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3. "Wanna bet?" Trtklr banned. And note on forum rules...

This is a fishing forum. Off-topic political discussions will be tolerated only very rarely, only if they don't degenerate into infighting, and only if all sides meet my arbitrary standard of reasonability (i.e. no idiotic rightwing rants). I tolerate opposing viewpoints when they're presented thoughtfully, but I do not tolerate a continuous barrage of over-the-top stupidity that persists unchanged despite all patient and rational attempts to debunk it. Anyone who's noticed Trtklr's many recent deleted posts will see why this was not the wisest message for him to send me:



Wanna bet?

We won't be hearing from him (or anyone else at any of the IP addresses he's ever used to access this site) again.

Thanks.

I was wondering when this was going to happen...Now I won't have to risk an aneurism trying to rebutt his complete lack of intelligence!

Not that I'm a religeous person, but...AMEN.

Jonathon

Sometimes one just has to walk away from a person who shows no respect. Or, if possible, keep the person from approaching. Glad you know how to do this, Jason.

Not trying to be caustic.... but after reading this statement... "(i.e. no idiotic rightwing rants)." I have to ask, do idiotic leftwing rants receive the same scrutiny?


I have to compliment you on a fine website, I have really enjoyed the wealth of information and generally good interaction. However, bumping through a few posts here and there it appears that there is a general tendency to lean strongly to the left politically.... which is fine, to each his own; I am very to the right and very conservative and rather than rock your boat I think it best to respectfully bow out of this forum.

Tight lines to all,
Ron
Col. 1:10

If they're idiotic, sure. For example, if somebody from PETA showed up, or someone promoting anti-vaccine paranoia, or someone claiming 9/11 was an inside job, and if they were repeatedly posting half-literate rants despite requests to stop, they'd be banned. There are loonies on both sides of the spectrum. Unfortunately, the rightwing crazies (global warming deniers, evolution deniers, etc) are much more abundant and are given more mainstream attention and credibility than their counterparts on the left. Both types of fools are treated more kindly than those who think the moon landings were faked, Elvis is still alive, or aliens are installing anal probes in millions of people. I think that's unfair, and that all these whackjobs should be dismissed with equal prejudice. Their absurdities have no place on this forum once their entertainment value runs out.



Better yet, just talk fishing. That's what we're here for.

I do moderate the occasional political discussions with a liberal bias, because that's my viewpoint. (I prefer that there be few if any such discussions to begin with.) Many rightwing views (e.g. the "birther" movement) are so clearly undeserving of any respect that I'd rather just filter them out. That said, it's perfectly okay jump into a political topic with a right-of-center ideology, as long as you keep it civil and reasonable. I even have some conservative views, such as a strong disdain for political correctness. I won't censor reasonable views even if I disagree with them; I'll only censor stupid views. I'll censor someone who listens to Rush Limbaugh for 3 hours and gets pumped up to come here and rant about how scientists worldwide can't be trusted. I'll censor someone who thinks Bill Ayers and ACORN are among America's most important enemies, rather than petty nuisances. I'll censor someone who can't even define communism, socialism, and fascism, but thinks they all describe Barack Obama perfectly. (These aren't straw-men; I'm describing the guy I banned, and there've been others like him.)

Judging by the coherence of your posts, I doubt you're that kind of "conservative" (and may even be as embarrassed by them as we lefties are by PETA), so your views wouldn't be stifled. More importantly, though, this is a fishing forum, and I can't stress enough that there's no need to get involved in anything political here. Just ignore that 1% of the discussions if you want.

Jason, I second you on this one. Ron, please don't leave this site on account of one particular idiot who essentially came here seeking a fight. This fellow - if I should even call him that, because other than having fishing in common he wasn't a fellow to ANY of us - was rightfully banned because he could not carry on a civil conversation on any politically charged topic without resorting to name-calling. And when challenged on it, he defied Jason, who is after all in control of this site. YOU, however, Ron, seem to be a considerably more rational individual who would present your opposing viewpoints in a well-thought-out and polite manner. So, I think I speak for all when I say you are indeed welcome on this site. I hope you are still on this site so you can read this.

As with Jason, I too consider myself to be left-of-center on the political spectrum, but make no mistake, I am no socialist (I work in the private consulting industry!) and I do have some more conservative points of view on certain topics. For example, I do believe in a strong military and I am absolutely for gun ownership rights. These viewpoints might seem contradictory to some "liberals" coming from such a fervent environmentalist as myself, but I was in the military myself for three years and grew up with a father who was (and still is) a most avid firearms collector, hunter, shooter, and reloader. I personally don't like "knee-jerk liberalism" any more than I like the opposite political viewpoint. Stupid liberals make the rest of us liberals look stupid!

