Sorry to take part of your post out of its context nel, but this is the reason I am uncomfortable with the idea of banning a member of the community.
You did not take it out of context. That was indeed the thrust of my post.
But the fact is, this is a fairly small and insular, and close knit, group, and no matter how much we may not like any one person’s behavior we simply cannot say that person has no place in this community.
It is precisely because we are small and insular that we can and should have the ability to say that. We are a contained group of friends who have known each other online for years; those of us who are left at this point intend to stay for a good long while; we welcome and integrate unknown, new members into our ranks sparingly. If those new members behave poorly, they are possibly banned (as you point out) or more easily ignored. It is those of us whose membership dates back 3, 5, 7 years whose bad behavior has the potential to impact the community as a whole.
If you, tinwë, or vison, or Lali, or me, or any of the others in this thread were to begin multiple threads with titles like "I AM NOT AN INSTIGATOR!!!", begin threads solely to insult the members and administration of other boards, threaten to sue people who disagree with you (sorry to keep referencing it...it's still my personal favorite), etc etc etc...it would have a profound effect on this board if you acted like that, tinwë, or if I did - particularly when the nonsense repeated itself over a period of months or years. And it is because our behavior would have a greater effect on the community than a newbie's that the community should have a greater, not a lesser, ability to respond to it.
With respect to SF and C_G (sorry, I hate dancing around names when everyone knows who we are talking about): their disputes were substantive. They primarily kept them to the correct subject threads. They definitely hurled personal insults, but they gave as good as they got and rarely whined to others about them (that I recall.) Some complained that the "libertarian debate" spilled into other substantive threads - but again, that was a substantive position (cf "the fucking HoF people are running a dictatorship so they can run everything the exact way they want to while blowing off their own rules," which has nothing to do with this board or any substantive discussion on it.) And on the rare occasion that the libertarian debaters truly spammed the board with their dispute (e.g. SF started a thread that roughly said "Having a wonderful fantastic day" to glory in his scoring a point over C_G), they were called on it and usually stopped. I wouldn't put that into the same category at all. They didn't bother me personally at all, and I definitely don't think that anything they did was a bannable offense.
You mentioned that expelling someone for a repeated pattern of unacceptable behavior is part of any workable human society, but I would argue that incarceration is not the same thing as banishment. In the one case the person is still living within the workings of the societal system, whereas in the other, well, I can’t help but think of the scene from Mad Max where they tied him up, put the giant clown head on him, set him on a horse and sent him out into the desert alone. Granted, being kicked off of a messageboard may not seem quite so bad, but when that MB is a huge part of your life than the analogy might fit.
Well, a more exact analogy to incarceration would be this: we could ban the offender from reading or posting in any private forums, additionally restrict his/her posting in any public forums, and open up a "jail" forum for the offender, in which they could post but in which no other members would participate. So that way, they'd still be within the societal system. I...think we'd effectively be doing the same thing as banning them.
But in the interest of exactness, I suppose more exact analogies would be to a school expulsion or religious excommunication.
Now, I will be very direct. I believe we are dealing with a situation of one, here. Other than hal (and we cannot honestly pretend that we are not talking about him at least in part),
who are we talking about? Why are we having this conversation at all? When hal announced that he was leaving this board (and to his credit, for the first time actually managed to stop posting for more than a month), why was there any reason to drag all of this back up publically rather than for those who still had things to say to approach hal privately? And if there was a need to address hal publically (in a forum he had left, to all outward appearances), then why are we now engaging in this charade of talking about hal, adverting to hal's situation, concerning ourselves with other people who might behave like hal, and yet insisting that this is not a conversation about hal. If not him, than what? Are we anticipating that we will experience a similar pattern of unconscionably bad behavior by other long standing members? That we will be flooded with an influx of new, poorly behaved members? Or is this to deal with the possibility that hal himself may return? If there is any likelihood of the third possibility, I suppose it is a reasonable discussion to have (and I am not sure whether this discussion makes that possibility more or less likely.) But unless we are talking about hal - in which case I suppose we might as well be honest and say that that is what we are doing - I don't understand who we are talking about.
If we are genuinely planning for the possibility of someone other than hal launching us into that sort of protracted drama, then...is this really the most likely eventuality that we need to be spending time on? Why not focus on the far more pressing problem of people gradually drifting into the West, and thinning the numbers of an already small crowd?
I wasn't supposed to respond again today, huh. That worked out really well for me.