I am usually one of the first in line to hand out spankings to the assholes, especially during the time I was a more active poster. It’s been a good way to weed out the idiotic dickweeds who contribute nothing to the board except trolling disruption. It’s what has kept the quality of the board what it is.
I agree that Reverend Mykeru has been posting some pretty hateful vitriol, but if you go back and reread the posts you will see a lot of instigation on that part of some of our well-liked regs. It is a little disheartening to see an obviously intelligent and articulate newbie run off the board.
I am pretty certain that I am not the only one seeing a similarities to a group of children poking a stick at a doberman and then having the dog put down when he lashes out and bites.
Really, you guys, you know I love you and consider you good friends, but step back for one second and look at what is happening here and how and why it got to this point.
Well Diane, I started off as nice as anything in my first post to him, giving nothing but friendly pointers and generally sticking up for him - just not in an unequivical or blinkered way.
His response was to lash out.
In each subsequent post my politeness has slipped a little further. This is in response to countless phrases of abuse heaped upon me - everything from “dipshit” to “monumental prick” and pretty much everything else you can think of.
How many times have I replied in kind? Zero.
If you think that is equivalent to poking a doberman then I dread to think what would happen if I really did get the stick out.
Really - there comes a point where you simply have to recognise that someone is being pretty damned unpleasant. Patience starts to wear thin when your best-intentioned advice gets repeatedly thrown back at you with nothing but hate.
Kabbes - I agree with you totally. He lashed out unfairly at you. However, it was after a couple of days worth of being put on the defensive by people hell bend on making him appear to be a sock or troll. They kept stirring the shit pot.
I am not saying that his attitude is excusable, I am just saying that he isn’t alone in the blame for things getting to this point. It is JMHO that he was antagonized to this point and now some posters have their panties in a twist that he got angry.
jjimm - I have read his site, and although it isn’t my cup of tea, I see it as nothing more than Rush Limbard/Dennis Miller satire.
I figured that out a long time ago which is why I was deliberately trying to confuse him. He really should search the board for posts by Suspenderzzzz and december then compare the two, he might learn something. Maybe even :gasp: how to be opinionated and confrontational while acting like and asshole and not get banned.
Diane, just add me to the list that started out in his corner and now find him an intolerable asshole. Three times I offered him friendly advice, only to be ignored. Then, I answered questions of his, and got nothing but vitrol and idiocy in response. Then, I try to make amends, only to have him spew his inane crap again. Finally, I find that he starts this thread by lying about how he acted in the other thread. It only took awhile for his true colors to show.
I’ve gotta disagree with you here, Diane. The last time you expressed that opinion it pissed me off personally, but you were right, to some extent. In this case, though, there isn’t a leg to stand on. If
makes kabbes a lazy ‘dipshit’ in RM’s mind, I don’t think any amount of stepping back and taking a look on our part is going to help the guy.
As for ‘stirring the shit pot,’ you may recall that kabbes was one of the few posters giving RM actual constructive input in one of the previous iterations of this thread. RM shit on him for it then, too. I don’t buy that he’s just some poor victim of an extended witchhunt. He brought it on himself, and continues to do so.
Would it be ungracious of me to say that this is exactly what I’ve been saying about him all along?
I can’t argue with you there, Hamlet, but I still think he was pushed into his assholish behavior unnecessarily and I think it is too bad because he could (and hopefully still may) have become a valuable member to our board.
White Lightening - I am not arguing that he hasn’t now started to act like a prick, but I am still under the opinion that a few people saw a newbie who wasn’t afraid to voice a strong opinion, didn’t cower to board regs, and fought back when attacked with the sock/troll accusation. These few people let their egos and tempers get out of control for no other reason than a newbie holding his own in a flame war.
It got out of control on both sides. Trolls, socks, idiots, jackasses, etc., should be run off the board in true self-moderating fashion, but I don’t think we need to make newbies who happen to have strong, vocal opinions different than one or two popular regs run a gauntlet or be pitted against a lynch mob in order to stay.
I simply hope it is not utterly pointless to point out that, for example, in the thread “The SDMB is run at a loss” I simply asked for information while stating:
meaning:
I admitted I might not know what I am talking about.
I asked for a precedent.
I indicated that although participants have sued each other, I did not see it extending to providers.
