A Toast to Banned and Disappeared Posters

[barracuda]

Has anyone seen Montag around lately? Haven't seen him here in a couple of weeks now.. did he get mad about something?

Yeah. When it turned out the whole WikiLeaks thing was for reals, he left in shame.

[lupercal]

Has anyone seen Montag around lately? Haven't seen him here in a couple of weeks now.. did he get mad about something?

Yeah. When it turned out the whole WikiLeaks thing was for reals, he left in shame.

A real gatekeeping LHO psyop, no argument there, but you're saying you don't know anything about Montag?

[barracuda]

Naw, I was just joshing you. I figure he joined the French Foreign Legion, or maybe Anonymous or something. Moved to Sweden, maybe.

You might try a pm.

[AlicetheKurious]

I figure he joined the French Foreign Legion, or maybe Anonymous or something. Moved to Sweden, maybe.

You might try a pm.

He sent me a pm just over a week ago, saying that he found the groupthink on the subject of Wikileaks "weird", that it had given him "a whole different view of RI" and that he would be reducing his posting on the forum.

I hope I'm not betraying a confidence, but I've been feeling a little weird myself, and wonder how many others are feeling uneasy in the current atmosphere but not speaking up.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I do miss the multi-lateral, vigorous, critical debate that I always associated with this board, which coincides with the apparent emergence of an alienating echo chamber with lots of "Amens" and back-slapping and unresponsiveness to information or opinions that don't fit the script. Wikileaks seems to have just sucked up a lot of the energy here and left little for timely debates about what else is going on in the world. Just in general, I don't feel I'm learning as much as I used to, which is a huge part of what made RI so attractive. I don't know if it's my imagination, but there seems to be fewer active posters as well.

Finally, the old RI (I think) would have made mincemeat of a poster like "Hacktivist" blowing in here and demanding agreement based on his secret, inscrutable knowledge, then explicitly threatening to "silence" dissent. Instead, few seemed to find his attitude objectionable and in fact he's been quite warmly welcomed by some.

Maybe it's because of the holiday season, and most people are preoccupied with RL. Time will tell, I guess.

[Nordic]

I've been extremely preoccupied with real life, and I find that yes, the Wikileaks thing did sorta take over. I was kind of bored with that, in a way, because it seemed to me that debate over the "realness" of Assange is kind of pointless, seeing as how all we can do is speculate. Nobody really knows anything at this point.

Then the leaks themselves were a bit overwhelming I think, to the point where the subject became Assange himself, rather than the content of the leaks.

Of maybe I'm completely wrong, since I have, up until just the past day or two, been completely too busy to do much here, can't even keep up. I don't even know who "Hacktivist" is, I completely missed that.

[AlicetheKurious]

it seemed to me that debate over the "realness" of Assange is kind of pointless, seeing as how all we can do is speculate. Nobody really knows anything at this point.

Sure, but I thought that was the exact sort of thing this board was about: taking a scalpel to deep politics, using rigorous logic combined with intuition to dissect widely accepted truths, sifting through clues about who and what are really behind so many official stories. Given the prominence of the Assange/Wikileaks phenomenon, especially in the mainstream media, if that's pointless, then almost everything else we do here is pointless. Maybe it is, but clearly those who are working constantly to shape our perceptions don't think so, and I don't think they mean us well.

[Nordic]

You're right, Alice, but I suppose what "bored" me in this case was the lack of evidence one way or another. It seems that there was nowhere to dig, or nothing to find when we did dig, and instead, we had to rely on merely infering what we could from the leaks themselves, which, based on the fact that only a small percentage have actually been released, is a statistically insignificant route to attempt.

Or maybe it's just not my cup of tea? I don't know. Like I said, maybe I've just been too busy for once! There's a good chance I don't actually know what you're talking about, since I haven't been able to go anywhere near those 50 plus pages of the main Assange thread!

I'm more fascinated at how the leaks confirm things we already know, and what the released ones reveal that we did not. I think we got a bit overloaded, I mean, just the Yemen revelations are worth a good solid thread and I don't even see one on that. It seems that regardless of who he is and who is behind him, we got a pretty major overdose of info, more than we could process. Seems like every day, even, there's something new to digest.

It seems to reveal (confirm) that the entire role of the U.S. government is to strong-arm the rest of the earth to accept our the business practices of our worst and biggest and most evil corporations, to force-feed this bullshit down the gullets of everyone on earth, while telling our own citizens that we're pushing "peace and Democracy" rather than frankenfoods and rat poisons and cluster bombs.

