QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Mon 12th October 2009, 4:43pm)
In regard to this proposal:
"Piotrus topic banned
3) Piotrus (talk · contribs) is topic banned from articles about Eastern Europe, their associated talk pages, and any process discussion about same, widely construed, for one year. This ban is consecutive with any editing ban."
If this idiocy is enacted -- and it probably will be, given the vindictive nature of some arbitrators -- then I hope that Piotrus follows my advice and starts writing a book based on his knowledge of Polish history. Really, why is he giving away all of this stuff when he can be published by a professional media company and get paid for it?
Penalty creep. For really outrageous behavior, one year topic ban. For mild, possibly even positive behavior, one year plus three months. Or did Coren mean "concurrent"? Whatever, this is the first time I've seen a "consecutive" remedy. Has this been done before?
QUOTE(Malleus @ Mon 12th October 2009, 5:32pm)
I find small town America really scary. God knows, the big ones are bad enough.
It's just politics. The area is really nice, and that particular small town is pretty much the worst, not quite sure why. It may be fine if you live in it. I lived in a smaller town that was the second next town West on the state highway, maybe another ten or fifteen miles further on, and it was one of the nicest small towns in North America, population 1000. Town Meeting town, like most of them around here, and when we moved there, having come very recently from California, and this is supposedly the closed, uptight East Coast, Massachusetts, we were immediately invited to participate in town government. I'd walk into the little grocery store which was where everyone gathered, and, always, and immediately, there was someone we knew in there. The chief of police might be there, yakking up a storm. The local minister, who had been a professional baseball player, and who was an excellent poet, often worked the cash register. Two U.S. Poet Laureates lived in the town, and I could say more. We moved to a larger town because of the kids, we were adopting another, and we saw that we were always driving to events or schools or shopping, etc. Otherwise, we'd still be there.