Leaving the forum

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AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Fortunately Tommy Pham sucks now. Thank goodness we traded him. Cabrera alone was worth Pham. Plus it saved Dewitt money which is always good.

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heyzeus
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by heyzeus »

AWvsCBsteeeerike3 wrote:Fortunately Tommy Pham sucks now. Thank goodness we traded him. Cabrera alone was worth Pham. Plus it saved Dewitt money which is always good.
I see what you're doing. Lure BAS back in with some primo Pham content.

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thrill
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by thrill »

Being a mod is tough when people aren't directly violating rules, but are definitely degrading quality of the discourse for everyone else.

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33anda3rd
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by 33anda3rd »

I told myself I wasn't going to post again, but I guess I will one last time. Here's my characteristically long-winded goodbye.
InvincibleCakeEater wrote:Kiss and make nice and keep posting...
I'm not leaving over BAS. The troll doesn't bother me enough to make me want to leave.

My mantra has always been that objectivity has to matter, and has to trump belief. I came here because I wrote a stats- and Cardinals-obsessed blog like 10 years ago and I saw traffic from a place called Gateway Redbirds so I came and joined and my style as a member as been my style as a person: objectivity matters and always trumps belief. Study a thing, learn a thing, then speak on a thing so you don't look silly. Someone lies to us every day and not just about baseball but about something that's actually important. Climate Change is not the greatest challenge facing us: it's misinformation. We only fail on climate change because we're misinformed. Same as gun deaths, green infrastructure, equality issues, foreign policy and everything in between. I came into this board preaching objectivity about baseball--we don't need to believe when we can measure, and we need not believe in false measures. I'm going out kind of on the same note, but about politics and a far more sinister kind of falsehood. We can't let people lie to us, because we're at a huge inflection point in the world, and that should apply to braindead megaphones on this board. We can't allow people to call others racist for using demographic data, just because that data--those facts--trump the belief that they so desperately need to hold on to, any more than we should accept a baseball skipper who allows a player with a .320 OBP to hit leadoff because skipper believes that Ecksteinian player to be quick and gritty and a good table-setter.

BAS is an offensive loud troll. He'd come to politics and tell people that all landlords are evil and when some were like "knock it off, I'm a landlord" he would double down. He did not care who he offended. He'd troll, then proclaim himself "exhausted" by having to put up with those of us he started trolling as if he as above it all. If someone brought up Cory Booker then he would call Booker a hack, the same thing as a Republican, etc. Never mind Booker passed on Wall Street to be a housing advocate in NJ and BAS claimed housing as one of his pet causes, Booker was a hack because he wasn't here to burn it all down. This was the tone literally every time he came into that forum. In baseball he'd refute that Goldschmidt is declining despite all evidence that he is then call Goldschmidt a "generational talent." Goldschmidt had less WAR through age 30 than guys like Olerud and Jesse Barfield, but whatever. BAS is wrong but it's not worth arguing about it because facts don't matter to him, arguing his point and condescending others does. I'd love to talk with you guys in BT about how hitters who don't swing and miss at curveballs can be predictive of outperforming projection, but I have no interest in the baggage that conversation would entail with him. I haven't been very active at all in BT for over 2 years. Others are the same.

I put some stats up about black voters a couple weeks ago and made a joke that it's unlikely he sees many, living in a place that has so few. He took the opportunity to call me racist based on the use of demographic data of where he lives, also a place I once lived and know then used a town 20 minutes away that's still well under national average and knowingly stated a stat he knew to be wrong ("we're around 10%" when they're at 7% and when national average is 11% and average of cities that size is far higher) to double-down on his improper claim that his city is highly diverse and to use as a basis for his accusations of racism on my part. In case you missed it that's what led to the whole blow-up. The mods asked us both to take one week off politics and I said no out of principle: I would not accept the same punishment as a troll who was unfoundedly calling me racist. Then they banned me, and Theo posted on the board that I was banned a week and the troll was asked not to post in politics for a week.

For me, that was the point at which I knew I should probably hang up my GRB spurs, because one of the mods announced to you guys that I was being treated worse than the troll who called me racist when he knew I wasn't (see below) just to put me down for the benefit of covering up his bad point. For what it's worth, Theo offered, after I brought this up post-ban, to correct the post but did not offer an apology, which I still feel is owed: I was called racist for using data about a major electoral demographic, then banned for telling someone off for that nonsense, and I should not have been treated the same as a troll.

BAS PMed me while I was banned:
Big Amoco Sign wrote:Hey..

Sorry for calling you racist. I don't think you are---or err, that you don't mean to even if I believe a statement was out of whack.

Anyways, I'll be taking a break from forum. I realize I'm not as senior as you and others and don't want to sully.

Take care,
-redacted (real name)
The troll knows that he was trolling, though can't leave it at that. The troll puts in "...that you don't mean to..." Everyone who knows my politics on this board knows of course that this is wrong, if you've interacted with me even a little. Equality issues are one of my hot-button issues. If I was a racist, then fair game, question my values. You know one when you see one, we've had them here and I've brought it up. But labeling me that when you know you're out of line just to try to dig in on a dumb argument is...well, way out of line. That the mods treated us the same was then and is now not ok with me.

Anyhoo, in reply to his dumb message I said
33anda3rd wrote:Thank you so much for putting "real name" in ( ). Otherwise I'd have guessed it was just an alias.

You can go [expletive] yourself you ignorant offensive little [expletive].
So yeah, I certainly did hurl some profanity at the troll. And if he's gone because of it: you're welcome, GRB.

This doesn't matter much to me for my own interests since I'm bowing out, but this long-winded goodbye is something I felt compelled to post because it should matter to y'all, and I like almost all of you. BAS will be back, or there will be the next BAS who has little regard for the 14+ years (crazy, right) you've all spent together and if that poster comes to drive everything into the ground to make valuable members of the board with something to say not want to post, it's a net loss for the board. Someone PMed me this week "Seems like GRB lost a lot of the givers - people that are interesting and want to share a personal insight expertise humor etc with the group -rather than regurgitating something we hear every where else. Your departure is another loss of a GRB giver." You guys shouldn't be ok with losing the good posters (and there's a long list of departed great posters) because the mods don't differentiate between the thoughtful know-it-alls and the thoughtlessly-aggressive-for-the-sake-of-being-aggressive.

The next time someone comes around here constantly screaming misinformation at you then stubbornly hanging on to that misinformation and condescending you, at a certain point, you should tell them to screw off. Or expect your mods to take care of that for you, and not to treat non-trolls like trolls.

You guys take care of yourselves. Many thanks to Michael and Kyle for hosting the site all these years.

Arthur Dent
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by Arthur Dent »

thrill wrote:degrading quality of the discourse for everyone else.
I found myself scrolling past pages upon pages of repetitive uninformative bickering reading almost nothing. Maintaining the discourse so it is possible to have a conversation is a worthy and necessary moderating goal which I support.

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wart57
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by wart57 »

I don't really care how smart a poster thinks he/she is, or how long the poster has been a member of the forum, it does not excuse being rude and hateful to another poster - perceived troll or not.

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heyzeus
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Re: Leaving the forum

Post by heyzeus »

I think everyone's said their piece here.

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