Ophis said:
I.m not fighting with everybody....If you notice through this whole mess, my rep points have stayed around the same. There are alot more poeple out there who feel the same way as I do about this. I think they are afraid that if they speak up, they will have the crew try to bully them into submission. I guarantee you one thing. NO ONE (save a mod) is going to shut me up because they don't like my opinion. I see four or five people here who I am fighting with and your all just pissed that I am not going to cow tow and back off.
I agree 100% that the horse is dead, gone and beaten to death, but I will be damned if I am going to continue to suffer verbal pokes without resopnse. You want the horse to CONTINUE to be beaten? keep it up.
Well, Joe, I beg to differ but your "Rep Power was 68 or 69 at the beginning of this thread and is now 64 indicating a net drop of roughly 400-500 points. No doubt there were many who silently gave you positives, and many who silently gave you negatives. At your membership level, unless they signed their ratings like some people we know did, or otherwise contacted you, you really can't be sure who left what.
I commend you for sticking to your guns (so to speak) even where I disagreed with you on *some* of your points. My main criticism is that you attempted to dictate how others should feel and how they should respond. And you did it over and over and over and...well, the energizer bunny comes to mind. My point is that when you allow your emotions to dictate your actions then you can come across as just acting emotionally and your content, which is valid, is missed. And like the boy who cried "Wolf", if you say the same thing enough times, people will tune it out, all of it, even the good stuff.
Many people here at Fauna are conflicted about Bill. As Sammy said, it seemed Bill was one of those guys who could smell BS from a distance and was not afraid to call it as it was. He had opinions that he came to honestly (we thought
) and they were usually worth reading. For many of us, the shock of finding out that he stole a snake (he did not try to scam someone as you said above, he DID scam someone and got caught by his own stupidity) has made us reassess what we think that we know. Perhaps the response, muted in some ways, is a result of that. But more than that, he owned up to it and took his lumps. He may not have told the whole truth but he confessed to enough to be "found guilty". Usually the really "bad guys" start swearing when they are cornered, continue to deny, send in fake ID's to defend them, etc, etc. Bill did none of that.
Many posts back I asked if it was worse for a previous "good guy" to do this as opposed to a known scheming scumbag, and my conclusion was the former. I stand by that. But as Chuck alluded, it is hard for some of us to pull the trigger on one of our own. Call it what you will, I call it human nature. If your job was to be the executioner for the state of Texas, and your brother, or your mother was convicted of a heinous double murder, could you do the execution? I hope the answer is "no, of course not". Because while you would be angry and disappointed in your family member, you might still love them. I still like Bill in a way, but I am hugely disappointed in him. I could never trust him. He is a lying, scheming, scammer and not particularly good at any of them. But I still have some warmth of feeling, as I am certain some others do.
Lastly, Joe, I apologize for the name calling. That was unwarranted. I still love ya, bro.
