A fairly innocuous one at that.
Here is a printout of their ratings. (In case you are not in the know, two zeroes with no other higher rating hide any given post. But…since these people have been doing this sort of thing for several years, I always save my comments. I will not be McCarthyized!!!):
Why the House Must Have an Impeachment Inquiry | 38 comments (38 topical, 0 editorial, 1 hidden) | Post A Comment
Others have rated this comment as follows:
oaguabonita 0
marduk 0
And here is the post to which I was answering and my (very friendly and totally pro-Elizabeth Warren) response:
Re: Why the House Must Have an Impeachment Inquiry (4.00 / 2)
I do not think Mueller implied this at all. I think it is fairly obvious that Mueller accepted this as a constraint from day one. (I have not yet finished part one of the report so I may have to change my view of the matter before I am done.)I think part one of the report is enough to impeach. There may not be a provable crime in it, but it is scathing nonetheless. Trump knew the Russians were committing a crime, they welcomed it, they lied about it and they benefitted from it.
The Democrats will get around to doing the right thing. Elizabeth Warren – who is proving to be a formidable candidate, IMO – has it exactly right.
by Tom Benjamin on Sat Apr 20th, 2019 at 03:48:14 PM EST
[ Parent | Reply to This | ]
=================Re: Why the House Must Have an Impeachment Inquiry (none / 1)
Warren.YES!!!
Thank you.
Please read my most recent post here if you have not already done so..
Elizabeth Warren/Impeachment. ALWAYS the First Dem Out On Morally Correct Issues.
Thanks again…
AG
Not until faithfulness turns to betrayal-and betrayal into trust-can any human being become part of the truth. — Rumi
by Arthur Gilroy (arthurgilroy<at>earthlink.net) on Sat Apr 20th, 2019 at 03:54:09 PM EST
If this blog is to remain anything more than a printout for the DNC, this sort of nonsense simply must stop!!!
Booman?
Are you watching?
AG
Update [2019-4-21 17:20:52 by Arthur Gilroy]: In answer to the over-the-top wailings of our neocentrist cadre below:
Three things.
#1-I made a perfectly friendly and innocent recommendation to a…to me, anyway…new poster who had written something along the same lines. I thought he might like it.
#2-I have not posted a link to one of my standalones for quite a while. I cannot remember when.
Why?
Because:
2a-I don’t really give a fuck if they are read or not. I write them, and y’all can either pick up on them or ignore them. No skin off my teeth, either way.
and
2b-Your whining spoils the fun.
3-I have better things to do than spar with you kneejerkers.
See ya later, DNCers…
I can’t wait to see exactly how the DNC is going to fuck up this time!!! It’ll be hard to top the HRC fiasco.
P.S. Always remember, blessed enemies:
You put up a lame candidate, you probably lose.
And so does everyone else, even if you win.
Buh-BYE…!!!
Stop spamming ads for your diary content in unrelated frontpage stories, asshole.
he’s an asshole spamming ads for his “standalone articles” [LOL!] in unrelated frontpage stories.
Given the extremely consistently hostile and duplicitous behaviors AG indulges here, it is a sign of this community’s remarkable patience and grudging acceptance of his presence that his comments receive multiple “Mega-Troll” ratings extremely rarely; almost certainly less than 5% of his comments receive these ratings.
A healthy human being would reconsider his own actions when it can be clearly observed that he is now the only community member whose comments sometimes receive multiple “Mega-Troll” ratings. A healthy human being would ask why multiple community members occasionally find his behaviors to be at a “Mega-Troll” level.
What was it about this comment or that comment that caused multiple community members to express their view that I was acting as a “Mega-Troll” in those cases? A healthy human being would ask himself that question.
Many of us don’t want this community to become sick. The upcoming period will be far too important for this community to allow new visitors to believe that Arthur Gilroy’s nonsense, nonsense which he is offering in extremely bad faith, is happily accepted at the Frog Pond.
The guy is a Trump supporter, as revealed by his constant denigrations of Democrats to this progressive community and his repeated open admissions that he does not denigrate Trump and other Republicans when communicating with conservative communities.
I only use the zero rating when he spams his diaries into Booman’s posts.
Yep, I very rarely downrate his posts. But I’ll be damned if this discussion is going to be made about our behavior. It’s the right wing, sexist, racist troll who has already repeatedly announced his plans to come here to campaign for Trump and other Republicans in 2020 whose behaviors deserve scrutiny. Our responses to his provocations are sane and appropriate.
Arthur Gilroy should simply make the case honestly for his stubborn desire to dissolve the United States and cause as much of it as possible to be remade in the ideals espoused by Ron Paul, and abandon his appallingly dishonest pretense that he is with those who wish to push the Democratic Party to the left. That is a lie. Arthur Gilroy is lying every time he does that. He does that often, which means he lies frequently.
What a way to spend some the last years of your life, to burn much time online in pathetic attempts to deceive others in order to defend and empower Donald Trump and his enablers. It’s a goddamn shame.
