Rules and Moderator information

[Atlanticmike]

Great day. And you?

We had a plumbing emergency at the kids’ place. And we got it fixed. All is well.

Hey. This stuff is not worth bothering Shades. Don’t do it. This is a bunch of petulant crap.

I think it is absurd that we are going to moderate the triggering appearance of “PROGRESSIVE” but tolerate the needling fuckwiths of “right wing friend” and “Trumpists” and “fascists.”

The moderators are here to moderate. This is all silly petulant B.S.. Let it slide. Don’t indulge it.

Gambit, right?

I'm in the black, so my personal opinions. I shouldn't have to bother Shades with any of this. I only have to because Mike gets up every morning and decides to troll and harass and take a crap all over the board.

No one should have to tell a grown man not to harass Lem the way Mike has. There is no excuse. None. He's taken a forum where he has more latitude to discuss stuff than most other places, and his response is to get up every day and take a crap all over it. That's his choice. No one forces him to post here.

I obviously can't discuss moderator stuff in the black, but it doesn't take a genius to understand how this works. If you push the limits hard enough, the limits get moved. What Mike is doing is out and out harassment, with Lem as the clearest target. If he acted toward Lem in the workplace the way he has here, he'd be out of a job and/or have a much smaller bank account. There is simply no excuse for a grown man to behave this way. If someone behaved that way toward his daughters in his presence, I suspect he'd punch them into next week.

So, this really goes one of a couple ways. Mike can stop crapping all over the board. If I got to vote, that's what I'd vote for. The second is we end up with anti-harassment rules which we shouldn't have to need. The third is a substantial portion of the board membership gives up on this place. All because one guy refuses to exhibit basic human decency. The process of getting to alternatives two or three will be so unpleasant we may lose a bunch of folks anyway.

So, I hope Mike stops. Just stops.

You really are a good little PROGRESSIVE arent you! Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing is being said about how the liberal loons are constantly bashing conservatives. Stupid this, stupid that! Ignorant this, ignorant that! Everything you have asked me to change, I've done. So now that I use "pink vagina hat" as a way to hit back at posters who call me stupid, ignorant, joke on my vocabulary and writing skills, say my frontal lobe isn't fully developed and so on, you want me to quit!?!?!? Really?? You're a fxxxin ixxxt! I've extended my hand, in fact, I'm the only poster I've ever seen on this board extend a hand in friendship and say pM and we'll talk about it.

[Chap]

This is so simple to solve it's not even funny. I've been saying it from the beginning. I've extended my hand in friendship over a dozen times on this forum and also on the terrestrial forum. I've said multiple times, you can PM me and we will work this out.

I hate to break this to Atlanticmike, but I have no interest in being his friend. I don't come to a discussion board to make friends. I come here (surprise!!) to discuss.

And when some posters make discussion difficult by posting what amounts to a splurge of "white noise" in the form of nonsense posts or repeated posts that have no purpose other than to provoke and insult, which drives away potentially interesting discussants, I'd like that to stop. And if we need new rules to stop what are (in my long experience) new kinds of trolling so far as this board is concerned, then we need to go ahead and make the new rules.

[Cultellus]

This is so simple to solve it's not even funny. I've been saying it from the beginning. I've extended my hand in friendship over a dozen times on this forum and also on the terrestrial forum. I've said multiple times, you can PM me and we will work this out.

I hate to break this to Atlanticmike, but I have no interest in being his friend. I don't come to a discussion board to make friends. I come here (surprise!!) to discuss.

And when some posters make discussion difficult by posting what amounts to a splurge of "white noise" in the form of nonsense posts or repeated posts that have no purpose other than to provoke and insult, which drives away potentially interesting discussants, I'd like that to stop. And if we need new rules to stop what are (in my long experience) new kinds of trolling so far as this board is concerned, then we need to go ahead and make the new rules.

This is rich. I am laughing so so so damn hard.

Chap, you don’t provoke and insult?

So much for that friendly living room, Chap shat.

[ceeboo]

I hate to break this to Atlanticmike, but I have no interest in being his friend.

Why? Do you need him to be your enemy for personal purposes? Do you have any interest in being anybody's friend here? How about someone who thinks and believes exactly like you do, any interest in friendship there? Do you consider any board member a friend?

I don't come to a discussion board to make friends. I come here (surprise!!) to discuss.

Do you think it's possible to do both - discuss and make friends? Or is it one or the other?

And when some posters make discussion difficult by posting what amounts to a splurge of "white noise" in the form of nonsense posts or repeated posts that have no purpose other than to provoke and insult, which drives away potentially interesting discussants, I'd like that to stop.

Do you want the insults and provoking posts that are directed at people who don't happen to share your particular ideology/beliefs to stop as well? Or is this a one way stop that you're desiring?

[Chap]

I hate to break this to Atlanticmike, but I have no interest in being his friend.

Why? Do you need him to be your enemy for personal purposes? Do you have any interest in being anybody's friend here? How about someone who thinks and believes exactly like you do, any interest in friendship there? Do you consider any board member a friend?