The simple fact of the matter is, any person with intelligence is going to have a more subtle, nuanced view of the world than the majority of simpletons, left or right of center, who see the world as black and white. I think Jason will agree that intelligence is ALWAYS welcomed on this site!

Jonathon

P.S. I am considering posting a thread on why fly fishing represents the perfect mixture of capitalism and socialism, and I suspect that the vast majority of folks on this site will agree with me. Stay tuned!

Very nice replies, Jason and Jonathon. Hope you won't leave just for that reason, Ron.

-Shawn

Ron,

Let me echo what Jonathon and Shawn have said. I believe any intelligent and well-backed opinion will be welcome here. We disagree on many topics that are more dear to us than politics, such as whether or not flies such as the Vladi worm are acceptable, or how long a midge dropper should be. I've enjoyed your posts and hope to see more. Heck, we might even find ourselves in the same pool on the J one day, or up on Tipton. Just look at what Trtlkr sent Jason. That explains why he was banned. We all were weary of his rudeness.

"without resorting to name-calling"...

A cursory scanning of this thread and I find such warn & fuzzy descriptors as, "idiotic", "stupidity", "lack of intelligence", "half-literate", "loonies", "crazies" "whackjobs", "stupid views"...Whoa! Slow down here a bit fellas! Sticks and stones may break my bones...etc. I think our slips are showing a bit here and we need to shave our legs!


"I think Jason will agree that intelligence is ALWAYS welcomed on this site!" Now here's a nice sentiment..."intelligence" according to whom? These so-called "crazies", unless they have just kicked in your front door and are carrying heat, are pretty much harmless. It is a bit like being harrassed by black-flies while night fishing...But they have only chased me away from the river once...They ate Deet the next time I ran in to them.

Jason probably should of just shut the guy down and left it at that. It's his site after-all. But lets try to focus here for a moment and get back to bull-shitting each other about things other than the cable news talking heads stuff being jammed down our throats 24/7.

Jon...I don't want to pick on you, but what the hell is this!?! I want a hit on this pipe, man!

"P.S. I am considering posting a thread on why fly fishing represents the perfect mixture of capitalism and socialism, and I suspect that the vast majority of folks on this site will agree with me. Stay tuned!"

I have met a good many trout in my day and I have never met one that said to me he was particular about whether the guy that poked him had read Adam Smith or Karl Marx. I have suspected that they got together when they saw me coming to decide who's turn it was to smack my hook...I have been a vegetarian since I was 16 and I swear I heard some trout say, "Hey! Joe. It's your turn...I did it last time he waded through here...He thinks he's educating us or something...I promise you this guy will let you go...Splash around a bit and make it look good and you will be back in no time."

I think us humans should reserve our fantasies about how this world works basically to (I'd like to say here to ourselves) an appropriate place...The Net is replete with blogs so one can vent their spleen about this stuff and unfortunately lacking in bio sites like Jason has created here.

Hey! How about us switching the discussion from "bad behavior" to "behavioral drift"...

I know I'm an old fart. But all this reminds me of an old "underground comic" called Mr Natural written by a guy named R Crumb back in the 60's...Mr. Natural had a side-kick named Shuman and whenever Shuman got himself jammed up somehow Mr. Natural would always say, "Shuman the human...He's so human!"

Let's start cutting each other some slack, eh! We are in this, after all, together...How's that for a 60's sentiment?

Spence

Good points, Spence. Intelligently and thoughtfully presented, and with a bit of humor. I'm always happy to hear comments such as this one.

What's that old saying Louis? I have to keep laughing to keep from crying...

In another life time I was a Poli-Sci major and you know that no matter how much education I had I found that no one really wanted to hear my opinion, especially if it wasn't the same as theirs. Political views are similar to religious ones...You are either in our camp or you are a heretic...

I was very lucky as a young child and I had my very own Buddha...My Grandfather. The man never made it out of elementary school but he taught me everything about dealing with folks and all about being out in the woods...He always offered a man his hand to shake when he first met him...His view was you make the offer and sooner or later you will know if its worth shaking his hand again. But you made the offer.

He and I could live in the woods listening to a Beagle chasing bunnies for ever. Even when it was 20 below...We just didn't care. I fish now to commune with my memories of him without having to blast bunnies. I can sit on the bank of some old river somewhere and forget about the arguments that our cousins find so damn important but somehow seem incapable of really changing anything.

Louis the problem is, the way I see it is, no one really wants to discuss or work towards a concensus. They just want to state their case the way they see it and basically blow over you if you disagree. I remember an old Dylan tune where he said something about, "Propaganda all is phony". The talking heads on the "Glass Teat" (as Harlan Ellison used to say)are basically propagandists and wouldn't know the truth if he was staring them in the face...Truth seeking isn't what they get paid for...It's to "sell" you the party line.

