What does 'cheese-eating' mean?

Anyone who whines about me using the (at least superficially) innocuous term "cheese-eater" should ask themselves if they would be similarly "offended" if someone called me (or anybody else):

1. A racist
2. A sexist
3. A homophobe
4. A bigot
5. A Nazi.

All of the above (and worse) are routine, standard fare, epithets used by commie-ass cheese-eaters at the drop of a hat and without any compunction whatsoever, know what I'm sayin?

I'll answer my own question here.

Hell, yes!

A cheese-eater would be greatly offended and would object vociferously if you ever called him, or any of his cheese-eating homeys, a racist.

Anyone else? Naw, they ARE racists.

There are a lot of A2K users of the past I miss too.. people who were funny, kind, smart or all of the above.

I can’t know for sure if we have the same people in mind, of course… but if we do, I don’t think the timeline here adds up. Because those have mostly been gone for quite a while.

Some of us will be aware of the Facebook group which a few former A2K users created to bring together (ex-)A2K’ers. Some 80 people joined up and it briefly burst into a lot of activity, before slowly quieting down again as such groups tend to do. There were a lot of joyful personal reunions… and also a lot of discussions where people complained about how A2K was no longer what it used to be, how discourse had deteriorated, how the politics threads etc had devolved into childish partisan squabbling and insults, how they’d stopped feeling comfortable or at home there anymore…

That was two and a half years ago. Layman had barely joined A2K back then. I was still on a four-year hiatus from A2K, and wouldn’t return for almost another year. The departures of those people wasn’t anything to do with either the Trump era (as mentioned as possible explanation in another post here), or any perceived recent laxness of A2K moderation.

I don’t mean to be dismissive, but I think we can’t rule out .. what’s the phenomenon called? I thought it was “Eternal September”, but googling for that suggests the meaning of that phrase is slightly different. What I mean is the phenomenon, pretty closely associated with web forums, online communities etc, where generation after generation of users discovered a place (or a medium), had an amazing experience, became very fond of it, and then, over time… it felt less and less special. Until they looked back and felt that it’s the place (or medium) that must have gotten degraded, and its golden days are just behind it - always coinciding with when they joined or discovered it, natch. And of course, the longer a place exists, the more users cycle through and become former users, adding evidence that things have just become uniquely bad in the present.

Well, maybe that’s not quite fair and that’s only part of it. To some extent, it seems fair to say the glory days of traditional web forums are in the past, since a lot of the social discovery, interaction and exchange has been sucked up into the silos of the social media giants — Facebook, Twitter, etc. A whole lot of especially smaller web forums and online communities have died, or zombified into empty shells with the occasional spammer; I know, I had to go looking when doing some work a while back. In that light it’s perhaps a miracle that A2K’s even still running the way it is, as small as it may be.

Moreover, I’m thinking the absorption of online social interaction by Facebook and its peers has probably not been even when it comes to the different kinds of content. Intuitively, it would seem plausible that the casual, chatty, fun banter has moved to social media to an (even) greater extent than the bitter political debate, leaving surviving web forums with a relatively larger share of the latter in general, and weirdo crusaders in particular.

(Even so, the overwhelming majority of new A2K topics are not actually about politics at all - it’s just the choice of many A2K regulars to congregate primarily in political threads...)

Yes. Absolutely. I realised, reading that, that 2018 marks the 20th year I have been on the web. I know of many that have died a death, or are now just composed of spam. I also remember times when people would join a forum think it was a chat room, and would start off a thread with "Hey room!" and nothing else, and then, about 5 minutes later, "Hello?".

sounds like roger and me wandering around A2k by ourselves in the beta test days

there was a change in moderation style which coincided to some degree with one generation of posters leaving - after complaining about the change

for the most part they're not people I miss - other than as mmmm people who posted
__

there is another reality here - the aging and death of posters

the forum skewed old to begin with and still does - outside of some of the rap/related niches (which don't seem to be as young as they used to be either)

the majority of the witty posters I miss - have died

___


the moderation and wit issues are separate (for me)

___

IMNSHO if A2k survives/evolves it's going to need a nice dose of fresh blood - and have determined a way to engage/retain some of the one and gone posters before the renewal is attempted

- actually that's where I feel the biggest change - retention of new members. lots of new threads - as there always were - but people don't seem to hang around after their questions are answered - they're obviously looking for answers/community/something and only getting a piece of it

What happened to all the Rainsoft questions?

All good issues being brought up...

