Yeah Stoid! Make like a blonde bubble-gum poppin’ cheeleader and work those shoulders!
Stoid, as much as it pains me to admit it, (Your election threads pissed me off for the most part) I am with you on this one. 
Been there…
** Stoid**, I’m with you here. 
Having said that? This is the Pit, people, not the goddamned fucking Editorial Page of the New York Times. For those people who think Stoid has no right to flame? Fuck you man. She brought a totally legitimate issue to the Pit, and as far as I can read- that is WHY THE PIT IS HERE. If you’re unsure, then go to the Straight Dope Home Page, and read the definition of the use for the BBQ Pit. Flame her, disagree with her most voiciferously, etc. But holy shit, since when does anyone not associated with administration on this board get to say that a thread here should be shut down?
She’s allowed her say in THIS forum. I for one also agree with her, and believe her 110%. I’ve been called a m***-f***ing liar in the Pit, for stating I was attacked by a certain breed of large dog. Flat out called a liar. Well, lah dee dah. I did as suggested during that mess, I backed out of the Pit, and left for a few weeks and chilled my heels. I’m not suggesting, **Stoid **, that you back down. I’m suggesting the attacker’s not worth the oxygen. 
Sincerely, and with no malice aforethought,
Cartooniverse
First off, I have to go with Stoid and Cecil on the facts of the issue. At the very least, It looks like there is a very debatable case to be made that some people are aware while being operated on. This will scare the hell out of me if I go for surgery.
Second…The way things were handled.
I’m certainly no MPSIMS veteran, so forgive me if I’m missing some sort of unwritten rule that is widely understood in there, but I didn’t see Scylla’s posts as out of line at all.
Stoid posted something. If it had been left right there, I would have dismissed it as internet stuff and moved on. However, Scylla responded, and re-enforced my impressions even further.
(Insert Board Motto Here)
Then…Stoid comes back and CITES her position, and somebody comes around and brings up the Cecil column. Mixed in there was another CALM AND REASONABLE post from Scylla.
Moderator shows up, calmly informs Stoid and Scylla that this belongs in GD. Scylla acknowledges the request and moves on.
Unbeknownst to the board at large, Stoid is firing off e-mails at Scylla.
Does anyone out there really think this is an appropriate response to Scylla’s posts?
???
I don’t think it is all that much of a stretch to call that hateful and threatening.
As for unreasonable demands?
The whole thrust of this Pit thread is that no one should DARE disagree with Stoid. Don’t you DARE open a GD thread to debate an issue if Stoid has already handed down the good word. God forbid you post a reasonable reply and you interpret the facts differently than Stoid.
Gimme a break.
This is a public message board. Don’t you dare post something here unless you want it talked about. This is not a public saop box where you get to spout off anything and everything you ever wanted to without being challenged. The ridiculous part of this whole mess, is that it SHOULD have gone to GD.
The board is here to FIGHT IGNORANCE. This assumes that the public at large is IGNORANT of the TRUTH.
I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who might have the wrong first impression of this issue. A good GD thread where the facts are exposed could only do good.
Cecil has come down squarely on the side of the Second Amendment, and we still have a bazillion gun threads. We argue scientifically objective things like race every week. The glaringly obvious is never avoided either with numerous threads on the moon landings and evolution.
This is the biggest example of a SD poster throwing a hissy fit because she didn’t get her way. I agree that someone is either a liar or suffering from paranoid delusions, but I might disagree on who that is.
Have I gone through a time warp? Are we all back in fifth grade? Do we need a good hard game of dodge ball with those damned red rubber balls in order to settle this?
I don’t understand why an adult would start such a nit-picky, name calling argument. If someone says something you don’t like, I think it’s customary to call them “asshole” under your breath and let it go at that. Why do you CARE what someone else thinks about your experiences? Is another poster’s opinion really worthy of this kind of inflammatory language and ire?
As for someone making claims that you did something you didn’t do, it should be enough that anyone reading it knows your reputation. If you’re not the type of person to do such things, there’s no reason for anyone to give misinforamtion a second glance.
In certain arguments it should be clear that a consensus will not be reached. People on X side of the argument will always BE on X side and never switch over to the Y side of the dodge ball court. So fucking what? Can’t you think of anything else to do with your writing skills and energy?
-L
Clearly a potential nominee for the “post with the most rhetorical questions” award.
Somehow, to me, “don’t you fucking DARE” isn’t a threat until you actually threaten a consequence, ie “don’t you fucking DARE or I’ll come over there… etc.”
Although if he perceived it as threatening, it doesn’t matter much what I think.
And as to the responses of people who say this is a worthless, nitpicky argument: I’ve seen many more in the Pit that are even ore so and have recieved no such criticism. I’m with Cartooniverse on the “this is the fucking Pit” issue.
I’ll be quiet now.
Damn, Vince, you just did a wonderful job summing up how at least half the ugly shit on SDMB happens. Someone goofs up, someone overreacts, others jump in, everyone gets reeeeeeal invested in proving how their post/feelings/actions/reactions were justified, and nobody has the balls/decency/maturity to say “Damn, I was wrong there. I’m sorry.”
