Politics and Religion

[Dill]

(03-04-2021, 05:50 PM)hollodero Wrote: Admittedly, I have a higher passion to single out people that apparently only consider everyone else the problem when this imho clearly is not so clear cut. Might SSF qualify for that, I don't really think so. I got the impression he does not see himself as perfect beyond doubt either. I'm fine with you disagreeing.
- Also, I must have called statements of SSF hyperbolic a thousand times now. And I already got sucked into (ok, might have been my own fault) into this more specific conversation once, and I don't think I deliberatley omitted SSF or treated him with velvet gloves in any way. And I did not do so here. There's an aspect regarding bullying I just happen to have a similar viewpoint on, or a similar observation on. To a point and not totally, which I think I made clear in roughly a thousand words or so too.
Regarding your ongoing quarrels with him. I have to admit. I usually skip those conversations. They are not really pleasant or entertaining to me. So I just cannot pass judgment one way or another, or who's more at fault for these ongoing escalations. When it was still SFF vs. Dino, I thought it to be roughly a 50/50 split that made neither look particularly good. Told SSF that as well, with specific examples and everything. Sorry for not being able to do so again, I just can't go through these point-by-point altercations that gets produced between you two.
Well, one person can't be a mob. Think of it what you will, but he does not gang up and usually acts as a lone wolf. That he's not fond of your posts, or fred's posts, well aside from the merits to me that's not bullying someone out.
I most certainly don't endorse all of his ways to express things. And I said so many times in the past. I mean, I personally can't complain, he never said anything belittling or offensive to me, which is less than happened the other way round. I am not pitch perfect either and don't want to be the referee or put myself beyond all fault in the first place. I sure see him saying stuff that I would deem over the top. I see him getting responses that I deem over the top too. Many conversations and words tend to be lead in an overly dismissive, overly offensive, overly belittling tone, and SSF gets a lot of that thrown at him, but nope he is no saint in that regard either. Didn't feel the need to specifically state that, but apparently you want me to, so there. It's not like this is a secret.

I don't doubt you have skipped our "ongoing quarrels," and so are reluctant to "pass judgement." Most do skip them.

But here is what you missed in my quarrels with SSF, just so you might understand why I become incensed, probably for the first time in the new forum, when someone blameless shares an "aspect on bullying" with SSF, as he constructs a bullying problem "out there" in some others. 

The pattern is the same on every thread, including this one, your thread. I make arguments about the topic, and he jumps in to "call out" my "lies" and "hypocrisy."  And then the thread is off topic, as I often feel the need to correct misattributed statements. (As a poster on the Limbaugh thread put it: "Lather, rinse, repeat.")  But not always, as sometimes I urge SSF to get back on topic, or just ignore the ad hominem. And in the past he has said much worse. To which I can only add that I have not returned in kind. At all. Ever. The mods have never suspended me or deleted my posts to stabilize a thread. A record which you seem to acknowledge.  And SSF does too, obliquely, when he occasionally promises to change his behavior, or when, lacking anything else, and in a pique of faux outrage, he leverages one of my "lols" to an order of hyperbolic condescension.

So I am not "reaping what I sow." You may indeed have carefully criticized some of his "hyperbole," but you have never to my knowledge said to him "You are bullying," as you did Fred. 

And I am going to go out on a limb here and say there is no thread in this forum in which SSF has been just merrily discoursing along on topic when Dino, out of nowhere, landed on him with verbal abuse.  Closest I can recall is Dino once followed a personal attack on me with "This is why we can't have nice things." Sometimes Dino defends himself. More often he ignores denigrating posts. He reaps far more than he sows. I am going to go out on a limb again and say there is not thread in which someone launches unprovoked attacks on SSF in which he, Dino-style, just moves on. 

If a poster announces a mission to "call out hypocrisy" wherever he finds it, you far-seeing and reasonable Hollo, know that he surely will find it, and at the expense of forum peace. I don't have to persuade you that "calling out hypocrisy" is not a solution to the problem of bullying, but a cause of it. And only one person in this forum has settled on that mission. A refusal to name names may indeed express a wish not to expose someone, but it may also be just a kind of innuendo, a claim no one can check, deployed to buttress an otherwise unsupported narrative. Like a "lone wolf" who refers to himself in the plural, speaking for a group of unnamed, who agree with his construction of those "others."

I close acknowledging you don't want this discussion. I don't either. Part of your difficulty in not seeing "who's more at fault" is your desire not to take sides, not to single out anyone.  And I don't want you to change that. Your post #67 and others show that you understand perfectly well that people may decide to leave the forum, not because they are bullied, but because they don't want beliefs challenged.

But when you share with SSF, "a similar view on an aspect of bullying" while unable to see "who's more at fault for these ongoing escalations," then of course he's going to respond "Well stated."  And I am going to fill in some blanks.