Screw you guys – I’m going home.
Four Years ago, primarily because of “The Phantom Gourmet” Show, I used to listen to WTKK all the time while at work, and while driving. Unfortunately, Jay Severan and Michelle McPhee turned the station into a toilet of racism and garbage with Birther crap and “the Affirmative Action” President that I reached a breaking point and I had to stop listening.
When I joined Blue Mass Group, I was under the impression that this would be a place where “Blue”/Liberal/Progressive types could discuss local and national issues affecting us. Instead, BMG is degenerating similarly into the “Dan from Waltham Group toilet”, where every posting is hijacked with “Fill in the Blank” Garbage, or else where I am reading about how “Feminist and Gays” drove the shooter in Wisconsin to mass murder and how “Gays” are going to cause the destruction of the world.
To which I say:
Screw you guys – I’m going home.
If I want to subject myself to this garbage, I can get it directly from Fox, I don’t need the regurgitated RNC talking points from Waltham every 5 minutes. Hopefully, BlueMassGroup will clean up its business model but until that time, if ever, I am turning the channel – because:
Screw you guys – I’m going home.
I am not here to rain on anyone’s parade. I have no clue what you mean about gays responsible for the Colorado shooting, who said that? But I don’t regret defending Chick-Fil-A, if that is what you mean. I was proven right and even Tom agreed with me.
Dave and Bob, if you are being emailed by people who want me off the blog, I understand and email me if you wish I post once a day or if I am hurting business, you can suspend my signon. I will take suggestions from my peeps at BMG as well.
I find myself skimming over your posts.
You might want to think about posting less, but considering more of what you say before you write.
You’re also not going to convince some people here of anything. There are are people here who are anti-car for Pete’s sake. If you read some posts there are atheists, socialists, and a range of people who’s world view is not going to be swayed by a blunt attack, or any attack.
Best to think about scoring a good point once in a while that might make a person on the BMG fringe (meaning a moderate!) say “hmmm I hadn’t thought of that”
Or you can keep doing what you’re doing.
Sound advice. I definitely got into some pretty heated arguments with people I arguably agree with on most political issues, particularly when religion came up. But generally I try to disagree without being disagreeable. After the Gabby Giffords shooting I made a vow to not take politics so seriously or personally and feel I’ve lived up to that.
but some here doubled down after the Giffords shooting. I was pushing for civility on all levels, but some here just get nasty!
I wasn’t talk about the chicken. I was talking about the weird defense of the Wisconsin shooter and the bizarre “Blaming” allthrough this: Harvesting the strange ftuit of bigotry, just search for “feminist” and/or “gay”. I tried to say “or else I am reading” to distinquish this “Other” from yours.
and post less frequently. Peace.
I made my point well enough in that thread, I won’t repeat myself again. But I will say I made no defense of the shooter! Holy smokes where’d that come from! If you stay, please take more time to understand what people are saying, and don’t assume everyone that disagrees with you all believe some cartoonish idiocy. I’m glad you seem to remember that Dan and I are not the same though: remember, he’s a libertarian, I’m a conservative.
and you will see that you blamed “Feminist” and “Gays” for the hatred that motivated the shooter (I apoligize for repeating this here but:)
With my limited mental skills, I read this as the shooter simply responding to “white-supremacy plus mainstream-feminist-righteous-indignation reacting together” (Note: The gay stuff comes in later).
Perhaps that is not what you meant, but that is what I see when I read it, which in my mind is a defense of the shooter.
Or as Monty Python put it:
I’m a Calvinist, which means I believe everyone’s actions and choices are all the unavoidable result of the influences on their lives. But it doesn’t mean we don’t blame and praise people for their actions, because praise and blame are big influences on people’s lives and, well we can’t help doing it. It does mean we forgive people, even as we blame them, and are humble when we are praised. So I say forgive everyone, you and feminists and libertarians and racists, for turning this guy into a raging anti-religious nut, even as I blame all those influences, because they couldn’t help it. And I forgive him, as a human soul born into that body, even as I blame him for the actions that he and he alone perpetrated. I don’t “defend the shooter” which sounds too much like saying he did a good, understandable thing that I approve of. I certainly do not, it was his fault and he was responsible. That doesn’t absolve people who incite anti-religious, anti-muslim hatred from responsibility for this tragedy though.
