Banned.

I was recently banned from The Paceline forums for two weks.The moderators were 100% justified in their actions, and I would have done the same thing when I moderated forums when confronted with such behavior. When I clicked on the link for the forums, it read:

You have been banned for the following reason:
derailing thread - lance thread.

Date the ban will be lifted: 12-12-2020, 06:00 AM

Yep, I was banned for a couple posts on a thread about Lance Armstrong, which started with a link to a clickbait CyclingNews article where Johan Bruyneel says Lance would have been the best of his generation 'with or without doping'. Magazines have been trotting out these sorts of stories for years during the off-season because they generate traffic from both sides of the divide.

A couple things:

• Lance has never done anything to me personally or to anyone I know.
• I do believe cycling (and the world in general) is better off without Lance Armstrong. Sorry, he's a doper (like most of his contemporaries) and he's a horrible person, Both of these facts are well-documented by any number of reliable sources.

I've seen countless threads like this over the years. They all follow the same pattern. It starts with a link to one of those articles or another reference. People will then post and identify which side of the line they fall on. The pro-Lance will say he was the greatest cyclist ever, and the drugs really did nothing but level the playing field. The anti-Lance side will counter with his lack of noteworthy Grand Tour performances prior to his wins and point out that not everyone responds the same to doping protocols. Back and forth, with neither side ceding any ground.

Then the Pro-Lance side will start in on Greg LeMond, saying he's a doper without any real proof or even a shred of testimony to back up the accusation. It's a strategy that's all too familiar these days. I don't know if LeMond doped or didn't dope, but his contemporaries seem to all agree Greg rode clean. So, if there's no credible proof he doped, why bring it up in a Lance thread? Because Lance did it to deflect attention away from his own doping and it's a common strategy to minimize the extent or impact of the Postal program.

Every fucking thread.

Maybe it's COVID, but I just wanted the noise to stop. These threads go nowhere and do nothing. The lines are too well drawn. I snapped.

First I posted that the Lance supporters were like Trump supporters, in that they both ignored all evidence their heroes were unworthy of adulation. It was simply a ploy to get the thread closed to avoid political fireworks.

No luck.

Then I upped the ante and said all Lance supporters were also close personal friends of Jeffrey Epstein, fully admitting that this was an unsubstantiated insinuation (like LeMond is regularly subjected to).

Boom. That did it. Thread closed, and I was banned.

Zero hard feelings here.

The moderator who closed the thread said you should just ignore threads which offend you, and it's a good policy. I do it all the time on Facebook and elsewhere on any number of topics. Nope nope nopity nope.

Usually I'm pretty measured in what I respond to and how I do it. If I offend someone unintentionally, I try to explain my position or restate it so my intended message is clearer, although I'm not always successful. Sometimes I just have to admit that I'm an asshole and move on.

This time was fully intentional. I'll own this one. Just as I have no hard feelings, I also have no regrets. Maybe next time I'll click on by. Maybe I won't.

If I never see another thread or article about him, I'll be happy because the world moved on.

Even this post is one too many.