| | | The ugliness began during the election of Clinton to his first term.
What are you talking about, Michael? Clinton's first term began before SI.
There was a time when people could disagree, move on and still be civil with one another.
Yes, but there were certainly some raging arguments. I was fairly active on one or two of those political threads. One of them being FADG. Eventually Bill decided to take his ball and go home, i.e., to his "Professional" thread, where he could ban people to his heart's delight. And yes, I know, he didn't always ban people, instead he sent them a PM first and asked them to stop posting on his thread if he didn't like what they were saying. Most of those who were so requested--like me--just stopped posting there. So he kept his "ban" numbers down. But he still effectively banned them, at least as abruptly as you accuse Dale of doing. Indeed, more so--I was being very careful and diplomatic about what I said on that thread, but Bill asked to leave anyway, even though he acknowledged in a PM that I was being careful.
Dale can't reply to you, and really, it probably isn't worth replying, but--if you are somehow pretending that the "ugliness" or arbitrariness was all from the left, you are distorting the record. I won't say that none of it was from the left, but plenty was from the right as well. And I will also say that, personally, I never saw "ugliness" coming from Dale. Yes, he banned some people from the thread (although not HB, that was Epicure), but frankly, I don't blame him. The discussions, such as they were, were getting absolutely nowhere and invectives began to appear. As far as the RW was concerned, the left was making things up, and as far as LW people were concerned, the RW was making things up and living in fantasyland. People were in different worlds. Eventually, even Bill said as much, and publicly agreed with Epicure's admittedly draconian solution (as he essentially had already implicitly done privately with his PMs). We know how it will end, we even pretty much know what most people will say in advance--why bother going through the motions?
I lament the fact that we can't talk to each other. I really do. But that is the brute fact. We can't. I have studied history--the antebellum period was like that, although it got even worse in the 1840s and especially the 1850s. That didn't end well. But life is too short, way too short, to engage in completely pointless discussions on sites like this one, endlessly repeating the same old nonsense over and over again. It is tiresome, Sisyphean nonsense. |
|
