Job opportunity (urgent)

Hopefully you find your way back Steve.

 

Hello!

While he had certainly his merits, you can hardly say he contributed to a friendly discussion climate...

Best regards,
Mac Juli

 

He definitely has his own way of doing things however, he has never been rude or disrespectful to me. I generally take a kindness approach though and he has never had a reason to treat with anything less than respectful.

 

Okay, since it's a Saturday and I had a little time to kill, I actually read Levicoff's diatribe about DI. Just one question... Who is Jack Tracey?

 

Have you ever heard of the TV Show Catfish?

Basically, that’s what DI ‘was’ and kind of ‘is’.

More or less a bunch of people you wouldn’t have over for dinner, most of the aviators are fake, they dont post their real names ..... etc

Steve Levicoff was actually one of the only ones on DI who wasn’t fake.

 

Wow. I miss a lot when I don't log in very often. I am surprised at the tenderness of some here. When I first joined, I vaguely remember Kizmet being rather rude to me. But I stuck around, feelings unhurt, and enjoy the occasional log-in and thread or two. Hopefully by the next time I log-in things will be back to normal.

Good luck surviving the 'rona, all!

 

Hopefully he will at some point. He could kind of go ballistic at times but was also insightful and fun. Not sure since I did not see it, whether the moderation that prompted his departure was heavy handed in his case. On the surface I felt it was perhaps overkill and was not surprised Steve was upset.

One thing I did agree with in his DD post and was amused about is that I too did not think Kizmet is a woman. Could be but early on the way Kizmet posted led me to believe that the person behind it was not a female. The posts seemed to reflect male tendencies.

 

Steve was the first person to welcome me on here and while I did bump into his highly caustic wit I took it in the very dry, sarcastic manner I think he meant it. He knew his onions and was a very responsive person who time and again demonstrated why he was needed on here with his experience and depth of knowledge.

Did you need a thick skin to withstand his fire if you had different opinions, of course. It's going to be duller though without him and I'm not getting into a moderation debate but when it comes to avatars and real names, my board name is my first given name, the picture simply as I didn't have a recent photo when I joined and keep forgetting. I don't mind copping flak under my own name. It reminds of being back at uni!

 

I like to thing manners matter, that how you treat people is a reflection on yourself.

 

I haven't really followed this recent argument but Steve Levicoff, always the drama queen, certainly seems to want to embellish it for theatric effect.

It dates back to the 1990s when it was the usenet group alt.education.distance. That was a very good group in its day, but lacking any moderation it eventually was overwhelmed by trolls and spam. That's when Chip volunteered to set up this board. It's been going for some 20 years I guess, with various ups and downs.

I used to post using my real name, largely because S. Levicoff and R. Douglas (two old timers on the board) used to insist that anonymous posters shouldn't be taken seriously. However I decided that discretion is the best part of valor and changed to a new username. I think that my old username is still active and so technically I have two logins, a huge no-no I guess.

An interesting cast of characters over the years. I wouldn't call it an "old boy's club" though, since most of the old timers are long gone and lots of new replacements have taken their places. (I still mourn the passing of Uncle Janko...)

I was very into it in the early years, as I completed my own DL degree. Then I was on the lookout for something else, a doctorate perhaps or a venture into a brand new field. Today I find that I've kind of lost my interest in formal higher education. I don't really feel any desire to take a formal class and submit myself to some professor, let alone pay today's vastly inflated tuition to enroll in a complete degree program. I've decided that I have all the degrees that I will ever need. I have a computer full of free e-books that I found here or there on the internet, enough to keep me reading for the rest of my life. That's my higher education now, I choose my own readings, progress at my own pace, according to my own and not a professor's interests.

Right. Kizmet is... well, Kizmet. I don't care who she is in flesh and blood life. You are Maniac, that's more than good enough for me. Even those who use their real names are just those names, I've never met most of them. (I have met John Bear and Chip face to face.) As far as I'm concerned, everyone is their posts and that's it. I know as little or as much about each of you as you want to reveal. But the tone and content of the posts do reveal a lot.

The thing that keeps me coming back is that Degreeinfo is like a bunch of familiar, if at times annoying, friends. Given the isolation and anxiety that coronavirus causes right now, that attracts me.

I will say that the board's recent politicization, led in some large part by Kizmet herself, made the board far less friendly and welcoming than it once was. It's started to become a Trump-haters only club. That needs to change if I'm going to be a regular participant again. I'm saddened by Decimon's disappearance, I thought of him as a friend. I miss Me Again too. He could be annoying, but I kind of liked him.

 

Can't take the differences in opinion? Bwt, those sentiments are usually found in the Off-topic/Political discussion section. People have a right to express how they feel.

 

I don't need the aggravation, especially now. Like I said, I post for the feeling of companionship. When the board ceases to feel like a friendly place, then I'm gone.

 

That's not accurate in my case. I maintain that the personal anecdotes of an anonymous poster cannot be relied upon because they cannot be verified and/observed by others. That's all. Many posters with handles have made outstanding contributions to this board and can be relied upon for insights and guidance in any area. But their personal claims about themselves do not add weight to their opinions.

That's a lot different than a sweeping dismissal of anyone who posts under a handle, which is what Levicoff often did.

 

I find it appalling that anyone could read the things that damned FOOL has posted and have any hope other than him disappearing for good. We're all entitled to be offended or not offended by whatever we want personally, but for anyone to watch the inflammatory posts he's made to other people, unprovoked, over and over again and be okay with it is unconscionable. He is an ignorant, immature, needlessly disrespectful, narcissist. I don't find him witty, smart, or funny. I see him for who he is, a joke and a bully, because he does a great job of showing it consistently. Him having the audacity to post crying about how he's been treated after all of the absolute garbage he's posted (and I am laughing my head off at the clown as I type this) proves how deep his personality disorder goes. He's totally unable to see himself as he is and own up to his wrongdoing. Like almost all bullies, he is really just a punk. He can dish it out but he can't take it, and when he gets it back he cries like the pathetic little baby that he is.

