Ultra's suspension

If you thought it was threadshitting, did you report it? And yes, you can flag posts in a closed thread.

If you don’t support modding ITD for her post, why did you even bring it up? The hypocrisy is strong with your comments.

Obviously I can’t claim to read someone’s mind to know their true intent but it seemed like obvious trolling to me. Good call on the suspension.

Agreed, though from where I sit I could buy into jerkish rather than trolling – hey, I do understand, the position is “oh, please, everyone knows that will provoke a heated discussion, he did it deliberately, nobody’d just say that casualy!!” But I know some people, even who do know better, that will and DO casually say obnoxious things. So they need to be given some correction to remind them to always think before they write.

Maybe he should have started a pitting of the show and its rules, instead.

Not necessarily obviously. I’m pro-mask but I do not automatically fill with anger when I hear someone blather about virtue-signaling sheeple.

On further review by the staff, the suspension has been reversed.

Thank you.

Completely reversed, or downgraded to a warning or note?

Thank you.

I don’t know anything about UltraVires history but I am glad to know that opinions regarding mask wearing are not yet cause to be dislodged from the Dope.

It wasn’t mask wearing, it was to me the apparent trolling about it in a thread pretending to be about a TV show posted in The Café. Take it to GD or The Pit or even IMHO to talk about the issue. But don’t try to disguise it in the The Café.

Classic troll move is to post something controversial in benign forums to solicit strong reactions to try and get others to over-react and get in trouble.

They shouldn’t be, but they dropping them into CS is inappropriate. A warning for trolling seems right. What that warning results in is based on past warnings I’d think.

FWIW my wife and I tuned in to the channel briefly too. Maybe not the saddest Dick Clark New Years Eve ever but up there. Vapid interviewing. Performers who didn’t know how to handle it. Awful. But not sad because people outside were following city rules.

Condolences ITD.

Bad call.

to me, it just read like a stream of consciousness comment, towards the end of an evening. Can’t believe it was considered worth a suspension.

Jutur88, partial post " like the staging, which didn’t look sincere. Masked for stage effect, not safety."

I would have thought the same,! BUT I WOULD HAVE KEPT MY THOUGHTS TO MYSELF!

In today’s highy charged political climate and UNBELIEVABLE CENSORSHIP OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

I think the powers that be change what can and can’t be said on social media PDQ. I was read a post about not hiring Trump supporters, that seeks of discrimination.

How about someone with a Biden t-shirt on that’s blind about to walk in front of a semi. Is it alright for a Trump supporter to ignore the blind. Biden voter? I don’t think so!
He’ll I never voted for Trump but I know right from wrong.

Ditto. Tone deaf, and possibly alcohol lubricated, but not worthy of a suspension.

Eh. I can’t get too worked up about it. I took it as a fairly inarticulate way of trying to say that there was an extremely small crowd, and that they were making a heavy-handed point of wearing masks/social distancing for the camera, and that it was all depressing, so he changed the channel.

Know what? I agree with him- seeing what amounts to a morality play instead of a celebration IS depressing, even if the morality aspect is absolutely correct. I mean, I would be aghast if they weren’t wearing masks, but there are bound to be ways to film the thing and not be heavy-handed about it.

I didn’t take this to be a jab at mask wearing, but rather as a jab at the heavy-handedness of the producers making a point of it. We can criticize that kind of thing without getting slapped around by the mods, I think.

I also think ITD was overreacting a bit, but considering the circumstances, she gets a pass.

It would seem that the issue there is whether we are to take the position that I referenced in my earlier post, of “but of course that HAS to be trolling!!” It seems to operate from a presumption that anything that looks like that HAS to be a case of “post something controversial in benign forums to solicit strong reactions to try and get others to over-react and get in trouble”. It seems to be saying that by default any posting that meets the first criterion of that sentence must be a deliberate provocation.

IMO this at most was worth a note and either a threadlock or a sending to the Pit.

Saying you don’t support something that you just said doesn’t negate what you just said. Or are you still trolling?

Looking at UltraVires’ posts, he’s not an anti-masker. He says he wears a mask and disagrees with anti-maskers. There’s no reason to think that he would put a veiled comment about anti-masks when he doesn’t hold that view.

I read his comment as saying that the event looks forced because of the necessity of wearing masks, not that masks shouldn’t be required because of course they should, but that it’s sad that it’s now the state of affairs that they are. That goes along with the earlier part of his post where he says that he understands the need for no crowds.

Looking at this video of celebrations around the world, the first part of the video with New Zealand’s celebration and Australia’s celebration (where no masks are required because of their low infection rate) is a contrast with New York’s celebration this year.

At the risk of junior modding, this seems slightly out of place for an ATMB thread

Because it is. If you know something is controversial and will make a lot of people angry, and you put in your post in a forum not for that type of discussion, it is clear your goal is to try and piss those people off.

You don’t seem to understand how bad anti-maskers are. They have killed hundreds of thousands of people due to their callousness. That’s not “virtue signaling” for me to say that, either. It’s fact.

The fact that many of us have strong emotional reactions to that is not “virtue signaling” either. In fact, it is the use of that term in situations like this that lead me to believe the term was coined by people who lack any strong moral convictions at all, and thus assume everyone must be overdoing it for show.

Merely coping with how many people are so easily tricked or are actively malevolent enough to be anti-mask has been one of the hardest parts of the pandemic for me. And, yes, I do have someone in my family who was affected—my mom was delayed on getting a hospital bed because of COVID-19. But, even before that, it was a moral injury finding out how many people I thought I knew were so awful. It is hard to understate how horrible antimaskers are. I think people just undervalue just how bad it is due to moral fatigue. It really is like knowing your friend would kill you to not have to wear a mask.

It takes a profoundly callous person to make comments about masks only being for show. It’s not an okay thing to say, let alone believe. The main reason I wasn’t sure that UV deserved a suspension was that it’s such an awful thing to say that I want to believe he slipped up somehow.

But I do worry that reversing the suspension sends a bad message. It’s one thing not to give it at all, but another to reverse it. The messaging behind the two are not the same.

Moderator Note

Accusations of trolling are not permitted in ATMB. Do not do this again.