Forum Post: Re: the whole Ron Lawl business

First of all, for the record, I find the whole Ron Lawl thing rather immature. This is partially because it just sounds stupid and partially because it hurts debate on both sides; when I use his name and respectfully disagree with some of Paul's views the name gets changed automatically. A stupid attempted pun of that nature makes those who disagree with him look like immature assholes who prefer name-calling to ideas unless you're already familiar with what's going on. I feel this way because I mentioned him once in a post about political activism on the part of OWSers (and by that I do NOT mean telling everyone to vote for Ron P aul; in fact I said quite the opposite) and I had to correct it twice before it was left alone. It also just happened to this post... enough already.

That said, Obama's name hasn't been moderated because so far for every post praising Obama I can name you ten that prefer such lovely variants as obummer, obozo, ob/sama, barack osama (Yes, I saw that) and several more that I don't particularly care to remember or repeat right now. Yes, this is a place where we can have meaningful policy discussions based on our beliefs, and no I don't want us to be hijacked by shills of any sort.

The problem is that when a group of people decide that they want to hijack a forum by posting a guy's name and a string of links over and over, or they just randomly decide to sing his praises on large groups of threads where it simply isn't relevant it's not cool. They're not fostering intelligent debate, they're not even trying to have a discussion; they're simply trying to yell loudly enough that nobody else is going to be heard. It's essentially the same crap the drummers are pulling in Zuccotti Park, and it's no cooler on the Internet than it is in the real world. For that reason, I feel like something did have to be done to keep them from drowning the rest of us out, and while "Ron Lawl" was quite crude in and of itself it did somewhat do the trick. That said, I feel like it's run its course and we'd be better off dealing with spammers and shills on an individual basis than simply blocking out the name.