Thank you, and thank you to the rest of the mods!
If there’s anything to take away from the #metoo movement it’s not about the individual cases that make the news. It’s not about Les Moonvees or Jian Gomeshi or Bill O’Reilly or Harvey Weinstein or whomever is face-front this week.
No, the main takeaway should be just how universal the experience in sexual assault, harassment and other types of intrusive experience appear to be. There’s been a real break in the wall of silence women participated in over the decades. It’s KellyAnne Conway admitted she’s been assaulted. It’s Sharon Stone just laughing long and loud when someone asks if she’d ever faced it when she was a star. It’s the basic assumption - apparently - among women that of course they’ve been subject to it.
That’s the real indication that it’s real, it’s pervasive and that it needs to be respected. We elected to do so.
Good to know. Good call, FWIW coming from me. Think you guys made a tough call, but think it was the right one based on that.
Agreed. Thanks for keeping us in the loop as to the why of the decision. Sometimes, we just want to know what you guys are thinking. Again, good call guys.
Thinking?
Don’t give us too much credit. We’re a hive mind. Like ants. Individually? Don’t hope for much.
Many people have been jerks. I have been a jerk.
Most long term posters here have been.
If we banned everyone the first time they were jerk, we’d have no board.
Thank you for the explanation. I know these decisions aren’t taken lightly. I, for one, appreciate the thought given to the overall experience of the members of the board.
SA seemed unwilling or unable to rein himself in of late. His investment in spreading hatred made this board a less welcoming place to be. Mods you made the right call.
In many of his posts he was clearly playing “I’m not touching you!” provocation games, seeking an outcome where the other side would either come unbalanced and drw the foul, or else walk away because it’s hopeless, to then claim the last word as having “won”.
But as Little Nemo observes there was a spike in obnoxiousness in this final period, as if he had decided he would either help drive out the maximum people through offense or else immolate in martyrdom by Mod.
nm
See, that’s all I asked- for there to have been warnings first.
There was, and that’s fine, and good bye SA.
You think this was the first time?
nm
Seriously, why are you doing this?
This was an outstanding set of decisions by the powers that be to resolve what has been a very ugly period of the board’s history. As I said above, don’t be a jerk is obviously going to be open to interpretation. We’ve all acted like jerks before. I certainly have, the way I shoot my mouth off sometimes, but being a jerk is not always a bannable offense. Why would you attempt to rules lawyer to death a decision which actively sends the message that the SDMB wants nothing to do with fostering or promoting rape culture, and wants no part of the sexist/misogynistic implications that comes along with all that? Can you possibly argue that this is not a good thing?
Or, you know, you can get all butthurt about popularity contests blah blah cliques blah blah and go off and sulk in a corner. Look dude, I get it, I wasn’t part of the popular crowd in high school, but get therapy and deal with it and get over it already, jesus christ.
on preview: I’m going to have to call BS on the fact that “all you wanted” was to see a list of his warnings. You were searching for ammo to further make your arguments, and have now made a tactical retreat seeing that the ammo is not forthcoming.
From my first post: “However, maybe he does have a list of warnings, in which case- good riddance.” Then Bone gave us a link to a warning as said there were others, wereupon I said *"See, that’s all I asked- for there to have been warnings first.
There was, and that’s fine, and good bye SA."*
I have no idea of what you mean by “always do this” or why you are making this forum into a sounding board for personal attacks on me.
I only wanted there to have been warnings first- there was, so that’s fine. Done.
You have never added anything to this board.
Moderator Note
DrDeth, expectopatronum, you have made your points. Stop the bickering now, please.
Sorry. Will do. May take further comments to the Pit at a later time.
Glad to see him gone.
Speak for yourself, pal. As far as I know, I’ve never been a jerk, nor have many other regular posters here.
And SA was an aggressive, name-calling, impervious to others’ views, nasty jerk repeatedly, for years. I’m just surprised it took this long; he should have been deepsixed for his revolting conduct in the Paterno/Sandusky thread.
Well done, mods.
I also think Starving Artist got a very generous pass for a very long time on what he acknowledged was his deliberately inflammatory posting style, which he tried to pitch as simple retaliation for what he claimed were gratuitous attacks on him.
And that’s just in his last few months of posting.
If there is such a thing as “Dunning-Kruger troll syndrome”, I think that’s what Starving Artist had. He didn’t think of himself as a troll because he wasn’t actually faking his opinions to get a rise out of people. But he was such a substandard debater, in terms of logical consistency and coherence and so forth, that he embraced an argument style that was often effectively indistinguishable from trolling.
That is, he’d make some sloppily extravagant claim that was either way too sweeping a generalization or directly contradicted by facts, or some combination of the two. And then when people challenged him on his sloppiness, he’d nitpick that their argument was invalid since he didn’t use the exact words they ascribed to him, or he was demonstrably correct about some individual detail of the big sloppy claim, and so forth. His modus operandi was to get other posters so exasperated with him that they’d start making big sloppy claims and hurling angry insults themselves, which is the sort of discourse he was comfortable with.
Where he was out of his depth was in fact-based analysis of an argument, so when he found himself in that sort of dispute he tried to goad the disputants back into big sloppy anger again. He kept insisting that he only fought that way because his opponents started it, but I think basically he was just covering up the fact that he didn’t really understand any other way to fight.
I get how it could be argued that if SA was sincere in his opinions, and not cussing or insulting people in the wrong forum, then he shouldn’t be banned just for essentially being a shit debater, and certainly not just based on the content of his sincere opinions. After all, we’ve had many posters over the years who weren’t exactly rapier (no pun intended) wits.
But I think there’s an argument to be made that if somebody is constantly blundering into fencing matches and punching the combatants until they get angry enough to start punching him back, you don’t give him a pass for that just because he’s no good at handling a sword. Someone who’s perpetually trying to turn a fencing match into a fistfight because he feels better equipped to handle fistfights is, effectively, trolling the fencers, no matter how sincere his feelings of antagonism may be.
Could you PM the person so that I’ll know if it’s me you’re thinking of?