Users Blocked and Posts Deleted

thanks...there are a lot of nut cases out there...

I had a feeling that things were coming to a head when Bert adopted the silly tactic of flooding the site with repeat copy/paste posts.

But I'd be disingenuous if I agreed with his banning.

I thought the whole process was playing out perfectly well, with Bert trying more volume on the same schtick, and MRA's absolutely refusing to play his game.

Bert would have evaporated within a few more weeks.

Even the most ardent narcissist moves on to other ponds when they cannot conjure their reflections.

The MRA bugaboo with banning is that it plays right into feminist tyranny.

Men have started to notice that feminism's power derives primarily from determining the boundaries of debate.

The Larry Summers Harvard U. incident was a perfect illustration of how fems want to ban not just language, but the actual thought that language makes possible.

And of course fems are not adverse to using shame, blame, guilt, chauvanism, chivalry, and other male weaknesses to their advantage.

So when MRA sites BAN a voice, I always see it as a victory for feminists.

They have a forty-year head start over MRA's, and we might be well advised to learn what patience and persistence can accomplish.

Actually, I won't miss Bert that much.

Because his uninteresting lack of integrity was exceeded by his lack of interesting content.

He was on the verge of self-immolation.

Too bad he was denied an honorable death.

The problem I had with Bert was his personal attacks on other posters. Other than that I mostly ignored his often incoherent yammerings. And I have to admit a few, but very few, were actually humorous.

BTW: I wish Thundercloud was back! Now he was a real asset. If anyone by chance knows how to contact him let him know he needs to hoka hey back.

We weren't attacking him so I didn't really appreciate his ad hominem attacks on us. I hope he is okay and has something productive to do. There are just far to many men driven to the fringes of society with nothing left to do, but vituperatively rant and rave in an effort to get out the frustrations created by living in a very hostile, anti-male society.

Beautiful writing, Roy. You could be a good author.

Thank you for finally removing that nutcase. His posts were entertaining in the same way that a horrible car crash is, but were worthless otherwise. They lacked reason, common sense, and integrity. He would often say something without providing anything to back it up or just insult another user pointlessly.

Hopefully he won't try to come back using a proxy. Judging by the copy and paste determination, he may try this.

..evidently doesn't work below a certain criticle mass that this site hasn't achieved yet.
It does work on large sites of this type like the pioneering slashdot.org, even with anonymous posting enabled, but here it's just too easy to wreak a lot of havoc with a little trolling (btw, have you seen his website? My goodness). I also have to say I'm a bit sceptical of the whole concept, nothing beats good moderation.

Thanks for the cleanup, Scott. You're much more patient than I am.

I have to say that I don't agree with you here, Roy. Trolls need to be taken care of swiftly and surely. It keeps the morale of the site's other users up. How many times has someone clicked hopefully on a new story with a reply notification and found Bert's claptrap?

This is not about limiting speech like with feminists and them disallowing other viewpoints, this is about maintaining the integrity of the site.

It's about time, the guy was self destructive and doing his best to take mra's with him.

During Bert's short stay I watched a LOT of long term posters disappear from the site... and any site that is unwilling to to set limits to behavior will invariably suffer the same fate from the fruit loops out there. These people drive away everyone who they see as outside their 'in group', and the smaller the pool to attack gets... the smaller the 'in group' gets until you've got two crazies who agree about 99.9% of the issues screaming at each other because of the .1% they don't agree on.

IMO it's not really about censorship... it's about limiting the impact of destructive contributers (often but not always trolls). I have no doubt that the most radical feminist in the world could come to this site and as long as she was civil and debated the issues instead of attacking the people she would not be kicked and would likely find lots of challenging debate (now THAT would be in interesting conversation).

Dave K
A Radical Moderate

There is a difference between a disenting voice and a disruptive voice. Even when Bert was doing nothing more than personal attacks at the rate of one per story I would of disagreed with his banning. However, when he performed the multi-spamming of stories he was no longer contribuiting anything other than noise to our forum, and being extremly disruptive to the rest of us.

I don't see banning Bert as a victory for Feminists, but rather a way to keep this forum constructive.

--Demonspawn

Good riddance. It is one thing to have "freedom of speech" and another to use attacks which are destructive to the board. Unfortunately I did get on HIS case a couple times. Hopefully you guys don't consider me a hypocrite? I was trying to demoralize him into quitting the board. I think eventually he would have anyway.
-Axolotl

Freedom of speech and freedom of association. I support both wholeheartedly.

Freedom of association also means being free to choose who NOT to associate with.

Bert's presence was damaging the membership and discussion here.

I think you've made the right call, Scott. You (and we collectively) have been more than patient and tolerant, but enough's enough.

Ragtime