[barracuda]

Hey! This isn't a wikileaks thread, garshdarnit!

Kindly place your assents and dissents regarding this divisive topic in the APPROPRIATE threads available in severe profuseness in General Discussion or elsewhere. Thank you muchly.

Oh. Just a sec. I guess I brought it up first didn't I? Shoot.

Now for a Christmas toast to both Banned as well as Diappeared posters - fare thee well, one and all.

[DeltaDawn]

Yes, tyvm, here's a holiday toast to banned & disappeared posters, some of whom, I miss very much!!!! Merry Christmas everyone, Gbu all

[AhabsOtherLeg]

... I do miss the multi-lateral, vigorous, critical debate that I always associated with this board...

That's what I honestly think is going on in the "Wikileaks Question" thread. Seriously. A vigorous critical debate.

There may be a bit of unnecessary personal snark here and there ( that's nothing new) but the rest of it has been a mostly-serious argument between various different, and sometimes opposing, viewpoints - each laying out their arguments and sources to the best of their ability, then justifying their positions and fighting their various corners. Like any other serious thread, really.

On most boards I read, the idea that Wikileaks could be false, or that it's being used as a tool by various intelligence services, just isn't raised at all, which is why I come here.

The possibility is being considered here, by almost everyone, and at great length. There's a whole thread about it. But the only people I've seen staking out an immoveable position in that thread, and refusing to consider other possibilities, are those who say Wikileaks is a definite psy-op or a Mossad front org.

I just don't find the arguments against Wikileaks very convincing or credible or free of obvious (seemingly pointless and unmotivated) animosity. So far.

which coincides with the apparent emergence of an alienating echo chamber with lots of "Amens" and back-slapping and unresponsiveness to information or opinions that don't fit the script.

A number of people agreeing with each other's conclusions about a highly publicised organisation that's been around for years isn't necessarily evidence of groupthink. Maybe some people in the thread just agree (strongly or otherwise) with one hypothesis, and others agree with another.
Mostly, everybody here seems to agree that it's too early to judge, and nearly everyone says they haven't decided yet - this includes people who have used and followed Wikileaks since it's inception. There is no script. Or if there is, I'm not privy to it.

Finally, the old RI (I think) would have made mincemeat of a poster like "Hacktivist" blowing in here and demanding agreement based on his secret, inscrutable knowledge, then explicitly threatening to "silence" dissent.

Yeah. Agreed. In a way, I have no problem with Hacktivist - words on a screen, etc, and all that, and I admit that I wanted to hear what would be said - the official position of Anonymous (hahaha). But those were threats - crappy ones too. Threats of censorship, no less.

How long did OSR last here? A thread?

EDIT: I got off on the wrong foot with Montag, quite badly, but he should definitely come back. After reading a lot of his other post and threads (which I should have done in the first place) I realised he was a good guy, and we both like Morrissey and The Smiths. He should come back. There are disagreements all the time on this board - dozens of them every day. We're all still friends. It would be like the US Politics Online forum if we weren't.

[barracuda]

OSR probably isn't the best benchmark for trolling longevity, though. In the time I've been here, I watched trolls and groups of trolls literally last years under the ban-radar, or return again and again, bringing with them the same perfume in a different bottle each time.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Yeah. It's like San Quentin. "I've seen 'em come and go, and I've seen 'em die... and long ago I stopped asking why."

Interestingly enough, OSR showed up on the Madeleine McCann forum of The Mirror Newspaper for a while, in 2007-8, when I was reading those forums religiously. She had her theories. As always. She didn't have time to get banned, though, because the entire forum (the largest, and busiest, section of a national newspaper's online content, at the time) got unceremoniously shut down by Clarence Mitchell, former head of the UK Government's Media Monitoring Unit, who was at that time functioning as the McCann's personal spokesman and PR spin-doctor.

That's what a DA-Notice can do. But if such a thing is brought into law in America, it will not be Wikileaks' fault.

But... eh... don't get me started on the McCanns. I had a long lunch.

[Col. Quisp]

Time is speeding up and that's why there's no time for RI any longer. It's too difficult to make it through each day's pile of work that keeps getting taller....lots of work, but no pay makes Col. Quisp a dull bog. (yes, I have been watching The Shining perhaps too many nights while trying to get to sleep!)

Happy Yule, y'all

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Happy Yule Mr. Quisp. Sorry, I meant Colonel.

And a happy Yule to all the banned and the disappeared. Their names will be remembered forever, though often under different names.

[Nordic]

We may have just lost Alice again. But I hope not.