Towards a new RI

[BrandonD]

who even slightly irritates our sensibilities.

"The Jew screams in pain as he strikes you."

Just an irritation to my sensibilities. Obviously not to yours.

Yes that is an irritation to my sensibilities, because it is a cruel generalization. But that's my point. I still wouldn't wish whomever posted that to be banned, unless it was the overwhelming wish of the majority of the participants/moderators in this forum. I am not so arrogant as to think I alone am the ultimate arbiter of who is "evil" and "good" on this forum.

And despite the fact that (IMO) aggressive foul-mouthed attitudes such are yours are one of the main things hindering calm and measured intellectual discussion, I would never wish for you to be banned either. You are a very smart and insightful guy with much to offer, and for the most part I agree with your point of view (with perhaps a few exceptions on the woo end of the spectrum). I just think your method of dealing with people you disagree with is not constructive or conducive to the type of environment I think we'd all like to have here. That is really our only main beef, at least as far as I can tell.

But what the hell, maybe I'm totally wrong. Seriously, I'm not being facetious here. I don't consider my point of view to be unalterable. I just think that a forum for intellectual discussion requires at least a minimum level of civility which must be adhered to by ALL participants. If someone is doing evil or racist things and yet staying within the rules of civility, then we alert the moderators and they decide on the final course of action. We do not engage in a Bill Oreilly public spectacle of expletive-filled outrage.

[Elvis]

who even slightly irritates our sensibilities.

"The Jew screams in pain as he strikes you."

Just an irritation to my sensibilities. Obviously not to yours.

Yes that is an irritation to my sensibilities, because it is a cruel generalization. But that's my point. I still wouldn't wish whomever posted that to be banned, unless it was the overwhelming wish of the majority of the participants/moderators in this forum. I am not so arrogant as to think I alone am the ultimate arbiter of who is "evil" and "good" on this forum.

And despite the fact that (IMO) aggressive foul-mouthed attitudes such are yours are one of the main things hindering calm and measured intellectual discussion, I would never wish for you to be banned either. You are a very smart and insightful guy with much to offer, and for the most part I agree with your point of view (with perhaps a few exceptions on the woo end of the spectrum). I just think your method of dealing with people you disagree with is not constructive or conducive to the type of environment I think we'd all like to have here. That is really our only main beef, at least as far as I can tell.

But what the hell, maybe I'm totally wrong. Seriously, I'm not being facetious here. I don't consider my point of view to be unalterable. I just think that a forum for intellectual discussion requires at least a minimum level of civility which must be adhered to by ALL participants. If someone is doing evil or racist things and yet staying within the rules of civility, then we alert the moderators and they decide on the final course of action. We do not engage in a Bill Oreilly public spectacle of expletive-filled outrage.

Yeah what's all the fuss? "Jew" is just a word.

[BrandonD]

Jakell's urging of readers to go visit white nationalist sites really had nothing to do with me at first. It was me noticing what he was doing- and then noticing that he was doing it again, that led to our ongoing clashes. It certainly is true that he's been evasive about this and likes to play games, provoke etc.

Regarding certain comments urging that we focus on tolerance of and coexistence with those promoting hateful ideas, I'll hazard a guess that the vast majority of those advancing this position are white men from the cultural majority, straight, cis-gendered, native-born? Or at least most of the above? If so- and with all due respect- I've got to wonder how this might influence your perspective regarding the inclusion of neo-Nazis, and other such racist/fascist sympathizers.

What do you think these sorts of individuals might do to this board with regards to marginalized and oppressed people?

Yes your categories do apply to me: a white American male who doesn't have a high opinion of white people, Americans, or males.

My sympathies are always towards marginalized and oppressed people, and I definitely wouldn't like the idea of including those hate groups you mentioned. But that is what moderators are for, correct?

I can't say that I've read every thread, so perhaps certain people here do secretly harbor hateful ideas. If, in your opinion, someone has made their hateful POV clear and apparent, then that is the point where you alert the moderators with your evidence. If the moderators agree with your presumption and consider them a legitimate bad apple, then that person would surely be removed, would they not?

However, if the moderators do NOT remove the person after your request then consider the possibility, however remote, that perhaps you might be mistaken. Perhaps that other person is not actually your enemy, bent on thwarting your goals. They are just a person with their own unique experiences and a slightly different POV, and perhaps you can actually reach a common understanding without exiling them from the forum.

