So why was Ammonius Saccus banned?

The BBQ Pit
101

You’re still a joke. You lie even when you think youre being self-righteous in telling the truth. Look at your post above for a second (you do read these things, don’t you?). You have accused badchad of trolling , which you denied when I pointed it out before, but the other Mods disagreed–you DO understand what this means, don’t you? YOU ARE WRONG. YOU HAVE MADE A FALSE ACCUSATION, AND WHEN IT’S BEEN POINTED OUT TO YOU, YOU HAVENT RETRACTED IT BUT HAVE AGAIN REPEATED IT, JUST AS IF IT WERE TRUE. You’ve made no effort to persuade them? Why on earth would you believe sincerely that someone has violated the rule against trolling and expend zero effort in even seeing whether or not your fellow Mods agree with you? If you so much as even asked, one time, “Hey, is there anything to these vile accusations I keep spouting about badchad, fellows?” then that constitutes making an effort to lobby them. Maybe the fact that they ignore you, or patronized you, or asked you to take a chill pill and re-think your zeal, FELT like you had made no headway. But by your own admission, again, you clearly made some effort to lobby your fellow Mods, and then again rather stupidly admitted as much as you were denying it. WTG!

Is that in any way clear to you? You pop into threads on religion, donning and doffing your Mod cap, accusing (let’s say, at least “one,” since I remember at least that one and you are copping to it, though I believe you’ve accused others, I remain unwilling to search your every thread and post) an atheist of trolling , and generallly setting a tone of “These atheist scum are our pinatas!”

In any case, I’m not interested in playing “gotcha” with such a powerful falsifier as you. As I told Frank above, I’m highly suspicious of your pro-religion agenda and am doing a pretty good job of making people aware of my suspicions about you, even if they’re dismissing them as paranoid and over-sensitive. Maybe they are, and if they are, then no harm, no foul. But I think the least of what will happen is that your fellow Mods will review your Modding in religion threads, whether or not they assure you they aren’t, and you’ll either get caught abusing your Mod powers or, more likely, you’ll clean up your act a little bit from this point on. If this makes you a better Mod, then I’ve done a good job here, and if this has no effect at all, well, I’ve tried.

102

It’s just hit me: pseudotriton ruber ruber argues about Tom the way Starving Artist argues about liberals.

Except SA doesn’t resort to caplocks and spittle-flecked vituperation.

103

Excuse me? I have just recapped our entire exchange. First you accused me of allowing other posters to abuse atheists with the term “troll,” then you accused me of abusing “posters of an atheist bent” with that label. Where have you accused me of calling badchad a troll? Where have I denied it? Where, outside the single Pit thread in which he falsely attacked me, have I done it?

In the word of the poster for whom you appear to hold such sycophantic devotion, “Cite?”.

The accusation that his behavior is that of a troll is not false, you simply choose to disagree with it.

Since badchad has made it a point to sinlge me out for his special attentions, I have not felt it appropriate to use my staff position to respond to him. In exactly one thread (where he attempted to rally the TM to abuse me, using, as I pointed out in that thread, false claims), I (as a poster) pointed out to him the reasons that I felt he was, in fact, behaving as a troll.

However, it is not my job to ban everyone of whose behavior I disapprove. It is my job to try to keep conflict and disruption on the board to a minimum. Since he limits himself to a relatively few posts in a tiny number of threads, he is not really a disruptive influence, overall, and as long as he keeps his toes on, and not over, the line in GD I see no reason to take official action against him. He has, indeed, been Warned twice. I did not issue either of those Warnings even though I have had to admonish him on several occasions. If I was intent on removing him from the SDMB, it would have been a fairly easy thing to elevate each of my admonitions to Warnings, which would, in combination with his other Warnings, create the critical mass to start a discussion of banning him.
Despite your paranoia, that is not my style.

Now, since I am sure that you will choose to not believe me, I suggest that you e-mail a couple of Mods whom you believe you can trust, asking them how many attacks I have launched on badchad within the staff discussions. (You have my permission to ask about that aspect, i.e., my comments, of our super secret meetings.)

With that sort of imagination, you might try your hand at fiction. Since I get the same complaint (of favoritism) only from the most extreme ends of the spectrum, (two atheists claiming I favor religious types, three religious types claiming I favor atheists), I’m probably not favoring either side, merely offending the extremes by not favoring them.

[del](And you might want to wipe off your monitor, you appear to have a bit of spittle flecking it.)[/del]Removed comment where I see, on preview, that it has been noticed by at least one other poster.
Happy Christmas!

104

Ahh, the multifunction jerk clause. I take this as your admission that there were and are no rules against taking a thread on a tangent. Thank you very much.

Sort of like on this thread, where a lot of people AND YOU, are arguing about whether or not I am a troll or related things, right?

Well clearly any discussions in this thread as to whether or not I am a troll is off topic as to my original post and sure looks like the latter flavor. So where are your admonishments? Where are your instructions for these posters to start their own thread?

Still the questions of Valteron, Cisco, or TokyoPlayer if anything seem like the former flavor. So why were you “unofficially” admonishing them for their very related questions but actively taking part in what you have labeled “jerk” behavior in my thread? I suppose it just depends on how much you like/identify the original poster, I guess.

Well see here there is need for more clarification. In this post you said I (and I imagine that means we all) don’t need to obey your instructions about thread hijacking, at least so long as you are not acting as a mod (which I assume means you don’t write “moderating” at the bottom of your post). So if we do choose to ignore your request to stop our discussion in said fashion, as you said is ok, are we to assume you will not just come back and slap us with an official warning? Or is what you told me in the post above in error?

