You came in with nothing, and you left with nothing.
But at least you left…and that’s something.
Does anyone else imagine this coming from Al Swearengen’s mouth in Deadwood?
I think we have no choice but to decide what is trifling and what needs action. People will take offence at almost anything if they try hard enough, so at some point, we do have to say that the best solution is for the person who imagines themself wounded to get a thicker skin.
We wouldn’t do that for some things, of course (like racism, homophobia, misogyny, direct personal attack, bullying, etc), but for things where the ‘victim’ has to apply a multi-stage, speculative, dubious chain of inference, in order to discover that they have been wounded, they just need to grow a spine and stop trying so damn hard to be offended.
Nah–I just said I was done with showing the audience one of your styles of threadshitting. I’ll still be here and continue to mock you as and when needed.
But hey! Thanks for yet another demonstration of your ability to read and comprehend what people write.
Ladies and gentlemen, this thread couldn’t have been possible without Czarcasm, the poo-flinging chimp. Let’s all give him a round of applause and remember to tip your waiters.
As has been pointed out, it all has to do with context: when you say it, and how you say it.
I can’t see any of those demands for citations as being even especially inappropriate, some of them are thoroughly *a propos *to my mind. None of them could be called “threadshitting”.
I think I’m as neutral as one could be here (I know neither you nor **Czarcasm **particularly, though I suspect that I don’t like Czarcasm) – if those links are all you’ve got, you should give it up. (Or were you hoping that no-one would look at them?)
There’s no applause, Fenris-you didn’t come up with the off-topic threadshitting posts as requested, but instead hurled a bunch of wild “He’s the worst poopy head moderator in the whole wide world!” claims and stalked off. Hold your head up high, Fenris-you posted a bunch of links to my asking for cites, which seems to annoy you for some reason, and you got to call me names. Yay for you!!
As I see it, Czarcasm, there are three levels of “Cite?” requests.
-
Someone makes a remarkable claim, and after a bit of googling for evidence, you’re unable to find any evidence that supports the claim. In this case, asking for a cite is absolutely appropriate. Even here, a bit of finesse is helpful: say something like, “I’m not able to find any research that suggests that mint Oreos are a reliable insulator against gamma rays–can you link to your source?” instead of “Cite, please, that Oreos stop gamma radiation.” (You’re not required to be polite about it, but if you genuinely want a cite, rather than wanting an Internet Smart Guy Badge, try honey rather than vinegar).
-
Someone makes a remarkable claim, and you go straight for “cite?” without looking for it yourself. This is poor form, but perhaps excusable. You’d be better off doing the research first, because maybe it’s not a remarkable claim, but rather a claim that falls within an area of your ignorance.
-
Someone makes a common claim, and you ask for a cite without doing any research. Note that with a common claim, if you do research, you’ll find a cite, so I’ll assume you didn’t research first. This is terrible form. Don’t do it. It looks like you’re just doing makework, trying to annoy someone enough that they’ll stop posting.
If someone makes a common claim that you believe is false, don’t ask them for a cite. Instead, provide your own cite that their claim is false. “The idea that sociopaths are common in society is incorrect,” you might say: “According to this study, less than one in 10,000 people is a sociopath.” In other cases, you might say, “The only websites I can find that say trees cause pollution appear to be
wingnut conservative websites–if there’s anything resembling a scientific consensus on this claim, I can’t find it. If you have some good evidence, please cite it.”
My experience with you–and no, I will not cite it, either believe it or not–is that you often fall in the second, or even the third, category of cite requests. You request cites without having done background research first. It’s pretty offputting when you do it, and it doesn’t lead to better discussions, and it doesn’t fight ignorance. If you’d confine yourself to the first category of cite requests, I think you, and the rest of us, would have better, more illuminating conversations.
Honest assessment time. Considering what the topic of discussion was when the request was made(my supposedly making many off-topic atheistic drivebys, which lead people to not to believe that I was sincere when I said that I was only referring to fiction depictions of God in that Café Society thread), and the fact that I asked for off-topic driveby examples, do you think Fenris provided good examples?
That last line makes me a little dubious about your neutrality. 
