The OP lists a poor example of this, but I’ve noticed that you will sometimes enter a thread in a contentious and insufficiently elaborated manner.
Perhaps you could try this approach. The next time you enter into a discussion, consider the likely responses to your comment. Then preemptandsoften them as appropriate.
You may find that the results are less inflammatory. Regardless, I believe the exercise improves post quality.
Oddly, you will probably get fewer responses; many pass over the strongest arguments in favor of the low lying fruit.
Here’s an example of a comment that was too brief, IMHO. After reading the Wikipedia thread on the topic, I’d say that Occam’s Razor is definitely related to the concept of simplicity, even though necessity may in fact be a better way to understand or the concept. (Or not: I find underlying issues to be tricky.)
Your post implied that the underlying issues were straightforward when in fact (IMHO) they are not.
I once heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again, expecting the results to somehow be different.
Lib has been pitted over and over and over again for “constantly derailing threads”. According to many of you, he keeps doing it. Perhaps its time to stop pitting him and actually do what the mods suggest, such as emailing them and reporting his posts, because clearly the pittings are not having the desired effect.
And now we all sing kum ba ya, hold hands and dab tears from our eyes as Liberal makes some commitment to reconsider his posting style. Sort of like this. (Wherein he even references another bit of prior criticism about his posting style from Gaudere).
I’m sure there have been others, but I don’t feel like searching for them. Didn’t someone have a handy catalog of Liberal moments, or was that in regards to someone else?
jrfranchi, Liberal does have quite a history as a troublemaker. He is a pseudo-intellectual who goes through phases of self-control and lucidity. His contributions are largely off-topic, highly defensives swipes, based on religion or politics. He is famous for engaging in the most excruciating type of semantic nit-pickery.
He’ll get his attention, in the form of calls from some to ignore him and calls from others for him to carefully consider how his posts could be more beneficial. Then in a few months, you’ll see it all over again.
I’m responding to Tom’s post from the other thread here so as to keep discussions of mod actions where they belong, not because I want to pit anyone involved.
That seems all well and fine. But I get the impression that jrfranchi was expecting more commentary on the humor, and that the thread was primarily about the humor until the monkey threw a turd. (I think that turd was emblazoned “communal leftwing peacocking,” and is pretty blatantly insulting to anyone in the thread prior to that point).
If Lib hadn’t sanctimoniously insulted everyone in the thread and hijacked it by forcing people to defend themselves against his venomous contempt–if the thread had continued in the vein that it had been going in–would y’all have moved it?
The thing is, by moving the thread, you validate the monkey: the thread becomes what he wants it to be, instead of what other folks wanted it to be.
True, other folks were complicit in this: nobody had to pick up the monkeypoo and throw it back, but folks did.
Still–and this is my personal preference, not a high-and-mighty philosophical stance–I’d rather in such circumstances honor the OP’s intent: warn Lib, caution other folks not to respond to his venom, tell folks that the blatantly political debate is not appropriate for the forum, and let it remain in Cafe Society.
It’s obviously not a big deal with this thread; frankly, I suspect it’s too poisoned to continue profitably at this point. But in the future, if you move a thread according to the mistakes made by people who deliberately err in how they post, the errorists have won.
Right. If this were just some random poster, or one who had been here a lot less time I would agree with you. But come on. How many tens of thousands of divisive and unproductive posts more do we need here? This is reaching the point of me starting to wonder if Lib has compromising photos of the administration or something.
It seems nearly unanimous that a certain poster is a jerk, and it is oft claimed that the #1 rule is, “don’t be a jerk.” Maybe there needs to be more clarity of the rules.
I was under the impression he paid for a lot of other members subscription fees so it would be a noticeable cash loss to ban him. Seems reasonable. That true, Starving Artist?
Couple of things: First, while what you say seems sleazy and it makes me want to shower (regarding the money thing) it actually makes a lot of sense. In fact, given all that we know and see it is about the only thing that does. Second: What is the Starving Artist reference? You don’t think that’s me do you? (sort of sounds like it).
Actually, I suspect that his continued presence on the boards is more due to his fantastic nitpickery. His capacity to shave points exceedlingly thin has allowed him to avoid violating rules in letter while flouting their spirit. As venomous as he is, I have no hesitation about reporting him to the mods when I see him doing something that violates the rules; and yet it’s still very rare that I see a place where he forgets himself and violates the letter of the rule, even when he’s flinging turds at the spirit of the rule.
Holy jeez, not at all. Poster Starving Artist is just a liberal/libertarian groupie is all. Figured he might know if there’s any truth to my impression.
Left Hand of Dorkness, there was nothing subtle about that Daily Show hijack.
Left Hand of Dorkness, In general I do get what you are saying, and yet I can’t help but now think that the money explanation offered earlier carries a lot of weight. As I mentioned, we have had posters banned before not based of a specific rule violation, but rather based on a long history of skirting the edges. I am thinking that december would fall into that category, and Reeder more recently.
At the end of the day, Liberal is a disrespectful jerk. His presence detracts from the overall quality and enjoyment that people get out of these boards. How much more clear do things need to be before something is done?
In fact, I want to take things just one step further: Can any passing moderator or administrator please be so kind as to offer some sort of explanation as to why Liberal is still here? I am totally naive and want to believe the best, so I will pretty much buy anything that you want to offer.
I hardly think the solution is to ban him. Hell, if you pull up any long thread from a couple of years ago you will find that a surprising number of the posters have banned under their names. If I had my druthers I would just do a mass unbanning and take em all back.
That being said, Dex’s limp wristed response to yet another Liberal hijacking was absurd. Given the fairly heavy use of the ban stick around here I find it hard to imagine how Lib get’s a free pass. The worst he can expect from the mods is the kind of admonishment a grandmother gives her beloved but cantankerous grandson. The dude is a royal pain in the ass and uses tortured semantic games and disengenous ‘who me?’ bullshit to escape trouble. The least I would expect is for someone to tell him to butt out and stop hijacking perfectly good threads that other people are enjoying.
Why not? We saw with Reeder that at the end of the day having a special rule for a poster (in his case, only one Bush thread at a time or something to that effect) doesn’t work. I don’t for one second believe that giving Liberal a “no hijacking” rule would work. All that it would do would be to further derail threads with people accusing him of it and him nitpicking and rule lawyering. I also don’t for one second believe that any other poster would get away with this shit for as long as he has.
Failing anything being done about Liberal, perhaps someone could share the secret with me so that I can do whatever the fuck I want around here and never have to worry about being banned.