Power, the community, and Linden Lab.

I, for one, am not particularly power hungry.

Personally, I hate the concept of power and much prefer a system where the meritous and risk takers are rewarded appropiately for the service they provide to the ecologies of ideas.

Sometimes, I believe that the powerful will destroy themselves simply by using their power in irrational ways (they foolishly assume, for example, might makes right). This is also why I believe that the echoed statement "it's their world, they can do what they want" is absolutely wrong.

Which is often why undermining the power of the central authority and its various supporters, such as LL and its FIC, is not only a good thing for the community but also for LL itself who I think is often in the position of making poor choices with the power that it has.

What LL needs to learn that if they wish to start leveraging the wisdom and wealth of the crowd, they need to stop trying to force their individual neurotic ideas onto that crowd and learn to surf its energy.

ie: What they want to do is what WE want to do.

Are you speaking about just blaze, or all your alts?

Really, every idea is (or should be) a self contained alt intself.

Oh, hi Prok. I had heard somewhere that you bought Blaze's account. I must say, your hyperbole and paranoiac timbre is something that tends to give you away no matter how much you try to mask it.

As to the 'point' -- you're as wrong today as the day you popped your cork and got yourself banned. Get therapy. Spending this much energy on hatred and resentment is not healthy.

Should they all post their thoughts and opinions to the forums individually or speak via one alt?

You have issues.

i know i drank too much nyquil when I agree with a blaze post and it makes sense

Not issues, a subscription. (chuckle)

Hmm. Someone must have been playing with the settings again. Someone connect up to the BSACR telnet server and set

tr_inflammatory 500

It seems to have been set at 5, and if folks are going to play around with this app, I'd at least like them to have a good time with it.

Not at all. It's when people personalize ideas and try to reconcile them with the person behind the ideas that our ability to tackle something rationally is destroyed.

We get consumed with attack on the man, which is pure logical fallacy.

I mean, really, if someone were to say 2+2=4, would you doubt its accuracy because of some fear of a hidden agenda?

I think that people would be bothered, champ, because you would use a poll to make that statement. Ignore 'em, tiger!

If that someone were you, then yes. I'd check the facts.

Oh quit it, you're just feeding my ego.

I disagree as often you can frame what somebody says better by knowing the history of the person. It gives some ability to find clarity in what they're saying, where they're coming from and what their possible reasons could be.

We all have motives and we should all have the courage of our convictions and not resort to alts to make those convictions known. If you believe them, however right or wrong they appear to others, you can't be taken seriously if you don't have conviction in your own opinions and instead hide behind another name to make them known.

LOL, more relevantly, if someone said 2 + 2 = 4 only because of the conspirational manipulations of the Mathematical Star Chamber, I would suggest a larger piece of tinfoil.

It's not an issue of belief.

For example, I say a lot of things I do not necessarily believe.

In fact, I often like to say things because I *don't* believe them and I wish to have others help me firm up my arguments against those ideas as they argue against them.

Sometimes their arguments are poor and irrational and sometimes they're very interesting and compelling.

Unfortunately, and this is why I use an ALT, the community is oddly obsessed with the person behind the ideas and so they get a tad upset when we express ones we don't necessarily believe in.

However, that's just the community. There are some people around here who can make the cognitive leap and handle this sort of thing.

Cristiano is certainly one of the few. Margeret Mafume is another.

I don't always agree with their thoughts on the matter, but that's OK, because there is no value for me in agreement but rather in the debate and the evolution of the ideas.

If I could ask of them any more, I just wish they'd be more disagreeable. I find I can generally only count on them to say things that are not unpopular.

Tisk Tisk all this back biting and innuendo makes it very difficult to understand what the topic is. In other words leave your emotional baggage at the door and let ppl make their points.

To dissuade these topics only proves how no meaningful discussion can ever be made in the forums. What part of that do ppl have such a tough time understanding? All of it.

Shame on LL for allowing it to continue. Somethings never change.

I'm sorry, we're busy right now. Please get back to us when you can follow your own rules. Thankyou Mr. Martin Magpie / Ms. Catherine Cotton.

This is a perfect illustration of what I'm saying blaze. The holier-than-thou attitude of this poster suddenly has absolutely no merit what so ever, to those who know who it actually is/was, because we have reams of background posts from them that allow us to realise that this person actually does the same things as they are trying to pretend they are above. The sentiments carry little weight because the poster never follows them personally. Especially the part about emotional baggage.

Background is all important.

And that's a B-I-N-G-O!

The moment you start babbling about FIC you've already veered off into irrational territory. You can't have a rational discussion about an irrational premise.

Sing IT!

This is a startlingly new and interesting discussion. I wish I was able to make the cognitive leaps necessary to contribute in some meaningful way.

I also wish that my history did not necessitate creating an alt to be taken seriously. This is, of course, the fault of the community for not understanding my mercurial nature and for not being able to read the proper nuance and emotion embedded in my written prose.

You all should be ashamed of yourselves (and your alts) for having driven me to create my army of mindless alts.

Keep it up, blaze More power to ya....oh, wait....

I am every bit as outraged as you, Blaze. Great post! That frickin' FIC...man, they crimp my crust.

There are two aspects of your debating technique that people can't, or won't, leap.

One you stated as "no value for me in agreement." Most people post, and attend inworld discussions, with the idea of changing everyone's mind to match their own way of thinking. It wholly frustrates them that you stubbornly refuse to accept their point of view and just keep spouting *gasp* your own ideas over and over again like you think you're right or something. There's no point in trying to debate with people that maintain this mindset unless, as you say, you're looking for ideas or trying to reason out their rationale.

The second is your ability to switch sides from the opposite of what I'm saying to the opposite of the opposite of what I'm saying forcing me to alter my tact without realizing that you're still arguing the same point. You are very very good at this and most people simply will not "get it" as you say. My forte is changing the subject; but that segues the encounter from debate to conversation.

We must all seem like little buggies crawling through the grid. "Oh how boring" - Margaret from Liquid Sky