Should able2know ban people for having untoward opinions?

Given the piling-on aspect that inevitably surrounds conflict and criticism in forum culture and that I feel remorse for having helped initiate (Jean-Claude Van Damme I like alliteration), I do want to say this: I may have strong, nearly-religious-in-nature, disagreements with Occom Bill and be diametrically, and nearly as obdurately, opposed to his worldview, but he's a damned good guy at heart, and though he is not technically correct (the best kind of correct, I inevitably add) he is a good ******* guy (as in the grammaitical-intensifier, having had no such experience to relate).

If my "king-loyalty" (that is not ******* (just for alliteration) "friend loyalty" Bill, and if you want to play the king card don't daftly call it a "friend" card and you might also consider that it may go the other way, and criticism with varying degrees of validity (such as that of your wildly-diverging timbre) are also part and parcel of the post) is worth anything I want to use it to vehemently disagree with the Occom Bill's opinion but assert that his heart is in the right, if misguided, place and nobody but Harry is perfect. If, for example, I weren't retarded I'd neither be so parenthetical nor inable to use typographical constructs with the consistency of a, say, joefromchicago. Plus I'd know how to use a comma inaleatorically, shun lazy, crutch-like use of neologism when inable to express myself within lexicographical confines, have a better sense of what prefix to employ, and avoid mathematical jargon as a crudely-implemented and over-hyphenated segue in inordinate, and metaphilic run-on sentences heavily steeped in nested parenthesis and sesquipedalian logorrhea.

Now if that bit of nauseating, meta navel-gazing doesn't diffuse and end this nauseatingly-meta navel-gazing nothing will. OB, can you agree to disagree with me on matters of such acute import as how the forum is censored? I can't please you and everyone else, lemme do my level best even if that doesn't reckon with what your take on that would be. You seem to have the notion that I am trying to "poison" the community's opinion of you, but my real intent is to have you see that the face of the community does not monolithically mirror yours and have you pursue your desired forum culture with less righteous absolutism. The community that you seemingly desire is not easily found at such scale, that is why I make groups and talk of my own desired, if poorly-couched, idiot-free implementation thereof. What you want really only works very well at much smaller scales and again I extend unto you the invitation to pick start and run a group after your fashion. I'll even lend as much support as I can muster for its promotion and viability, but I wish you would just try to understand that one man's meat is another man's poison and that the curation you desire is not a objective truth that we miss but a balance we merely have not struck for you, while perhaps better attending to that of others to a better degree.

Surprisingly few on forums understand that this is all relative, and that they nearly-universally like some trolls and despise others, and enjoy some insults while deploring others. Remonstrate the right troll and you are a hero, the wrong "innocent" and you are yourself the troll. The fickle nature of individual animus is not a legitimate yardstick for justice of any sort and the sooner we all understand this the sooner we can take responsibility for our own experiences here and move the ***** on.

*I don't know why I became so ******* vulgar in the last year or so, but I don't know why I think every post of such grave an lengthy nature needs an asterisk either, so let's all go talk about something else for ****'s sake, we already learned what most matters here: most of us want able2know to be a free marketplace of ideas that does its best to cater to individual preferences and sensitivities rather than the other way around.

When I first joined A2K I took umbrage over the fact that a "monitor" had shut down a thread. The then Craven was nice enough to send me a PM pointing out that no one has a right to participate in this forum. He was absolutely correct and I acknowledged to him that he was.

No one pays to participate in this forum. We all enjoy the opportunity at the sufference of the person who toils to keep the site up and running.

Obvioulsy the site is of little value to Robert if no one uses it and so it makes no sense for him to manage it in a way that will drive off users.

If "trolls" real or imagined drive off users he will need to consider taking some action, but the suggested arbitrary banning of users might drive off as many or more.

Robert and I have crossed rhetorical swords on many occassions, but I think he does a great job managing this site.

The Ignore feature is the perfect solution to the problem under consideration. If someone believes it compromises their principles to use the feature then they need to live with what they see.

Abuzz died not because there were people posting offensive comments, but because there were people rendering debate virtually impossible with spamming. I don't know how Robert has prevented this on A2K, but, thankfully, he has.

Don't ask for censorship lest you recieve it.

Well I'm sincerely sorry about that msolga, if not always able to avoid having to be. I feel a bit pedantic, yet again unable to refrain, but I think this only underscores what I am trying to say and I think you go about it the way I appeal to. If it's not edifying to you you don't eat it, and you don't waste energy trying to change the menu. Not all taste favors the same food despite widespread agreement on the what the concept of good food to an individual is.

There speaketh your individual subjectivity.

