Diversifying babble

Pondering this is absolute Garbage. The group in question was Liberal.

And now you are saying you don't identify with being a Liberal? That being a Liberal is the greatest insult I could acll you so much that this justifies calling me a bigot?

I called you a Liberal and for that you want to call me a bigot. You have got to be kidding trying to defend that pile of crap.

Not interested in rehashing your response to that post about Trudeau-- the record is there and your response was a hell of a lot more than you pretend now. In that post you were responding to my post about Trudeau not a post I wrote about you. Why don't you go back and look at it before you spread more manure?

This post about you is because of your attacks that this Board seems to want to allow you to do for some unknown reasons. It does not make it okay just becuase the Mods are silent when you do this shit.

Here is the quote where you suggested another poster was being a bad parent. There was no need to frame it this way:

"Unlike you, I am unwilling to have my daughter living next to a Pickton or a Bernardo because they get their rocks off by torturing and killing women."

Here is the quote where you say that my view of you is from bigotry rather than your own behaviour:

"Strategic voting means voting for the NDP when they are the strongest contender in the riding which I have stated often but that doesn't fit your bigoted view of me."

Here is where you invoke moderator approval in attacking me:

"You know full well I'm a Trudeau supporter not a Liberal so your goal is to force me to deny it which will cause your little posse to exclaim that I am a Liberal. It is with good reason the mods say "grow-up"."

And for the record-- I never heard you say you were not a Liberal before. This quote from you over a year ago looks like you saying that you are a Liberal. It came when you had only been here for a month and before you spent the last year praising everything Liberal. Nothing here about being a Trudeau groupie but not a Liberal:

"That's probably because right now I am a liberal supporter but last election I voted NDP, hence, I am a swing voter. Right now I am convinced I will go Liberal next election but if the NDP changed or the Liberals changed I could definitely vote differently. The only party I can't ever imagine voting for is the Conservatives even when they were the Progressive Conservatives."

What part of "Right now I am a Liberal supporter" makes you not a Liberal or makes calling you a Liberal something so serious that you could call me a bigot for doing so.

Pondering your games are annoying and destructive but I can only assume that this is what you intend.

I'm feeling really disheartened by the ongoing personal animosity between Pondering and a few other babblers. I'd like to ask that it please stop, and that the mods please step up to get it to stop. I don't care who's right or wrong, I would just like to see an end to the angry exchanges between Pondering and Sean in Ottawa ect.

Pondering -- you know where those quotes are --find them using the search function. They are direct quotes. I was having a hard time getting the links to work so copied and pasted but the quotes are accurate. To say I go to the Mods for defence is a joke. I don't go to them for anything.

And no, when you launch personal attacks there is no way of responding to you without acknowledging that you are indeed the source.

After chasing me around the board responding to my posts even when I asked you not to here you are proposing some version of the same thing except a twisted biased version: You want to keep your personal attacks and you want to misrepresent my posts. But you want me to respond to your content without interpreting it (how does that work?) and not reference you even if you are launching personal attacks (how does that work?)

I offer the same thing I did before -- do not repsond to my posts and I'll avoid yours so long as they do not reference me or what I am saying. Ther is nothing unbalance about this as it is mutual. Simply ognore everything I say and I'll do the same. this way you can engage with everyone else you please and so can I.

I won't pretend to suggest that you could respond to my post without interpreting them becuase that is impossible and you know it.

Just mutually agree to stop responding to the other's posts. If you agree just say so and I won't address anything further to you or about you.

ETA cross-posted with catchfire.

I think this can stand and I'll leave it there if you do the same Pondering.

Sean, if you see a personal attack, flag it and move on. Don't take up important threads about diversifying babble with your latest persecution novella.

Why was my post removed? Technical error or was it because of my comment? Just curious as why. 

I thought it diversified quite a bit since the OP.

Well, it is called "babble", isn't it?

And though all my life I've written prose, I'm more than willing to die versifying.

Mods, quick question for you.

Was Sean permanetly banned from Rabble? 

That's very unfortunate.

Catchfire wrote:

No, Webgear. Sean emailed Meg and I to inform us that when his suspension was lifted, he would come back on here to say goodbye and give the moderators a piece of his mind. We told Sean that we wouldn't be removing his suspension just so he could flame out and asked him to reconsider his intentions. He didn't. So his suspension will remain in place until he can convince us he is back here to play nice.

Thanks, I see.

Babble's version of the Dangerous Offender Act.

Like SJ has said, he will be missed. 

While I feel uncomfortable about calling any babbler "the best", I have certainly always appreciated Sean's contributions, whether or not I agreed with him, and I do agree that there is some kind of problem we have to work out so as not to lose any more serious contributors. It is true that it is a "fuite en avant" to strive to increase babble (and rabble) diversity without doing what we can to retain veteran babblers and encourage some to return, at least from time to time.

It is sad that only the demise of some of our longterm friends, such as skdadl and pogge recently, Boom Boom not long ago, and several others, that has this impact.

Unionist wrote:

In the workplace, we can't ban the employer, and we get very upset when the employer bans individuals or the union, so we look for solutions. Discussion. Exploration. Mediation. Arbitration.

I wish there were a way to do that here.

There was talk upthread of a workshop, and while it may not be its main intent, I think it might deal with some of the same tools needed to deal with situations like this.

But betore we even get there, I'd say step one is to resist the temptation to frame this as a dispute between a babbler and the mods, or dangerous offender status, or anything else that takes an already difficult situation and spins it into something even worse.