Nope. I find my friendships in real life, not on an anonymous discussion board. And I prefer not to risk any possible leaking of real life into this board, or vice versa. Hence I try hard not to post anything that might point to my in real life identity. I find some people's posts more pleasant and interesting to read than others, of course.

I don't come to a discussion board to make friends. I come here (surprise!!) to discuss.

Do you think it's possible to do both - discuss and make friends? Or is it one or the other?

Friendship requires a degree of real knowledge of the other that is impossible if one is just an anonymous pair of hands on a keyboard. And (for reasons set out above), that is all the contact with other posters that I can permit myself.

And when some posters make discussion difficult by posting what amounts to a splurge of "white noise" in the form of nonsense posts or repeated posts that have no purpose other than to provoke and insult, which drives away potentially interesting discussants, I'd like that to stop.

Do you want the insults and provoking posts that are directed at people who don't happen to share your particular ideology/beliefs to stop as well? Or is this a one way stop that you're desiring?

On the whole insults of the grosser kind don't please me, whatever their target. I don't include under insults posts that simply point out (with citation of appropriate evidence and argument) that someone is grossly ill-informed on a topic of discussion, or has failed to understand an important point of argument or fact, or has been deceived by some third party, even if someone dislikes being told such things.

[Atlanticmike]

This is so simple to solve it's not even funny. I've been saying it from the beginning. I've extended my hand in friendship over a dozen times on this forum and also on the terrestrial forum. I've said multiple times, you can PM me and we will work this out.

I hate to break this to Atlanticmike, but I have no interest in being his friend. I don't come to a discussion board to make friends. I come here (surprise!!) to discuss.

And when some posters make discussion difficult by posting what amounts to a splurge of "white noise" in the form of nonsense posts or repeated posts that have no purpose other than to provoke and insult, which drives away potentially interesting discussants, I'd like that to stop. And if we need new rules to stop what are (in my long experience) new kinds of trolling so far as this board is concerned, then we need to go ahead and make the new rules.

Comical comical gold I tell ya! Here's the way I see it. Way before I stumbled across this board, Lem has been obsessively following around conservatives and asking the moderators to Q them because of the use of certain words like liberal. I can't remember the thread, but in a thread last year Lem was picking on leeuniverse because he was defending his position as a conservative and Lem was asking the moderators to "deal" with his azz. Time and time and time again, it's the more conservative posters being harassed by Lem. If you look back through her post, just about every conservative she's chosen to get rid of has become a "sexist" because she knows that label will help her accomplish her goal of painting certain posters as A-Holes. The only difference with me is I'm willing to fight back and I don't care what Lem tries to label me as. And it drives the SJWs in the board absolutely insane. You see! You SJWs like when your conservative pets are willing to comply with your demands. But when someone comes along and calls out your bullxxxt, you guys get in a feeding frenzy like a bunch of hungry piranhas. The reason you're so upset with me is I'm not intimidated by piranhas. As I've said before, I'm a fisherman and I love to catch fish and take them home, skin em, them fry em up in hot grease.

[Atlanticmike]

This board already has a rule in place regarding harassment of posters. It's clear as day that Atlanticmike is targeting, primarily, Lem with sexually harassing remarks, and to a lesser extent myself, because she is a known female here. He has been interacting with unknown female posters ( no names, wild horses) here since the day he tripped in here and yet, the sexual remarks he's making are made directly to known female posters. That makes the case for targeted sexual harassment.

While I understand your wish to create a new forum with 'Celestial' rules, I think that Shades has ruled that out, and I always prefer to accept his rulings on matters than concern the board he has created.

But the best should not be the enemy of the good. I do think it would be appropriate to make rulings about:

(a) The prolonged use of deliberately insulting or provocative language that transgresses the boundary into harassment, whether of a particular poster or of a class of posters. I am not talking about one-off exclamations of exasperation of the "Wow you are dumb" variety, but such matters as the continuous use of sexual expressions of a kind that serve no purpose other than to provoke and make people feel so uncomfortable that they cease to post, even if there is no credible threat to personal safety.

(b) The kind of trolling that Cultellus originally engaged in - a continuous flow of nonsensensical posts which functioned solely to disrupt dialog on the board and discourage participation.

Both of these are relatively new threats, and demand new countermeasures.

Hahaha!! In other words, help help, help, there's a poster here in spirit paradise who's not willing to comply with our SJW demands!! Please moderators! Deal with him, make more rules because he's not going away like leeuniverse, Mayan elephant, ldsfaqs, subgenius or sometimes ceeboo!! Please help us! He's disturbing our safe space! Please moderators, Plesse bring back the ECHO CHAMBER!

[Chap]

... Please help us! He's disturbing our safe space! ...

I think you are missing the point.

I have no objection at all to hearing someone arguing a point of view different from my own. Of course, if all they do is to repetitively shout that people they disagree with are in a cult, that gets boring. But boring I can cope with, either by just skipping posts or by putting people on ignore to save myself having to skip.

If on the other hand they make repeated posts using words specifically designed to make another poster feel harassed or despised because of their gender, then I think that should be a job for the mods. There is no point of view that requires that kind of grossness in order to be adequately expressed for the purposes of discussion.

