[Gedanken]

Rich, I can certainly appreciate you view of the thread in question. I'm not sure if you got my Little Bill Daggett reference in that thread, but it in fact acknowledges that your assessment isn't far off the mark.

There's no denying that I took the banned member all the way downtown, and was the intention shortly after the start. The reason for this is simple.

In an earlier altercation, the member had announced that he would be stepping back from the thread instead of continuing the argument. At that juncture he had already given me grounds to issue him with six infraction points, but I stayed that decision since he decided to let the matter drop. Mind you, this was AFTER he had failed to read the reason why the other member had been banned, AFTER it had been pointed out to him by both moderators and members that he'd completely misunderstood the situation, and AFTER he'd come back and did the whole childish Freudian displacement thing.

Disappointingly, after a week the member reneged and decided to sneak back and start the fight again. If he thought that he could try a "death by a thousand cuts" strategy to sneak off and come back to snipe some more later, he was sadly mistaken and I made sure I got that point through clearly. That's the bullying you saw.

There is one angle that you may have missed. Yes, it could have been taken offline. Yes, it could have been done quietly. No, it wasn't done that way. And yes, that was done on purpose.

We had a member here who waded in guns-a-blazing and then had too fragile of an ego to get with the program when other members set him straight. Instead he took it upon himself to be the de facto moderator, then snuck off only to sneak back with more nonsense. This is not the kind of member we have here, this is not the behaviour countenanced on this forum, this is entirely against the code of conduct that makes the forum what it is, and a very public announcement was made of the aforementioned points. Now it got your attention, and although the point may not be obvious to you, members like Greg do get it and tell us that they get it.

You're entitled to still perceive my actions as bullying. However, I do such things for a reason, so please don't be disappointed if no change results from your raising the issue.