Your comments about women on the thread in question were offensive and misogynist. Your attempts to justify them on religious grounds exemplify why religion and politics don’t mix.
Feel free to believe whatever you like, but don’t whine and complain when the reaction to your comments is so hostile.
It’s depressing how little of what I tried to say got through to you. You will now go on just as before, stir the cauldron of anti-muslim hatred, refusing to consider your own responsibility, and blaming the victims for believing in the basic tenets of their religion instead of becoming secular. Celebrating male and female sexes and believing in the marital union and cultural gender roles is not misogyny!! Calling it misogyny is offensive and illiberal and irresponsible, it puts all religious believers in danger, when what they need is support and affirmation of their beliefs as good noble moral and responsible beliefs.
Nothing about the drivel you’ve posted here is “good”, “noble”, “moral”, nor “responsible”. You didn’t “celebrate” anything. You wrote insulting garbage like “feminist damsels in distress screaming about losing their freedoms to swarthy bearded men”.
I’m sorry I responded to you. Your bizarre commentary is better suited to some cult’s blog, and I regret encouraging more of it here.
some subjects cannot be discussed here, period! It would be great to have discussions about controversial subjects but you will pidgeon holed into a corner looking like a lunatic. I think it’s actually sad because so many subjects need to be discussed in an open honest manner, but I have yet to see it happen here without name calling and hyperbole. We can’t even discuss legitimate issues without the hyperbole (we say “Medicare needs to be reformed”… they say “JohnD wants to discontinue Medicare”).
So… going forward, skip discussing or commenting on an subject which can be twisted into making you sound like racist, misogynist, homophobe, anti-semite… downside – nothing changes.
Dont-get-cute’s arguments are just plain incoherent. They aren’t just unconvincing; they are unreproducible. For example, I can describe any number of positions of yours with which I vehemently disagree. DCG by contrast seems to be a member of an obscure cult (“bioconservatives”) afraid that the evil libertarians are plotting to take over the world and force us all to abandon our biological destinies. Or something like that. He holds strongly to his evaluations of motives and public opinion, but they seem to have no empirical basis whatever. They seem completely arbitrary, unpredictable, and fashioned for the day on which they were uttered.
Because there’s so little there there, one applies Ockham’s razor. Conclusion? This is a bigot hiding behind a false complexity.
*
Do we have strong disagreements on this site argued out fully? Yes, we do — and especially when they involve only liberals. See the recent exchanges involving tudor386, for an example.
nt..
I am not a Calvinist, so when I read your writing,
I read this as you are say that “II” turned this guy into a raging anti-religious nut. That I did it, and others like me. That we did it. Collectively.
Granted, I had to google this but:
Which gets back to my original point, which some people thought I was attributing to DanFromWaltham but I was categorizing as “Other” when I wrote:
To summarize, I believe you are trying to establish a “Cause and Effect” relationship, in which you say that “some of us including me” are the “Cause” for turning this guy into a raging anti-religious nut. This I can get at Faux News anytime. I expected better here.
I forgot the “Defense” part. When I said Defense, I was speaking in a “Legal” sense, like “I was only following orders” or “I was insane at the time”, putting the blame somewhere else, and I read your comments as putting the blame on me and people like me, at no time do I believe that I was I saying or trying to say that you approved of it, but that in drawing your lines of “Cause and Effect”, you were putting the “Cause” on me and people like me.
You may think that “your act of forgiving” makes this all better, but it does not. I do not believe that I have done anything to merit forgiveness and as someone not of you faith, I find it rather insulting.