Kabbas for his part, immediately replies with:
From what orifice did Kabbas pull a presumption that I think I’ve seen everything on the internet from? Who knows? Who cares. It’s obvious that what one actually writes is secondary to some poster’s need to immediately get in some nasty comment and provoke a discussion not about the topic, but a discussion about the discussion, which many seem much more comfortable with, the more ad hominem the better.
Plus, if people don’t want to discuss the issue at hand, in this case whether its dumb to shut down a thread on ripping MP3s because someone thinks this is synonymous with file sharing and Intellectual Property Right violations, it’s a useful weapon of mass distraction.
Just to use it as an example, my original post in that thread was a light, self-effacing query:
For this I get Kabbas claiming that I think I have seen everything on the internet, and then Hamlet, who claims he was nothing but gracious, pipes in:
Now, here we have two posters whose take on the conversation is:
Uh, yeah. Sure. This is the same Kabbas who gave me a word to “search for” and then when I responsed that a Google Search yielded nothing played gotcha with me because he meant the SDMB search function, which isn’t the first thing I would think of. So both of these posters did provide infomation, but especially in Kabbas’ case he used it as an opportunity for more oneupmanship. I did thank Hamlet for his information, but that got lost in the deluge of posters that berated me for not thanking Hamlet no matter how many times I reposted my thanking him, only to have the sentences parsed to get at what I “really meant”.
sigh
I think I have figured it out. The SDMB is, in part, a clearing house for socially autistic people who cannot correlate their behavior to how people respond to them. How else does one explain Hamlet and Kabbas’ initial nasty and unprovoked remarks with their later insistance that they are Emily Post and Will Roger’s love children?
All flamage aside, people like this should seriously think of how they treat people and how that makes people respond to them in kind. They also should consider whether they are on forums to discuss things substancially or simply to provoke people into anger because this fills some need of theirs.
The obvious answer is simply not to respond to people such as this. A nice flame war might be fun, but why waste a big chunk of one’s life that you will never get back dealing with people who want to turn every exchange into a pissing match? I don’t like relegating some people to being the noise in the signal to noise ratio, because even people like that might have something useful to be found in their nasty, arch, condescending manner. But really, this sort of nasty crap gets boring fast and seems to be simply the next logical step for people who, as children, abused animals, played with fire and wet the bed.
You did not thank him for his information, sir. You thanked him for “trying” to provide something of substance, then went on in the same post to tell him the information was not relevant … although he specifically pointed out its relevancy.
And apparently two posters (myself and one other) equals a “deluge.”
Do not play semantic games, Reverend Mykeru. I attempted several times in that thread to explain to you what I was saying, and you elected to snap at me. That is on your head, not mine.
Looking at his site, I realized that RM has some slight misconceptions about the SDMB, and thus many of the remarks made towards him lately. For instance, he quoted Coldfire’s suggestion he visit some other forums, since he’s spent about 98% of his posts in the Pit. On his site, it appears that RM uses “forums” to describe message boards, and not the various categories within one particular message board. It’s these small inconsistencies that can create a huge communication gap, which is what we’ve experienced here. THAT is why RM needed to have spent more time getting to know how things work here, not because more times equates to conformity.
I partly agree with Diane, in that RM could very well be an excellent contribution to this board. However, due to his insistence on being nowhere but the Pit, it’s going to be a short contribution. When all you see is a bunch of people slapping each other around (especially brain damaged former MENSA members - a disturbingly humorous mental image), you’re going to be oddly amused as RM is.
I disagree with Diane in that RM immediately began stirring the shitpot upon arrival, and no assistance was necessary to make him look like a troll (the sock accusation was bogus) - he did a bang-up job of that all by himself.
Sheesh, Rev, you love the sight of your own text, don’t you?
I find that nasty, arch, and condescending manners, like yours, really cancel out any usefulness. Which is a shame, because I am intrigued that your website costs you $500 a year, and I’d love to ask you for a breakdown of that. Oh, well, I’ll have to find me a more pleasant webmaster.
Truly great advice. I plan to take it, and I suggest that every other participant in this thread and the several that spawned it strongly consider doing the same.
That’s rich. Or wait. Maybe it’s satire. The Reverend is very fond of bad satire. No, wait. I know, I know, I know what it is. Irony. The cold and fickle fist of irony. Or perhaps fisting. Maybe it’s the cold and fickle fisting of irony.
Best part was all the personal insults he used right before that drivel.
