WHAT THE BLOODY HELL

I'm cool.
And this has been fun reading.
Joe( {^~^})Nation

Anybody got some holy water and a wooden stake ?

This thread is currently #1 on the Featured Topics list.

If you owned a bar and there was a city-wide power outage and one of the bar patrons, annoyed at being in the dark, says to the assembled (including you, the bar owner), "Jesus wept, what a lame goddamn bar," mightn't you take that personally? Especially if you happen to own several other businesses affected by the power outage and you're scrambling to solve the various problems that are not of your doing?

I'm feeling unusually cranky this morning.

Sozobe and Dyslexia just added 2 more points to this thread's popularity rating.

Well there's the fact that this particular bar patron had a history of kvetching and this is just the latest thing, but that wasn't my main point. You're saying that Robert started it, which is disingenuous. (You may have insulted the site rather than naming him but since he's the owner of the site of course that's implicit.)

As for deference, I've had puh-lenty of arguments with Robert. I don't defer as a matter of course... I agree with him when he has a point and disagree with him when he doesn't.

I'm thinking there must be some ritualist value to uncorking wines, somehow the cork implies a value. That's the onply thing I can think of that would prohibit accepting improving quality of boxed wines. didn't was all go through this same thing with capped vs corked wines?

dude....that's some good acid ya got...you need to wander over to the Whine thread

That would not make you a very good bartender/business owner. Oh, and also... I don't believe you.


Given your history of replies to things much less personal, I struggle to believe you would just shrug it off.


Mm hmm. Bottom line is whatever RG's motivation be it for profit or altruism, you choose this site (bar) to do your pissing and moaning. When the site is down, it's not going to be you that fixes anything. If this was a bar and the power was out, you're no more entitled to your free beer in the dark than anyone else.

Your complaint is indecent and obnoxious.

I love your bar fight example though. It points out exactly why you're out of line. You are the 4th man, not RG. This thread is your sucker punch cheep shot, and now that your attack is drawing fire on you and your posting MO, you're claiming self defense.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

T
K
O

I wonder if we could examine the continued wisdom of further attempts to either educate or correct people's attitudes in this thread. While I do believe that several posters here are indeed posting in good faith and with good intentions, this has devolved into the sort of one-sided 'beat up on xx' thread that I have not found to be very successful in accomplishing the overall goal.

As I, er, Diest, said earlier - what more is to be gained from continued pounding of the rhetorical fist into the opposing hand? Let us turn to more scholarly and gentlemanly pursuits, such as making fun of Sarah Palin, arguing over global warming, or which Tablet computer will achieve dominance...

Cycloptichorn

Dyslexia was making an important point about uncorking wine. Why not discuss it on this thread? I think we should!

If you don't want folks to call you a jackass, then don't act like a jackass in public.

There's a help desk for a reason. You simply ignored the reasonable approach (reporting the problem to the help desk), and chose to start a thread that publicly disparaged your host's work.

At this point, I suggest that your best approach is to take your lumps and move on. The more defensive you are, the worse you come off.

I'm reminded of going to punk rock shows and how my friend would attempt to take on the mosh pit. We'd leave and he'd say he was fighting, but everyone else understood he was just getting his ass kicked enthusiastically. He'd never admit how dumb the idea was, and in his mind, everyone in that most pit would never forget the mistake of clashing with him.

My frustration with Set is that his poor behavior is such distraction from his brilliant thoughts. He knows his stuff, and I learn a lot, but it's insufferable to read though his hostile bullshit. I'd honestly have a lesser objection if he was just somebody I disagreed with on most topics.

Take a debate on religion, we have some posters here who love nothing more than to characterize atheists as bitter and angry, and here comes Set fueling their stereotype. At this point, the thread theme will change and it becomes soooooo much harder to maintain discussion in terms of history, evidence or even thoughts and feelings, because now it's just about who is worse. It becomes about winning, or fighting the longest until the other person bows out.

I have no idea what Setanta hoped to ACCOMPLISH in this thread. What was the objective? Perhaps it would have been a topic worth ignoring, but I think at some very minor level we function as a community and have over time establish a certain set of communal values about how we interact. In a forum, all we have is our words. It is our only transaction, so it does not surprise me that so many posters would take issue with anyone (not just Set) that behaves in a way which doesn't really square with those values.

Oh, and Sarah Palin is dumb, I prefer "climate change" over "global warming" because it better describes the issue, and while the iPad doesn't seem to be anything too special right now, the app community will be what decides if it will be anything worthwhile.

T
K
O

I don't think that Set was 'setting' (lol) out to accomplish anything at all. I think that when people are frustrated, they vent. From time to time we all deal with anger and frustration when things aren't working. Some of us vent that frustration out loud, others keep it to themselves. It behooves all of us to realize that when this is the case, piling on the person who has chosen to vent causes nothing but an argument, as people don't like being yelled at.

This isn't to say that we have to spend all our time going around mollifying people; quite the opposite. I recommend doing what you do in real life, when people around you are frustrated and venting: chock it up to that and move on with the project, which is in this case discussing actual interesting topics, instead of attacking someone for being grumpy.

Cycloptichorn

You've just described the everyday life of a computer network systems administrator. The hardest part of the job is network downtime and dealing with all the inquiries and not-so-helpful comments from the users as to what happened, why haven't you fixed it yet, when it will be fixed, why it had to happen now when they were using it, and why you didn't give any pre-warning about the down time.

There have been many a systems administrator who has said to themselves and sometimes to the users when they've had more than enough, "if I wasn't having to deal with all your complaints about it, I'd be able to use my time to diagnose and fix it that much sooner."