It's also worth noting that after being pushed by C2W, I was able to document two recent occurrences where C2W made the exact type of name-calling posts that led me to find it interesting that she, among others, seemed to be bothered by the enforcement of the rule as it pertained to barracuda's "dickhead" comment. I said I found it interesting, and I still do, and it's still not an ad hominem for me to say so.
I'd really appreciate it if you stopped rewriting history. I appreciate that's how you experienced/understood it. But you're not impartial. And your word carries the imprimatur of authority. So please recuse yourself.
What happened was:
I was completely baffled by what your standards and guidelines were for determining whether something was or wasn't name-calling/a personal attack. So I asked for elucidation and/or guidance and/or an index of terms/phrases.
You chose to regard this as a defense of name-calling.
You cherry-picked two instances of what you regard as name-calling out of the total of perhaps a dozen or so you'd find in a close examination of my eight-thousand-plus posts, which, let's face it:
It's less interesting that you were able to document than it is utterly predictable since I'm completely sure that Canadian_watcher reported them at the time, along with what were doubtless who-knows-how-many false positives.
Because that's the only explanation for your even having been aware of something as completely unexceptional as my having asked stickdog99 why he was being such a douche to me when I was respecting his request from earlier in the thread to begin with. Nobody else would have noticed or cared. Or been incapable of understanding who was attacking whom. Or been so narrowly focused on my actions to the exclusion of all else as to construe it as an instance of my bad behavior. That takes a unique kind of genius, that I've come to recognize as my friend, Canadian_watcher.
It also explains why it is you can't see that my having called Mac an asshole was the direct result of my shock that after fighting with him for years without any loss of respect or affection on either side, he was suddenly unable to see that I would never do anything as low or bad-faith as invisibly, maliciously back-edit my posts. Which is a completely specious concept that owes its existence to the same person who'd insinuated (as she has previously outright stated) that I was barracuda's sock-puppet only days earlier.
And, seriously. I'm sticking strictly to the instances of her making an effort to influence and/or interfere with threads for no other reason than that it was disadvantageous to me that are pertinent to this flare-up. A comprehensive catalog of them would be book-length. She thinks she has a righteous cause. So she doesn't recognize any limits or care whom she hurts. And that's assuming that she's even capable of acknowledging the pain of others. The last time I objected to being victimized by her, she mocked me for it. It was one of the most painful things anyone's ever said to me.
Despite all of which, I like and respect her, I should add. She's got a right to her feelings. And to her opinion. Within limits THAT THE MODS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENFORCE.
I can't post here if the moderators can't tell the difference between the attackers and the attacked. Speaking of which. That might be for the best, though. I'm just saying.
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Anyway. Of course your understanding of what constitutes disruptive name-calling is going to appear incomprehensible and biased to sensible people if you're getting it via Canadian_watcher's tunnel vision. Anyone whose views weren't as blinkered would be saying to themselves:
(Apologies to those three blameless posters.)
And if you think those are cherry-picked examples, do your own search. What you'll see is that those appellations have only ever been the source of sanctions when they were used by someone who was engaged in the kind of sustained chronically hostile or angry personal assault on another poster or posters that can and do also frequently occur without any name-calling whatsoever. Because THAT'S what leads to most of the conflict and thread-derailment on the board.
As it did here.
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That said, I'm not personally a fan of name-calling. I just could not, for the life of me, figure out what your standards were, since they didn't appear to be based on any organized or systematic principles I'd ever come across or could think of any way to discern via inference. And that's why I kept asking you what they were.
Now that the penny's dropped -- and, btw, I find it interesting which posters didn't think they needed any explanation -- they make perfect sense to me, though.
I kind of can't believe it took me that long to figure it out. Please accept my sincerest apologies for having mishandled our exchange as badly as I did. The reason I said that post was a petty abuse of power was less because it seemed to me that you were threatening me with suspension for asking a question (which you were, it turned out) than because I couldn't understand where it was coming from. So I'm very sorry to have added to your difficulties. I wouldn't have done it if I'd realized what they were.
Not that that's an excuse. It's just a reason. But fwiw, I am sorry. I appreciate your hard and thankless work on the board's behalf. And....TBH, it's once again become more stressful than it's worth for me to post articulately while at constant risk of assault for any random, exploitable word that could conceivably be construed as problematic. So my judgment's probably a little more compromised than it should be. But once I get over that, I promise to do better in future.
As for the rest:
What you said was ad hominem. But since I don't really care and it would be a very linguistically technical and minute case to make, I'm willing to retract it if you can't live with it. And I definitely do retract the abuse-of-power thing, as well as apologize for it with much shameful remorse. I completely misunderstood what was going on.
And....I wouldn't be surprised if none of this seems sincere or on-point to you, even still. Actually. We're not really proceeding from a shared perception here. So communication is a little chancy. But that's due to factors beyond my control. And I am sorry. So there you have it.
I apologize in advance for skirting the ban with this. But after a certain point, rebuttal becomes obsolete. And you're really being very unfair.