Its like shouting “Happy Birthday, you child molesting, thieving, dim-witted, shit-licking, beastiality-loving murderer” then complaining that you were thrown out of the party by the evil Nazi party-goers for simply wishing someone a “happy birthday”.
There is a word for posters like Reverend Mykeru- and we all know what it is.
After Kabbas played “I have a point, but I’m not going to make it, I’m just going to give you a keyword to search and you do the work for me” I responded to Hamlet actually cuting and pasting cases with:
You will note “thank you for trying” unlike Kabbas. Thank you for the mere attempt. You can play clever-dick word games all you want to make my thanks a non-thanks, make black white, make up down and talk in ever decreasing concentric circles, sir, until you disappear up your own asshole, but please don’t tell me I didn’t thank him.
Because I did.
Whether or not the information is relevant is an entirely separate issue. Simply because someone provides information doesn’t mean it has to be axiomatically accepted. I simply did not see the legal connection between someone serving a provider such as AOL, who collects billing information, to reveal someone’s identity and the SDMB where people can register with bogus information on a disposable hotmail account. Nor did I see the connection between a poster suing another poster for libel and the Chicago’s Reader’s liability in information being disseminated (in this case MP3 ripping) because it might be used for a separate illegal activity (file sharing). As one wit noted, this would be like barring discussions of automobiles because of their possible use in illegal activities.
Your problem seems to be that I questioned how this is relevant, period, rather than a disagreement with my reasoning for not find it relevant. Your problem is with questioning per se.
Munch
You go on about my error:
Please explain to me the logical distinction between “forums” and “message boards” then got to the Internet Infidels and straighten them out because they refer to their whole thing as the Internet Infidels Discussion Forum or the JREF Forum and any other number of forums. This seems to be some sort of “I need to get off the Straight Dope” things. Just because the SDMB refers to the entire thing as a “message board” and refers to subtopics as “forums” doesn’t mean that everyone does, or even that it is common to do so. Just because that’s the way you do it here doesn’t mean that’s how they do it out there on the big bus.
Rather like the Doper-specific board/forum distinction, I have realized that the Doper definition of a troll is different from the common-place definition of “a posting designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase “trolling for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “trolling”, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.” Apparently on the SDMB a “troll” is synonymous with “anyone with an opinion I don’t like and, conversely, anyone I don’t like with an opinion”. Technically, the regular Doper love for baiting and running off newbies seems to be much closer to the classic definition of a troll than anything I have done.
I do detect a note of pride from some regulars, such as Jeff Olsen who pretty much admits to being a troll, in their ability to run people off. But before anyone gets too smug, I should remind you that a monkey throwing his feces can accomplish the same thing.
sugaree
Oh, I see. Since I was talking about the nasty, arch, condescending behavior of some posters (with examples), you exhibit some form of cleverness by calling me “nasty, arch and condescending”, which is itself, rather nasty, arch and condescending.
Well, it’s simplest if you keep in mind that it ain’t Geocites then figure in about $150 a year for DSL, and about $300 a year for commercial server space, which is anything about the shit 10 mb you get free for having an account with a provider. And then there is incidental wear and tear, upgrading software and of course, beer and hookers.
What makes you think I’m interested in accepting outside contracts and/or hosting?
Hey, look kids, it’s UncleBeer. I remember him. When some silly, silly Dopers started a thread where I was a “fucking tool” UncleBeer decided to “moderate” the discussion by popping up with:
What is he talking about? Well, UncleBeer went cruising other boards for some “unsavory” stuff about me and found a sarcastic post which he then tried to pass off as actual opinion: That I like shoot shootings and Charles Whitman is my hero without understanding the thread, understanding the poster I was replying to or much else for that matter. In fact, he claimed I was no Jonathan Swift because of the poor taste issue, conveniently forgetting about that whole eating babies thing Swift penned.
Well, at least UncleBeer is getting a clue accusing me of “bad satire” instead of trying to pass of a year old post of mine on another board as my honest to goodness opinion.
elf6c
Yup, continue to flame me while moshing with that strawman despite the obvious fire hazard and you too can be the Great White of the SDMB.
Everyone
Feel free to continue flinging your feces and patting each other on the back.
Reverend Mykeru, in looking over my posts and yours on this subject, I find that it’s entirely possible I was imputing motives to you that weren’t there. For that I apologize. I’m prepared to accept your explanation as fact.
