Penni, just want to correct a misperception. I was not complaining about Terrence's behavior to me personally. In fact, I have nothing to complain about at all, in that respect. His barbs were directed at other people.
One of the problems that I see on SI (and here I am NOT talking about Terrence), is that when Person A is attacked by Person B, the rest of the people on the thread often look away, just as people in a subway car generally pretend not to notice when one passenger in the car is being harassed by another. (LeRoy Jones -- now ? Baraka -- once wrote a viciously funny one-act play about such an incident.)
Edit(Paragraph left out, for some reason): If Person A tries to defend himself, he often sounds flustered and pompous, and more often than not, he ends up being the one slapped on the wrist by SI. If he chooses to ignore the attack, to be "above it", then Person B thinks he has "won", and proceeds to harass someone else, and then someone else, and then someone else...Here, the other members of the audience have to stand up and speak out, or else this sort of behavior will continue indefinitely.
EV is something of a special case, because he does not harass individuals (at least, not usually), but rather a whole group of individuals. And those of us who have not lost family members in Nazi concentration camps (or the equivalent) should perhaps be more comprehending of the outrage his posts evoke in those who have.
Joan
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