At what point in the process do we viciously and publicly attack people we do not agree with? I'm surprised that I'm even arguing this point, I would think it was totally obvious here.

Not that it matters, but you seem to generally keep it together from my POV. My request which has been depicted as wishing "everyone would get along" is actually a request for people to communicate in a more civil manner. Perhaps this will result in turning this place into a haven of fascists, but I seriously doubt anything remotely like that will happen. What WILL happen, I strongly suspect, is that threads will go on much longer before being derailed with emotionally-triggering negative comments.

[BrandonD]

Yeah what's all the fuss? "Jew" is just a word.

Please answer this: If the poster who made that disparaging Jewish joke is in fact racist and a negative influence on this forum, then why have the moderators not banned him or her?

Are the moderators incompetent?

Or, perhaps have you guys taken one too many rides on the McCarthy rollercoaster?

People get pissed off and say things they do not necessarily mean ALL the time.

I am making a plea for a little sanity here.

[Elvis]

Just enjoyed a splendid day with Project Willow, Twyla LaSarc and Perelandra at the art street fest Willow organized. Between exhibits, live music and helping as we could with the festival, we had some great RI-themed conversations, mused over 82_28's plea not to fuck up the forum and I think we all expressed a general optimism for its future.

Sounds great. Wish I'd been there.

That would have been epic, Jack, and of course the conversation "threads" were all over the place not just about RI. Come out west sometime when 82_20 is in town! another member we missed this time.

Better than banning Bluenoseclaret: ignore Bluenoseclaret. Completely.

Don't you see what happens after that? Twenty motherfuckers from Stormfront and whatnot eventually find a home here to talk about the Jew animals on 80% of the threads, and they can debate their racist brethren from the KKK about whether the Arab animals are worse. We can ignore all of them too. As long as it's a new RI, where everyone is nice to each other and no one says fuck.

I am amazed at how many of you care about AD boring you or something, and yet not this:

As the Polish proverb says:

“The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.”

Perhaps this should be modernised to:

“The Jew cries out in pain as he bombs you.”

Stuff of this caliber is actually everywhere on the Internet at the moment. Hate speech of various kinds, usually camouflaged up in some legitimate grievance. It is what will predominate here sooner or later if you allow bluenoseclaret to be ignored.

.

I must say, I didn't see that "cries out in pain" thing where it was posted, I skip past much of the multi-thread Israel/Palestine discussion. If that was posted as a sincere sentiment I wonder why the poster wasn't just banned; maybe I'll go look at the context. And yeah, ignoring the obvious antisemites who never quite cross the ban threshhold might not be the best tactic, but the overreaction to them is boring and does make the board look like that's almost all we talk about. I think shunning can work on one person; there's a good chance they'll simply go away. If not, and the pile draws flies, you're right and the muzzless come off. When this came up on Saturday, I think all four of us agreed that the overractions were doing more harm than good. (And at least one speaker was NOT as polite about it as they are online. )

[Searcher08]

Jakell's urging of readers to go visit white nationalist sites

Stop being such a queen. I've gone to bat for you before like bph is here, valiant white knight that he is, but I'm all out of fucks to give about fairness to you. You're singlehandedly destroying this place, AD.

If you're not a textbook, intentional, progress-disrupting online persona managed by some group tasked with delicately preventing the RI community from achieving consensus and time-efficiently synthesizing OSINT data into evidence of crimes of state, then I'm sad for the members of your IRL sphere of influence that they have to accomplish their self-organizing for the greater good in clear spite of your fascistic-autistic divisiveness, interrogations, polarizations, and all the shit-stirring, finger-pointing bullshit. It's for sure giving this board the cancer, and I can't imagine how often you must get accused down at the community center of being another Brandon Darby.

If you ARE for real, then I hope you eventually realize what a controlling asshole you've always been, underneath all the patronizing italics.

I'll never forget the way you treated Rachel Begley, and I wish that behavioral pattern were more an aberration for you than a dot on the scatter-plot of your "contributions" here.

I agree with your assessment word for word.

When someone is taking a heroic stand and is legally fighting forces - that are physically threatening her and her family - forces that murdered her Dad - and comes to a place for assistance and respite and to share - and gets treated the way AD consistently treated her, was appalling.