I have sympathy for Sean; I don't want to see him go either, but as I see it he let something get under his skin. We all deal with situations where we feel like reaching through the screen and smacking someone. We all feel at times that mods are out to lunch, or are refusing to listen to us. We DON"T all assume that the babbler who is pissing us off and the mods are in conspiracy against us. We don't turn it to personal attack. We don't all talk over threads and shut them down, and ignore clear warnings that we have lost it.

And not to be callous, but if that babbler's only intent was to come back and scream some more before flouncing I wouldn't let it happen either; I think I have heard enough to understand his concerns, and as much as I appreciate his frustration, I don't want to hear it, and I especially don't want to hear it if all it has been distilled into is a tirade against the mods. I think it is not clear thinking, I think he needs to cool off and think about this, and I especially don't think the rest of us should get caught up by that unclear thinking and start making more bad assumptions.

There is another babbler who has taken this situation as a cue to walk away, without saying a word. I wish he would change his mind too, but no one has mentioned him, because he didn't make a big stink about it.

Yes I remember; I was there.

And you know where Sean is. Ask him.

What alarms me is automatically turning the onus on the people who are supposed to keep order and take a hell of a lot of abuse for it. I have seen exactly the same reaction in past caseswhere it wasn't someone who was ordinarily so level headed, and far more disruptive. Even so, once the mods were put in a position where they had to exercise their authority all of that was out the window, and suddenly the moral imperative was freeing our persecuted fellow babbler from the bondage of the evil mods.

And if you didn't see that it had reached a situation this time where someone needed to step in and do something, I sure did. Webgear's emoticon? I don't know what his intention was, but it nicely reflected the cringing I was doing at some of the things that were being said.

Sorry, but it smacks a bit much of letting those who shout the loudest direct the debate and understanding of the situation, and I think that is a dangerous precedent that we fall into enough even when it doesn't concern flouncing.

I know Unionist, and I should clarify that I am not pointing the finger at you.

And I can perfectly understand wanting to hear it from Sean's perspective, but intended or not, the assumption there is that Catchfire is not telling the truth.

That is what alarms me: the underlying mistrust, and casting holding off from personal attack as knuckling under and submission.Talk about it, sure. But this is a two-way street. And I frankly don't think an open forum is any more the appropriate place for that very specific negotiation than it is for having a moderator's words picked apart in a very personal way. And it is certainly something I don't see happening while the situation is still as hot as it is.

And while support, moral and financial, counts, it doesn't give anyone the right to cross all lines.

If this all sounds like I am an apologist for peace, order and good government, it is not the case. I came to the realization years ago that this place, while a very good place, doesn't perfectly reflect all my values any more than it does all of yours. How can it? And if it ever got to the point where that tension was too much to bear I'd walk away. It is surprising how coming to that understanding makes it easier to deal with the obvious differences of opinion which will always be here.

Unionist, I appreciate your requests for mediation here. I hope you know I agree with your "no banning" policy. My thoughts here are that this dispute, which started with Meg, proceeded to Pondering and now comes to rest on my posts above, have already taken up more space then they deserve and I don't see the merit in continuing the conversation around the same mulberry bush.

I also find Sean's posts on Canadian Politics sober and thoughtful at times. I find his time-tested inabiliy to treat mods or very simple requests with respect to be childish and toxic to this space. Last night, after emailing me accusing me of lying, Sean took to harassing me on my personal Twitter account, which uses my real name. I'm not exactly anonymous here but I'm not exactly "out" either. This is also not the first time Sean has done this. During a past flounce, Sean emailed the publisher and president of rabble.ca requesting that they fire the mods. His emails to me -- which are plentiful -- have always been abusive and never responded to any sort of reaching out positively.

I am not going to publish the snippets of our email exchange which "support" my case because I don't care to give this incident any more oxygen. The request is simple: Sean can return if he can convince me he won't start this whole nonsense over again. It won't take much. I didn't ask for an apology at first (although I did last night after his Twitter outburst), just a simple "oh no, I won't come back to babble just so I can insult the mods." Instead, Sean refused -- and the worry that he would flame out proved justified. If he is leaving anyway, I can't see why this is an issue -- for him or for us.

If this response seems overly draconian, I don't have many tools available to me and I have a lot of work to do. I don't have time to coddle his ego or mine. So it goes. I do find it rather offensive that this discussion has hijacked Meg's very promising thread on diversity. Perhaps we could move this discussion elsewhere (although I personally don't have much to say at the moment).

And there it is prove your worth. Very sad Catchfire very sad. I saw your correspondence don't play the victim because you aren't. 

6079_Smith_W wrote:

@ oda

Were you agreeing with me?

Yeah, but I promise not to make a habit of it.

For my money, given that Sean has been banned from Rabble, I do not think it appropriate to be talking about him or impugning his character or intentions. I would ask this stop please. Sean is gone; it is not approrpriate to make comments directly, or otherwise, that suggest his character or intent should be open to question in anyway. On top of that, I will state that I simply do not believe that Sean would ever under any case want to maliciously post any content with resolve and volition that would be personal attack. It is simply not in him, and he was a model of what sound, balanced, and reasoned debate sounds like. I would suggest that those of you posting in these last few comments give some serious thought to what you wrote and what Sean tried to say.

Jeezus H. Murphy!  Ok, I've seen threads go like this so many times.  It started off with absolutely solid intentions, then turned in to a meta thread on the board in general, and went south at considerable speed. I've seen this particular mulberry bush danced around too many times. It has filled its purpose, it is well past its best before date, and I'm closing it.