What Is A Screen Shot, Sir?

Author's Note: The below illustrates how screenshots and thread saves can play an invaluable role in catching neo-cons or neo-DLCers in action on discussion boards.

One could practically hear The MEREgistrate gulp, and his stomach churn, when he typed that question. Caught. Red-handed. Snared in his own ignorance of technology, and a very simple, very basic computer skill, at that.

Screenshotting ain't difficult.

Yes, his participation in the grief, swarm, and lock clique's activities (detailed below) became crystal clear to me on the night of January 21st.

Within 2 minutes of my posting an OP that was critical of the Clintons' ties to Abu Dhabi, there was The MEREgistrate. I've done extensive Oppo Research on the Clintons' ties to foreign donors to the Clinton Library, and - if she's the nom - I honestly believe we're in for a long, hard slog on this issue, especially in key swing states in November. Like Ohio. (Batter up, Ohio! Happy voting today in the primary! I'm up early for a reason.)

As you can see from reading down thru that thread (which I've copied, in case it suddenly disappears now), The MEREgistrate went a bit too far with his biased gaveling, making it a bit too easy to catch him in a blatant lie.

What is a screen shot, Sir?

Among my replies:

It's an objective tool, that can help with digital forensics, for instance.

He climbed down out of his high hollerin' tree, clearly unsure of himself now, and clearly chastened by the implications, making a weak attempt at humor:

You Know, Sir, That Is What A Number Of People Call Me....

An objective tool.

But I was having none of it. He had blatantly lied in one of his weaker, more inane, and more transparent attempts to grief, swarm, and lock a thread that was critical of the Clintons. I replied:

Objective, Subjective, Tomato, Tomahto

Oh, he's a pro-Clinton, pro-Shillary tool all right. But objective? Hell, no! What's worse, he's dishonest about the underlying bias in his rulings.

By contrast, when I wield a gavel in any organization to which I belong, I make sure everyone in the room knows if I have a conflict, a dog in the hunt, etc. The gavel is a trust. I have been awarded gavels. Gavels mean something important to me. The Majesty of the Law means something, too. Even today.

Upthread, I had written:

12. A Screenshot Is an Unalterable Picture of What Shows up on the Screen...

... and could help troubleshoot more than one problem.

- Dave

These were not technical difficulties, folks. This was outright judicial misconduct. I've seen it before, from gavel-wielders great and small. And I know that carefully-collected evidence is the best, tried, and true cure.

13. There Is No Problem, Sir
That is what activating your link shows me.

Horsecrap. Won't take a screenshot to show us all? We're obliged to take his word for it? The Great Oz has spoken.

14. Neither the Original Link nor the Tightened One Shows That up on My End...
... anywhere near the top.

- Dave

In other words, he cherry-picked the most off-topic result he could find on short notice, and tried to use that to twist the meaning of the OP to grief, swarm, and lock it. Caught red-handed at it, and unaware of the possibility that someone besides the all-powerful Mods and Admins might have tech tools, he invoked his already-threadbare personal credibility.

Upthread, he also admits:

4. Then You Have Come To The Wrong Person, Sir
My electronic illiteracy is legend....

There's probably some truth to that blind spot of his, though I suspect he's overblowing it.

Still. Enough e-lliteracy to catch him, red-handed, participating in the histrionic grief, swarm, and lock clique's activities that very important night.

Coming to him for unbiased gavel-wielding amounts to coming to the wrong person, too, Sir, to speak in the vernacular of that oracular.

Once he knew that there was actual evidence to produce to the Admins, he slinked off.

Once other onlookers realized I'd bested him and that he had practically run with arms flailing from the field, they began to address the originally-intended point of the OP.

Upthread, when I had offered to provide the actual proof for others to see his lie, he'd replied:

If You Say So, Sir

I am taking a pork roast out of the oven, and will be otherwise occupied for a while.

I replied:

19. I Say So, and I Copied and Pasted Accurately

No apology was forthcoming. The MEREgistrate doesn't do apologies.

Instead, he hightails it back to the mod hot tub to conspire with his disciples, taking counsel one with each other as to how to deal with the troubling truthteller, who will not fall in line behind the Clintons in the primaries.

Even when there are screenshots of his judicial misconduct, apparently, The MEREgistrate does not feel compelled to apologize from the bench.

Early the next morning, I was surprised to discover myself TS'ed.

Ah, well. Can't fight City Hall after all. After all, The MEREgistrate regales everyone about Chicagoland justice. (With a little too much familiar admiration for the stories of the corrupt courts there, it seems, at least for my taste.)