It's sort of a bind. For one thing, there are so many social media outlets and choices now, so many more than when I first went online and thought I'd check out this "Abuzz" thing. The message board/forum model is horse-and-buggy stuff for people who've come online more recently. That sort of cuts down on the number of young people who are likely to show up. And as for older people, they're probably on their own equivalent of A2K or on enthusiast sites centered around one particular interest, and they've probably been there for years.

I am as well. I think it is safe to say that there's been a general coarsening in civic discourse in the US but I see this as a gradual trends over a couple of decades and certainly pre-dating Trump. Although Trump is certainly an outlier here, I think he's not causal but rather a nearly inevitable consequence of what we are talking about.

This has been such a sad dimension of this community... like you said, the forum skewed unusually old from the beginning, maybe because of its roots at Abuzz/NYT, and well, it's almost fifteen years later now... The cycle of life is catching up with so many of us, and as inevitable as this was always going to be, god damn, it's always again a shock of sobering sadness.

In a way, I suppose, it's a comforting thought to know that the forum served as a community and a companion for people up through (and especially in) their last few years -- setting it apart from sites where young people fleet in and out. But it's heartbreaking.


I'm still thinking about this ex-A2K group on Facebook, and how it seemed to be awash with bitching about how A2K was left to go to the dumps (etc, etc) when it spurted into being in mid-2015. I guess that means this exodus of a generation of posters either already happened a couple of years ago, or was really always more of a gradual evolution (the not-eternal september thing). The latter would intuitively seem more likely to me, but that's where I should butt out -- because I basically wasn't here for about four years between 2012 and 2016, so what do I know!

Can't think of a great number of regular posters who've left in the last year or so, other than for natural causes :-(, but I'm probably doing injustice to some people now... When it comes to the political threads, if anything, I've noticed some depletion of our regular right-wingers/conservatives (McGentrix barely posts anymore, Georgeob hardly does too, Giujohn's obviously gone -- I thought Finn was posting less too, but a look at his recent posts suggests that ain't so).


This might be a chicken and egg thing... like Hightor said, "the message board/forum model is horse-and-buggy stuff for people who've come online more recently" and as such weighs against retaining new members from the start. I'm sure a format change would help attract or retain new members, although drastic changes always run the risk of losing some of the older regulars in return.

It feels to me like the marketplace for smaller, autonomous communities (as opposed to ones that are folded into larger structures from Reddit to Tumblr to Facebook) is likely worse now than when this site started, and much more slanted to economies of scale, so I guess it's going to be a challenge any way round, but we have Robert. :-)

This is a pretty consistent human behavior - to imagine the past as a much better time than the present. Things were grand, then something happened that made things crappy. There's actually a term for this is sociology but damned if I can remember it. Examples:

- the Garden of Eden story
- feminist theory that once humans organized themselves in peaceful matriarchies
- right wing nostalgia for a poorly remembered 1950s
- Shakespeare's tragedies where, at the end, everything and everyone is dead or is a second-tier, pedestrian version of what had been before
- "Kids these days!"
- Kennedy White House as Camelot
- Camelot

One could go on for a long while with this.

It's difficult to ignore the truth of this. But I'm trying.

I think there's a pretty obvious difference between, on the one hand, arguing that someone is a racist / sexist / homophobe / Nazi / etc -- or vice versa, to lend a phrase, a bleeding heart liberal divisive apologist leftist commie pinko -- and, on the other hand, calling someone a jerk, idiot, asshole, etc.

In a political discussion you're always going to have people arguing that, from their ideological point of view, you're lining up with the bad guys. Sometimes they might even be right. If a site's moderators would start clamping down on that, they'd soon find themselves censoring substantive political arguments. That's substantively different from just throwing personal insults at each other. Leave those out, and nothing of substance would be lost.

So I guess that just leaves the question where "cheese eater" fits. Since, the way you use it, the phrase is basically your idiosyncratic invention and can mean anything or nothing, who knows. It's just noise.

Amen, amen, amen. The derivation I gave is accurate, and it is a disobliging term. Who cares what any individual means when they use an epithet to sneer at those with whom they disagree?

Naw , it aint

There's 8-10 definitions given at this site, and that aint even one of them. Mine aint it in neither, but this one might be closest:



https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cheese%20eater

I mean what I mean:

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

All things considered, I think the name calling is rather tame in comparison to what 1 pathetic individual advised me to do a few years back.

Name calling? Ignore it or report it. If an individual is troublesome to you, don't respond to them. Many times they do it just to get a rise out of people and/or to get attention. Don't satisfy them and they'll stop or leave (or return with a new face).

Aren't you the cheese-eating snowflake?

Hate speech?

Do you?

How about demonstrating it?