It’s been said before, there’s no place like home (or for the internet, perhaps your homepage 
)
For a fair amount of time, I limited my participation to OO.net. In all the agreement and disagreement, I found that the signal to noise ratio has mostly been pretty high. I thought perhaps I would branch out a bit, and share my views in other forums, and see how they were received. Well I still need improvement, Objectivism and OO.net has helped me understand myself better, and has helped sharpen my ability to communicate my ideas to other people.
So, over the past couple of months I have delved into a couple of other forums. I do not represent that I’m surprised by what I find. Instead, I remain somewhat distressed by what I read. Here are three forums I participated in, ranked from the worst to the best, in my opinion.
BetaNews.com - This forum largely focuses on tech talk, tech news, etc. It is littered with people who hate “big business”, view the successful as evil, and trample all over any praise for Capitalism, and the concepts that encompass it’s foundation. Here, the prevailing viewpoint is, if you are rich, you should give of yourself to the less fortunate people. Far too many participants exercise a very poor understanding of reason and logic, but a high level of emotionalism. Personal attacks are far too frequent here, and go virtually unchecked. I walk away with the summary “Give me mp3’s or I’ll take them.”
Packing.org - This forum concentrates on firearms possession, concealed carry laws, firearms related news, and the 2nd Amendment. It is littered with libertarians and anarchists. While I could find one or two more people on here who were at least somewhat more reasonable than at BetaNews, the ratio was still somewhat low. While it certainly has it’s share of passionate valuers, sometimes those values are not steeped in rationality. Moderation is basically done by the community. People who do not participate in a thread can rate the posts in a thread with a numbering system. The numbers are based on picking a description of the rater’s opinion of the post, but I suspect that description often has no relevant relationship to the post rated. If your number gets to low, you are officially deemed a troll and possibly banned. In other words, it’s a popularity contest, not an objective evaluation of the content of posts for the most part. I walk away with the summary, “from my cold, dead hands…”, “dead in a pile of brass”, and “god-given rights”.
Glocktalk.com - Glocktalk is a little more unique than the other two forums. While the web site is dedicated to Glock firearms and Glock users, they have a variety of sub-forums on a variety of firearms and non-firearms related issues. In some sub-forums, I could find some folks who were quite reasonable, well-informed and capable of conversing without constantly insulting people. For instance, in a sub-forum devoted to martial arts, I found quite a few very knowledgeable and reasonable people, apart from some beliefs in eastern mysticism. A sub-forum on motorcycles was quite informative, and people got along quite well there. Unfortunately, the sub-forum devoted to “Cop Talk” was much worse. This forum is largely divided into two groups, the LEO’s vs. the Cop-bashers. It really doesn’t matter where a thread starts, or what the topic is, almost all threads degenerate to that division. I met one person who had a CLEAR understanding of logic and reason. Again, a high level of personal attacks, but they are weakly addressed by a very limited moderation crew, and thus continue daily, essentially unabated. My summary, “You can’t possible understand anything because you’ve never been a cop” and “Jack boot thugs”.
So where do all these long-winded observations lead me? Back “home”. OO.net is a solace to me when the rest of the world seems unreasonable. I really need to participate here more often than I have been lately.
It is for that reason that I must again thank David and all of the other members here who provide a constructive contribution to a place I value. B)
