I think it’s unnecessarily piling-on. I’m also seeing a lot of elements in people’s conversations with him here that put someone like me off—calling him delusional and then waving “forum etiquette rules” at him if he gets likewise lippy, for example. Without the variety of input like his (serious or not), we’re left with an echo chamber… and a pretty quiet one at that.
Yes, it’s a hard call, Dorion. When someone starts posting odd stuff, it’s easy to think the person has different views but is rational enough to defend him/herself. At that point, other members will attack the ideas pretty fiercely. It takes quite a number of posts before members might begin to recognize delusion and back off. In addition, although most of our members are atheists and many are humanists, they have a wide range of empathy and awareness.
Yeah, that’s why I said someone like me. My recent—and very brief—forays into some other well-known forums indicates that I am apparently squarely in the fluffy-kitty category of reader/poster, in spite of the fact that I’m a f*cking wildebeest in person.
And I admit, I find well-expressed craziness pretty entertaining.
One of the problems with a forum like this is that we have a real difficulty balancing our desires that all be fluffy-kitties and also that everyone have quite a bit of freedom in their posts.
Yeah, I would love it if I could assign a, say, 1 to 10 factor dependent on my opinion of each of the members so that they would have varyind degrees of freedom to post. Unfortunately, Doug is far too mature to let me do that.
