I’m curious whether people (mods included) would consider this (OP linked for context, see post 17) a case of blatantly inserting political snark in an entirely non-political thread. I called him on it, and he was pretty much a complete ass in response, and, not wanting to turn it into a successful hijack, I just sarcastically told him he was right and dropped it. But this seems like a prime example of the kind of BS we’re complaining about.
Don’t sweat it, Binary. Gum came to my defense when he was upset. He’s a good guy. He’s okay. You’re okay. Obviously, the goons around the cauldron were somehow related to this site, and in all likelihood might have participated in this thread. But they are just pathetic really. And if it matters whether your name is cleared with me, it is. We’ve all learned some lessons from this. Let’s just move on.
Liberal. Thank you. I will take that in the spirit that it was offered.
that wouldn’t be “moveon.org” wouldn’t it??? 
Would you consider this to be an off-topic snarky drive-by? (Op linked for context, see post #6.) Admittedly not political, but did it cause anyone to descend into a helpless snit-fit, feeling the need to take the poster to task and bring it up in some other thread weeks later? Is there some reason it’s not one of your prime examples?
Ack!!! Hell, no. 
That was obviously a joke, Liberal.
That was obviously posted for humor content.
Yes, and? Does humor excuse off-topicness? If so, why not political opinion? Why does something have to be meaningless to be acceptable?
Oof, Metacom you beat me.
Besides which, the post Galt linked wasn’t even off-topic. He just didn’t like that it was short.
Well, it might have to do with the fact that Giraffe doesn’t do that incessantly, nor does that type of light joke tend to derail threads. Your story is different.
Listen, I happen to appreciate your unique view on things, and I happen to agree with you politically an awful lot. You just seem to delight in cramming political contention in where it doesn’t belong, and I’ve seen an awful lot of threads go south because of it. If your comment in the UPS/FedEx thread had caught the attention of the people it was designed to rile, you probably would have successfully turned a “bitching about UPS/FedEx service” thread into an “arguing about government regulation” thread.
Disingenuous much?
In addition to being humorous, Giraffe’s comment was also on-topic.
galt, if you want a nice isolated example of someone getting suckered I offer myself.
Tomndebb, you say you’ve not seen any complaints. Well, that’s why this thread is here, you could address some specific issues. Apparently my complaints about Dex’s craptacular moderating are beneath his notice. Would you like to take a crack at it?
Original bad post:
Okay, political post in the Cafe. Also threadshitting and insulting demeanor. Should merit a warning of SOME sort. Nah. Dex and Ike are silent. I don’t know if someone reported the post at this time, but Dex has complained that Daily Show threads often devolve into fights, so I’d imagine that whenever he or Ike check the forum during the day, the might look at this thread. They don’t.
Further on, we have this.
Still political. Ignores the posters pointing out that they were talking about how funny this episode was until he showed. Didn’t report the post (if he genuinely thinks it’s out of line), nor did he move the discussion to GD or the Pit where he says it belongs. Mod response? Zilch.
In fact, no action was taken at all from 11:37 AM on August 5 until 6:39 AM the next day, August 6. I reported the post at around 11:00 that night, about twelve hours after this shit started. Eighteen hours have passed before Dex formally looks at this, and unless he’s comatose or lives on Venus or something, he should have seen this by now. He slaps Liberal on the wrist, blames everyone in sight, and closes the thread. No threatened consequences for this bad behavior. Liberal gets what he wanted all along - no one is discussing this episode any more. Complaints pile up in this thread, and Dex backs off - sort of. He moves the Daily Show to GD, where everyone posting in it since points out there’s nothing to debate - except Liberal’s unauthorized political post back when the thread was in the Cafe. He still dominates the thread. The derail, with a bumbling assist from Dex, is complete.
What was Dex doing? At every step, he’s played into Liberal’s hands. Why should any given poster trust Dex’s judgment in the future, or summon him for help if this situation arises again? Dex protected a misbehaving poster and cannot be trusted as a moderator.
Can we do this with you, Tom? Let’s try! Post #10, meaningless drive-by. Post 35, takes a vague anti-independence stance and tells Monty to shut up. Post 39, starts lawyering on what words mean, this was something you touched on above. Post 62, makes bizarre post about the Constitution merely providing “access to a republican form of government” rather than stipulating it. Posts 65 and 66, more word lawyering to “win” the debate with Alessan and Monty after they questioned Post 62, abandoning the odd interpretation of the Constitution in the process. Post 67, Monty explodes. Posts 69 and 71, they trade shots. Post 72, tomndebb admonishes Monty for taking the bait, fails to admonish Liberal for providing it.
Not as good a blowout as Dex’s, but still, why didn’t you tell Liberal to use correct English, or to pick a specific stance and either stay with it or acknowlege another poster was correct? Tom, you failed, just like Dex. The thread has wandered off course so Liberal can be the center of attention. And he’s accomplished this with your tacit support. I think you can see where ordinary posters believe Liberal is allowed to break the rules and the mods ignore the consequences. And that mods are deaf to complaints and can’t be trusted to their jobs. That’s definitely the impression I’m getting. After Hawaiian independence somehow turned into The Liberal Show, I went ahead and posted directly in it asking for a mod review. MEBuckner was kind enough to point me to the more usual ways of complaining, and did not broach my complaint. Whoopee. I’m so glad I came forward.