It is *the same* to what AD is still doing in the Eqypt thread with Alice, posting a mountain of information jamming CopyPasta, which she then debunks forensically before another time waste mountain comes in. If someone doesn't submit (and Rachel certainly didn't, she thought he was a prat) then bury their message and try to shred their credibility with a snowblower load of CopyPasta. It is the same with jakell. Same on this thread, same behavior, full of as you describe:
fascistic-autistic divisiveness, interrogations, polarizations, and all the shit-stirring, finger-pointing bullshit.

[Sounder]

Thanks psynaps, it's good to hear from someone other than one of us Pavlovian dogs on this issue.

I am an anti-banner. (In principle, practically speaking I'm fine with whatever the mods feel they must do to keep the board in shape.) There will always be lairs, conscious or unconscious, in every group. ((We all lie, unconsciously at least.)) When one is banned, the next layer of lies will be yet more subtle. I want the easy lies to confront.

Like those of the George Soros set. Those are easy lies.

[American Dream]

It would be great to see a little more thoughtful engagement with issues around what these sorts of individuals might do to this board with regards to marginalized and oppressed people...

[Sounder]

edited Searcher08
posting a mountain of (Georgr Soros sponsored) information jamming CopyPasta

It would be great to see a little more thoughtful engagement with issues around what these sorts of individuals might do to this board with regards to marginalized and oppressed people...

Color me off, but I and many others, I suspect, are more concerned about what we are doing to this board, right now, rather than with hypotheticals.

The constant implication is made by AD that he has great commitment to the marginalized and oppressed. So do I, but I'm not going to embed that in every other bit of rhetoric, because that would be irritating.

AD supports the marginalized and oppressed by pimping for the globalists, while I feel that a global government would facilitate the harmonization required for multinational corporate rape of the planet. (And that would be very bad for the marginalized and oppressed.)

But yeah, wouldn't some 'thoughtful engagement' be good? Geez what a cheesehead think tank phrase.

[jakell]

Jakell's urging of readers to go visit white nationalist sites

Stop being such a queen. I've gone to bat for you before like bph is here, valiant white knight that he is, but I'm all out of fucks to give about fairness to you. You're singlehandedly destroying this place, AD.

If you're not a textbook, intentional, progress-disrupting online persona managed by some group tasked with delicately preventing the RI community from achieving consensus and time-efficiently synthesizing OSINT data into evidence of crimes of state, then I'm sad for the members of your IRL sphere of influence that they have to accomplish their self-organizing for the greater good in clear spite of your fascistic-autistic divisiveness, interrogations, polarizations, and all the shit-stirring, finger-pointing bullshit. It's for sure giving this board the cancer, and I can't imagine how often you must get accused down at the community center of being another Brandon Darby.

If you ARE for real, then I hope you eventually realize what a controlling asshole you've always been, underneath all the patronizing italics.

I'll never forget the way you treated Rachel Begley, and I wish that behavioral pattern were more an aberration for you than a dot on the scatter-plot of your "contributions" here.

This sounds almost paranoid, an abstract notion, but I think I've encountered one of these and engaged them on a regular basis.

It wasn't quite an empty container, but seemed to start off as a regular poster who was quite impressionable, who suddenly displayed surprising and previously invisible in-depth knowledge and abilities during discussions. Quite a few of us decided that she was allowing others to use her account when certain sticky situations arose that needed a more 'expert' touch.
Also, the character seemed to revert to the default person for the day to day conversations.

[semper occultus]

Nevermind. Deaf ears.

...ahh....did I imagine that someone was spreading rumours around town of your "demise" on the board.....happily seems they were mistaken....or I was..

[BOOGIE66]

Something people might consider when posting is "attack the post, not the poster." A post can be dissected and its weaknesses attacked if it is a shit post with no valid points.
Instead of questioning the motives of others posts or continuing a blood feud because of a slight or percieved slight in the past just pulls discussion into petty bickering.

Address what is being said, instead of focusing on who said it.

[elfismiles]

More good ideas.

RE: getting rid of GD ... that was the extreme end of the idea of somehow making the sub-forums used more and more appropriately. There certainly are tons of things that are difficult to categorize.

As for funding ... afaik its Jeff footing the bill with tech help from PW (frontend design elements) and JD (backend techy mechanic). I'm sure that's an oversimplification but its the best approximation from the data. And of course folks can help pay those bills with the the DONATE link at the top left ... oh wait, I thought there was a PayPal option somewhere? That link at the top left is to an outdated 2013 fundraiser campaign at indiegogo:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/rigo ... ition-2013

EDIT: the PayPayl donation button is at the old blog (version 2.0) but the link is dead.