It was intended to be insulting. It was.
http://www.theonion.com/video/girl-raised-from-birth-by-wolf-blitzer-taken-into,17714/
You do realize this is from the Onion, right?
I know it’s frustrating sometimes. These things tend to come in waves, we’re seeing a lot right now because this is a high-visibility Democratic blog in a presidential election year with a high-visibility Democratic Senate race. I’m not saying that our trolls are paid sock-puppets — I’m just saying that much of this garbage is likely to go away on November 7, 2012.
I encourage you to take a break, maybe just check in and skim the front page every now and then, and give yourself a chance to flush the pollution these guys inject.
…what you refer to in the Strange Fruit of Bigotry thread came from “Don’t Get Cute” rather than “Dan From Waltham”.
My two cents is if we got our rating system back, this would be a bit more tolerable.
I have responded to both of them above. Also, the rating system may be before my time, I don’t know what that does or would do.
The rating system on the old site (using different blog technology) allowed any registered participant to rate any comment between “0” (“delete”) and “6” (“Excellent”). The nickname of the participant was displayed along with the rating, providing a useful check on ratings abuse.
After a threshold (I think it was six) of “0” votes, a comment was removed.
For whatever reasons, it seemed to discourage the anti-social comments that have become so commonplace now.
No one is making anyone do that.
Yes, I would like a kill-file feature like Usenet used to have. But we don’t have one. You can still use restraint and patience and not feel like you need to rise to the bait every time someone casts it.
and minimizing the unpleasantness of those of us who spend more time in threads than on the front page.
the threads that go on forever with a certain poster. They are not pleasant. And I try my damnedest — actually I don’t have to try very hard — to stay out of those pissing matches. We have long given people a long leash on this site, and if people enjoy flame wars, then go right ahead! On the other hand, if people want to contribute informative, provocative, challenging content (as they often do), they can do that.
‘Twas ever thus: Dont. Feed. The. Trolls.
… however… a goodly portion of the threads you mention began with trenchant comment or keenly perceptive posts which were then hijacked with outrageous statements, reaction formation or, indeed, outright bigotry and never return to actual debate
For my part, if I’m reading a good post but the very first comment is from any of the known trolls…
I stop right there.
… That’s it. There”s nothing to entice me further. Why? Because I don’t want to feed the trolls. Sigh.
A leash that can get you anywhere isn’t, in fact, much of a leash at all. Is it? Frankly, from where I sit I don’t see much of the leash at all. Where are the boundaries?
I think you underestimate the pervasive ill-will that some of the bigots and trolls bring with them. I don’t fault the people whose buttons get pushed and feel the need to respond to lies and outrage. I think that’s normal. In a distant time it was the outrage and lies that were behavioral outliers. I fault the people who feel they need to come here and impose their corrupt thinking on the rest of us and who continually shift the ground of the debate to put everybody else off balance. It’s often pretty clear when some people are not debating in earnest; and it’s even more clear when the deeply stupid have invaded; where then is the leash of which you speak?
To be sure, that happens. But a signal to noise ratio at parity, or worse, makes it that much harder to even find, much less understand the signal, no matter how provocative, challenging and informative it might be. If the choice lies between wading through a thousand criminally stupid and ill-informed shades of bigotry to find the one or two provocative and informed comments on the one hand and doing something more enjoyable, like sticking a rusty fork in my eye, then I’m not going to read the bigotry.
requires a high level of unity and a desire on everyone’s part to hold back.
We don’t have that.
We have some people who hold out hope for a rationality. We have some who think answering banal conservative lines provides education to the general public thereby fulfilling BMG’s mission. We even have “counter-trolls” who make trollish responses to trolls.
So advising me not to feed the trolls does no good at all. There are too many breaks in the blockade, too many rogue buyers for a boycott, too many bad rounds of prisoners’ dilemna.
nt
…whose analysis of the situation is spot on- a pre-day limit on comments-per-person might be something to consider.