Maybe it was my best wishes for his culinary enjoyment, after he'd fled the field of debate, that did the deed:

But I Do Hope the Pork Roast Was Fine n/t

Or maybe it was the indigestion he got from having his antics caught that made the pork roast go down like saw dust.

Enyhoo, screen shots and thread saves are a magnificent way to memorialize evidence of the grief, swarm, and lock clique's antics, which will - no doubt - become increasingly bizarre as Senator Clinton continues to lose. They'll be in rare form tonight as results come in from OH, RI, TX, and VT. Mark my words.

Oh? And that first TS'ing, which shocked the hell out of me?

For the record...

At 10:18 a.m. ET on the morning of the 22nd, I sent the following e-mail to mail@youknowwhere.

Skinner -

At your convenience, could you specify whether there is a way for me to retrieve my journal entries?

Thank you, and best wishes to DU throughout 2008.

Sincerely,

- Dave

Let the record reflect that I most certainly DID NOT request reinstatement. I have enough self-respect, and - at that time, still, at least - enough respect for Skinner's efforts to found DU, that I thought:

Well. They give poor guidance to the users, and apparently, to the mods, as well. They apparently cannot tolerate having a real, experienced Parliamentarian or real, experienced gavel-wielder in their midst, especially right now, when their pro-Clinton antics are becoming this shrill and this transparent. I guess I no longer fit with their Prime Directive there.

For my journal entries? I wasn't too proud to beg.

For reinstatement? I was willing to just let the matter lie within their own judgment. Their house. Their rules. Their loss.

No. There was no begging for reinstatement.

At high noon, EarlG replied:

Hello Dave,

I have reinstated your account. We reviewed the situation and decided that the moderators acted precipitously. My apologies for the inconvenience.

It has come to our attention that you may be using two accounts on DU: CorpGovActivist and IdesOfOctober. Members are only permitted to use one account. Please let me know which one you would like to use.

Regards,

EG (DU Admin)

No apology for the activities of The MEREgistrate, either from him or from his superiors.

The only apology here was the apology that the mods had done 'n gone made the clique's existence so, so obvious, giving rise to a hue and cry that went up on the board.

And, to make matters worse for the Admins, I didn't file a motion for reinstatement, but rather, for the transcript (my journal entries).

If the Admin Appellate Court was going to remedy this lower court's gross injustice, it was gonna hafta do so sua sponte. I wasn't about to file the motion for an appeal, so that they could say they acted on such a request.

As a sop to the clique, swarm, and lock clique, though, the Appellate Court trotted out the ol' sockpuppet chestnut.

I replied:

Earl -

Thank you for reinstating my account.

Ides is a different person. He is often nearby, as I am quite sick and almost housebound with my Crohn's.

- Dave

Not something I particularly wanted to reveal. But I was, after all, in chambers (so to speak) with an Appeals Court judge.

Funnily enough, they TS'ed Ides anyway.

A number of e-mails came in decrying my TS'ing. I demurred on explaining what had happened, out of respect for the Appellate Court and its possible published opinion. It never came.

Typically, in real courts, when there is a reversal of a lower court, guidance is handed down, with a published opinion - to the benefit of all involved.

But kangaroo courts don't care about such niceties and formalities.

At 12:40 p.m. ET, I sent this to EarlG:

Earl -

The pro-Clinton bias and completely provable - objectively, provable - rush by The Magistrate that led to his getting caught red-handed in a lie last night requires an apology.

Publicly. He is unfit to be a mod. He is a kangaroo courtroom judge with a badge and a gavel.

- Dave

P.S. I have [redacted poster's gravedancing]* thread forwarded to me, too.

Oh, but don't take my word for it.

The MEREgistrate exults in his power in the strangest places.

As things began to heat up in anticipation of Iowa, NanceGreggs (bless her) started a marvelous gem of an OP: DU Goes to the Movies.

The MEREgistrate had three responses in that light-hearted thread of hers, with that serious point of hers (again, I say, bless her).

All three of his responses in her thread give insights into his skewed mindset of what wielding a gavel or a badge is all about.

But one is especially revealing.

One poster replied to the OP:

16. For the mods: "Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"
From "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre".

The MEREgistrate replied:

True Enough, Sir
We have grey ghosts, and a hot tub....

The grey ghosts are a reference to the mods' badges. Blue ghosts are Admins. Some are one and the same. But to preserve the seeming sanctity of the blue ghost...

