Limiting Speak2Truth's posting frequency

[Barry]

As I'm sure many of you who have followed the discussion categories on WaccoBB.net, the user Speak2Truth has been posting very many ultra-conservative posts the last few days (including referring to the current administration as communists).

This board is for the progressive community. "Free Speech" does not apply here. While I welcome a diverse range of opinions here, I'm not interested in having the board be dominated by someone who is far from the progressive side of the spectrum.

I have indicated that I'd like to see Speak2truth post less frequently. That request was not headed. He posted 18 times today.

I have decided to limit the Speak2Truth's posting frequency to 2 politically oriented posts per day.

Thanks for your understanding.
Barry
Moderator

[CSummer]

Are you sure you aren't ignoring the entertainment factor here, Barry?

Though I suppose it's sometimes almost too ludicrous (or nauseating) to be funny. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. I thought red-baiting had gone out with the sixties, but here it is, rearing it's sick head again! Makes me a bit curious to know who this person's been listening to. Sad that anyone would still fall for that horsesh*t in this information age!

Reflecting on the user name - speak - 2 - truth - I recalled the word "doublespeak" from Orwell's book, 1984. Here's a list of attributes that seem appropriate:

• misleads
• distorts reality
• pretends to communicate
• makes the bad seem good
• avoids or shifts responsibility
• makes the negative appear positive
• creates a false verbal map of the world
• limits, conceals, corrupts, and prevents thought
• makes the unpleasant appear attractive or tolerable
• creates incongruity between reality and what is said or not said

I was much more tolerant of these posts until I read the one about circumcision. I completely agree: this may be "Waccoland," but who wants to wade through a lot of crap to find the posts worth reading?!

CS

As I'm sure many of you who have followed the discussion categories on WaccoBB.net, the user Speak2Truth has been posting very many ultra-conservative posts the last few days (including referring to the current administration as communists).

This board is for the progressive community. "Free Speech" does not apply here. While I welcome a diverse range of opinions here, I'm not interested in having the board be dominated by someone who is far from the progressive side of the spectrum.

I have indicated that I'd like to see Speak2truth post less frequently. That request was not headed. He posted 18 times today.

I have decided to limit the Speak2Truth's posting frequency to 2 politically oriented posts per day.

Thanks for your understanding.
Barry
Moderator

[Clancy]

Are you sure you aren't ignoring the entertainment factor here, Barry?

Though I suppose it's sometimes almost too ludicrous (or nauseating) to be funny. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. I thought red-baiting had gone out with the sixties, but here it is, rearing it's sick head again! Makes me a bit curious to know who this person's been listening to. Sad that anyone would still fall for that horsesh*t in this information age!

Reflecting on the user name - speak - 2 - truth - I recalled the word "doublespeak" from Orwell's book, 1984. Here's a list of attributes that seem appropriate:

• misleads
• distorts reality
• pretends to communicate
• makes the bad seem good
• avoids or shifts responsibility
• makes the negative appear positive
• creates a false verbal map of the world
• limits, conceals, corrupts, and prevents thought
• makes the unpleasant appear attractive or tolerable
• creates incongruity between reality and what is said or not said

I was much more tolerant of these posts until I read the one about circumcision. I completely agree: this may be "Waccoland," but who wants to wade through a lot of crap to find the posts worth reading?!

CS

If you can bear it, listen to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News for a while and you'll see what he's regurgitating. His tactics, evasions and opinions are repeated, almost word for word, everywhere on the internet that they're tolerated. It's very scary, and it's destroying rational political discourse at perhaps the most dangerous time in our history.

We are ripe for fascism now as never before.

[Barry]

...Reflecting on the user name - speak - 2 - truth - I recalled the word "doublespeak" from Orwell's book, 1984. ...

I noted Speak-to-truth implies that the speaker is separate from truth. SpeakingTruth, SpeakOfTruth, SpeakTheTruth, or just SpeakTruth would imply an alignment with the truth, whereas SpeakToTruth implies separateness, even opposition, as in Speak Truth to Power.

Note that I have not banned S2T, as it can be useful to have that point of view represented, so long as it does not dominate.

I want to commend S2T on keeping it largely respectful, despite being taunted personally (while he attempts to taunt us politically) and for cooperating with these restrictions (which also include posting no more than once per day on this thread, in addition to the 2 political ones).

It appears S2T has attracted the attention of our self-appointed Grand Inquisitor, Rossmen, so that should keep them both creatively challenged. Might even make for some good reading! Rossmen (the latest incarnation of a trickster we have been visited by in the past), please also mind your manners and choose your words carefully.

Use your posts well, S2T. Keep your posts relevant to the thread topic, so choose them carefully. You'll be forgiven for abandoning most of your active threads. You are welcome to start a new thread topic. I'd suggest something really fundamental, that goes to the heart of the political tension between the individual and the community, freedom and cooperation, power used and abused.

[zenekar]

As I'm sure many of you who have followed the discussion categories on WaccoBB.net, the user Speak2Truth has been posting very many ultra-conservative posts the last few days (including referring to the current administration as communists).

This board is for the progressive community. "Free Speech" does not apply here. While I welcome a diverse range of opinions here, I'm not interested in having the board be dominated by someone who is far from the progressive side of the spectrum.

I have indicated that I'd like to see Speak2truth post less frequently. That request was not headed. He posted 18 times today.

I have decided to limit the Speak2Truth's posting frequency to 2 politically oriented posts per day.

