Hawkeye's Final Thread

Esquire magazine used to run a little item called "The Indefensible Position" wherein the writer would pick an unpopular opinion and defend it. I always loved that item as it provided a lot of food for thought.

I liked Hawkeye in the same way.

Strangely, we often agreed on some big picture things for very different, small picture reasons.

I was often frustrated for him. He'd raise a good point and people would just mock him for silly reasons unrelated to what he said and any discussion would hit the skids. He put up with it a lot longer than I did when a popular poster decided they didn't like me and started trolling my posts.

I'm sure Robert had his reasons and I respect that. Still, I'll miss Hawkeye.

Well said.

That's possible. Here's where Hawkeye first wrote of the "St. Pete fags" - he followed up in the thread with two other posts where he used that term.


Those who are interested can judge for themselves, but it doesn't appear to me that any of the St. Petersburg contingent ever "ganged up" on Hawkeye in that thread. JCBoy was the only one of the St. Petersburg crowd who even participated in that thread, and he mostly just ignored Hawkeye. Instead, it was mainly Firefly and Rockhead who engaged with him. Whether their positions could be considered "ganging up" I'll leave for others to decide, but I'm fairly confident that neither of them would fit under the category of "St. Pete fags."


It's possible they did so, but they didn't do it in that thread. Hawkeye was the first to use that term in the Barilla boycott thread.

Ok, I went back and read the first nine pages of that thread and I'm really surprised. Hawkeye and JCBoy were completely cordial to each other. Hawkeye even told a joke (which may be the only time I saw that). JC then goes on to recount how the local gay community boycotted a business into closure.

Several posters weren't happy including Mame saying

Hawkeye starts using the slur shortly thereafter and Firefly (respectfully) calls him on it.

Hawkeye then replies with his standard free speech manifesto.

The following two pages are perfect. Hawkeye and Firefly have spirited debate on the use of slurs versus free speech rights. This is why I will miss Hawkeye. There are lot of people out there (small in percentage, large in numbers) who agree with him. Firefly responded beautifully. Her response doesn't exist without his provocation. Hawkeye is in the wrong and it was clearly intentional. Can't argue that. But this isn't the hateful thread I thought it was going to be.

Most of the talk, re Hawkeye, is now centered on his posts re gays, but I found him not to my liking on other topics as well.

But, I have to add, he is gone. I don't need to go after him. So, that will be my last criticism of the man.

Well that actually wasn't even one of the posts I came across when I suspended him (contrary to what he thinks I did not go digging through his posts, I was reading a completely unrelated old thread and saw someone link to several such posts of his). Guess there were even more of them.

It wasn't just once and wasn't always well countered (I suspect because most of the people in the other cases were ignoring him), and frankly I was very surprised that this was happening in a2k, those kinds of posts had always been removed and the users suspended in the past. That it was a long time ago doesn't make it any better to me, it just meant neglecting the forum has been worse than I imagined. I don't have any personal vendetta against Hawkeye (like others I don't mind having a foil to use every now and then) and when the new platform is ready I have no problem with him returning. Frankly part of the goals I have in the new platform are to better support such users who are annoying to the majority without losing the majority of the community (because they have better tools to follow the conversation with people and on subjects that they are most interested in following).

Anyway, what I came here to say is that to those who say that there should be a way to contest a suspension there is, there is a help desk that reaches the moderators and anyone who wants to reach the moderators can. Obviously we can't be arsed to hold a mini court case prior to suspending every user but if users would like to contest their suspensions the help desk is there for it.

And that's plainly BS, he does dislike gay people (along with black people and to a lesser degree women) and just hides behind "free speech" mantra about it trying to pretend he's just being provocative and edgy in general instead of owning up to this being driven by bigotry. They did not attack him, they were just flamboyantly gay and wielding their power to boycott a product and he doesn't like that society is now a place where they can more successfully do so.

To be completely fair, you might ask what kind of liking he has for smoking tobacco.

That's good to know.

Well, unless you saw a post wherein he declared that he disliked gays, black people and women, it's only one man's opinion (unless of course you can read keystrokes like the entrails of a goat).

You can choose not to believe him when he says he doesn't dislike them, but you can't tell us what he thinks...at least not with any any authority.

As for the St Pete Boys, I haven't reread the thread and I'm not going to pass judgment on how one or more of them dealt with hawkeye, but as I noted previously, I had a couple of run-ins with one or more of them and they give as good as they get, and sometimes "better." As one of them was noted to write, they can be vindictive.

My point isn't that hawkeye was a good guy and they weren't, nor that they harassed him to a point where he blew his top (I also previously noted that, regardless of the level of provocation, no amount of harassment is an excuse to violate one of the rules that is held in high standing by the owner). I would just like to think that when a thread blows up and there are over-the-top and unacceptable insults getting thrown around, that the behavior of everyone involved is subject to scrutiny. Again I don't know if what he wrote about being threatened is true, but I would think that doing so violates the rules too. Personally, I think that the one week suspensions of frank and timur were a little heavy, but I was glad to see they both got the same sentence.