... Enyhoo, nevermind the British spelling of gray as grey. An Anglophile like me picks up on stuff like that.

Apropos of nothing, isn't EarlG, David Allsopp, from the UK?

EarlG wrote back, in response to my indictment of The Magistrate as "a kangaroo courtroom judge with a badge and a gavel." His response came at 3:28 p.m. ET:

For the record, the moderators act by consensus. The decision to ban you was made by a group of six moderators. The Magistrate was not the moderator who deactivated your account, nor was he part of the final discussion.

Corporate boards act by consensus, too. I can point Messrs. Allen, Allsopp, and Leitner to a great deal of scholarly literature about how one single, strong personality (e.g., the CEO, The MEREgistrate) can skew consensus decision-making by board members eager to keep their board seats and the accompanying perks.

And that word, final, suggests, implicitly, that The MEREgistrate really disliked being bested on a field where the other party actually had enough tools to fight scrappy. He was in on the preliminary discussion, with a fig leaf of faux recusal from the final decision.

In other words: he led them by the nose, then made a show of leaving the room. Weak-minded mods (but not all of them, as it turns out.)

EarlG/David Allsopp continued:

A lot of people are posting a lot of flamebait right now,

Let's stop this right here, right now. Real courts have rules. Those rules have definitions. Those Definitions apply equally.

The Admins have employed - poorly - a very subjective, "we know it when we see it," Scalia-esque court system. Sorry, but I've seen real courts in action. This ain't even close.

What is "flamebait"?

but you have
been one of the worst offenders. You were warned about this two weeks
ago and your behavior improved for a while, but deteriorated again over
the past day or so. The decision to ban you was based on that fact.

No, it was based on the exchange with The MEREgistrate the prior night during the debate.

And if "flamebait" means I posted thought-provoking threads, designed to get open-minded progressives thinking out a few steps in the future, thinking strategically about how to win in the fall, thinking strategically about how to take on McCain or any other nominee the GOP might substitute, then, yeah: I did.

But instead of hosing down the flamers, and the protected-status, pro-Clinton grief, swarm, and lock clique, the Admins and Mods have taken the view that a thread that might spark actual discussion that could be conducted in a civil manner (Exhibit A: DemocraticWarrior.com) should be locked as flamebait.

When Admin reviewed the situation today we decided to reactivate your account because we haven't specifically given moderators the go-ahead to ban people purely because they post a lot of flamebait. However, you should be aware that there is a limit to what we will tolerate.

*shrug* Don't do me any favors, pal. I only asked for my journal entries. If I'm stinking up the place with factual posts about inconvenient or sore subjects like the Clinton Library donors, let's have a nice, civil, friendly split. I just want my journal entries. You can keep the house.

[redacted poster's gravedancing] thread was permitted because it is not against the rules to attack people who aren't members of DU, which you weren't at the time. As soon as I reinstated you, I deleted the thread.

Regards,
EG (DU Admin)

What a happy horsecrap technicality that is! For the approximate two hours that I was TSed, it was OK to savage me?

One thing about that very cool post of NanceGreggs': I finally found out what The Lounge was for.

“We’ll always have *STRIKETHRUParis* the Lounge.”
(Rick Blaine – “Casablanca”)

I didn't join DU to hang out in The Lounge, but - until the primaries blew over, I thought maybe I should just belly up to the bar there.

Immediately after learning of my Lazarus rebound, I posted at 12:08 p.m. ET:

My Sincere and Fondest Wishes to DU throughout 2008
Thank you all for helping to pass many housebound hours in lively debate and discussion.

I will continue to read many of you with great joy, sometimes great irritation, but always with great affection.

- Dave

Shortly after that, they repurposed GDP.

Cool! I thought. Hit hard on the field. Shake hands off the field. Have a beer at the nearest pub afterwards, even with foes from the field. No longer just confined to The Lounge or the sidelines. Get back in there and mix it up some.

That philosophy has worked well in many arenas, both real ones (like baseball, soccer, or lacrosse), and metaphorical ones (like courtrooms).

Soon after, The MEREgistrate griefed another thread of mine, I complained*, and the Admins apparently sidelined him. Details on my blog.

The grief, swarm, and lock clique couldn't stand it, and I now no longer believe that the Admins were anything but complicit in their activities.

But to drive home the point of this thread: as you watch the fouls on the field that are sure to take place today (given what's at stake, the grief, swarm, and lock clique have probably made playbooks), just remember: screenshots and thread saves can capture the true play-by-play.

; )

- Dave