A Confession: I Was Wrong About Not Being Disruptive to Thomland
I often accuse Libs of not being very reflective of their ideas or even their own actions as in what they write on public message boards/forums. So in the spirit of self-reflective analysis, I wish to say that I was wrong about not being disruptive of discussions that happened on Thomland. I honestly did not want to address that issue before as I was always under the assumption that a discussion can only be disrupted if the participants so let it happen. My words or anybody's words can not take away from someone else's. For example, adding a book to the library in no way diminishes the value of any other individual book. In fact the more books {variety} in a library the more likely to be visited by readers. I tried in fact to show that no matter how many "troll" visited my threads, I was not the least bit distracted. Of course when you get banned for simply pointing out their failures in logic and sources of information, then yes, my ability to continue a conversation is greatly diminished.
This form of censorship creates "dead zones" in the free flow of information. After a while it is like being in a dysfunctional family. I often refer these dead zones in families as the collective "taboo" subjects. As a family creates more and more taboos, the family no longer is communicating but simply on non-personal levels. Their interactions become more like transactions in the market. "May I have the butter?" "Yes, here it is." "Thanks." As I even told .Ass, I personally identify people by the subjects that interest them. Clearly it was easy to spot him on other boards. He denied it but clearly he just lied.
I had the sneaky idea about this long before writing this, and not because they kept squeaking like a little mouse about it, but because when I took breaks then certain threads would pop up without a single conservative voice or any view of variance. The most recent example is "Republican Neoliberalism". Four pages and not a single contrary view-talk about group think. Any deviance was quickly squashed by the intellectual bullies.
Of course, my absence allows the intellectual shallow mice to come out of their woodwork and spout nonsense. Since their "leader" is just as shallow {i.e. Thom Hartmann} it is no wonder that they so easily fall under group think mentality. One of the most hilarious idiotic statements made on that thread was: "Glen Beck as spokesman for the neoliberal forces..." Obviously if you watch his interview with Ron Paul {Glenn Beck - Interviews - Congressman Ron Paul Interview} then you would not jump to such idiotic statements. I did include his full descriptor as he likes using "weasel words" to describe simple shit. I suppose he thinks it distances himself from his words but he either thinks Glenn Beck is an actual supporter of Neoliberalism or he is not and no amount of adjectives takes that away. For example what does it mean "spokesman for neoliberal forces"? Is that different from being a supporter? Is .Ass trying to say that he gets paid to say stuff whether he believes it or not? And if so then why "neoliberal forces" included? Is the forces different than the actual people?
Naturally, .Ass feels the need to put his ideological opposition in "ticky tacky little boxes" as this makes it so much easier to address the issues they bring up like Glenn Beck being a neoliberalist or not? At first he tried countless times to put me in the Neocon box. I honestly found things that I could agree with, according to the PNAC website {defunct?}. The issue that most of the neocons presidents over the past century were clearly Democrats. Even Obama is clearly a neocon with his stance on Afghanistan. This does not mean it is right or wrong but just a framework that fits the model. Then it was binary oppositional thinking, neoliberalist, authoritarian, conservative narrow minded cretin, intellectually shallow-based on writing, and of course all the various ad homs that Kate spewed out including rodeo clown, Eddie Haskal...
Now it seems that I am a "positivist". It seems that at least I should have been allowed to defend myself from personal attacks. Oh that is right, respect is what is demanded for people to speak to the mighty and great .Ass, all other intellectually inferior people get spoken down to. I really have not studied that much, but from what I have read, .Ass is clearly a positivist when it comes to matters of ecology. Strangely, he would play the "Only an expert can know" video, but it seems to only apply to "experts" that he disagreed with. Like he hates economists. I can only conclude that he clearly does not understand the concepts of economics and as such does not like those "experts" but when it comes to the ecology, they "know their stuff" and are experts we need to counter the right wing noise machine.
.Ass clearly showed his positivism when we discussed DDT. He insisted that for us to have a discussion I must in fact announce that DDT was a Persistent Organic Pollution (POP). Even recently with Chris he mentioned that he spent days trying to explain to "someone" about POP and DDT.
Even though I admit that maybe I was wrong about being disruptive, I in no way will change my behavior. I felt I was invited by Thom Hartmann, and as such he needs to be the one to address me or to the conservatives on his board. He needs to spell out that he plans to change policies. Otherwise, this is just an example of principle-agent problems. All the moderators are {including Sue and Louise} just agents of Thom and thus have no bearing on my decisions. They can have adverse effects on my encounters at Thomland, but what they say has no bearing on my actions.
As far as the moderators are concerned, they clearly are whores as they work for an organization that limits speech and censors people out of some distorted sense of justice. I have lost a lot of respect for liberals from these encounters. I am not sure that conservative groups are much better, but at least the pretenses are done away with. Thomland was suppose to be different as he invited all different points of view.
Cross post at JoeDan's also: A Confession: I Was Wrong.