Too many threads are virtually unreadable IMHO, and the two trolls who were alluded to are not the whole issue. I, for one, appreciate & agree with the editor’s liberal policy of not easily banning people, even the really annoying ones. But, if folks can’t make their point in, say 3 or 5 comments a day, they really could find a way to make their point better.
I was thinking of that suggestion.
… horn, but I’ve had posts in the past that surpassed 100 comments that produced a largely productive good back and forth. I think the comment limit would have killed that.
I’d also note that, if you’re going to impose a limit, the comment limit should be increased for commenting on one’s own post – to allow for a poster to have adequate bandwidth to respond to comments made to his/her post.
First, I doubt you made that many comments. Minimally, because you think about what you write and 100 comments would take you a very long time.
Second, you’re never trollish and you’re much nicer than I am.
Third, if you made 100 comments, they would be 100 different comments and not 100 taunts or 100 requests for Romney’s taxes.
I think comment restriction is most useful when the blog risks becoming boring because someone is filling it with banal & predictable content. For an online medium like this, the absolute worst sin is to be boring.
…. this thread and this thread in particular. I wasn’t think of the ‘100 comments’ thing, but the ‘3 to 5 comments a day limit’. The post received a lot of comments and as the original poster, I think I would have needed much more than 3 to five a day to be adequate for responding. Now it could have gone on with the limit, but it would have slowed down the rate of discourse resulting in what I think would have been a diminished quality.
I guess my point is rapid-fire discourse can be a good thing and it has been in the past here.
I would only expect some commenters, never all, to be under comment restriction.
I too come for the back and forth, as well as to learn from those with viewpoints with which I disagree. I too was once a newcomer here and learned over time that this blog is different from so many others, what you all often label as a troll, I would call a snipe. That is, posts from those who just want to shoot and not take shots back. Really there are very few of those here. Limiting or excluding people would I think have a very negative effect on the vibrance of BMG. Just look at how Johnd and I have grown to understand how it works here, Dan will come around, and when he does demint will stop responding with personal attacks and we can get back to informed debate. Patience is a virtue.
nt
This approach was the most effective of the many alternatives tried during the early years of Ward Cunningham’s first Wiki. We had a serious trolling problem, and limiting the rate at which certain people could edit helped immensely.
Note that such an approach should NOT be imposed on everyone. This is where a ratings system can be effective — a participant whose average comment rating is below a certain threshold might be subject to the limit, for example.
A person who comments too much ought to be able to formulate his/her thoughts into a post … hopefully not five a day.
We are waiting (waiting waiting) on a ratings system. I would love a killfile, as I’ve said. But I’ll put this to the eds.
On August 9, Danfromwaltham made 25 comments.
There are many prolific commentators on BMG, it isn’t the absolute volume of comments that are problematic.
It is the signal/noise ratio — excessive numbers of comments whose content is deemed offensive or largely worthless by the rest of the community. This is why any comment-limiting should be akin to a penalty-box — it should be punishment for violating community standards.
to email us with complaint of comment abuse … not copiously, of course, and with restraint. But of course we miss things, and sometimes need to have things pointed out.
I think the editors should simply enforce the rules, regardless of the ideology of the BMGer. The subjective nature of the comments may cause someone with a bias to limit comments of someone like myself simply because you don’t like what we say. Maybe you would say you don’t want noses to be tweaked but I get my nose tweaked all the time here from BMGers… name calling, I see Dan and others being called names all the time. I’ve been called on calling Obama instead of President Obama and I’ve taken grief for it but nobody thinks twice about calling President Bush simply Bush… Scott Brown is called names here but Heaven forbid someone call EW any of her nicknames.
Enforce the community standards for everyone the same way!
Well, perhaps not irony. Cruel habit?
A thought-out post explaining why somebody is ratcheting down activity on this site due to certain distractions is derailed by one of those selfsame distractions.
It’s beginning to feel like the Globe, where indulging a certain vocal enthusiasm for fiction and extremism is seen as proof of seriousness and “balance.”
Expectations are premeditated resentments.
Take the good, leave the bad.