Being completely unwilling to blow my morning reviewing the thread in question, I can’t say whether this one actually did fall in that half. Whatever; you made me laugh.
Welcome to the pit. Your insights are most welcome, and I am delighted to add you to my mental “Dopers I want to hear more from” list.
pssssst. Are you married? attached? attempts to adjust cleavage more appealingly, forgetting that she’s wearing a turtleneck today
Hmmmm…I guess I’ll toss my $0.02 into the ring. Rarely have I seen such willful ignorance as Scylla’s contributions to the GD thread about fat-people stereotyping.
To heap insult upon injury, he then felt he had to bring up a private email that should have been kept private, and did so in a manner that deliberate cast aspersions on Stoid’s character.
Bad form. No respect is forthcoming here.
Carry on.
I found the email disturbing. My wife found the email disturbing. I notified Unclebeer of what happened without showing him the email (I did later forward the email to Tubadiva upon her request for information, wondering if she’d done this to somebody else,) and said nothing should be done, but wanted to notify him in case things persisted. He agreed, and though I was upset that somebody would attempt to censor what valid topics I might discuss. I did not pursue the issue in the interests of peace, and resolved to avoid Stoid in the future.
I was trying to make a difficult point on a sensitive issue in the stereotype thread, and ignored what I saw as Stoid’s blatant attempts at character asassination. I felt it was clear that she was using the forum to give vent to her personal grievances with me.
Against my better judgement I finally responded. When the attack continued I told her to stop. It didn’t.
I felt that the best course of action was to make it perfectly clear what she was doing, and why I was not willing to participate in it, which I did. End of story.
My $0.02:
While, I’m not sure I would have taken Scylla’s MPSIMS comments so personally, I think that’s because I’m a Great Debater not a MPSIMSer. As I understand it, MPSIMS is about sharing and reinforcing each other, not debating anything of consequence (well… the length of your endowments may be of consequence to you, but you know what I mean!). That makes Scylla’s comments in Stoid’s thread a bit inappropriate.
Nothing he said in the fat thread, on the other hand, was out of the norm for Great Debates where shoddy arguments abound (and exist to be skewered! ;))
If anything is to be learned from this, I think that it should be taken as proper MPSIMS etiquette AND good debating practice not to question someone’s personal experience unless they are engaging in slander or trying to use it as the basis of a generalization. (In both of those latter cases, it should just be objectively noted that unsubstantiated personal anecdotes from strangers are no basis for an educated opinion.)
Unless there’s a really good reason, insisting that someone you don’t know didn’t see something she said she saw or hear something she said she heard is not only counter-productive, it’s going to paint you as an arrogant jerk.
hmmm. I have seen Scylla admit he was wrong (one of the few posters in GD that have done so). I understand his original position (of believing his friend over some one else), tho’ I think at the point when you bring in ** Cecil** as a reference, the time has come to say ‘oops, I was wrong’
Don’t understand the relevance of the quote from Ed Zotti - it’s not attributed to a particular thread, so we can’t see if he’s referring to a situation similar to this.
As far as who broke which protocal, jeeze, everybody seems to have a different take on it.
IMHO:
-
The pit is the proper place for some one to call out to another poster re: stuff on the boards. Not re: e-mails, other forums, chat, etc.
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MPSIMS hijacks, are common. I don’t condemn Scyllas’ first post, nor Stoids first answer to it. Past that, it shouldn’t have gone into the thread.
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e-mail seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable alternative to either hijacking the thread more or starting another thread. OTOH, Scylla is perfectly reasonable in his request to not hear from her via e-mail anymore. (late addition), if he says he found them disturbing (and he does say that here), then I am not going to substitute my assessment of them.
-
BUT, references to the e-mails IMHO, should go into the pit and not in other threads.
-
Neither probably care at all what my opinion on this matter is.
I hate simulposting! Now there’s a pit topic! Why does it keep taking me 5 minutes to load a page or get a post to submit??
In any case, the email was indeed disturbing, Scylla, but it was probably best just to leave it alone after that, especially in Great Debates where people are judged by what they say, not what’s said about them. I never read a GD thread and think “Wow… Stoid’s really nailing into Scylla… Scylla must be a real jerk.” I think either “Wow… Stoid’s really nailing into Scylla… She’s knocking his arguments down one by one…” or “Wow… Stoid’s really nailing into Scylla… What’s she got up HER butt?”, depending on the strength of her points.
Look. I said in that thread that (one of) the most alarming thing(s) that had ever happened to me was that I had been nearly gay bashed.
Suppose someone jumped in and said, Oh, that didn’t really happen. My cousin’s roommate’s uncle is a trained sociologist who told me that nobody has actually ever gotten gay bashed.
And then supposing I responded with an avalanche of cites from gay organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and the mainstream media showing that gaybashing does happen. At the same time I email the person, telling them to go take a look at the cites, and inviting them to apologize.
They write that they have looked at the cites and that they still believe that gay bashing does not occur. This flabbergasts me. I’m even more flabbergasted to see a moderator telling us to take it to GD, as if there’s an actual debate in progress.
