I first started commenting on this board as a sophomore in high school. That was a little more than five years ago. At that time, we had posters who would make smitty look like Larry Sabato.
One was DickVitale, who I've already jokingly mentioned in this thread. You think Big girl is bad about reducing everything to racism? DickVitale was a Houston area basketball coach who thought that everyone whose favorite color wasn't black was racist. You don't like President Obama? Racist. You think taxes are too high? Racist. You think we spend too much? Racist. You agree with the war in Iraq? Racist. You like vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate? Racist. You're white? Racist. It didn't matter what it was, everything was a matter of race to him, and he would bring up his racial commentary in every single thread regardless of the subject over and over and over again, just like smitty and some of the others do with Benghazi and Cloward and Piven and whatever else.
And Dickie V wasn't alone. We had another poster called stang4life who was very much the same way. She was never as confrontational as DV, but she was an expert at provoking people via emotional manipulation. BlueDove liked to get on the bandwagon too; he was much more active on this part of the board then than he is now. DV's most serious internet ally, though, was a poster named SFA85. He accused us all of "hiding behind our mother's skirts" in our "lilly white neighborhoods" because we wouldn't meet him outside of the World Gym in Beaumont to settle things with our fists like he kept demanding. Just about every thread he commented in contained some kind of emasculating insult or physical threat.
You know what kept this board going at that time? Do you know why most of us stuck around? Because most of the people here recognized all of that for what it was and chose not to sink to their level. Hippy, and tvc, and westend, and bullets, and baddog and a handful of others called the crap where they saw it, and then got back to the topic of the thread. There wasn't any of the trolling you like to do. And do you know what happened? DV and SFA kept trying to push the envelope until they got themselves suspended and, at least in DV's case, eventually banned. stang4life found her little petty tactics less and less effective and one day finally decided to basically tell us all we were beneath her and she was leaving the board.
For about a year and a half after that, this board couldn't have been much better. You would come in here and find a dozen different threads with real discussions taking place - no threats, no insults, no irrelevant tangents about this news source or that special interest group. Just real discussion. Granted, the cycle eventually restarted itself when a guy named True Blue showed up, but the point is, the longer you choose to emulate their tactics, the longer you perpetuate this cycle. Instead of saying this board of "FUBAR" and choosing to help keep it that way, I think we'd all be better served if we stuck to the substance of the debates and didn't delve into this political pettiness.
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