And I still haven't bought any Barilla pasta.

Come now, that does not do justice to my legendary reading ability. I can read them better than the entrails of a goat!

In poker you can't tell what cards someone has till you see them either but that doesn't mean you can't read their pattern of actions and their tells and make a highly educated guess on what they are holding. You can even get good enough at this to make a living off of it, did that myself briefly.

And just like poker life presents the same case where what people say will not always be truthful and you can and should have skill in reading people beyond what they are willing to say about themselves. A gazelle should not wait for a lion to say "I'm going to eat you" to run and in life we must recognize less explicit patterns that stated intent.

You obviously know this though, you do it with Obama (not explicitly only trusting his statements and trying to read beyond that) and you should.

He did not like blacks and gays, he was very clear about that based on his actions (you will not ever find him lashing out with such slurs against white people, it's not equal opportunity vulgarity like he likes to pretend it is) and while yes this is based on my read of him as a person based on his pattern of interaction and not something he said about himself it's a strong read that I'd put a lot of chips onto and in you can't get through life without making such educated guesses as not every person or situation is going to explicitly telegraph intent.

Incidentally, when the Cosby case came out and I saw that he posted on it I went to read the post with a wager to myself that his dislike for blacks would trump his dislike for women on it and yep he comes down on Cosby where he previously defended Polanski et all.

In any case being a bigot is not against the rules, and he was always a bigot before. On topics about black protests etc he would occasionally get angry (not at provocation from others attacking him but at those uppity black people protesting) and lash out against blacks in thinly veiled terms intimating low intelligence etc. The times I saw this it was never in response to being attacked himself (which is really not the point, idiots here attack each other all day long) but becoming angry at those uppity gays and uppity blacks wielding greater power in society than he thought they should. He dislikes blacks and gays and, to use his own words, he often liked to "punch in the mouth" those he thought needed to be put back into their place (which is how he liked to portray his outbursts, as him reasserting his power).

We have typically allowed bigotry couched like that in order to have debate about bigotry but have never allowed it to get to the point of lashing out and using hateful slurs at other members here. It has nothing to do with who starts what, who was good and who was bad or anything. It's just a level of tone not going to be tolerated because we seek to have a higher level of tone than the lowest common denominator that you can find on the internet. That level of tone hurts the community more than just being a personal insult and while a handful of people agreed with him and a handful more liked him as a foil to speak against ultimately the forum will be a better place when it does not allow the level of discourse to sink that low and the types of people he liked to attack are actually less well represented on the forum than the pedestrian bigot point of view that he brought to the table.

There will be other bigots who will come along and take up his crusades and as long as they maintain the standards of tone and decorum the community has they will be tolerated too. I found no use for Hawkeye shortly after he got here and he made sure to try to annoy and attack me as much as possible, but he was tolerated for almost a decade with no interruption. It was his choice to start adding such slurs to his attacks in the last few years and this is not a community that allows that, it's just that simple.

If he wants to be part of this community he can follow its rules, if not that's his choice but it's his loss more than ours for sure.

I think of that old thread every time I pass over the Barilla (my immediate grocer has never restocked it )

I buy Barilla (it's the only decent spaghetti I can find almost anywhere in the world) and thought the basis of the boycott was tenuous. There's a lot of wrong in this world and that struck me as one of the more contrived/fabricated outrages.

Luckily we can all make our own decisions (and as I posted in the original thread, Barilla wasn't a pasta I cared for to begin with - we have good fresh pasta available)

Cheers to that, while I didn't agree with their boycott the anger about it seemed silly and outside of the context of resenting the growing power of gays in society seemed nonsensical. Caring too much about what pasta someone buys is silly.

Excuse my ignorance as I don't spend much time here any more (I did years ago mostly as it relates to the rejection of religious belief). How about a very quick summation?

I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the "bitchy queen" comment came from a homosexual.

Mame then brings up the legitimate issue with this type of "protest." Vindictiveness is not something to be admired. But, beyond that, there is the attempt to require that one go beyond merely accepting and tolerating a "lifestyle" you may personally disagree with. Now the demand is that you APPROVE of it and PROMOTE it.

Any person with any sense of personal dignity and integrity will strongly object to such tactics.

These people are trying to PUNISH (economically) someone who doesn't care to put gay men kissing (or whatever) on their product advertising. Why can't they allow others to just "live and let live" as they want for themselves? Why can't they show others the tolerance they demand for themselves?

That such tactics can generate a deserved backlash was demonstrated a few years ago when the City of Philadelphia was forced to pay over $1,000,000 for a deliberate attempt to violate the constitutional rights of individuals.

There a gay-dominated city council passed a "civil rights" ordinance. They interpreted it to require the Boy Scouts to accept homosexuals as members, and to require that homosexual boys be invited to sleep in the same tents as other boys on camping trips, etc.

The federal courts held that this was a violation of an individual's constitutional "right to association," as I recall.