Cal, well at least your arguments are a whole lot more cogent, closely reasoned and credible than Scrap’s. So kudos for that much
One problem with trying to bludgeon someone admitting he was wrong is that that judgement is , generally speaking, to a large extent subjective; and I’ve come across any number of different perspectives on the issues in hand. You can’t guarantee that the wrongdoer has the same perspective as yourself. Far from it. So your demand for an honest admission might easily come accross as a demand for an abject lie. Just to shut you up.
Personally speaking I’ve been in that position any number of times during my formatives years. I wouldn’t mind betting that most, perhaps all spazzes have, and are consequently highly defended against it and /or highly stressed by it.
Let’s take “Odeon genuinely believes he was right” as a working hypothesis, then try to put yourself in his shoes. Extremely uncomfortable, no? Now, let’s take “Odeon suspects he might have bene wrong” as a working hypothesis and put yopurself in his shoes. What do you do? Expose that vulnerability to the howling mob, in the middle of a public forum” Hell, no. Now take “Odeon knows he is wrong” as a…. fact. Of course it’s a fact cos you can see him squirming and lashing out in self-defence . QED. You see the logical error?
Actually, I really don’t think you have to be a baby to buckle under that sort of stress, just more-or-less human., like I said. And never mind how "power" the target has as a forum admin, I'm pretty sure they'd feel powerless against that kind of onslaught ; especially if they are, basically, loathe to ban people.
You think people should grow up. I’m it sure anybody is being given a fair chance to grow up if they’re still being called out on things that happened ten years ago…or even three years ago, which is more to the point, IMO.
I was interested to get your perspective on the Democracy wash-out. So it was basically a case of tough love accidently achieving the oppsite of the desired effect? I mean from your side. Well,well you can’t blame folk for not quite getting that. Nor can you blame them for revising their opinion of your younger self from “wantonly destructive” (or whatever) to “arrogant” once they do get it. Ofc that was neither the first time nor the last time that some I^2 regular screwed up in a similar fashion. Nor is the first or last time they’ve blamed somebody else for the resulting cock-up.
I was also slightly interested to hear that Odeon supposedly misused the blabberiser to silence the opposition during that all- important election. That explains your antagonism. But again, I’ve heard multiple perspectives , and I find no reason to take yours- nor anybody else’s, for that matter - for the one bona fide objective perspective on that. And unfortunately , I don’t have a perspective of my own, cos I just wasn’t active enough on the board at that point in time to form a clear perspective of my own, (dammit. I always seem to miss the juicy bits). The only thing I (vaguely) recall is your previous behaviour.
So, all I can say about that is : yeah, that was really bad, if it was exactly like you say. But inasmuch as you make an issue of it now, and add to the litany of “proof” against Odeon, seems to m e very much like flogging a live defendant with a long-dead horse
It’s bad enough that most of the present butthurt actually stems from about three years ago, when Zegh abruptly left the board , pursued by a torrent of abuse, which still goes on to this day (witness Scraps’ regular negs of Zegh’s posts) . I went to the trouble of tracking down all of the relevant posts, right back to that event and beyond, and reading them carefully. ( But God that was a schlepp. I’m not gonna do that with many of these issues! )
Again , you get a lot of conflicting perspectives. But what emerged was that Zegh was a whole lot less innocent than he appeared on the surface (that is to people like myself, fwho found him interesting to talk with, but didn’t get into any fights with him) and that Odeon almost certainly totally missed the worst of Zegh’s postings.
So my conclusion runs thus: Scrap’s claim that Odeon was biased in favour of Zegh was probably a) true and b) not actually Odeon’s fault really, just the unfortunate result of Odeon not being omniscient, together with abusage of the shoutbox .
But also, I gotta thank Al for pointing out to me some even older posts from Zegh, in which he made his toxic intentions abundantly clear. So you certainly can’t call Zegh an innocent victim of the forum bullies.. Maybe a victim of his own cavalier belligerence.
So I think I figured out what went wrong there, but I never figured out how to fix it . Starting from it’s morally ambiguos beginnings , the thing has just gathered momentum down the years, gathering all kinds of extraneous shit as it rolls . At this point in time , the thing that bothers me most about that event is that nobody (except Odeon) - seems to give a flying fuck for the possibility that Zegh might have run off and killed himself, or otherwise come to grief. Seems that whatever his fate was, he deserved it for being a cry-baby, and for finding Intensity too hot to handle.
In the present day, it’s basically about personal butthurt , self-righteousness and the flogging of long-dead horses. So I don’t blame the majority who don’t give a fuck about that issue at all. It just looks like another way to propagate the combative playground culture, which was the real villain of the piece in the first place, IMO.
It’s so freaking tiresome and gives the lie to all the calls for frankness and honesty which people throw out like gauntlets: a completely self-defeating gesture, if ever there was one. Surely to god, there have to better uses for Free Speech than that? At least that’s how most of the current denizens see it. So maybe we women (as we mostly seem to be) don’t belong here? Or maybe it’s time that all the old diehards admitted that that the playground culture turned out to be a bigger disaster than Democracy? Never mind what kind of half-baked gibberish Mc J wrote about that on the front page. Heck, maybe it’s time we trawled through all that stuff about Intensity’s mission , and decided which bits we really can and do subscribe to.
“Back up your words “ sounds OK… until you find out that people think it means “ submit yourself to an endless cross-examination concerning your character defects which can only end when you finally scream yes! You’re right. And I’m wrong’ “ . Leaving aside that McJ isn’t God, I can’t believe that’s what he really intended anyway.
