Just a little house-cleaning today. As lord of this fief, it is my duty to lay down the law, so here come a few rules I'd like you all to be so kind as to follow. Both of you.
First off, no flooding the riotbox. If you have something you'd like to put in print that takes more than one sentence to say, then please post a thesis or summary statement in the riotbox and continue your argument in full on your own blog or whatever other means. Link it if you must, but the general concept of a blogring is that you're already linked to all the other blogs in the ring, and we assume that the community provides mutual readership and argument. Look way back in my archives to see several posts in specific reference to the blogring to which I belonged before all of them stopped blogging and I got stuck with you lot.
No anonymous rioting. This isn't the Catholic church; we're not going to banish you to the gallows for saying something somebody else doesn't agree with, so I don't know why we have people afraid to tell us who they are. To that end, I'll just say that a) since the question has come up, I know who The Pusher is and I'm allowing it because the person told me who they were in person, b) I know who Trips is and I'll thank him kindly to stop using any other handles - you've got nothing to gain by using anonymous aliases and nothing to lose by using one we know, c) I know who Wade is, of course, and that about sums that up. The rioters whose identities are currently unknown to me are as follows: Gorgon, Tarbuck, Mason. You lot have to choice to either tell me who you are or stop posting. Henceforth, if anybody uses an anonymous handle, the comment will be deleted. Regardless of how sound an argument you bring up or even if you are just kissing my ass thinking that will save you from deletion, your comment will still be deleted. In fact I won't even be reading them; if I see one of these names or some new one you come up with, I'll just delete it on sight. The reason for this is that I'm assuming that these three handles, as well as a few others that have been used once or twice, are the handywork of our friend Trips. I have piles of evidence, including not only the content itself but the sentence structure and form and even the timing of the comments from these people, that lead me to no other conclusion but this. If you'd like to prove me otherwise after being thusly offended by the accusation of being Trips, feel free to do so.
A similar problem has been posting under someone else's established handle. There's no call for immaturity of this nature. If I see a comment posted under my name that I didn't write, I will delete it. If I see a post from any individual that I have reasn to suspect that person didn't write, I will consult the person personally, and if I find that they did in fact not write it, I will delete it. This has happened on more than one occasion and I'd thank Trips kindly not to do it anymore. I know there are more people who read this than post here, so I'm aware that there are occasional posts from Morgan or Jken or whoever else wants to throw in their two cents from time to time, but I also know who does not and has never posted, so it is of these which I will be more scrutinous.
The above are just practices of courtesy and respect common throughout the internet community and should not be unfamiliar to any of you. But now onto some lesser, but still significant issues I'd like to address that are my personal rules for rioting on this site. Nobody calls anybody out but me. If you'd like to take something out against a particular person, do it on your own space. I reserve the right to drop bows on anybody who enters the premises and does something stupid, and I allow you to take any shots you want at me, but disputes between individual rioters are not allowed here. I'll also ask you to keep your riots relevent and coherent. The most recent exchanges, for example, had almost to do with what I actually wrote about in the last post, and half of them didn't even make any sense. You'll note that I'm not even offering up a challenge to religion in any way, but rather posing a discuss on how I do so when I do. The post is not even about religion, but about my style of argumentation. This is a lesson in rhetoric and approach to language more than anything; it's just that religion happens to be one possible subject I bring up a lot, so I thought it'd be an appropriate reference to display what I was talking about. And what the hell does a site about evolution have to do with that? Nothing. What does evolution have to do with anything I've ever talked about? Nothing. There's nothing wrong with wanting to talk about the ins and outs of the theory, but do it on your own space where you make the rules, or at least wait till I write a post where it might be relevent if you really want to shove your little site down our throats. And no, Mason, I'm not done talking about religion. I'll never be done talking about religion. There are always new avenues to be explored and new perspectives to experience, so as long as there's religion in the world, which there will inevitably always be, I'll never get tired of talking about what's wrong with it. What I'm tired of is all the same old tired arguments you people spit out that don't even mean anything. Pay attention to what you're reading and analyze it for its intellectual value instead of dismissing it right away just because an atheist wrote it and responding with something you copied and pasted off your Google search for falsified dogma. Quoting the Bible doesn't count as thinking, Jack, I can make it say whatever I want, too. Anyway, basically I'm just going to start cracking down on the rules from now on. And I'm not just arbitrarily deciding these rules today on a whim because you pissed me off. No, these have always been the rules; look back in the archives; you'll find several posts of this nature throughout several different transformations of the blog, and the rules have been consistent regardless of my content or my audience.
Persistent and deliberate breaking of my rules will result in deletion of any future posts you write, as well as those of any new handle you come up with because I'm smarter than that.
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