He should've never even had the option to leave on his own. I don't know how on earth he wasn't banned a long time ago. There are people who make contributions here and their absence would be a great loss to this board. He is absolutely NOT one of those people and that is a fact based on his posts which anyone can search for themselves and quickly see the problem. There is a mountain of proof, too thick to try and penetrate to extract the few things he's said that might be useful. It's one thing to take a jab at a person here and there, but he went way beyond that WAY too many times. People excusing it or giving it the old "he is who he is" are just chronic enablers and should be ashamed of themselves for being so. He dragged this board into a dark place. His post over at DD is just sour grapes because his trash posts finally got censored here and he can't handle it. Oh, boo-hoo! And just the fact that he resurrected that stuff is another example of the low quality human being he is.

About handles vs. using your real name, well, most people here who have been here for a long time picked their usernames based on what was common during the earlier days of online communication, and that meant picking a pseudonymous handle. Using your real name wasn't en vogue back then, and it didn't really become a normal thing for the average person to do until social media took hold, particularly with Facebook. In my mind, nothing has really changed in terms of the reason for picking a handle over using your real name. If anything, the way people are so quick these days to dox people and do harm to their personal lives via social media, it makes more sense to use a handle today than it did back then. The quality of a person's contributions aren't determined by the name they choose to use, it's determined by the content of what they post. It was that way back then, and it's still that way now. After all, the person we're discussing uses his real name and his posts are utter trash.

If he never comes back, this board will be far better off for it, and new members won't just vanish after 0-3 posts like they have so many times because of his BS.

 

I'd have to disagree here. Sure, Levicoff is a drama queen, and the quality of his posts IMHO went down lately. My guess is he doesn't keep up with the field but still feel compelled to act as the smartest person in the room; it's sad really. But - but! - Steve is one of the Board's originals. In his day, he earned 3 nontraditional degrees. He may be the guy with the most portfolio credit in his TESC degree (an achievement unlikely to be beat, as other methods of earning credit are more practical now), and wrote a post that at a time was the definitive guide to the process. He earned his PhD by distance before it was widespread. He is a published author, one of the two people on this board who wrote a book on Distance Learning (the other, of course, is Dr. John Bear. I believe there were one or two others, but they do not post anymore). He used to be an expert on religious degree mills, and come up with the list of "NIFI criteria" to evaluate these. He's also, I believe, one of the very few people who were sued by the mill operator he helped expose (I believe so were Dr. Douglas and Dr. Bear, on other occasions). Now, of course, he promotes distinction between "online degrees" and what he has, and I think he's full of sh1t on this one; he also is waaay too sarcastic and mean towards people with what he perceives as "lesser" degrees. I do not believe any holder of a legit degree deserves that. Of course, this gives me the opportunity to bust his balls with "my doctorate is bigger than yours" routine, so pure win for me

In short, I think you should respect thy elders, even after they have jumped the proverbial shark. Rich Douglas can be more direct, of course; they have a long history on this board, and Steve knows what he did

 

Since you're really fishing for it, I will chime in. It's hard to take a Trump supporter seriously when he complains that his feelings are hurt. I'm an immigrant, and the Trump movement makes the world a less friendly place for me, and for people less privileged (at least I look like a Caucasian male; this generally makes life easier). Take heart, though; when Trump is out of office, most of this multilateral hostility will fade into obscurity.

 

I'm not sure what you're referring to with "Steve knows what he did."

As for "respecting elders," I disagree that anyone has a special frame of reference or place for reverence. Yes, I've earned seven degrees by DL. Two were done completely by examination (an associate's and a bachelor's). Yes, I've earned two doctorates by DL. Yes, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on this subject. But none of that gives me--or anyone--the right to treat others so cruelly. That, and the persistent need to distort what others are saying or what they've done--was my main problem with Levicoff. For someone with a PhD, he is incredibly impervious to new information and jumps to conclusions immediately. He is routinely self-contradicting--look at him taking an exit in a manner he criticized in others all the time. He is condescending (while, simultaneously, being wrong about what what he's looking down his nose at), rude, mean, and contributed very little to the understanding of the subject. He is loathsome.

What I never did was jump on him about his chosen occupation. I always felt that was his decision--who is anyone else to dictate that? But he couldn't leave others alone even in that area. I do find it interesting that someone with such anti-social behavior would choose to (a) do his degrees by independent study and (b) chose an occupation that could be accomplished in complete solitude. It all fits rather neatly. I never felt the urge to criticize that choice--again, it was his. But I found it interesting that he tried to do that to others, including me.

I don't pity him, mainly because it's not my place to judge his choices and I feel there's nothing to pity. I'm sure he feels that he is not lonely, but alone. And I suspect he enjoys that solitude, breaking it (virtually) here. Too bad he didn't have manners and a more open conversational style. This site seemed to be, for him, a place to come dump all his anger. But he dumped all over others participating on the board, which was hardly fair to them. Did he skewer bad actors? Sure. But he antagonized a lot of others to the point where it was difficult to distinguish criticism from bullying.

I guess I was most disappointed not in Steve, but in those that cheered him on and those in a position to stop him, yet did not. For years. Perhaps the moderator who stepped in finally had enough; I don't know. But I liked the board better when he wasn't around to draw it away from the subject with his antics.