Now I don't want to sound the pessimist here because I'm really not. I'm just a bit tired of this "It's my way or the highway"...steamrolling bullshit we all have to wade through.

The dust will settle here and we will get back to talking and sharing ideas...even controversal ones...But we can do it in a more civil manner I think. For the most part guys were drawn to this site because we are of a weird bent...We love fly fishing and learning more than we really need to about the critters that Jason has laid out so well for us here. If it wasn't for him being in Alaska, I'd tell him to get his behind back down here and bring his camera...I have a few more bugs I need to see with a macro lens shoved in their faces...He, he! (Gonzo and Roger would want the lens aimed at the other end but I don't know what that says about them)...Ha!

Maybe one day Louis you and I will run in to each other after a long day astream somewhere and will sit on the tailgate of our vehicles and share a couple cold beers and will listen to coyotes and whipoorwills and owls and I promise the only thing controversial we will have to worry about is just how deep the bullshit might get.

Take Care! Thanks for the comments.

Spence

I don't have a problem with name-calling, unless it's direct and personal between members of this site. Sometimes, name-calling is just honesty: calling a spade a spade. Referring to people who think Obama is a foreign-born Muslim as "loonies" is simply accurate. Ditto for the "crazies" who insist we faked the moon landings.



That's where I strongly disagree. This comic sums up my reasons perfectly.



Agreed. Jon, I'd rather not set off another such discussion... send it around in private if you want.

Hmm. More food for thought here. Good exchange.

Spence, we must be leading somewhat parallel lives here: I too was a political science major, in fact I completed all of the requirements for the degree before declaring botany a second major and coming to the stark realization that a scientific career was going to be more suitable for me than a military/political one. Also, I am a vegetarian - not strict, but in the 90% range and my exceptions are dairy and fish.

Gentlemen, my intended discussion on capitalism and socialism would merely serve to illustrate how BOTH economic systems are beneficial to our favorite pastime and that the loss of either would likely doom the sport. It's really a metaphor for our society as a whole - whether we like it or not, we live in a mixed economic system that we ALL benefit from in some way or another. Herewith:

OK, who among you out there on this site fish primarily public waters? I certainly do, and I bet the vast majority of the rest of you do too. All that we have to pay for this wonderful privelidge in this country, which is NOT available in many other countries, is the price of our state licenses and, of course, the expenses to get there and the equipment we are using. Would every single one of you like to have to pay a USER FEE every time you went fishing somewhere? How about if all of the best waters became private and exclusive? The fact that our Federal, state, and even municipal governments* maintain public waters open to all is a tremendous benefit of "state ownership" of those waters. Is this not, in essence, socialism? Don't we all pay for this together in our taxes??

(*Note: The City of Troy, MI stocks black crappie in a lake about 2 1/2 miles from where I am sitting right now. I must have caught a couple hundred of them last spring. I'd call that a public benefit...)

In contrast, I LOVE good fly fishing gear!! Who amongst us doesn't?? We all love the feel of quality made rods, reels, lines, hooks, waders, etc. Practically every time I pick up a magazine someone new is getting into the fly-fishing gear business. There are literally thousands of different models of fly rods and hundreds of fly reels and that's just a start. The free market and its relentless competition for customers has given us fly fishers such variety and quality that there is simply something for everyone, no matter what you are fishing for or where or how or why. A monolithic state-run enterprise, a la the bad old days of the Soviet Union, could never produce such sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing tools for catching fish as the likes of Orvis, Abel, or even Cabelas (more in MY price range).

Personally speaking, I am very happy that I don't have to go cough up some $$$ just to catch a few bluegill on a fly rod. I am also very happy that I don't have to make due with some poorly designed and shoddily constructed Sovietski-brand fly reel and a cheap crappy line. Realistically speaking, THIS IS how modern American society runs. If all services were provided by private industry, many of them would be so expensive that only the wealthy could afford them. (Remember, the wealthy will ALWAYS have access to good fishing no matter what happens to us peons...) So, we all pay taxes to have governments provide some of them more cheaply. On the other hand, the government generally SUCKS when it comes to producing consumer goods becuase of the lack of competition and therefore the lack of incentive to improve things. So whether any of us like it or not, we already live in a society that involves both capitalism and socialism. Going to one extreme or the other would be the absolute worst thing this country could do to itself. The trick, in my opinion, is knowing HOW to strike the balance.

If anyone out there thinks I'm just full of it on this one, please do comment. I suspect this will make a lot of sense to the great majority of you. Just remember that in the end it is all about the FISHING.