There’s no “smoking gun” post to give you reason to ban him. He should be banned for being a jerk. He’s the equivalent of that kid on the school bus who sits sideways on the bench, arm raised, finger pointed, hand an inch from another kid’s head, and chants, “I’m not touching you!” Technically, he’s not doing anything specifically against the rules. He’s just an arrogant, aggressive poster who baits others, then whines when they tire of being badgered and erupt. He deliberately misuses words, making a debate with him impossible. He uses politics as a cudgel, and not even in the “Politics as a Cudgel” forum alone. He’s no fun. If you can’t squeeze a promise from him to change his behavior, you should ban him immediately, with a little apology note from the mod staff for dawdling so long. You say you would have to punish other aggressive, intellectually dishonest posters if you did this to Liberal. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. GD would benefit from a Hell Week of this type, you could run a lot of worthless but prolific posters off for good. But barring that, Liberal still should be forced to change or forced out. In the meantime…you do not have my respect.
If you start a thread praising, say, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh on any one of the SDMB boards, I guarantee you it will be filled with nasty political comments. That doesn’t make it right, but Liberal wasn’t doing anything that half a dozen regular posters on the left wouldn’t do in a Limbaugh thread.
Nothing he’s done comes remotely close to being a banning offense, IMO. And he has a point with those Daily Show threads. Often they are nothing more than a thin excuse to engage in more Republican bashing and high fiving over how Stewart tore the 'pubbies a new one. That’s political content, even if it is in the context of a show.
Again, how quickly would you guys be complaining if I routinely started threads in Cafe Society like this:
IMO, too. Not remotely.
Liberal always has a point. Typically, it’s a point from his somewhat unusual vantage.
Skilled or funny wisecracks typically don’t derail threads. Boring or easily refuted pisspoor opinions typically don’t derail threads.
In contrast, emphatic statements, unsufficiently elaborated upon are almost automatically dubious even supposing they are wholly correct.
From my viewpoint, Liberal is rarely wholly correct but almost always somewhat correct. Even when he’s mostly correct, his initial salvo too often won’t appropriately acknowldege the POV of his mainstream opponents. But Lib has sufficient deductive abilities to easily hold up his side of the debate. Thus, pages of fireworks ensue. (Admittedly, I have an inductive/empirical bent.)
But wait. Aren’t I holding Lib to a pretty high standard here? Yes: most (not all) posters are not especially adept at pre-emption and softening. But their opinions are pedestrian, so it typically doesn’t matter.
Just to reiterate, I’m not saying that Lib is oppressed because his opinions are unpopular. I’m saying that unusual vantagepoints are poorly served by terseness to the point of being cryptic and a tone which doesn’t acknowledge the difficulty of the underlying issue. I mean jeez, does anybody really believe any philosophical issue (such as the nature of Occam’s Razor or the ontology of Mathematics) has a resolution both obvious and straightforward?
Oh, and appropos nothing, I don’t like CarnalK either. I guess that puts me on the offsite firing line as well.
In fact, I did not say that. I do get complaints on Liberal from time to time. However, what I said was
One-line drive by? Yep, post #10. Is he the only poster who has done that? Not this week, much less as a habit. Semantic quibbling? Heck, user_hostile submitted the silliest one line drive-by and semantic quibble (possibly in jest) that kicked off the whole brouhaha, confusing the style of the four states which carry “commonwealth” in their titles with a form of government, yet I saw no one report him and you have not raised any objection to that post.
Correct English? Judgement call and you are deciding (surprise!) to fault Lib. Pick a stance? Your interpretation that he changed stances is not born out by the exchange.
I found the exchange pretty silly, but that sort of semantic nonsense goes on in GD all the time. Suddenly it only becomes an issue when one participant is Lib.
First, I did not admonish Monty for taking any bait or for entering into an exchange with Lib. I did point out, when Monty publicly sought to chastise Lib by invoking the “no insults” rule, that Lib had not actually violated that rule and that no one was innocent in the exchange. I issued no Warnings and ordered no one to change their posting behavior. I did suggest, first obliquely and, in a later post, explicitly, that it was not good practice to enter that Forum with very thin skin.
Then in order for Lib’s posts to be “bait,” we need to establish that Lib knew that he was misusing the language in an attempt to lure some hapless poster into a needless argument. I sometimes find Lib’s semantic constructions odd, (and I certainly believe that this is one serious cause for all the rancor), but I do not find any evidence that he is inconsistent or that he is pulling a Phaedrus-like or Chevy55SS-like game of changing the language on the fly to score points. Frankly, it would be easier for me if I could, because then I could issue a warning and go on about my business knowing that Lib would have to change or be banned. It is rather more difficult, here. You have decided that Lib’s actions are deliberate trolling (or something very similar). I do not perceive the same deliberate attempt to cause confusion.
Now, your complaints regarding posts #10 and #35 have more merit. The suggestion that a few million people who are already organized under one pair of overlapping governments with some not-yet-identified number of people agitating for a change to both of those relationships is not legitimately met with a reply to leave them be. However, in those instances, the rest of the posters handled it in exactly the correct way: there were a couple of polite requests for Lib to go away and a rather civil comment that the the thread was discussing a separate issue than that of reforming the entire world in Libertarian ideal. (And Lib told no one to shut up.) Since the posters handled that on their own, I saw no need to jump in with jackboots after the fact to scold Lib and resurrect the issue. In fact, if more people who dislike Lib would respond in the manner of the posters between posts #10 and the silence following post #39, there would be far fewer people fulminating over Lib’s presence (or existence).
As to the thread becoming “all about” him, I will note that Lib’s last post was #73, my last post in cleaning up the fallout was post #81 and the thread went on to post #110, so your claims that the thread had been destroyed or that it had become “all about” Lib are greatly exaggerated.
Just a thought. Having read and digested the thread, and having no particular axe to grind in this argument, might it not be that Liberal does not set out to derail threads and in fact such derailments occur because of some posters’ reactions (or over-reactions) to his comments?