Thanks for your understanding.
Barry
Moderator

Barry, I agree that it's good to limit the volume of posts (maybe for everyone) but I don't think it's necessary to cut off dialog if it doesn't conform to progressive ideas. It's good to have a diversity of ideas and opinions in a discussion. Maybe not such a good idea to limit free speech -- even S2T's right-wing diarrhea. But limit the posts.

["Mad" Miles]

The Personal Is Political, and vice versa.

[Star Man]

Another Perspective

Could there be something else, something perhaps more sinister, going on with Speak2Truth and TheGrandInquisitor? I think most if not all of the Waccobbians have unconsciously or thoughtlessly assumed that somewhere in the actual world there was a real person churning out the screeds and bloviations of these two posters.

What if that were not true? What if Speak2Truth and TheGrandInquisitor were computer programs? What if they were worms, moles, viruses designed to infect the body politic? This kind of program is different from the standard Trojan Horse, virus, or other form of malware that first appeared as Internet Worm in 1988. The objective of these programs is to corrupt as many computers as possible and often to cause hard drives to crash.

Alan Turing demonstrated that it is impossible for a human being to determine through asking questions via a keyboard if the human is speaking to a computer or another human being.

Political malware is designed to corrupt political discourse. The objective is to install contaminating thought scripts in the brains of human beings with the purpose of immobilizing them and making them easy to control and to dominate. The Progessive mind is particularly vulnerable to Polimalware (my neologism) because it has a built in placating loop that says all discourse must be treated as sane and actual and the only way to defeat it is to prove it is wrong by argumentation.

When a Polimalware program encounters the Progressive mind, it immediately immobilizes it by planting conflicting, internally inconsistent ideas, then taunting the Progressive while appearing to be oriented just enough to doctrines of fairness and reasonableness and liberalness that the Progressive will either attempt to refute the Polimalware through rational argument or, after discovering that the Polimalware cannot be convinced, will simply stop communicating (as one WaccoBBian wrote, "I thought about responding to a couple fo them, but became overwhelmed by the sheer number of statements that were not merely false, but the mirror image of the truth.") In either case, the Polimalware has succeeded in its mission.

Polimalware is like an Internet Spider. It searches through trillions of bits of information per second looking for key phrases like "Thanks to the work from the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and investigative journalists like Beau Hodai, we now know that ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a front group for major corporations, the Koch brothers and right-wing lobbying groups, actively disseminated model bills promoting its agenda to state leaders." This was the lead sentence in an article I posted from Truthout about the Koch brothers. When it finds such a key sentence, Polimalware begins its relentless corruption. I believe many programmers would find this task simple to execute. The programmer could take the commentaries of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity, scramble them up, and insert paragraphs organized randomly into a set format with pre-programmed citations.

Who might be sponsoring Polimalware? Anyone who stands to gain from corrupting the American political dialogue. Corporations are the agents of the perpetrators, and the perpetrators are most certainly the uber-rich who own the corporations. If we consider that the article about the Koch brothers that I posted was bait, then we probably have already caught our prey, for notice that Polimalware appeared almost instantly after the bait was dropped into the waters of the Internet.

There could certainly be other prospective perpetrators, the Chinese among them. Just consider that Polimalware appears to have corrupted the entire political process in Washington DC. The Tea Party embodies the insanity of Polimalware, and the Tea Party has just managed to stymie American government and to hold it hostage to what is demonstrably a nation-destroying ideology. The nation that is destroying itself is America.

Now perhaps you understand how Polimalware operates.

Star Man

[Barry]

... What if Speak2Truth and TheGrandInquisitor were computer programs? What if they were worms, moles, viruses designed to infect the body politic? ...

I'm starting to worry about you, SM.

[gardenmaniac]

And how is it we are willing to deny services to US citizens so that we can (continue to) provide foreign aid intended to afford these services to others? Where's the logic here?

Has anyone else read this? https://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/...3-62060dcbb3c3 (or was it posted here and I missed it?)

[Claire]

Another Perspective

Could there be something else, something perhaps more sinister, going on...?

Star Man

Thank you Star Man. I do not have time to read your response in its entirety right now, but the first thing I thought of was astroturfing. I reposted an article on this last week. What I read from 'him' really set off my BS detector.
All these posts are quite a distraction aren't they? I for one am ignoring them. Who needs that crap?

[Speak2Truth]

If you can bear it, listen to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News for a while and you'll see what he's regurgitating. His tactics, evasions and opinions are repeated, almost word for word, everywhere on the internet that they're tolerated. It's very scary, and it's destroying rational political discourse at perhaps the most dangerous time in our history.

We are ripe for fascism now as never before.

I have never listened to Rush Limbaugh and I don't get television, so no FOX News here.

I do my own research.

Why is it nobody here can ask the rather obvious question - why do you call them Communist and what is your supporting evidence?

In the quest for Truth, that would seem to be the obvious next step, don't you think?

I'll happily provide the evidence, if you are interested in Truth, for your open, honest, unbiased, unblindered consideration. Are you willing?

[Speak2Truth]

And how is it we are willing to deny services to US citizens so that we can (continue to) provide foreign aid intended to afford these services to others? Where's the logic here?

Hoorah to THAT! We give billions in "welfare" to foreign parties that can never be bribed to "like" us anyway. Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Pakistan.. the list is huge. Now we're spending our military resources helping the Muslim Brotherhood murder Libyans to seize control of Libya?

Something is terribly wrong with this picture. Our "public servants" have sold out the American People.