Barbelith Underground > Conversation

Well, it's pretty simple. Bendt's interests are served by a Barbelith that tolerates enormous quotations, people purporting to be representatives of an enlightened collective, lengthy off-topic rambles, threadrot, refusal to engage in any meaningful way with counterarguments and instead posting *more* endless quotations, personal abuse treated as a valid addition to threads and the flaming, trolling and threatening of people who disagree with these methoids, because that is, as has already been said ad nauseam, the way the Greenland Posse worked. He clearly feels that this was because we timorous fellows were afraid of the big sexy truth of the Greenland Posse, and thus logically the same thing is happening here. If Barbelith was more accepting of these methods, it would be a friendlier place to those methods and those who employed them would be respected more.

That's simple self-interest. It is unfortunate that this appears to be setting Bendt off again, after a period of apparent calm, but that's the danger of Bedlam - the howls of one disturb the sleep of another.

None of this changes the fact that Barbelith is a discussion forum, and IC has shown little interest so far in discussing anything. He has also done himself few favours by proposing, after about two days on the board, the rebuilding of the Supercollective, in effect, but called the Inner Circle, with all the "good" people on Barbelith in it (we might elegantly sort out this whole thing by inviting everybody into the Inner Circle except Innercircle), since he was finding himself belaboured by admittedly some pisstaking and also a fair amount of simple disagreement or questioning, or requests that he make his posts more comprehensible. He is now attemtping to threaten the moderators into leaving his posts and threads untouched, no matter how offtopic, unprofitable or misplaced they happen to be, and attempting to deploy the threat of *ahem* legal action over his intellectual property being stolen, among other dark threats. All rather schoolyard, really.

He had and still has the option of trying to meet the rest of the board on some middle ground, rather than insisting that the board change to accomodate him. He could engage in a productive way with his "er....boycott Barbelith....it stinks" thread, explaining what he was upset about, how he feels the moderators were out of line, and how such situations can be avoided in the future, instead of giving orders and then throwing a hissy fit when they are not obeyed. If he doesn't want to do that or anything like that, prefering to threaten and throw tantrums, that's entirely his affair. It's a familiar dance, after all.

Or he could boycott Barbelith, on the grounds that it stinks. That works too.

In the meantime, Bendt, could you find a single threat made by any member of Barbelith without provocation (or even with, really) against Innercircle?

Xenophobia