Dissenter, where do you come from? Are you Jewish?
Thanks for all of the compliments, Sarah, but I think that you're giving me too much credit.
No, I'm not Jewish, and I don't consider myself a leader. I'm just a boring workaday guy who lives in Manhattan and watches politics on television and reads a lot - including the JTF.ORG web site, which I recommend to many of our posters who still don't fully understand JTF's many positions. (Rational Thought, are you reading this?)
As I said in one of my other posts, I've been a fan of JTF since it first went on TV in the early 1990s. I don't agree with all of JTF's positions, but I've never gotten over my fascination with Chaim's take on the issues, and with his uncanny knack to be right about so many of them.
Making decisions about who to ban and who not to ban is difficult. We all have our own views on it. There was even a discussion recently about banning people who dared to dispute the contention that Torah scholars are (collectively, at least) infallible beings worthy almost of apotheosis.
As for me, I'm not even sure if it's right to ban people who come across as Nazis or Muslims or black or Hispanic racists, as long as they're honest about who they are, stick to the issues, back up their statements with facts (or what they believe are facts), and don't use obscenity, insults or threats.
On the other hand - and this is also a valid point of view - there are those admins who believe that we shouldn't waste our time and energy engaging in banter with people who will always hate us. Instead, we should get our rear in gear and start doing more to promote JTF of YouTube.
I wouldn't have banned Fruit, at least not at first. When I first came on here, I simply engaged him. In fact, I registered for that express purpose. I couldn't stand watching him throw insults around and wearing masks and not getting called for it.
But the admins can't tolerate overt threats of violence, or any of the other crazy things which Fruit, in the last stages of his meltdown, was apparently saying.
Don't worry about thinking yourself stupid. Remember what Socrates said - that the more he learned, the more he realized that he didn't know anything.
And speaking of Socrates - whom the Torah sages also admired, if only for his logical thinking - he was the one who invented the method, now called by his name, of letting people talk until they tripped themselves up, as they inevitably did. In the end, it earned him so much hatred that it proved the death of him. So maybe you've got something there, too.