That’s about as good a description of “being run out of town on a rail” that I can think of. A number of posters decided he was persona-non-grata around here, and attacked him mercilessly no matter what he said, until the mods were forced to act.
They should never have been allowed to attack him like that.
And you’re right that December had a history of posts like this - but so what? We’re not allowed to have posters that make provocative OPs? Have you ever seen anything remotely resembling a reasonable opinion about Republicans from say, Diogenes the Cynic? Or ElvisL1ves? This board is full of over-the-top angry liberals who bait conservatives constantly (as my list of current OPs in Great Debates illustrates). December was simply the right-wing version, albeit much more polite.
People like DtC are tolerated here simply because their form of extremism more closely fits in with the local zeitgeist.
anyone remember enough about a thread that Stoid did in GD positing something to the effect of “conservatives being heartless”??? let’s see if your theory held true.
That’s what I’ll miss most about december. He was just so polite! Always saying please and thank you. That was nice. “Please be aware that if you express your political views then you are responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent people. Thank you!”
So, so polite. Too bad we all ran him out of town on a rail. (Some people think that only admins can ban people – not true. It just takes enough votes, like on Survivor. Guys, wanna run Sam out next? He is asking a lot of difficult questions…)
Jack if you were referring to my post - I have this recollection of a thread that stoid started in which the OP was a thinly veiled ‘gosh, why are conservatives such heartless bastids’, which, to me is analagous to december’s countless thinly veiled ‘gosh why are liberals supporting evil’ threads.
it has been suggested here, that if a liberal had ever behaved like december, that the responses would have been thoughtful, compelling answers, w/o raking over the coals for the insult in the OP. I recall such a thread, and am curious to see how it played out, if indeed the conservatives didn’t complain mightily w/a pile on (obviously a minor one, since they’re so rare around here), while the liberals just basked in the glory of the essential truth contained in the OP.
so, since there was indeed such a thread (but I don’t remember enough about it to find it), let’s see what happened the day a liberal posted a december like thread.
No, I was referring to one of Sam’s in which he was singling out Diogenes, Elvis et al.
Anyway, for awhile there after the 2000 election Stoidwas registering extremely high on the Pain-In-The-Ass-O-Meter, at least from the standpoint of anyone to the right of Emma Goldman.
But she subsided, and we did not have to undergo daily fingernails-scraping-on-the-blackboard ululations of leftist outrage.
I’m sure you can find the odd counter-example. But nothing like the continual over-the-top reactions that December got.
Go have a look at some of the threads I mentioned. Some of them are remarkably similar to December’s efforts, complete with blogs as cites and unsupported smears like, “Rumsfeld the traitor said…”
And remember the thread started a few weeks ago that attempted to ‘characterize’ the various flavors of conservatives? There were the heartless conservatives, the tools of big business conservatives, the racist conservatives, the gun nut conservatives, and a few others. That was baiting and over the top more so than anything December posted, and the poster got his share of snide comments, but no “HOW OUTRAGEOUS! HOW DARE YOU!” type attacks. And a number of us actually responded with reasonable rebuttals.
Sam: Got a link to that thread? If that same poster had made a habit of posting such threads, over and over, for years, always making the same idiotic and outrageous comments no matter how often he had been slapped down or how many times he conceded that he was wrong, don’t you think that, eventually, you would have skipped over the reasonable rebuttals and gone right for the “Fuck you”?
I think it’s disingenous to say that liberal posters never get the sort of treatment december got, because there isn’t really a liberal analogue to december on the boards. He was, thank God, unique.
I’m sure you can find the odd counter-example. But nothing like the continual over-the-top reactions that December got.
Go have a look at some of the threads I mentioned. Some of them are remarkably similar to December’s efforts, complete with blogs as cites and unsupported smears like, “Rumsfeld the traitor said…”
And remember the thread started a few weeks ago that attempted to ‘characterize’ the various flavors of conservatives? There were the heartless conservatives, the tools of big business conservatives, the racist conservatives, the gun nut conservatives, and a few others. That was baiting and over the top more so than anything December posted, and the poster got his share of snide comments, but no “HOW OUTRAGEOUS! HOW DARE YOU!” type attacks. And a number of us actually responded with reasonable rebuttals.
Izzy, lemme ask: do the folks at New Republic regularly debate issues with liberals? Do many do so in a respectful manner? Are there long-term liberal posters there who are well-liked by the majority of Free Republic folks, despite an unapologetic defense of liberal standpoints? Is it me in particular that the Free Republic folks are screaming shrilly at?
If so, then I’ll take a definite step back and listen to what they say about me. After all, in that case, your analogy holds water.
