On Feb 28, 2006, at 1:40 PM, VeryVerily wrote:
Indeed, I have been very, very patient with all of you. Many users would be screaming in your ear right now, and not without cause. I was mistreated badly once, condemned and banned without due cause. You might do me the courtesy of cutting me some slack now on account of this.
I was going to wait for the case to actually wrap up to comment, since I clerked it, but this is frankly beyond the pale, and since the case is going to go to closed any time now, I'll comment.
I went into the evidence page expecting the request to overturn the ruling to be cut and dry. It was a long time ago, I hadn't heard anything of you in months, I figured you must be being sensible and that it would be an easy matter of summing up your contributions.
I was FLOORED to see that your sole grounds of appeal was that year- old evidence and decisions were a great travesty, and wrote a summary that was an unsubtle hint that providing some of the evidence that the arbcom was asking for would be a good idea. I left a note on your talk page to that effect. You basically told me to go fuck myself, though to your credit you were somewhat more civil than that.
Here's the problem - regardless of the previous case, you were, when you edited Wikipedia, one of the most committed revert warriors in existence. You and 172 still have an all-time record for the size of a revert war. And how were you sanctioned for your 40RR violation? You weren't. You avoided any sanction for being one of the worst of the worst in terms of edit warring until the case you're appealing. And the arbcom, not being stupid, is well aware of that.
So basically you're splitting year-old hairs and ignoring the fact that if that case wasn't the one that brought you down, another case would have, because there were easily a dozen that could have been made.
And yet all you had to do - ALL you had to do - was present some evidence that you were sorry, that you'd mellowed out in the last year, that you could work with others. The arbcom told you that after the first case, I told you that during your appeal, and the arbcom is telling you that again right now. And instead you presented yourself as the same old vicious bulldog ready to attack anything and anybody that stood in his way. You bungled the evidence presentation in this case in an epic manner, and turned sympathetic people against you in doing it.
-Phil