Should Sanctum Santorum be rolled back into Debate and Discussion?

Otterloop, I want you to know that every link I give in this thread is now strictly reserved for persecuting you. Every. Single. Like.

That depends - are you a rioter or someone who has to clean up after?

You're pioneering the technique of stopping a sentence and pretending you COULD say something but just AREN'T when you have nothing to say.
But you could be right, it's not like he said exactly that or anything

It's almost like the Holocaust...no you know what? You're not worth telling about the secret world wide conspir-no, I don't even have time to explain everything about the time mach-nope, I'm tired and need a nap, I better hop in my secret car powered by wa-well now I'm too busy eating a dinosuar egg omle-oops out of characters.

I'm the time machine. Pay attention.

I've argued not infrequently in the Drama Llama subforum against seeming persecution of individuals or communities.

You most certainly do not qualify.

I mean I've butted heads here over what I saw as the persecution of the LP-based community and Gus/Repoman. I am probably more sensitive to what can be interpreted as persecution than the average Drama Llama user.

But I don't see what's happening here as persecution of Otterloop. Does that make sense?

This is how I first read your sentence.

Those are called corrosive likes.

With no feels.

I absolutely didn't. Maybe if your knee wasn't reflexively jerking away so hard you'd have actually read and understood what I said.

Missing from that strip are the preceding 2,356 instances where mush-for-brains used up all of his credibility in the desperate combination of vanity and stupidity that permits terrible posters everywhere to retain their persecution complexes. But Breathed is a subtle guy, so I think it's fair to read that into the number of times Opus must have called in the past for the same number without writing it down.

"Credibility"? It's his job to give out numbers to people who ask Lizard King, not make decisions on who deserves the number or not.

See that bright, fiery thing that just passed overhead, Otterloop? That wasn't a meteor.

Stick to political cartoons; they're much less subtle.

Are you people fucking serious?

No. Not really.

You know Otterloop, I have no trouble saying that I think you've been a pretty good forum contributor over the past year+. Honestly. If we use metrics such as a poster's desire to be a part of the forum and its community and participation, and we should, you certainly qualify. I am always partial to people who want to be a part of a forum community as a part of it, as opposed to people who are attracted to being the lone voice of opposition, because quite frankly that is retarded. We have our history but I am of the opinion that it's just that, history, and it can stay there for all I care. I hope you feel the same way.

That is why Lum eventually bans those people. One, they clearly display their contempt for the other posters on the board and two, they make every thread they post in about them enough times that eventually every time they post in a thread, it becomes about them thanks to their justly-earned reputation. I certainly do not think you are in this category, incidentally.

However, I went back and looked at the last thread you had posted in D&D - the one you were banned for - and it seems to me a sort of pattern has emerged. You clearly really do not like when someone makes a joke at your expense. In D&D it was Aeon. I don't remember if you even called him a Nazi and if you did, I'd think it was funny and him mentioning it, funny. Not an attack against you. A few weeks ago it was me in your Big Thread of Stuff. That was also a big part of our issue last year. Incidentally I way overreacted back then, and I apologize for it. I think you can appreciate feeling on edge about things and then having someone get in your face and how it is easy to lose your cool.

I'm not going to pass judgment on you about this tendency, but I think you can recognize that it is a tendency, and that the side effect of it is you end up making threads all about you, and it forces Lum to have to do something about it. Lum wants D&D to be a certain type of place, and overreacting to a small joke that arguably wasn't even at your expense was determined to not be something that fit into the scheme there. FWIW I think you could end up posting back in D&D and never have a problem again, provided you kept in mind that it isn't the forum to get wound up in. I remind myself that every time I go into it. I actually rarely post in there because I don't want to get carried away and Be Part of the Problem. I guess that's part of the issue with this thread derail: it wasn't altogether necessary, as I think it's the opinion of most people that you would not be among the potential problem people if the two forums merged. Essentially you're just airing an old grievance and again, making the thread about you.

You could ask yourself why it is that small snide remarks made about you get to you so aggressively. I don't know, see, I get made fun of all the time, most people do. It's really not that big of a deal in the bigger picture. You just seem easily offended, not the worst internet forum crime ever but it is a trait you have. I can be a vile, bombastic asshole, that probably lies somewhere further up the hit list than that.

The other thing is, of course, that you posted on Qt3 as someone and you aren't willing to share who that is. I don't care about that anymore, either. Again, history. Unless you were Brian Koontz. Then I'd have to flip over some tables. But other former Qt3ers find that alarming. By withholding it, you likely appear to have far more to hide than you actually do. A lot of former Qt3ers don't give a shit either (I think most people on BF don't care), but on the internet it's more fun to post about things you care about than things you don't. For my part, all I care about is who you or anyone else is today, not however long ago. And my question is, can you recognize the things about you that you need to be aware of, or are you going to continue blaming everyone else for the things that happen to you? You were able to let things go in your Big Thread with respect to me, so that says to me you totally can.

