Darkside wrote:
This is a shame.
Frank is a top 5 contributor to the board. He's always got sports opinions. He posts more sports related stuff than most here do.
We all to some degree encouraged the bigfan/frank battle. We talked it up, fed it as we do any spat that's mildly entertaining to the onlookers.
Frank did take to following biggie around a bit. He would admit he was largely the aggressor. He would readily admit that. In his eyes bigfan shot all over his blog thread. I'm sure bigfan would say that Frank took advantage of the board and shit on its owner. He'd be right too. You don't walk into a guys house and hand everyone your business card and tell the homeowner he's a dick hole.
The road went both ways.
In the end, the board without frank is much less interesting. I can't stand his Sox thoughts. And his bears thoughts were about as Meatball as they come. But I still enjoyed it. I've spent 9 years reading his thoughts. It saddens me to know there won't be more.
Although I have no information to support this i suspect that this is less than permanent. I also hope that if he's allowed back he learns something about giving shit to bigfan, entertain as it may have been to me personally.
Most of us bear some responsibility to this getting out of hand.
I completely disagree with the statement highlighted above. Frank's feud with BigFan stopped being funny a while ago because their exchanges were clearly becoming increasingly hateful. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't recall anyone encouraging Frank to continue his assaults on BigFan following Frank's initial suspension. Frank has exercised horrible judgment in his behavior here, and he alone is responsible for that.
That said, I think he should be reinstated soon. After all, there are plenty of board regulars who are bigger assholes than Frank. Look at sinicalypse for Christ's sake. He is explicitly attempting to cultivate an identity as the message board equivalent of Pol Pot with verbal diarrhea, but Big Fan seems to have adopted him as something of a house pet, albeit one who badly needs a bath and nips at the ankles of strange men on the street until they consent to taking pictures with him. In any event, there's no consistency to BigFan's logic and there's little reason to extend Frank's suspension any further--that is, unless the board owner has decided to drive his own site into the ground, which seems like a distinct possibility.
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Antonio Gramsci wrote:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.