Look, as you well know, I disagree with you re where the boundaries are , although I am flexible enough to remain quite uncertain about what is right.. I think I have made it clear that, while I disagree, I "******* deal with it"...and support your right to do what you consider right here and am well aware and admiring of the thought you have put into it. I think the emotionally laden terms you have just chosen to use are silly, but I know you do get emotional re this stuff. I also understand that.

I am not quite clear about why you appear to react to challenges about how you delineate things as a personal attack and I am sorry if my language has led you to think that it is. It isn't....though i think some of your posts have been outrageous.

Well, that's likely not fair...I am attacking you about your rudeness and accusations that O'Bill has used sock puppets, which Is what I am assuming is what he means by your "poisoning the well"?

My point is that I think you are unfairly dismissive and scornful of the views of some who simply disagree with you, while you are still using certain criteria to delineate trolling and condemning rudely and dismissively criteria that simply differ from yours.

You say I am basically agreeing with you with different words. This may be true, or not. I am interested in calmly discovering if this is so ....if you are.

Not so very interested in ******* this or that.

You normally don't write like that in public, so I guess I am a bit concerned. I have no interest in some sort of fight.

Agreement! There IS a god!

I'm not sure of what you're saying (in part), Robert.
Is it something like: if you can't stand the heat, then stay out of the kitchen?
If so, I've tried really hard to.
Debating a subject is not my concern at all. Rather, it is how the debate is conducted.
However, in this case, on this thread, I was very interested in the discussion ... and maybe only have myself to blame for becoming involved.

Ok...THAT'S funny too.

You know, sometimes I just simply love you for what you say.

= : ->-)

I don't think your language has led me to think that it is because I don't think that at all, if anything my language has, quite mischievously, led you to believe that your language had led me to believe that it, whatever it may be, is.

I don't think you attacked me at all and really can't begin to imagine what you may have to apologize for (so please don't).



I have no idea what he actually had had in mind, but my general impression was that he was just feeling unfairly attacked on the whole when he spoke of my having "poisoned the well" and having had "[king] loyalty" used to his detriment.

And I never accused him of using sock puppets once. I merely stated to him that from the position of impartial and non-personal judgmental thingy evidence analysis there was no more evidence that one Bill had created a possible sock puppet than another. I did go so far as to accuse Just Brooke of sock puppetry, however, because after hundreds of votes that wasn't much of a leap of faith but the other votes in question that he was presumably reporting have a lot less sock puppetry pedigree to begin with and even less objective evidence to the effect that it was who he claimed and my point was to explain to him why I don't think it fair to take the action he demanded more so that point any suspicion towards him (for what it is worth I personally find his own denials more authentically constructed and than BillRM's and would personally lean towards a sock puppet or two being BillRM's than Occom Bill's but I was trying to explain to him that this "obvious" personal judgement is no objective yardstick and that it is not a basic upon which to take such actions (in my opinion). I just don't think this site should be run on the basis of how appealing to a single individual's subjective judgement a case may be and the objective evidence just did not amount to much at all when I looked for it. But **** it, I am having a hard time getting perfectly reasonable people to agree on just what is and is not subjective so I really don't think I can get any further than what I wanted: to know if the community really does support my ideal of able2know as a free marketplace of ideas or not. I think it is pretty clear that despite the occasional shoddy wares and the subsequent discontent about it that it is overwhelmingly clear that this community wants a free marketplace of ideas. We may not all agree on just where the boundaries should be set in cases of personal animus, disruption and such, but it should be perfectly clear now that the community does NOT want us to ban members for controversial opinions. And the bottom line is that there has been significant efforts to do exactly that, to tar opinions as "promoting rape" and insist that we ban the individuals behind it.



Fair enough. I may even agree, but still don't see how this assessment of me as a person has anything whatsoever to do with what I said to you and its merits.



I really don't care if we both get there or not, I'm selfish enough to just want to say things my own way and you can either agree with me or not and we can just both get on with our lives (or not).



That's just my sailor talk. I wouldn't read too much into it if I were you, I have no idea why it infected my vocabulary as of late.



Sorry about that, but I just got super vulgar (with friends, family and the like) all over the place recently. I really don't know why but the F-bombs have been flying for the last year or so.

I used to find that horribly distasteful but whatfucking ever, I say **** a lot now. Call it a mid-life crisis or something but it's not meant to be agressive, I'm just ******* vulgar dammit!

Well, yes, well said.

True. Just ask him, I was an early fan.