I do not understand why you are defending december. Jodi, are you reading this? Remember when you jumped on me for saying it was curious how many conservatives defended the indefensible behaviors of december? This is what I was talking about. No liberal that I remember defended chumpsky, once he was exposed as the dishonest cretin he turned out to be. What is the difference between the board’s liberals and conservatives, that december gets such a vociferous defense from so many of the board’s conservatives?
If you wish to set up these hypothetical scenarios, at least quote the guy.
In your example you have a hypothetical question by december of:
While that’s a legitimately debatable question, although one devoid of evidence, december never asked it.
In actuality, what he said was:
.
To be honest, I don’t think december was banned for that thread, as that wasn’t even one of his worse ones. I’m guessing the issue has been under discussion for a while, and timing simply coincided with the Bali thread. If you and the rest of the usual suspects still believe he was banned for his views, why in the hell wouldn’t they have picked a true right-winger? december was almost a moderate in many ways. If I was going to play moderator and ban those will a rightward tilt, you, Shodan, Izzy and others would be gone long before december.
He was trolling, plain and simple. He has been doing so, off and on, for close to a year now, which is unfortunate. I think the war issue has driven him over some ledge, as the lead-up to it is when the changes began to be apparent.
In that time, he has given us such gems as:
He tosses a few of his anti-semitic conspiracy theories in this one, just for fun:
And one of my personal favorites (he backpedals in the paragraph following this one, but you get the point):
For fuck’s sake, in december’s world, everyone who doesn’t toss Bush’s salad is an anti-semitic, Arafat loving, terrorist supporting, facist apologist, who all but personally killed thousands of people all over the globe, and should personally fly to the homes of each dead person, ring the bell and apologize to the family for causing the death of their loved one, simply because they don’t think George W. Christ walks on water.
I’d rather have Coll tell me I’m a fucking idiot a thousand times over the insults launched at us by december, no matter how “politely” they were delivered.
Without a link to the thread in question, I can’t speak with certainty, since I didn’t read it, but I’m having a hard time seeing how you’re calling something like that more over the top than december’s threads.
your example:
you conservatives are crazy
december:
you liberals hate this country
you liberals are helping terrorists
you liberals are responsible for the deaths of innocents and you don’t care
See the difference? I don’t see how saying “conservatives are a bunch of nuts” is worse than saying someone hates their country and willingly helps terrorists kill people. It’s definitely obnoxious, to be sure, but it’s not the same thing.
Reading all these threads in the wake of december’s banning, I realized there’s something I really respect about the guy. A number of posters have suggested that the board is biased, that december’s OP’s weren’t taken as seriously as they should have been, and that he had to put up with a lot of inappropriate personal attacks. But you didn’t hear those kind of complaints coming from him. He just said what he thought and accepted the consequences.
Dumbguy, I have stayed out of this fight (for the most part) because my opinion about our departed friend was known–I thought he was a reckless mouthpiece for the people who now control our national government, that for the most part his judgments were wrong headed and duplicitous when not outright dishonest.
Having said that, once a person comes to you and says that because you express doubts, reservation or dissent from the policies of the present national executive you hate your country, that you dishonor the memory of the innocents killed in the September 11 Horror, that you are contributing to the death and maiming of American service people, and when no amount of discussion, logic, reason or just plain common sense serves to stop his incessant accusations of disloyalty and bigotry, there is not much left to do except abandon the field to him or to tell him flat out that he is a dishonest, manipulative twit.
How it can be more reprehensible for me to tell our departed friend that he is a twit than for him to say that I am an accomplice to murder and treason is beyond my understanding.
For years his clear purpose was to enrage otherwise sensible people; people who are willing to accept that there are matters on which reasonable minds can differ. He was a provocateur (a characteristic for which the French do have a word) plain and simple. He was unwilling to accept that the people who thought the war in Iraq was a folly or who thought the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians ill advised were indeed rational and thinking people.
Sam, the mods were not forced to act by anyone but december, as evidenced by the extremely long consideration they gave to this decision. You are, in effect, asking that posters should consider each and every new OP in isolation, as if it were pure as the driven snow. December, as almost anyone is willing to acknowledge, piddled in his own snow so many times that even eskimos don’t have a word for it. To ask that people replying to his OPs ignore his entire history is asking too much, in my opinion.
He was, I agree, routinely piled upon. Where you and I differ is that you insist that it was because of his conservatism, ignoring even the possibility that his record of behaviour had anything to do with it. Unseemly as it may be, troll-feeding is a popular and sometimes fun sport. This does not equate to being run out on a rail, and reputations do not pop into existence for no reason. No “liberal” held a gun to december’s head and forced him to lie, yet he did.