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Gosh. You go out for a pint...
I don't know - I find myself reading this, and specifically this:
I can't think of a real argument to the point the poster made, so I'll just repeat myself ad nauseum
and I should probably feel angry, or affronted, but actually I am just thinking Hang on, he had a point? A point that I couldn't answer? This is new and interesting.
So, I check back, and no. It's just the usual Mathlete statements of what has happened, which do not have any basis in fact and will never be substantiated. See here or indeed here, or for that matter the chorus of requests that he read the source texts here.
This is what you might call a recurring theme. In fact, Mathlete has done almost nothing since he arrived here except hang around in the Policy trying to sound important. The worst part of that is that when he is told that he is wasting our time and his, he occasionally aims to prove us wrong by striking out into the big wide world by rotting threads to the bone with irrelevance, for example here, where shockingly little discussion of Howl (none) and Ginsberg's poetry (one post) took place.
Essentially, as far as I can tell Mathlete does not read Barbelith, and if he does read Barbelith his understanding of what is going on is at best through a glass, darkly. It seems odd to me that a man who said during the discussion about whether to ban Shadowsax said that he loved Barbelith so much that he could not think of banning as anything other than a terrible punishment is now saying:
I find that I now spend the majority of my time on Barbelith wondering where you get the neck to accuse Hieronymus of putting on the mod hat here after taking a partisan shot and therefore he's rather damaged your credibility.
If this is the case, then I can't imagine that Barbelith is much fun for Mathlete. In fact, it sounds like an obsessive pattern.
Which is pretty much where I came in. Although Mathelete chose to take my response as an invitation to deliver a volley of largely incoherent abuse, I was quite sincere. I felt, correctly by the looks of it, that Mathlete would do well not to post in the Policy, as he seems not to be able to get his head around the standards of evidence or interaction it requires. I felt that it was a bad idea for him to reserve the right to post in Policy threads according to his own definitions, simply because it would ensure that no goodwill was accrued for keeping out of the Policy. When he then decided to violate his own, self-made rules about where in the Policy he was going to post - after, what, a week or so? - this seemed like an even worse idea. I recommended to him that he avoid posting like this, and stated that I was not going to encourage him to do so by addressing his (as ever, unsupported) arguments, in the hope of avoiding precisely this response from the rest of the board. It seems that this didn't work.
So. I don't really have an opinion on whether or not Mathlete should be banned that I feel comfortable sharing at this point. However, I will say that Mathlete appears incapable a) of restraining himself from behaving in a way that would tear up any clean sheet he was given, even were such a thing possible b) of understanding the expectations we have about posts in the Policy and c) of responding to this incomprehension by not demanding attention in the Policy. Also, if 90% of his time on Barbelith is spent thinking about me, I don't think his interaction with Barbelith is at all healthy. These are outstanding problems which have not and it seems will not go away untreated.
He is right about one thing, however: I don't start as many threads as I used to, especially in the Head Shop. In part this is because I am busy, in part because handling the applications takes up a fair chunk of my Barbelith time is taken up with processing applications. It is also because I nno longer have any confidence that any thread I start will not be rotted by personal attacks or tangential ramblings about the target's sex life, and because I am spending too much time trying to teach basic social skills to people like you. That is certainly not what I want Barbelith to be, nor I hope what "people" want it to be.
Finally, I must take issue with my esteemed colleague Gourami, who is otherwise very wise:
It seems to me that you wish Haus would either leave or treat you differently, and leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether he should, I think I can say with confidence that neither of those things is going to happen.
I think it is unlikely that I will leave, at least as a result of this so far - experience shows that I have been trolled harder and more disturbingly. However, I have repeatedly explained to Mathlete how he could induce me and others to treat him differently. I think the failure of those explanations has led to the sense of weariness we are seeing on page 4 of this thread. It may be unreasonable or unkind to ask or expect him to change or be able to change his behaviour, but at least the theoretical possibility exists. |
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