"Y'all need to stop being assholes", while not being conducive to a peaceful discussion, probably comes from somebody whose had a lot of poorly-made assumptions thrown at him.
Just to be clear, my post aims to defend both Joey and michel and break down their reasonings from what I can understand.
Just because michel and Pixels were the primary subject of Joey's reaction post does not mean they were the only subject. Realizing that is a matter of reading the post. And if michel was someone who actually browsed and visited these forums, he might have also noticed that Joey has
already said shit about this issue. To me, this raises the question: why does he apparently care about something he doesn't actually know what he's talking about? And when Joey asked that question, in a more polite way, he didn't get an answer. That, and the stuff about gang-repping that I didn't even know about, is what prompted his reaction to the thread.
It's a strange assumption to make, though, that someone who doesn't take a particular thread seriously because of its OP doesn't care about the actual subject of the thread.
And really, let's make this more general. Why do a lot of us default to the worst possible conclusions we can make about X staff member when it's not specifically something they've said or done, ever?
On the other side, some people (or well, at least one person I recall but there may have been others) were saying michel's post was sarcastic. It wasn't sarcastic, it was satire. Not all satire is rude or intended to convey contempt. I've seen michel be sarcastic and he really lays it on like a wise ass, and even then it's usually at least funny and enjoyable especially if I agree with it. Michel might actually have felt that he had legitimate reasons for making the thread. Maybe his appearance was prompted by complaints in the IRC, for all I know. Maybe those complaints came from people he really felt he wanted to stand up for.
"In that case why didn't he just answer the question?"
Perhaps he felt that keeping to the subject at hand would be more likely to help him make his point. I dunno.
Nonetheless I kind of see how two people refusing to have the same conversation end up in an argument this big.
If I were in Joey's position, I think I would have taken the subject seriously enough not for michel's sake, but for the other people reading it. However I think it's pretty damn ironic that people accuse him of having a personal vendetta against michel. That's just as much of a logical fallacy as saying that michel's history discredits his argument—it doesn't. Furthermore, his appearance here, and the gang-repping, don't have to be interpreted as any kind of a coordinated attack. It could have just resulted from natural human behaviour. Sometimes when I talk to my friends about something that bothers me on the internet, and show them what I'm talking about, they join in with me even when I don't tell them to. This could easily be very similar to that.