Y’all could just ignore him. That’s what I do most of the time. Zeroing out the comment in question is the most childish crap I’ve seen. So what if he links to his own post? Especially when the post is semi related.
There are people who are sincerely trying to push the Democratic Party and our Federal, State and local governments to the left. I’m one of them. The vast majority of us are operating in good faith, and many of them may discover this blog every day. Those newly arriving people don’t have the benefit of knowing about Arthur’s history here.
I don’t think it’s healthy to ignore a person who wishes to manipulate people with sincerely progressive beliefs to serve his own regressive goals. I don’t think it would speak well of our community to ignore a person who comes here with the hidden desire to help Trump and his Republican enablers maintain maximum power. I don’t believe he’s hiding it particularly well, but he certainly is trying to hide his real desire.
It’s unpleasant to confront a troll. It would be much more unpleasant to allow a troll to have more success here in poisoning our discourse and distorting our understanding of the facts.
I doubt that there is any “ideal” way to handle those who engage in trolling behavior. Ignoring on the surface is a good idea. However, my experience since the good old days of USENET is that those engaging in trolling behavior often use that as license to push boundaries still further. Confrontation leads to the predicted results we can observe here. Either way the community in question is disrupted. In moderated communities (this is technically a moderated community) there are means available for dealing with trolling behavior. As part of my professional responsibilities I am an admin for a small handful of Facebook groups. Sometimes individuals get added who probably should not have and behave counter to group norms and expectations. Thankfully over the course of nearly a decade, I have almost never had problems with those specific groups. At least as an admin I have the recourse of being able to remove the offending member from the group and reporting them to FB, if it comes to that. That of course implies admin and mods who are present enough to enforce whatever rules are in place. What happens when when those circumstances don’t exist? We could just try to ignore. Whether or not that really does a service for those who lurk or who participate on some level is debatable. Members have for numerous years here been left with very few tools at their disposal: confrontation and downrating. I’d prefer to avoid the latter and only use downrating as a very last resort. A case for confrontation – especially when evidence-based seems viable under the circumstances. Newbies in particular can see what is being said, follow links (when made available) to decide for themselves if they agree or disagree that what comes across as trollish behavior is indeed trollish and indicative of someone who is a bad actor. If there were a better option, I’d advocate for it. As of yet, I have not figured that one out.
In the meantime, 2020 is just around the corner and we are going to need all hands on deck to try to save what is left of our aching republic from further devolution into dictatorship.
I significantly reduced my activity on this blog during the home stretch of the 2016 general election campaign. First, I became substantially occupied in helping run campaign work, mostly on State and local elections. Second, Trump’s rise was genuinely shocking to me, and I could see once the FBI began intervening on behalf of Trump that an unspeakable outcome was becoming possible. Third, the writings from a number of community members here throughout the general election campaign were so provocative and irresponsible that I needed to absent myself from responding frequently; I simply didn’t have the time or emotions available to spend on responses.
Given the outcome of the 2016 election, I have very poor associations from having remained more silent during that campaign. So, I spoke up here more frequently in opposition to AG during the 2018 campaign. I have more positive associations with that behavior. Also, we can see that the number of community members who join AG here in his destructive rhetoric have sharply reduced. He has very few acolytes now. This is encouraging.
I mean it when I say he simply will not be allowed to behave as he has without continually being called to account for his rotten ideology and dishonest rhetoric. I sometimes consider these exchanges tedious. Tedium is preferable to destruction.
Generally I look at what you and others have done as something of a public service. At bare minimum, I would want users here to have good reason to believe that they are safe to express themselves without being browbeaten, where they can disagree with one another and know that arguments are made in good faith. That sort of thing. The fallout from 2016 was devastating here. There are people who just dropped out because this blogging environment was toxic enough to be a SuperFund site. Hell, I started taking periodic walkabouts due to my own disgust. I have to wonder how many others left permanently due to their own disgust, how many new users never bothered to post a comment out of genuine concern that they would be barraged with abuse, and how many non-users who lurk saw what was quite frankly a clusterf*ck and felt discouraged to create accounts as a consequence. If the place becomes safer for genuine discourse, all the better.
Take it from one who has spent a depressing amount of time I will never get back substantively confronting ag’s illogic and refuting his many falsehoods, only to see him run away like the coward that he — in perfect sync with standard rightwing practice — projects onto those who forthrightly confront his lies and other dissembling (e.g., pretending to be a “progressive” and the arbiter of who’s a “true progressive”, when he’s in fact a far-rightwing glibertarian opposed to most actually progressive policies). It’s not only perfectly understandable and reasonable that folks give up eventually on trying to engage ag in good faith and just go straight to using the troll-ratings for their intended purpose — it’s in fact the only sane way to respond to him.
I’ve seen you write sensible stuff (when you bother to write anything at all, which seems very rare these days). But choosing the role of enabler for what ag does here does not do you proud.