No, just that while we can all agree on what the concept of "too hot" is as a definition we don't necessarily all agree on precisely what temperature constitutes it. Likewise we can all agree that a "troll" is "intentionally disruptive" while forming no agreement whatsover on just what post falls under such interpretation.

And this particular point is one I am perhaps just too simple-minded or self-indulgent to even begin to imagine reasonable disagreement to, and I prefer instead to think you just don't get what I am saying and are understandably reacting to impressions on me and how I say it rather than the real gist of what I am trying to say, which is: no matter what the definition of "troll" is it is going to be subjective and in the mind of the beholder. One man's troll will be another's freedom fighter or somesuch. I don't think my position is polemic at all but I think instead you are just disagreeing with my tone and personality which is a perfectly legitimate reaction and I'm sorry if I offend you. My tact and diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired by my book and tack and diplomacy tend to only have a footnote in it.



Exactly! And I'm sorry if mine isn't that compatible with yours. I don't think that has to be that bad of a thing if we just recognize that there are different strokes for different folks.



Well if there is one thing I can get you to agree with me on today it would be this: don't let me stop you, and don't let anyone else stop you. That's silly.

Throw a little wordplay your way and you go all weak in the knees.

My knees are iron.

'Tis my brain wot reacts. And it still sees your logical fallacies.

Last word from me, I hope!: I don't see it as being about "different strokes" at all.
It is about a reasonable level of civility when disagreeing. (And I don't mean that everyone should be "super-nice" to each other at all.)
I am saying that it is unreasonable to be subjected to aggression or what amounts abuse, almost, in the process of an online debate or a discussion. To some, anyway, that leads to feeling excluded & feeling uncomfortable about participating.

I think this goes back to what I said in my first post in this topic:



A decision/choice needs to be made about whether we are moderating the posts with the ignore button/thumbing system for just our own standards and perspective, or if we're doing it as part of the site's automated moderation.

If I remember correctly, many of us were using the ignore button and you wrote a post asking that we make more use of the thumbing system instead so it fed data to the site's automated moderating system of moving the viewing of certain posts below a threshold.

I know that until recently, I removed everyone from my list of ignored users and started using the thumbing because of your request. I've since gone back to the ignore button because I was not enjoying the time I spent thumbing down all those individual posts.

I can just explain the tool as I intended it, but as with any tool people will find uses ranging from the indented to those that require medical attention to extract, so here is the general notion I had had:

1) If you want someone banned, you can just ignore them, and they are banned for you.

2) If you want to try to control what other people see (which is what I think is the motivation behind most censorship requests) you have a vote, if enough people agree with you then by default it is collapsed.

Because no system is perfect, this system lets you opt-out easily. If you don't want posts collapsed and want to read all you can change a setting in your account and it will no longer do so, and at any time you can simply click a link and it will display the collapsed post without censoring the page.

The intent here is to let people who really know what they want to get it easily. If you don't wanna see someone on a forum anymore ignore them, but if you want to try to influence the censorship others see then this is democratized through voting (which is why sock puppetry matters, I don't care if someone has two accounts if they aren't trying to use it to have undue influence on processes we would like to be as democratic as an inherently non-democratic institution permits).

Personally, I never ignore and always vote. But do whatever you feel is most edifying for you, the core concept isn't really tied to the actions but rather the optional use of the aggregate data as a recommendation and there is no reason why ignoring can't eventually be algorithmically implemented in such crowd-sourced recommendations.

But as thing currently stand, if you want a user's posts gone altogether ignore (and if we get a threaded option going that will make the reverberations to the post easier to ignore too) and if you want to influence site culture (nothing wrong with that, I do too but just recognize that you are trying to influence the experience of others before you get too dogmatic about it all) use votes.

I agree with you completely, I just think that people will draw the line as to what constitutes abuse and acceptable leeway for personal expression at different points and that there is just no universal truth in that regard that can easily be defined and codified to the satisfaction of all.

But I feel like I'm almost goading you into argument and being "last-wordy" by trying to convince you that we are actually on the same page, so it's no biggie if I have it wrong here. I'm willing to agree that we are disagreeing.

It's been a huge biggie for me, Robert.
And it's happened so rarely, on so few threads.
I would do almost anything to avoid any further such encounters here, they have been so hurtful.
And that's included excluding myself from participating in A2K discussions I'm keenly interested in.
That's all I want to say.

In that case I don't know what to do than to try my best to just avoid expressing disagreement with you directly, it won't be easy because I'm opinionated and that means having a hard time avoiding expressing it but it's just not worth any personal animosity and I'm gonna give it my best shot. In any case, I do want to say that it has been a pleasure (for me at least) agreeing with you or disagreeing with you so far and happy trails.