This is the blood of liberty, given for your freedom. 
Is there anything that will bury that hatchet? One problem I’ve always had is born of a certain social naivity, which itself is born of early childhood withdrawal due to racial prejudice and abuse from a sibling — and that is that I cannot always effectively gage what will and will not hurt someone. Sometimes I hurt intentionally, because I’m mad or because I feel threatened. In your case, my intention was not to hurt, it was to edify, but it fell flat all the same. To know that you’re still angry is a revelation. And I sincerely apologize. Having left you angry for so long over so little is reprehensible on my part.
Oh you are so gonna get slimed for that one LOL.*
*While I like the loony grin of , he’s unable to convey actual laugher, therefore I will use LOL whenever I damn well please to indicate that I, in fact, laughed. Out loud. Why is there not a laughing emoticon? Does nobody here ever laugh? 
OK, make up your sanctimonious mind already. Message board posts are either:
- Harmless words on a screen which a person can take or leave as they prefer.
- Vicious hurtful hyena attacks which encircle their helpless victim and ignore his cries for mercy which they chew on his gallbladder.
You’ve really got to pick one. Arguing both sides is hurting your already incredibly annoying case.
Give me liberty, or give me slime!
Yeah.
Even I’m piling on on this one!!
Tris
And well you should be. Good for you. Confidence and self-esteem are important.
However, your “explanation” doesn’t match your “offer” and that’s what I was commenting on, so kudos on your ability to define words, but perhaps a bit more “learn to understand them in context” would be benificial as well?
Your “explanation”(s) were many and varied. As stated, there was the “ok, stop posting now and if you try to post contact info to get your money, you lose” one, the “it was just a POSSIBLE offer” one, the “just go away, you bother me” one (your original) and now your current one, the “courage of his convctions” one. I’m sure when this one collapses, you’ll come up with another.
Anyway, your offer doesn’t match your current explanation. You’re not testing his convctions by making him go somewhere else. That would be like paying an anti-abortion type to protest in front of someone else’s clinic–you haven’t tested his beliefs, you’ve just given him money to go somewhere else. None of your offers had anything to do with his convictions, just the forum in which he expressed them.
Well, it’s obvious!
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That’s when you or your buddies do it to someone else.
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That’s when someone else does it to you or your buddies.
Do I have to explain everything to you? :mad:
Myopic on your part. And surprising, given that you pick whichever you prefer for any given circumstance or person.
This is basically a false dichotomy.
The words on the screen have no physical ability to threaten. But there are people here, on this side of the screen, and on the other side of the cyber connection. Perhaps you are disconnected from that reality enough to entirely dismiss repeated evocation of personal hatred. Others are not.
I have fairly strong convictions that your implied solution is the most damaging.
Tris
I must admit it is true that I did not copy and paste my exact words forty-two times: clarifications were made, questions were answered, and deals were negotiated. I did choose to use various word-sets each time that I felt were appropriate or applicable.
But what about you?
Can you explain why your protest over all this has changed from your arrival here earlier this day? You began by saying that I lied. You dropped that accusation, and substituted one of blindness. Then you compared the terms of the offer to the explanation of why the offer was made. Now, you’re making analogies about abortion clinics. You didn’t mention abortion clinics originally. Why not? God only knows what your argument will morph into next.
I think you’re misreading my post. While I do personally tend to lean toward the “let’s not take message board interactions too seriously” camp, I can see that some people do and that’s fine. However, I think that if one is going to lecture people on their message board interactions, one should be consistent in how one paints said interactions. Quiddity’s posts in this thread have ranged from sanctimonious melodrama to condescending dismissal, depending on which thread she was talking about and who the players were. I don’t in fact agree with either extreme, but find the simultaneous application of both of them far more irritating and ineffective than consistent application of a single cliché.
I think you’re misreading her posts. She’s only feeding back to people what they’re slinging at her. All she did was encapsulate what people were saying to her — the very dichotomy you drew. They were telling her that this was vitriol while that was good clean fun. It’s like Neo deflecting bullets from Agent Smith’s gun to Agent Smith Prime. Your characterizations of her as “sanctimonious” and “condescending” and so forth reveal your own prejudices, and explain why you did not call out others for what she was only mirroring.
What in god’s name are you babbling about? Or are you just playing dumb cuz it’s easier to dodge the issues that way?
I never accused you of blindness. You lied about your explainations and my second post pointed that out as did my first one. I’ll still stand by my original post that you lied by constantly changing your “explanations” as you got heat.