What We Are.

Rigorous Intuition has been around since 2004. First as a blog, lately as a book, but most enduringly as a community of some of the Internet's most fearless and passionate minds committed to asking hard questions in pursuit of simple truth.

Why We're Doing This.

In nearly ten years, this is RigInt's first fundraiser. We're doing this now because we've grown enough that we really need to. Plus, we're kinda broke, and have debts we'd like to repay.

How Much We Need.

We're setting a goal of $3.500. This includes:

$300 to repay Drew for his out-of-pocket expense covering our move to a stable server on Rackspace in 2012.
$500 to cover server charges for 2013.
$500 to Project Willow for web design.
$1200 for 2013 tech support.
$1000 for 2013 growth.

And that's about it.

SO ... a new fundraiser and strategic plan for the future?

how about this idea

a single subforum for meta-discussion about the forum itself - thoughts and ruminations of a more meandering and subjective type, like music i'm listening to, is the Board rubbish, etc etc

and then keep all the discussions about the who and why of the forum itself out of the targetted discussion on specific topics, issues or events

if a person is disruptive consistently to the vibe of the forum or to the generally respectful and collegial community, they get reported and reviewed, if they are a genuine disruptor or hater of any type they are banned


this thought led me to a couple of questions I hadnt really considered before about the structure of the forum and its implications for the 'state' of the forum

i almost feel embarressed to ask but, who does pay for domain and the hosting of the forum?
who controls the number of mods and what they can and cant do? who can remove the mods?
who looks at membership applications and monitors them or analyses them in any way?

perhaps if people want a better forum and quality of discussion (as i do) they have to be more active in maintaining the forum

i advocate

banning no-one
getting more mods on the case
reporting behaviour to the mods that you think breaches the rules or the 'spirit' of the forum (instead of hinting at posters and their crimes)
keeping personal arguments in PM discussions

i dont quite understand the sub-forum proposal, are we saying get rid of General Discussion completely and file everything into a sub?
what about stories that are hard to categorise or change as they go along?

and how about all taking a breath, toning down the attacks, and getting on with our pursuits

[elfismiles]

That's the problem with anonymous forums users, you never really know if they are real.

I'd forgotten about the Rachel Begley / DesertFae debacle ...
search.php?keywords=&terms=all&author=desertfae

And the other seekers of note who've passed through but not stuck around like John Judge, Chris O'Brien, and others...

Jakell's urging of readers to go visit white nationalist sites

Stop being such a queen. I've gone to bat for you before like bph is here, valiant white knight that he is, but I'm all out of fucks to give about fairness to you. You're singlehandedly destroying this place, AD.

If you're not a textbook, intentional, progress-disrupting online persona managed by some group tasked with delicately preventing the RI community from achieving consensus and time-efficiently synthesizing OSINT data into evidence of crimes of state, then I'm sad for the members of your IRL sphere of influence that they have to accomplish their self-organizing for the greater good in clear spite of your fascistic-autistic divisiveness, interrogations, polarizations, and all the shit-stirring, finger-pointing bullshit. It's for sure giving this board the cancer, and I can't imagine how often you must get accused down at the community center of being another Brandon Darby.

If you ARE for real, then I hope you eventually realize what a controlling asshole you've always been, underneath all the patronizing italics.

I'll never forget the way you treated Rachel Begley, and I wish that behavioral pattern were more an aberration for you than a dot on the scatter-plot of your "contributions" here.

This sounds almost paranoid, an abstract notion, but I think I've encountered one of these and engaged them on a regular basis.

It wasn't quite an empty container, but seemed to start off as a regular poster who was quite impressionable, who suddenly displayed surprising and previously invisible in-depth knowledge and abilities during discussions. Quite a few of us decided that she was allowing others to use her account when certain sticky situations arose that needed a more 'expert' touch.
Also, the character seemed to revert to the default person for the day to day conversations.

[solace]

Yeah what's all the fuss? "Jew" is just a word.

Please answer this: If the poster who made that disparaging Jewish joke is in fact racist and a negative influence on this forum, then why have the moderators not banned him or her?

Are the moderators incompetent?

Or, perhaps have you guys taken one too many rides on the McCarthy rollercoaster?

People get pissed off and say things they do not necessarily mean ALL the time.

I am making a plea for a little sanity here.

Yeah, he probably just forgot to say Zionist by mistake. Does happen, right?