Alright, that's a fair compromise.

Agreed, and thank you.

As for a flame war, the only dissenters I saw were myself and 28, and 28 is the last person here that I'd expect to see "flaming" anyone.

There were some of the typical 'anti-label' dissenters, including Trucker and Blackmyheart, who launched some attacks on me, and there were a few others, including Red Cocoa, who dissented on the opinion that people will react in disgust to any sexual term with the 'philia' suffix attached to it due to the stigma aimed at the 'pedophile' term.

And maybe you don't, but I at least have better things to do than to get involved in a protracted fight over a damn word.

I do, and that was one of the main reasons I got so angry when you felt, for about two days, that the damn word was something worth getting hot and bothered over.

I see what you're trying to do here and I don't care for it. The only person I said anything about in terms of "clamoring to have sex with us" was you. I made no such accusations against the board, so don't be dragging the entirety of GC into this. It's between you and me.

This is a claim you have made against the bulk of the board on many occasions, and it makes even less sense to direct it at me alone since I have never said anything remotely implying that I thought there were hordes of AGs out there who would be lining up outside my house to have sex with me if intergenerational sex was legal I sure as hell do not believe that, and the matter is beside the point at any rate.

Thanks again for proving my point about your favoritism.

I'm not sure how making it clear that I have less problems with Minstrel because he doesn't attack the entire community like you do on a regular basis to constitute favoritism. I am obviously going to have less problems with someone who usually doesn't do the things I find the most offensive.

And by the way, things were pretty peaceful between me and the rest of GC while you were gone. And no, I'm not telling you to leave; I'm just pointing out that you have a way of stirring up my ire, due to your maddening need to be the dominant person on this board.

Your problems with me are more personal than with others because I think other people give you too much of a free ride over the past two years (they didn't prior to that; remember how many people on the board utterly detested you for a year or two after your initial change of position and then that matter with the charity incident that I will not go into any more detail about? Many posters weren't giving you a break then...). This is similar to how you believe that too many people have given Minstrel a free ride for his negative points. I told you that elsewhere in this thread. This is why I have a way of stirring your ire, and why you feel the need to attack me more than others if I say something you don't like, because I don't overlook your attacks on the community nearly as much as people over the past two-three years have, and I also told you why that is the case. Hence, you find it "maddening" that you perceive me as trying to be the "dominant" person on the board, which is your way of saying that you dislike the fact that people listen to me so much in comparison to how much they listen to you. I told you why that is the case too, and again, the key to these things are a combination of the following: 1) trustworthiness, due to the lack of incidents involving me compared to your breaches of that trust in the past; 2) confidence in my sexuality and also my opinions, something you do not evince; 3) my level of respect for the community at large compared to yours; 4) My emotional stability in comparison to yours.

This is why so much of your personal anger is directed at me, and this is why you felt the need to attack my proposal of a new term so much, because you have a general dislike for anything I say or propose that you think may become influential on the board, simply because it's me who is proposing it. I highly doubt that you would have had anything near as much of a hostile reaction--or even a 180 in your views overnight--if it was 28 who made the proposal instead of me.

Please also note that things would have stayed peaceful had you chosen not to attack me like you did over the word issue. If you feel I disrupt your peace of mind on the board simply by my presence, even when I don't say anything against you, then that is not my problem, but your own.

Not true. I made a handful of admittedly ill-conceived points about you in the context of the issue, whereas you turned most of your post into an attack of me. I fired some pot shots, but you got out the big guns. Not even close to the same thing. But whatever. I don't even care anymore.

No, I spent a portion of the post telling you like it is as I see it, just as you have done more than enough times to both me and the entire board at large. No one else has the compunction to do that to you for the past few years, so I disrupt your comfort zone by doing so.

Irrelevant. It isn't the quantity of his posts but the quality of them that disturbs me. Actually I wouldn't have said a word to him if not for the fact that he outright attacked kissbyalice for a post that was not intended to be insulting. Then I offered a little good natured ribbing to try to get him off his mopey ass, at which point he made it known that wanted to say something to me that would've been censor-worthy. He's gotten away with this negative bullshit for years without so much as a gentle reprimand from anyone. Although it has irked me for some time, I have never said a word to him about it. I'm not asking him to be a Pollyanna, but come on . . . Well, he can go fuck himself sideways for all I care at this point. I have no more sympathy for him.

I'm not going to defend Minstrel on these points, because you do have a legitimate reason for being upset at him, and you feel that the board has given him a free pass on this. But as I also tried to say, this is the same reason why I have been hard on you at times, because you need someone telling you these things when your behavior gets like it does periodically, just as you feel Minstrel needs at least one person on the board to do.

See, this is what you don't understand about me. Most of the time my critical comments are not made in a spirit of negativity but as an attempt to point out what I saw as flaws, so that they can be improved upon.

If that is true, then you need to be willing to take it as well as dish it out. I proved to you that I was willing to dish it out to friends when I felt it was warranted, and I provided you with ample examples in my last post, including one that went down over the past few days.

Granted, I could be a lot more judicial and tactful about it, and I'm working on that. The comment was not a cheap shot; it was an observation that you are not perfect in your judgment, and that in fact none of us are. We are all biased, all of us. I at least try to overcome my bias by erring on the opposite side so that my perspective balances out.

Constantly playing "devil's advocate" does not "balance" anything out, it simply makes you sound like you are rabidly against the side that you claim to actually be supporting. It's an excuse to fight for the side you really believe in by claiming you have a tactical reason for simply pretending to do so. I do not believe that I am always right, but I try to take the side that scientific evidence supports, rather than one that is entirely "feel-good" from an emotional perspective, and you do not do this. Not all sides are equal in terms of scientific objectivity. If I walked around here all day talking like a rabid anti while assuring everyone I was actually for the opposite stance, and that I just did acted contrary to my "true" beliefs for the purpose of "balancing" my perspective by playing a never-ending game of devil's advocate, I would sound utterly foolish, because too many other people here have made the same claims, and it turned out to be total B.S. (Does anyone here remember how Itinerant Giggles and Alice Christian used to make the same "devil's advocate" claims, when both later revealed what their stances really were?). C'mon, Markie, people on this board have been around too long to believe the "perpetual devil's advocate" nonsense.

ou keep saying I feel guilty and am trying to appease the other side, which is bullshit. If you followed my MAP-related postings at DU you would notice that I consistently fall on the opposite side there. The plan is to make both parties see this issue from the other side and therefore bring us closer to each other's perspectives.

Pretending to take a side opposite to what you actually have--on a near-constant basis--makes you come off as disingenuous and unstable, not as being "balanced." I have tried to tell you this, but you prefer not to listen. Acting differently on two different boards does not make you come off as looking honest or stable, and people both inside and outside of the community need to feel they can trust each of us.

The DUers have actually changed with new knowledge, but GCers have generally not. Guess which group appears to be more open-minded?

Maybe because there is no knowledge coming to the fore that contradicts the majority stance here? You are not being open-minded by paying respect to a stance that has no scientific validity behind it. Taking the side that empirical evidence suggests is objectively true is better than waffling between both sides of a matter just to come off as "balanced." I think the quest for objective truth is more important than a quest for "balance" between two conflicting viewpoints.