That’s fair enough, and thanks for calling me classy. All I ask now is for the clarifications above, and your future assistance in keeping my threads on topic just like you are doing for dangermom. Please start by instructing others, and taking your own, off topic discussions here, about my trollness, etc. to another thread. Thank you and happy Kwanzaa (it starts tomorrow).

105

Please Tom quit being a jerk and take your off topic argument somewhere else.

106

Yes, me and all the Mods. I understand why you think I’m a paranoid nutjob, but I think that characterization is a harsh one for your fellow Mods.

If he’s a troll, then you should have no trouble getting him banned. It’s obvious that he’s a troll, you give a jingle, the other Mods all chime in “Oh, God, yes, Tom, don’t know how we missed this one, will you ever forgive our collective obtuseness?” and you get to ban him, problem solved. You never have to put up with this b.s. again, and I’ll probably be so terrified of your efficiency, I’ll never give you another troubling word again.

Problem is, he’s not a troll, by overwhelming vote (see in re: the Known Universe v. Tom) and continuing to define a troll as “anyone whose argument you happen to dislike” just reinforces my point here. You’re personally offended, and you’re letting your personal feelings influence your Modding.

Maybe you’ll be less intrusive from here on in. I hope so. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my entire floor is flooded with spittle and there must be a mop floating around here somewhere…

107

Ruining the CIA: Well. Mormons are well educated and smart people who speak foreign languages. And they’re incredibly trustworthy. So the CIA recruited some. Then they recruited more, and the previous ones went up the hierarchy, and recruited more, and so on. The CIA is, like the Boy Scouts, pretty full of mormons these days. (As is the FBI.)

This is only a problem insofar as it leads to a monoculture, and that monoculture is pretty much what’s screwing a few pooches in intelligence gathering.

This is not a new thing. And it should be a pretty well known thing… I can’t find a good cite that’s not from some bullshit conspiracy site, but I’ve read about it in the Times a few times over the years.

108

The reason we can’t get a nice clean list of rules is because of people like Badchad — little armchair board attorneys who sit on pointed objects, playing semantic games with how the rules are worded. We can’t have a specific rule against hijacking because he will lump all tangential discussions under hijacking when it suits him, as he is doing here. By his own definition, he has already hijacked his own thread by making it about Tom rather than Ammonius Saccus.

So, on account of people like him, we have to have rules like “don’t be a jerk”, which cover things like actual hijackings, where threads are deliberately derailed as opposed to simply meandering around.

Whatever made him think he could win this discussion anyway is unclear. If he isn’t a troll, then he’s an idiot. Gee, I think I’ll jump on a mod’s ass and see how much shit I can stir up. Or else it was, Gee, I think I’ll jump on a mod’s ass and bask in the accolades as everyone joins me in a pile-on. Either way, what a putz.

109

Reading the thread further leads me to QED’s link. Yep, that’s conspiracy bullshit all right. The issue I have is with the monoculture and herd mentality that leads to bullshit analysis being supported when persons with more and longer direct relationships with the cultures are either ignored in favor of the crowd, or not hired in favor of more trustworthy mormons.

I suspect strongly that the mormon issue has something to do with the reason the gay linguists were fired when we needed them most, but hell, that’s just suspicion, no evidence for it at all.

Do you understand the point I am making, as opposed to the conspiracy bullshit from the weblinks?

110

So is that a vote, Liberal, for downgrading him from “troll” (RED ALERT) to “idiot” (ORANGE) or “putz” (GREEN)?

Either way, that’s progress of a sort.

111

Glad I could mediate. :slight_smile:

112

We should all probably give Liberal’s opinion a lot of weight here. He is, after all, a proven expert on hijacking and trollery, along with their philosophical justifications.
This thread had a simple question as to why a poster was banned. It’s most unseemly to hijack it into an attack on badchad. heh.

113

tom didn’t say badchad is a troll, he said badchad behaves like one. Bit of a difference there.

114

And you’re not a fucking douchebag cuntface nitpicking bullshit artist, but you do behave like one.

Was that distinction very comforting to you?

115

Hell, we’ve had Pit threads and such from people who claim this board is extremely ANTI-Christian, have we not?

116

And a very merry Christmas to you, too.

Nitpick it may be but it is a rule: in all other fora, one can refer to a poster’s behavior as trollng but not the person as a troll. That was the case in the Pit as well until the rule against troll-calling was relaxed.

Don’t rightly care one way or the other.

117

Guilty as charged. […squeamish grin…] I think my first ever Pit thread was whining about that very thing.

118

I don’t know if you’re being facetious to prove a point, but just in case this isn’t sarcasm, it was badchad.
Speaking of, badchad, they’ll usually tell you who the sock was-I don’t know if they’re permitted to tell you how they found out, but you can always ask.

119

Sorry for the double posts-damn, Lib, you and I have been getting along well in these past few days-and in the PIT, in a thread about religion, nonetheless.

Did the mods spike our drinks?

:wink:

(Merry Christmas!)

120

Exactly what I was thinking. I was never accused of trolling that I recall (even before the rules changed). But I was often accused of hijacking. I don’t know if that makes me a proven expert, but it does lend me some ad populum authority. And in a discussion with Badchad, that’s worth a lot.

And it got a simple answer. Ask the OP why he’s still pressing the matter.

But what about Tom? Why are you deflecting attention from Tom? If Badchad wants to discuss Tom, let’s discuss Tom. Tom. The Tomster. Tomboy. Tom.

Right now, I’m smelling Edlyn’s butt roast, and boy am I hungry!