I get angry. This person has denied that a traumatic event in my life has taken place. I fire off an angry email, telling them not to “fucking dare insist that [they] know what happened to me better than I do.” Period. No threats of reprisal. Just a harshly-worded email to somebody saying that I couldn’t have gotten gay bashed because their cousin’s roommate’s uncle says so.
Anyway, this person then kvetches - on the message board -that I was threatening them by email.
Point: “Don’t you dare so and so” is not a threat; it is a demand. “Don’t you dare so and so or I’ll beat the shit out of you” is a threat.
Point: A false accusation of having made threats is at worst legally-defined slander. At best it calls for a rebuttal.
I respond publicly, since I have been accused publicly. Then a bunch of posters get in my hair about having taken to the boards what, in fact, the other poster took to the boards.
I can stand no more and I start a pit thread, the pit being the proper place to vent anger and frustration over people behaving like lunatics.
Now: at this point do we stop, pause, look at the record, and say that a person who is standing against my personal testimony of a traumatic event, and the positive testimony of a number of reliable sources, is being a yo-yo and there’s no point in standing with him?
Or do we continue to argue as though there has been an actual debate with an actual exchange of viable opposing views in progress?
(Note: This post has been closed-captioned for the analogy impaired.)
You left out: [ul][]mentions that he has shown email to fluffy bunny, who went off carrots for a week.[]forwarded email to Santa, who had asked for information regarding threats. Agreement that no change to polar delivery route mentioned as support.[/ul]Otherwise nice job matt_mcl.
Screw facts. Screw courtesy. Screw compassion.
Death to fat Amish groundhogs.
Mearra:
You may be right.
The decision to refer to the email was a tough one.
I felt that I had been civil in the MPSIMS thread, and did nothing to deserve the hateful email. I would have been interested in discussing the topic further. Perhaps my friend wasn’t correct. It would have been an interesting and perhaps enlightening discussion.
However, we never got to find out. Measuring Stoid’s email against an interesting discussion, prudence suggested the best thing was to drop it and avoid her. Which I did.
Ignoring hate, personal feelings and resentment is difficult. I tried to do so in making my decision concerning the email.
I thought her consistent and uncivil attacks in the stereotype thread showed that she was unwilling to let bygones be bygones.
I could think of nothing constructive to be gained by addressing her attacks, or responding in kind.
Clearly ignoring her wasn’t working though.
I have no interest in getting into a hateful exchange with her, and decided with some misgivings that the best course of action was not to let her get away with it, but to make it perfectly clear why I was no longer willing to play these unconstructive games. I called her on her actions publicly because she was publicly attacking me.
Doing so served the duel purpose of explaining why I wasn’t addressing her accusations, as well as letting any readers know what prompted them.
Nobody should have to put up with it.
I’ve demonstrated that I’m capable of disagreeing civilly, as well as admitting when I’m wrong. She’s demonstrated that she’s not capable of civil discourse.
As I said, it was a tough call, and a reluctant decision. I hope it wasn’t the wrong one.
Geeze, Freedom, this is the first time I’ve agreed with you, I think!
Seriously, maybe Scylla was wrong, but at least he seemed civil about it. But Stoid totally overreacted. Yeah, it sucks that he denied it. But why the FUCK is she making e-mails public and the like? I was always under the impression that it’s in bad taste to do so.
Look-I don’t doubt that it happened. Fine. You guys had a disagreement. But…said disgreement appeared to have happened over a month ago. Not only that, you guys have never gotten along as far as I can see.
I feel bad for what happened to Stoid, but I often feel her self-righteousness gets under my skin. A LOT. I’m usually in agreement with her about SOME things in politics, but it’s her whole attitude-I’m right, you’re wrong, that’s it.
You tore him a new one in e-mail, fine. You were probably in the right. Likewise, he was in the right to feel somewhat disturbed by it. I mean, Jesus H. Christ the last time he posted in that thread was in January, no?
Stoid, I don’t think you’re lying. I don’t know jackshit about medical procedures, so I’m gonna assume you’re correct. And even if it was imagination, it would still be pretty damn horrible.
That said-Scylla dropped it two months ago. Let. It. Go.
Life is never like that.
Freedom
A comment on something you posted above:
Well…while that is the general purpose of the board, I submit that the MPSIMS forum is not intended as a “fighting ignorance” forum. That is why I feel that Scylla’s comment there on Stoid’s experience was out of line in that forum…if not in rule, at the very least in spirit.
Because he said her emails were threatening, and she wished to prove otherwise. It would be different if she’d posted HIS emails, but she didn’t. She posted HER emails to defend herself.
How in the hell does an e-mail written months before on a totally unrelated topic end up in a GD post? What was the point in that?
If you ask me (and I know you didn’t, but I’m telling you any way) it looked like a diversionary tactic. And it worked. There it is-- a big old red herring in the middle of a debate. By the looks of the further direction of the thread, the diversion worked.
As to why Stoid would make the e-mail public. Excuse me, but did you read the thread where Scylla accused Stoid of threatening him by e-mail? He did it quite publicly. I think posting the e-mail was the only response available.
Stoid does have a tendency to overreact. Scylla has a tendency to get personal in debates. Oil and water.