Anyway this wasn't supposed to be so long-winded and it is NOT an attack on you, merely an observation (and an overdue apology, heh).

I appreciate you and your contributions but you're wrong. I've no problem whatsoever with someone getting in my face, I fucking prefer to yell at people face to face. It's the sneaky cowardly shits who do it behind my back I hate. The Aeon thing: I never called him a Nazi. Never even talked to him. And yet there he is telling everyone I did that. Why? Suddenly I'm the guy who's calling people "Nazi" for no reason. Hooray.
This thread starts with someone bringing me up like I'm the biggest factor in the decision as if I haven't contributed positively for almost a year.
If you only read these grudge people I'm the guy who shits up every thread all the time by calling people Nazis. And they don't even have the guts to come into a thread I'm in and say this shit to my face, or point out a place where I'm wrong. Just, in general, I'm a terrible person who's bad for the world.
Gutless fucking bastards.

You may not have built up as much good will as you think you deserve in the last year, but that doesn't mean you have to make such an enormous bonfire out of what you did get.

You seriously need to take a deep breath, dude. So some people don't like you, and don't express it in the way you prefer. So fucking what? Your threshold for having a temper tantrum about it is really low, so yeah, it makes you look a bit crazy. So you can either go "I don't actually want to look crazy" and dial it back, or you can go "CRAZY AHOY" and just accept people are going to go, "Man, Otterloop goes crazy over the weirdest shit sometimes." The problem with CRAZY AHOY, of course, is that it DOES make threads all about you, and generally people get tired of that, regardless of where it happens. And that isn't persecution, that's just a general forum politeness expectation.

I've let this thread drop like four times but, up to an entire day later, someone finds a funny picture to post at me.
Yet it's ALL my fault it keeps going.

<looks at the time stamps between your last post before Raife's picture>

Uh. I guess you are a time machine, then.

Literally nobody came away from that thinking that except you. You need to realize that. I came away from it with "Aeon gets called all kinds of things and is a weirdo, Otterloop probably didn't even call him that and if he did, he probably deserved it." Aeon would be the first to tell you he happily enjoys stirring things up.

Also nothing posted on BF in a forum you can read is "behind your back." It is still a fixation of yours.

Raife. Truly the one voice that speaks for all of BF. He winds you up because he knows he can wind you up, and everyone else banned from D&D has either eventually been banned from BF as a whole or is Brett.

You left out the post 2 posts later lamenting the fact that banning you pre-preemptively from a combined politics forum would kill your cartoons thread, which rocks. Or that your first post in the thread doesn't even address nor reply to Raife's post, it is solely about you and your D&D ban and your presupposition that you'd eventually get banned from the new forum. Why wasn't that post a PM to Lum?

Who the hell would do that? How remotely possible is that? That doesn't even make any sense, dude.

How do you say something to someone's face on the internet? Also I did point out a place where you were wrong - Aeon's joke - and you are refusing to accept it. You just told me I'm wrong. I'm wrong about everything I have said about you. You are more concerned about people somehow, by tortuous stretches of logic, forming a poor opinion of you while remaining willfully in denial about the potential actual issues you may have. No one reading this thread was thinking "Otterloop - he's that guy who called Aeon a Nazi, what's his deal." Mostly it was "What the hell did he get banned for from D&D anyway? I dunno he seems harmless enough." Now it's likely something different, and whatever it is now was entirely up to you.

Wow. I don't want to turn this into an argument in any form but I can't not comment on that. I don't know where you got that sort of sentiment from.

QUOTE MALFUNCTION


edit: Now I look crazy! JUST AS PLANNED.

Read again. It was all about Flowers until you got cat-druggy.

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...debate-and-discussion.5053/page-4#post-477570

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...-into-debate-and-discussion.5053/#post-471684

I want cat drugs.

Dude. Telling us you HAD to get back into the thread and throw another tantrum because I posted a demotivator GIF is not exactly an argument AGAINST the idea that you go crazy over trivial shit.

And I don't think the fact that you HAD to post a Demotivational poster a full day after the issue was closed reflects well on you.

OH MY GOD I AM RIGHT HERE YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD

Seriously though, I don't try to wind Otterloop up, I just like to point out silly things. That Otterloop can be the subject of that in a thread he participates in is not really a surprise. I don't have a grudge against him as he seems to believe. I don't spend much time in the P&R threads, or thread in this case, so I barely even remember he's here. As you point out, I just took the obvious example from Lum's list.

Also, you're not my real dad.

Dude, not everyone scours the forums during their every waking hour to tally up the instances of their supposed persecution. Sometimes people don't respond to things right away because they have lives they have to deal with. There's no statute of limitations for commenting on things, although people will get shit for responding months or pages later (because it's hilarious). Also, you have a thinner skin than a nematode.*

*Otterloop spaz warning: Note that I am not calling you a nematode, just comparing the thickness of your skin to one**

**You're more of a frilled lizard***

***Because you are ectothermic

Can Lum change Otterloop's title to "Great Book of Grudges"? Because he seems like someone with the greatest of GBoGs.