Jonathon

Your computer hacking skills are amazing.

(Edit by Jason: This post by Dryfly was in response to a post by Trtklr that I deleted.)

He has no hacking skills whatsoever - look at how he writes! He just borrowed a friend's computer so he can satisfy his childish urges to act like, well, a child who was told not to do something and so does it anyway in defiance. I now realize that I have been giving this guy way too much credit after all and that what we are really dealing with here is someone with a 7-year-old mentality. I now realize how foolish my own rants were in retrospect because if a child, or an adult (I think) of such childish nature, doesn't want to learn or listen, you just can't make them. Perhaps that's why spanking was invented...

Jonathon

Responding to a deleted post Trtklr made using his friend's account:



No, Trtklr. Plenty of us have responded to your "challenges" in the past with undeservedly polite, clear-headed explanations of the facts. The problem is that you're just too damn stupid to understand them, or to understand that they matter. My position is summed up by this quote from the late Senator Patrick Moynihan:



We've shown you over and over that you're just wrong on the basic facts. Rather than taking that into account and adjusting your arguments, you continue to insist that up is down, black is white, the sky is green, and 2+2=5. It's impossible to have a useful, rational discussion with someone who doesn't adhere to the basic ground rule that a proven fact counts for something and shouldn't be ignored. Therefore, we have no use for you. Shoo.

Just in case anyone here is still in doubt that banning this disruptive half-wit was the right thing to do, here's a private message he sent me:



If he wants to go to FreeRepublic or Stormfront and beg a bunch of assholes to come harass this site, I doubt many will actually bother to respond. If they do, I'll just ban them and empower some other trusted users to do the same. If the problem gets really bad, I can waste an hour or two coding and fix it in any of a dozen different ways... but I doubt it'll come to that. I don't think he realizes I programmed this whole website from scratch and I'm not limited to the same administrative toolkit as someone running a standard PhpBB or vBulletin-type forum.

The bottom line on this banning thing (IMO, at any rate) is that this website is private property. Often, folks think places like this are within the penumbra of the 1st Amendment.

They aren't..

If it were Jason's wish that anybody posting here provide evidence that they always wear a feather boa and a set of elk antlers while participating in the discussion, that is within his prerogative..


The capitalism/socialism discussion is interesting (another poli-sci major here, undergrad anyway and it's so rare that I get to use my education...:))

I'd quibble ever so slightly that the public lands portion of the angling access mix in this country is an example of "socialism". To me, it seems more an expression of socialism's fairly close cousin, egalitarianism. It's an admittedly pretty narrow distinction. But I think if you were to research how the majority of public lands became, well, public, you find there was a capitalistic transaction involved somewhere along the line (even if it was only for a single dollar) rather than a seizure or fiat of some sort or another that changed their status.

That's my narrow ledge of dissent and I'll by God stand on it...:)

I would consider the urges and desires at the root of capitalism to be of more harm than benefit to our sport, although once we include the IC engine, etc. etc., it may be a close call. EXCEPT for the simple fact that the strength and prosperity brought about by capitalism has allowed us the luxury of fiddle-farting around with our egalitarian experiments.

Otherwise, it is virtually always capitalism that is the driving force behind the things that are threats to the future well being of our fisheries and our sport. More logging, more mining, more subdivisions, more dams so we can make the desert bloom and make even more subdivisions. Etc. etc. etc.

I'm not even sure that much of what we may otherwise see as fairly innocuous among the many trinkets than commerce and competition have given us for use in our sport are really good for it. The electronic fish finder is one example that comes to mind. I also have my misgivings about GPS systems. Maybe I'm irrevocably retro, but it seems to me that worthiness to fish the West Fork of the South Branch of Hometown Run is directly tied to how much blood, sweat ant tears we expend to find it. Speaking only for myself, I feel more "worthy" when I've spent half the morning using my maps and ending up at dead ends before I find the right road in than I would by simply getting in the car and punching in a set of coordinates. Burt again, that's just me..

All in all, it is a very good point that some portions of captialism has made our sport "better". All the same, it's going to take a lot more than the advent of chemically sharpened hooks, sharkskin fly line and frog's fanny to ever offset the damage that drive for profit often does to our sport.

Finally, I like to think of the mix of socialist and capitalist influences in our society and whether they work for good or ill in the same way I think of the hot and cold water faucets in the shower. Too much of either and we get scalded or frozen, but the right mix provides an optimal and worthwhile experience. The entirety of the American ideo-political debate can simply be seen as being identical to why I like my shower slightly warmer than yours and vice versa.

Jesus, that was taxing... I deserve a bowl of raisin bran now...:)