Russell Crowe sucked. The CGI stuff with the lion and Joaquin Phoenix made the movie watchable. He is a great actor – nailed Johnny Cash in Walk the Line.

Phoenix is a fantastic actor. Walk the line was incredible, and I’m still surprised he didn’t win an award for that one. However, that character itself was pretty creepy.

And Russell Crowe has always been an average actor, although most of the movies he has been in have been great. I love 3:10 to Yuma…but that could also be because Christian Bale absolutely kicks ass as an actor.

1. Both of your examples are from GDT’s, which they have repeatedly said are ‘game on’ for profanity.
2. The exact comment you refer to was “F@ck glover, miller sucks worse”. In that context, you could easily replace the F-word with ‘forget’ and have the same meaning. Hardly controversial. Nice try though.
3. The Hamilton comment went as follows:

Did he snort the foul line aftewards in celebration? Okay that’s inappopriate, sorry, I do respect Hamilton as a man for getting his life in order, but I’m sour that he only got the pro life back in order once he left.

So RJ made a passing comment about Hamilton’s drug use and then PRAISED him for getting his life in order. I’ve seen/heard much worse about Hamilton (though I don’t really appreciate any of it).
4. These ‘controversial’ statements netted a grand sum of 2, count them, 2 responses (likely because neither was targeted at another individual on the site) I’m sure if either of them had been taken to task they would have gladly recanted.
5. It’s also worth noting that you recorded zero comments in either of the threads you cite, making it highly likely you simply did a site search in an attempt to stir the pot.

From my perspective there are two things that should be off limits on the site: personal attacks and trolling. In all honesty, up until this thread was created, that is absolutely all I ever saw him do on this site. He said things that were simply too extreme to be opinion, and he personally attacked people who disagreed with those ‘opinions’. I mean, look at my posts; over the last couple of days I’ve made fun of Heath Ledger’s death, joked about Tony Saunders arm exploding (sort of), and posted a link to one of the most genuinely horrifying pictures I’ve seen in the last year. I’m by no means civil, but I’m also not so much of an asshole to be genuinely disruptive to the progress of a thread. His trolling has managed to derail GDTs, that’s no easy task when you have 1000+ replies and close to 50 users on at once viewing them.

Granted, it seems like over the last couple of days something’s clicked off in his head and he’s bringing more to the table, and I’ll give him credit for that, but it shouldn’t have taken an open forum calling for his ban to make him realize (directly or indirectly) that his act was tired. I also wouldn’t be surprised if after a short time he reverts right back to his antics which is a cause for concern. At this point I’m on the fence because I don’t want to hate the guy, but there are a hell of a lot of smart people on this board with a broad swath of opinions. There are communities on the internet where the intelligent simply do not tolerate the idiotic. This doesn’t have to be one of them, but that doesn’t mean that this community should just openly accept members whose sole purpose is to aggrivate and enrage.

That’s the problem. In an ideal world, he would be ignored, he’d realize that nobody is listening to him, and he’d go away.

But this isn’t an ideal world. This site is growing in popularity, and there will be new people who come here looking for smart Rays talk (and yes, there will be more assholes and trolls). Hell, the people here can’t seem to ignore him. RJ responds to him, Bendix responds to him, others respond to him that haven’t caught wind of his act. Those people respond, a flamewar starts, and it disrupts the thread and derails the topic being discussed. For all the joking that goes around on this site, I’m surprised how rare threadjacks really occur, yet he seems to have mastered the art with the simplest of trolling techniques. The guy should write a book on it, he’d sell millions of copies.

As I said in a previous thread, he has managed to clearly violate a terms of service agreement (yes, this site has a TOS) that was designed to be impossible to violate by being intentionally vague. His posts are akin to spam, and are completely irrelevant.

I have seen it, not from Rays fans. To be honest, I was the only one at the bar wanting to watch the Rays game. No, I have seen this from Yankees fans.