[Res Ipsa]

I'm in the black, so my personal opinions. I shouldn't have to bother Shades with any of this. I only have to because Mike gets up every morning and decides to troll and harass and take a crap all over the board.

No one should have to tell a grown man not to harass Lem the way Mike has. There is no excuse. None. He's taken a forum where he has more latitude to discuss stuff than most other places, and his response is to get up every day and take a crap all over it. That's his choice. No one forces him to post here.

I obviously can't discuss moderator stuff in the black, but it doesn't take a genius to understand how this works. If you push the limits hard enough, the limits get moved. What Mike is doing is out and out harassment, with Lem as the clearest target. If he acted toward Lem in the workplace the way he has here, he'd be out of a job and/or have a much smaller bank account. There is simply no excuse for a grown man to behave this way. If someone behaved that way toward his daughters in his presence, I suspect he'd punch them into next week.

So, this really goes one of a couple ways. Mike can stop crapping all over the board. If I got to vote, that's what I'd vote for. The second is we end up with anti-harassment rules which we shouldn't have to need. The third is a substantial portion of the board membership gives up on this place. All because one guy refuses to exhibit basic human decency. The process of getting to alternatives two or three will be so unpleasant we may lose a bunch of folks anyway.

So, I hope Mike stops. Just stops.

You really are a good little PROGRESSIVE arent you! Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing is being said about how the liberal loons are constantly bashing conservatives. Stupid this, stupid that! Ignorant this, ignorant that! Everything you have asked me to change, I've done. So now that I use "pink vagina hat" as a way to hit back at posters who call me stupid, ignorant, joke on my vocabulary and writing skills, say my frontal lobe isn't fully developed and so on, you want me to quit!?!?!? Really?? You're a fxxxin ixxxt! I've extended my hand, in fact, I'm the only poster I've ever seen on this board extend a hand in friendship and say pM and we'll talk about it.

Mike, you’ve told us several times that you hate politics. But you also see everything here through the lens of politics, leading you to draw conclusions that are spectacularly wrong.

First, I’m going to deal with stuff I didn’t say. I didn’t say anything to you about “pink vagina hat.” To the extent I’ve discussed that phrase in this thread, I’ve communicated the view of the mod team that the phrase as used in reported posts is not R rated and can stay in Paradise. That’s not being a “good progressive.” That’s applying the rules, as written, as evenhanded and as dispassionately as the three of us can. As a moderator, I don’t have the luxury of having a team or a tribe. That’s not my job.

I also asked Jersey Girl questions about a proposal she was making so that I could understand exactly what she wanted to happen and figure out what role, if any, I as a moderator would have in that process. And I was as civil and polite with her as I have been with you when I’ve talked with you in the red (shorthand for in my official capacity as a moderator.

With respect to “hitting back,” I’ve told you what your remedy is here, now that we have a functioning mod team again: if you see something that breaks the rules, click on the report button. You don’t get to use someone else’s bad behavior as an excuse for your own bad behavior. And, in your case, you respond to bad behavior with over the top bad behavior, which makes you the worse offender every time. You’ve been bragging about how you’ve stopped folks here from mistreating certain individuals, but you haven’t modified your behavior at all. So, were you really a white knight defending the honor of conservatives, or was that just a flimsy excuse for bad behavior?

You’re not the only poster who has contacted me and invited me to PM them if I see a problem with their posts. That’s my preferred way of handling moderation issues. And while I give you full credit for stopping certain behaviors when asked, I give you zero credit for using that fact as license to ignore the rules until you get a specific request from a mod to stop.

And, last, you haven’t extended your hand in friendship here. Not even close. Friendship isn’t empty words — it’s action. Your behavior here has more closely resembles that of a terrorist who bombs a hospital and then smiles and says “let’s negotiate.” Or a mobster running a protection racket.

With all that underbrush cleared away, here’s what I did talk about: your harassment of Lem. Do you disagree that what you’ve been doing is harassing her? That’s what you’ve done would legally constitute sexual harassment if done in the workplace? That you’d take a swing at a guy who treated your daughters this way? Can you explain to me in which universe that conduct is excusable?

That’s what I’m talking about when I say I hope you stop. Only Shades can ban words. Over the course of decades, he’s banned two or three. Everybody gets to have their say, but, convincing a person who places a high value on free speech to ban words or phrases has their work cut out for them. The references to LDS Faqs are refer to a special case that has occurred only once since the board was created. Again, applying rules created to handle a specific case to a situation that is not pretty much identical is always a hard sell. But, again, people here get to propose things to Shades and what happens is up to him. There’s a process and the issues will get handled.

But the harassment needs to stop, and that is what I hope you’ll do.

[Cultellus]

This is not a workplace. I appreciate the hypothetical as a basis for establishing a code of conduct, but it is still a hypothetical condition with a big huge IF.

I would not call people pissboys in the workplace. Res would not call people accomplices to manslaughter or murder in a legal workplace, if they only had contrarian points of view. Doc would not likely use homosexual epithets in a workplace.

If we reestablish the foundational standards, especially to follow a hypothetical setting, we change the board.

We can change, that is fine. Doing so based on a hypothetical to favor one cabal or ideology is misguided.