The analogy about “abortion clinics” supports the argument that your fourth excuse (lie/reason/whatever) has onthing to do with your first, stated reason. I explained the EXACT SAME THING in a different words to help you understand.
This is NOT the same thing as having two completely unrelated excuses (unless you can tell me how testing his convictions by paying him to go away and paying him to go away cuz he acts like a monkey at a banquet are in any way related). Going forward, if analogies are confusing to you, I’ll avoid them in the future. In any case, if you had trouble understanding the second post, I apologize and I’ll be clear that I still completely stand by my first post.
So now, will you stand by your original post that the reason you wanted PRr gone was that he “behave(d) like a wild monkey at a catered buffet.” and that you wanted him to “just go away” (which has NOTHING to do with testing the courage of his convictions?) Or can you explain how “I don’t like his behavior so I’m buying him off” somehow matches “I’ve devised an ethical test of his convictions”?
Are there two of you at the keyboard? If so, which one clacked out this: “Did you think your past words were invisible or something?”
For me, same same. Not the deal, though. Just the explanation. It is the nature of deals that people go back and forth, which is why PRR posted different counter-offers as well, until the final agreement was reached among the three of us. (Not you — Tris, PRR, and me. You weren’t there, were you?)
The final agreement is that he will abandon his mission here to spread the NoGospel forever, that he will get his money after two years of absence, and that Tris will settle all disputes by fiat.
I’m not, as has been explained to you. However, I’ll elaborate for your edification:
Anger, irritation, frustration, annoyance - these emotions actively damage the person experiencing them in empirically provable ways; immune system effects, blood pressure effects, etc. And how do these feelings arise but from how one interprets events.
Interpretation is subjective; it’s amply illustrated here where it’s clear that different people interpret posters’ words very differently. You choose the interpretation which leaves you feeling angry or you can choose another interpretation. It’s to you.
What humans ought not be doing, for a host of reasons, is allowing that anger to cause them to lash out with the intent of hurting someone else. If you hear someone’s words and that is your reaction, then I put it to you that you need to find out what it is about you to cause this kind of reaction because it’s something inside you. For this reason. as well as for those listed above, people need to learn to moderate their reactions when their reactions cause them harm and incite them to cause harm to others.
It is also possible to choose to be hurt or not by what others say. And I would counsel anyone, Liberal included, to give little regard to the opinions of strangers. Having said that, I have seen a lot of people crushed because they feel disliked or disapproved-of. Parental disapproval is particularly damaging. And it would seem to me that pain over disapproval may be a phenomenon that evolutionary psych will illuminate; in the animal world, rejection by a parent guarantees death, as does being cast out of a herd. This might be the explanation for why so many people are so dependent on others’ opinions of them.
So, yes, while I agree that it would be ideal if people could steel themselves against hurt and I do try to suggest that to people, the fact remains that it’s not all that easy for some people to do when people set out deliberately to hurt them.
Bottom line: there is no excuse, no matter how angry or irritated you are, to attack a person rather than attack what they say. Period. You can’t buy yourself off by saying ‘well, he should just get over it’. This is about appallingly incivil behaviour.
What’s most odious to me is that people launch these attacks based on personal dislike, not for logical reasons. ‘You’re an attention whore’ is hardly a hanging offense, even were it true, so how does this justify the vilification which follows? It does not.
So you DO have a problem with analogies/metaphors. Got it.
One of those irregular verbs, huh? “I am determined; you are stubborn; he is pig-headed!”
Well, for my part, it was about me amusing myself rather than any political or philosophical point I was trying to advance. Frankly, What Exit struck me a big ol’ wet blanket and I tried not to engage him/her more than I absolutely had to.
Are you being purposefully obtuse? Or do you really not understand how communication works?
I’m sure you know why trolls aren’t allowed here, as you seem to be intelligent. Trolls say things to provoke a reaction. They hijack threads with nonsense and foolishness, just to get a rise out of people. Or they say things that are intentionally obtuse, that any reasonable person could expect to cause problems, and then feign innocence and purity of heart. Why do they do this? Because they get off on the attention. Trollish behavior is just attention-whoring taken to an extreme.
Liberal isn’t a troll, but sometimes he does things that are borderline trollish.
If you’re going to castigate us for finding this pattern of his annoying, then you need to take issue with the board’s rules. Because, at least for me personally, my annoyance stems from the fact Liberal skirts along the edges of what’s allowed, pushing at the envelope and in doing so daring the board to ban him. I don’t think he skirts unintentionally; I think he’s quite aware of what he’s doing and just how far to take it. Sometimes, many times, I think he’s yanking all of our chains.