No–this is the SDMB. Except for Czarcasm who asks for cites only to troll, I expected pretty much everyone else on the board wouldlook at them. But then, the vast majority of people on the board aren’t afraid to actually follow links and look at cites.
LHoD in the post I see in preview does an excellent job of explaining in clearer terms why some Cite? requests are bad. Most of the ones I listed (and I didn’t just grab the first page of Google results, I did some sifting on the first couple pages) are in LHoD’s second or third category. The one where the OP asks a question for people who are familiar with a particular UFO kook gets a “Type 2” response. And since Czar hovers over the keyboard looking for these threads (based on the fact that he’s usually one of the first 10 posters or so), it’s annoying and threadshitting.
And again–nearly 2500 hits for “Czarcasm” and “Cite please” on Google. That doesn’t match up with two other posters with similar post counts who had like 30 or 40 “Cite Please” requests. (No, I’m not going to name them as they’re not participating in this thread)
Note: Deflection tactic in operation! Czam is ignoring every single thing LHoD posted, to try to hijack the thread to “atheistic drive-bys” when I’ve been talking about threadshitting since the original thread in ATMB. My claim was “He threadshits and threadshits are bad”. He asked for proof. It was provided, he deflects.
I know what the topic was-I quoted it. I know what I requested-I quoted it. I know you provided shit-you provided it.
Edited to add: Once again, Fenris, the topic of conversation isn’t your little hangup about my asking for cites, so quit trying to change the subject.
We’re talking about saying “There is no god,” or perhaps “God is fictional.” That’s precisely what we’ve been told is akin to racism or homophobia.
I suspect in this matter it’s less about what is said than what is heard. Zoid hears “You are stupid” when someone says god is fictional. You hear something that amounts to bigotry, apparently.
My suggestion is that you try to develop more confidence in your religious beliefs. Then you won’t feel so vulnerable and defensive, and the merest statement of disbelief will not become tantamount to the worst of hate crimes.
Do you guys really say Elastoplast for Band-Aid? Someone might need one. And a cucumber sandwich.
I’m sorry, but that’s not actually an interesting question to me; I’m not concerned with the atheistic drive-bys, which is why I didn’t post about them.
Rather, I’ll turn it around on you: looking through his links, which ones do you think were particularly good requests for cites? Give two or three, and we can discuss those.
If you’re thoroughly comfortable in the quality of your requests for cites, feel free to disregard everything I say.
Dude, that’s not lemon.
Erm, did you actually read anything here? Or there? I really don’t know how to respond to this.
My “religous beliefs” (which can be best described as “I don’t really care, everyone of us is probably wrong anyway”) are not threatened by Czarcasm. I just think the guy needs 10 cc’s of tact IV. I stand by my opinion that he’s a bigot, however. There’s a way to express your disagreement with another’s religious views tactfully. Czarcasm doesn’t care about that. The dude’s got a lot of hate in him.
If this thread was about whether my requests for cites are valid or not, that would indeed be an interesting discussion, wouldn’t it? I’d rather not join in on Fenris’ rather weak hijacking attempt, though.
Since you’re not a mod any more, I can tell you that your attempts to direct the conversation are useless and that you always were a whiny little bitch when you tried to, even when you were the worst mod on the Internet.
The OP and I were discussing threadshitting, not atheism. I gave a number of not-atheistic examples of threadshitting that would be as out of bounds as your crap.
I repeatedly said that your problem (in this case, you clearly have many) is that you threadshit. You demanded cites FROM ME. Not from the OP, FROM ME. So, I cited how you threadshit and LHoD kindly explained to you how some cite requests could be threadshits.
So
A) It is on topic, you stupid douchebag
and
B) Take your demands for what the topic “should” be, go back in time to when you were a mod, then fold the demand until it’s all pointy corners, then stuff it up your ass, you twat.
I know you asked **He Who Must Be Despised **himself, but perhaps you could humour me, of the nine links that Fenris posted (see my post #126), all but the first and the eighth appear on the face of it to be nothing but legitimate (and I find neither the first nor the eighth particularly objectionable).
YMOV.