I was going to go with Ectothermic Persecution, but I suppose that'll work.

This thread became much more entertaining than I expected it to when I browsed it last week. An old fashioned internet bonfire of the vanities, that’s always a nice distraction during dull office hours.

As for the original pre-Otterloop subject, I think the two areas would be better merged. Rather than having separate forums, why not just tighten it up a bit in Santorum? Tell people not to be assholes to one another and not get personal in their attacks and otherwise let them have at it. Ideally there would be some new blood too, people with actual contrary positions rather than simply being irascible in the same liberal sphere. Someone who actually voted for Mitt Romney maybe, not because Romney wasn’t a tool but because there actually are moderate conservatives out there. Politics should be a blood sport, not a sounding board where it’s mostly a variation on “look what those big boobies did this time” threads with 20 affirming responses along with a lot of likes.

There are two kinds of moderate conservatives who voted for Mitt Romney: "moderate" conservatives, and uninformed moderate conservatives. The issues that are interesting in P&R to me these days are rarely dealt with in a useful manner by the American left-right divide, so I really don't feel like I'm missing much with the absence of people outside of the moderate-liberal spectrum of the tiny percentage of the world's population that the US represents. I don't want to debate easily discredited economic theory from decades ago that relies on dogmatic repetition for its validity, and I don't want to have to talk about climate change in terms of basic principles or welfare mothers or THANKS OBAMA for the nth time, and so on. Those aren't moderate positions. I grew up well within the American conservative ideological framework, became relatively far right (albeit secular) in my undergrad years for a variety of reasons, and I don't miss the community of ideas that I gradually worked out of. I know the patterns and I know the tactics, and it's just not something I pine for.

I think politics as a blood sport is stupid. I'm as happy as the next guy to vent my spleen in Santorum, but you move away from the issues quickly and far into the personal/team solidarity shit. Which is why D&D and the academicized form of discourse it represents is where moderation and compromise will be perfectly safe from a non-left perspective, and consequently why I refuse to acknowledge the validity of some kind of white male conservative affirmative action program to protect Santorum conservatives from too many mean things. Those programs rely on societal context for their validity, not on the self-anointed victimization of the most privileged group in the country.

I mean, that's what you're getting at, right? Because otherwise D&D does pretty much exactly what you ask for, except that low information posters who rely on dogma and sound bites get pummelled.

No one said anything about taking some kind of proactive step to get more conservatives on the forum or to protect them from being hammered should they arrive. It’s just what I think, that alternative perspectives do provide value in themselves. To provide an example, I’m a lifelong atheist but in my time on Gone Gold/Octopus Overlords I had lots of good debates with believing Christians. They weren’t the half-baked kind, but people capable of intelligent and rational debate. I learned from them, not because I came to share their values but because the perspective they provided was interesting to me. These were the Bush administration, Iraq War days, so there were lots of great political discussions too. I came at almost all of these discussions from the left side of the ring, but I came to respect at least some of the opposing views. Even with positions I abhor, like the pro-life movement or creationists, I felt that I gained from understanding something of why they believe what they do. That’s a personal preference, of course, and this forum has also been educational in helping me to understand why not everyone can accept those kinds of views being expressed.

As for D&D, those kinds of threads do have great value, but I don’t see why they can’t coexist on the same forum with more passionate discourse. It’d require moderation, for sure, but that forum already has that.

Well, then, we'll just have to disagree. "Passionate" discourse requires the opportunity to call someone fucking stupid if need be, and I don't think alternative perspectives provide value in a manner that requires more than the current system already permits. You want to talk about the theological underpinnings of creationism, D&D has your back. You want to speak about policy compromises between creationists and secularists in terms of the nuts and bolts of it, D&D is all yours. But if you want to tell me how creationism should guide our educational and political policy as a nation because otherwise x godlessness will happen according to your beliefs, then I'm going to 1) tell you why it's stupid and 2) probably wind up calling you stupid when you say stupid things in response. If that's ok with our hypothetical "full baked" opponent, then so be it, and I'll see him on the Plains of Desolation. You know, by the metronome thingy.

All that said, this is purely hypothetical. Obviously the manner in which people approach things matters, and while I think the collective amount of internet jadedness here gives us a good collective gag reflex for troll routines, I think it's more a question of what the community wants than what moderation policy allows. I just don't think that many people fitting your abstract example are still around that are interested in what you describe, as that's really more internet primordial ooze stuff that gets mythologized in retrospect. I'm not blind to the risks, and as I said I haven't forgotten where I came from. But I'm not sure the cause-effect has much to do with having a more moderated "passionate" forum. What does that look like to you, in the present day? Are there examples?