making surrender monkeys.
And reeder was the shrill loony leftist.

With the amount of information saturating our brains every day, we don’t have space for more nuanced perceptions. reeder didn’t to a whole lot to change the perception, but he wasn’t just a loony leftist, as I discovered when I was looking for stuff for the pitting.

53

‘Tis a sad day in dufferland. A sad, sad day. Rarely is there a poster of such shallowness that offers me almost a slam-dunk win in arguing something. On my way to work I felt a disturbance in the force. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. The grass wasn’t as green, the birds’ singing was almost muffled and I saw 2 bunnies not having sex. It was almost surreal.

I guess in the end Reeder has won. Ironically, in a roundabout way, Bush is the reason he was banned. Imagine his ire today! :eek:

Anyone know his user name at DU? Please e-mail me, I just can’t resist a good, unmoderated melt-down.

Now if you all will excuse me, I must go grab a cold one and reflect on my place in the world. I just feel so empty.

54

Looks like the mods were waiting for an excuse to ban Reeder from where I’m sitting. That final straw was pretty innocuous unless not putting enough effort into your rants is now bannable.

55

If the SDMB had existed in Germany in the 1930s, and HerrReader made post after post about how evil Adolf Hitler was, would he have been banned? I think it’s quite possible that Bush really is as evil as Reeder said he was. I’ll fall back on Goldwater: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. He was extreme, but I wouldn’t say he’s wrong.

56

Well, in my opinion, if X is allowable behavior on these Boards, then no Doper should be prohibited from doing X just because he or she does it more than some people would like.

So, if pitting Bush/Republicans/Conservatives/whatever is allowable, then Reeder should not be banned from doing so just because he’s a bit of a one-trick pony. I thought that the thread created by Lynn specifically for Reeder’s Bush-bashing was ridiculous.

I do agree that someone can reasonably be banned for behaviour that might elicit only a warning for another Doper, because that actually involves breaking the rules. But i don’t think there should be special rules for individuals, and i don’t think anyone should be banned based on a thread that, if started by any other Doper, wouldn’t even have raised an eyebrow.

On a more general note about Reeder:

Anyone who has spent any time debating with me on these Boards will probably be aware that, when it comes to politics, i agree with Reeder about many things. We share pretty similar political leanings, and agree on many political issues. But i also agree that his posting style left much to be desired at times, and that he tended to flog many a horse long after it was dead. He also had an annoying tendency to start threads about trivial issues related to Bush and his family.

You know what i did in response to all this? I chose not to participate in most of his threads. Reeder started 749 threads in his time here, and 400 since 9/11/2003. Of the last 400 threads that he started, i participated in exactly six, five of which were political threads (the other one was about movies). Sure, those five threads* had OPs that were in Reeder’s typical style—a quote from some media outlet, and a simplistic statement or question. But those five threads all also developed into interesting discussions or arguments.

I spend quite a bit of time on these Boards, so i saw many (probably most) of his other threads. But if i opened a thread and saw that it was just another rant about something that had been hashed out ages ago, or about some trivial matter unworthy of getting worked up about, then i closed the thread without responding. If i thought, on the other hand, that the subject had merit, then i participated.

If more people had done this, then maybe Lynn and co. wouldn’t have had to whine about all the Reeder threads on the front page. Those threads would have died a natural death. Some of the people celebrating most exuberantly at his ouster are the same people who didn’t have the self-control to ignore him when he started silly threads. They got the Reeder they deserved, IMO.

  • For those who are interested, here are the five Reeder-started political threads that i particpated in out of his last 400 threads.

The Repugs have found a new way to raise money
Reagan the greatest American???
Coulter at it again. My apologies to our Canadian friends
CBS…NBC…Church of Christ commercial
What? No thread on O’Reilly’s latest bullshit?

57

AFAIK, the only time Reeder and I interacted was when he would do one of his typical drive-bys during one or two of my little pile-ons. That’s just to say there’s no real love lost between us, or interest for that matter.

I really don’t think he should have been banned. This stuff is better settled on a community level both through mhendo’s suggestion of selectively responding and simply calling him on his bad habits. This may come as a surprise to the certain readers coming from the guy who re-posted Desmostylus’ forgotten last warning, but IMHO Mods should be careful about painting themselves into a corner with “final warnings”. Most especially when bans of consequence are supposed to be group deliberated.

I agree with mhendo’s first paragraph to a slightly lesser degree. I thought the concept of stopping spam with “one Bush thread at a time” can be a fair probationary rule. If he had broke that it would have been a clear case for banning.

58

But what if the world is really being run by a secret cabal of Jewish industrialists? Would Reeder have been banned for warning us about them? You fall back on Goldwater. I prefer Godwin.

If you think Reeder was providing a valuable service in warning us that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy[sup]TM[/sup] is about to stage Kristalnacht, by all means take over his role. It’s easy - all that is needed is a link to some loony left-wing site with a picture of Bush’s dog pissing on a tree, and a one-line post saying “bush hate the envriomnant!”

Reeder was banned because he was a tiresome loon whose hatred of Bush carried him over the edge of reality. You might want to consider whether agreeing with him is a good sign.

Regards,
Shodan

59

Good job, Mods. There’s hope for this place yet.

60

I see the SDMB as a park where hundreds of dogs are walked every day. The vast majority of those dogs have owners who routinely pick up after them but a few needed reminders and were told that the next time they didn’t pick up they’d be forcibly removed from the park. Having no Reeder around means not having to dodge piles of shit from his dog.