This lefty is somewhat befuddled by the intent of this thread. For the record, I think december, in the end, earned his banning; it was less a single specific offense than a mounting pile of disingenuously straight-faced irritations.
And while I would rather vote for a Hefty bag full of scabs over the current President, I would not consider a banning of Reeder out of line in the least.
I’m embarrassed to have him on my side of the debate. I think he makes us liberal types look like a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth cretins. For all his stated intentions to bring down the corrupt goons currently occupying our national statehouse, his actual work in pursuit of this goal is, in my mind, completely counterproductive. He has no sense of perspective and doesn’t understand the effect of his strident repetition.
I know he thinks he’s doing us anti-Bush people a favor. He comes across another example of the administration’s shitty behavior, and he thinks, “Cool! More shit!” And he starts a thread in which he can dance up and down while pointing, “Hey, everybody, look at this shit!” But after a while, we no longer pay attention to the substance of his remarks; all we see is a guy who seems to enjoy carrying shit around. “Hey,” we say when we see another Reeder thread. “It’s the shit guy again.” Gone is any sense of where the shit comes from; it’s just Reeder and his shit.
I see it like this: If people are violating board policy, warn them; and if improvements in behavior are not forthcoming, ban them. Creating a one-shot exception like this thread smacks of inconsistency and dithering. I can’t recall a prior example of this approach; I’m not saying there isn’t one, but that it’s obviously rare if a precedent exists. Either way, we take pride in the relatively high-minded tone of the boards, and in my opinion we should trust our members to behave as adults and take responsibility for their actions and behavior. Trying to hand-hold a member by funneling his (and only his) output on a content-specific basis is just bizarre to me.
If Reeder is being a jerk, show him a yellow card, same as with anybody else. And if he persists, red-card him and kick him off the field, same as anybody else. It would be awfully strange if the refs in a football match spontaneously decided that this time, instead of sending an offending player to the showers, he would be allowed to kick the ball only with his left foot between this yard line and that one, when no other athletes had been the beneficiary of that sort of exception.
I know moderating our unruly bunch of iconoclasts and curmudgeons is a thankless task, and I don’t envy the challenge before Lynn and the rest of the gang. I respect the difficult and narrow course Lynn is trying to navigate, because I know she’s trying to do Reeder a favor here, jerking back on his choke-chain one last time before she has to take him out back, tie him to a tree, and put a bullet in his head. The thing is, though: I don’t think he deserves the favor, particularly. He’s shown neither maturity in his habits nor gratitude for the restraint of the powers-that-be. He traipses merrily about, shoveling shit before him, rationalizing the annoyance he engenders as being justified by the Righteousness of his Mission.
That, of course, is a load of crap.
If someone’s being an unapologetic fucknozzle, his politics should be irrelevant. Either let Reeder try to be a contributing member of the board, or kick him off. Just as december eventually wore out the patience of the SDMB’s collective leadership, the fact that this thread should be necessary is testament to Reeder’s having reached a similar point of time-wasting, both for members trying to refute his half-assed citations and for staff trying to decide what to do with the guy. This purgatory thing ain’t the way to go, in my view.
Just my opinion, of course. Oh, and here’s a penny, so at least you got something of value from me. 