No, people abusing the system got it voted away. If people hadn't kept just saying "tough it out" or "ignore it" and had instead provided a united front against those who did abuse it, then it would not have come to the vote in the first place.
No, people whining that they were getting smites when they didn't think they deserved them is what got it taken away. Look back at all the threads dealing with this. A lot of it goes "Waah, I got smites even I hadn't posted in days" or "I got ten smites after making one post" or such drek. Never mind the fact that there is no telling who issued the smites, or what they were reading at the time. It is quite possible (and more likely, in fact) that instead of one person getting annoyed enough at a post to smite it ten times, you simply pissed ten people off by the tone of your post. And just because it has been days or weeks since your last post doesn't mean that people read them at the moment it was posted. But no, people like to jump to "I'm a victim".
That also means, as of right now, you two are the ones whining and trying to get the world to bend over for you to bring the rep system back.
Please, quote me someplace in my last message where I said that the popular vote should be overturned? Just because I dislike the outcome doesn't mean I'm going to demand that you count hanging chads. When you lose a vote in a democracy, your only choices are to live with it or start a revolution. And since I don't have anywhere near the kind of power to consider a revolution in this case, I'm going to live with it. That doesn't mean I have to like it.
Oh, and by the way... by Mirikon's standard of "strong" everyone that's ever worked for peaceful social reform, from Ghandi to Martin Luther King, Jr, is "weak." After all, they're FAMOUS for "whining until the world bent over for them". Guess they should have sucked it up and "gotten stronger in their own right" by putting up with the bullshit they didn't like, or solved their problems by starting wars.
Yeah, a little hyperbolic, but shifting the scale to something that's harder for uncouth jerks to foo-foo helps illustrate the flaws in the principle behind the thought.
The problem with hyperbole is that you lose context and rationality. Or in your case, just context.
There are many kinds of strength, Dude, and the fact that you're only able to recognize one of them is unfortunate. You want to know why Ghandi and MLK Jr. are strong? It is because they sat there,
without complaining and made the world notice how they were being mistreated. They had the strength to take anything that was dished out at them, and keep moving forward. Never once did they claim that they were victims. That is one of the highest forms of strength. To have this strength, you must first look inside yourself, and get rid of your own weaknesses, otherwise you will break, and you'll lose.
Now compare that to the people here, who keep complaining about how many smites they've received, whining about how they are victims of abuse from mysterious others who must be chain-smiting them, when it could simply be that they pissed several people off, or made several posts that annoyed people. They don't look at themselves, they don't reflect as to whether they deserved the smites they've gotten. They simply complain that people on the internet don't like them, and so no one should be able to do anything to them because they might get their feelings hurt. Comparing mice like them to giants like Ghandi would be laughable, if it wasn't so tragic.
