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Policy on personal altercations in the comments section — 30 Comments

  1. Dear Neo,

    You’ve blessed us repeatedly with your insights, and in addition, with providing us a forum to (hopefully intelligently) discuss the points you raise.

    I for one regret that you have to spend your time policing the comments. But if this response can be the tiniest evidence of support and encouragement, I’m posting it.

    With appreciation,
    M J R [erstwhile lurker]

    .

  2. As Gabby Hayes once said after walking into the wreckage and dead bodies following a gunfight, “Why must thar always be fightin’ and killin’? Why cain’t thar be peace in the valley?”

  3. Beware of making any dissenting opinions on Sarah Palin topics. We’re coating her with multi-layers of Armor All, because she doesn’t need it. I said “doesn’t”. Does-not.

  4. Landlord’s Site-Landlord’s Rules. No problem.

    One of my favorite scenes in “Wyatt Earp” when Morgan has been back shot & Virgil gravely wounded. Doc Holliday watches Wyatt, who’s gazing out at the night. Doc:”What’chu want to do, Wyatt?” Earp keeps staring out at the enveloping night..Wyatt:”Kill’um…Kill’um all.”

    And, Baa-Daa-Bing, he does exactly that.

  5. Taking this as a semi-open thread about the “community”…

    It would be nice if Artfldgr started his/her own blog. Or at least broke comments into digestible and relevant bites. I might be in agreement with whatever is expressed, but I find I now skim past Artfldgr posts.

    I do not mean this to begin a personal altercation. Maybe I am alone in my opinion, and can continue skimming as I have been.

  6. Too-long comments are a sign of an uncontrolled mind. I never read ’em.

    Comment-attacks and other immature behaviors should stay in usenet where they belong.

  7. Well this thread appears to have become a series of declamations on Artfldgr’s posts. I must say I have some sympathy with those who are impatient with him. But on the other hand (there’s always the other hand, isn’t there?), every time I take the time to read Artfldgr, I learn something I did not know before. He has lived through a period in true life and history that most of us can only dimly imagine or recall, and he has a fine grasp of historical cause and effect, of how “then” may in fact turn out to be like “now.” He is a sort of claxon, and he bothers to give us the benefit of his experience. We should pay him heed, even if it costs us something in time and patience.

  8. Let’s have a moratorium on complaints about artfldgr’s prose style. Neo can edit for length as she sees fit. The rest of us can read or not read him depending on time and inclination. Most importantly, we should not abuse him; he’s sensitive.

    For his part, artfldgr should try neither to give nor to take offense.

    At his best, artfldgr makes tremendous contributions to the conversation, often describing the submerged topography of the issues well in advance of general awareness. For example, artfldgr has been beating the drum for some time about the new barbarism in sexual mores that is the subject of Charlotte Allen’s extraordinary piece in the new Weekly Standard http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game and that Richard Fernandez also hits today.

    I suspect that the dynamics (and imperatives) of these developments compose the unnamed (because taboo) wellspring of a great deal of the political ugliness we are experiencing; and that we will have a hard time changing minds politically until we understand why people let their cultural positions dictate their political allies and positions.

  9. Oblio,

    Artfldgr is sensitive: Geschenk.

    But that is not the only reason we should not abuse him.

    And I do not recall a single instance of his actually giving offense.

  10. To go a little further: I have said before, I believe, that I shorten some of Artfldgr’s comments because I don’t want their length to interfere unduly with the process of scrolling down and reading the comments in general. In addition, I believe that making them a bit shorter might cause more people to read them.

    I don’t agree with everything he says, naturally. But I think a great deal of the information there is quite fascinating, and not readily available elsewhere. He also has had some unusual experiences and an interesting and unique take on things.

    I have no problem if people wish to ignore and/or not read any commenter here. But I am somewhat puzzled as to why some people feel such a deep need to take it on themselves to be so critical of lengthy comments. All they have to do is scroll past them, if they don’t wish to read them. It’s not that difficult to do.

    What’s more, I have a tendency to write long posts myself. Here’s something I wrote quite some time ago on that subject.

  11. I agree, Artfldgr’s long threads are a little annoying true, but it’s no big dead to scroll past them. Some times I read them and sometimes I don’t. No biggy.

  12. I find Artfldgr’s posts to be an incredible source of interesting – if sometimes opaque – information, ideas, and commentary.

    I come to the site for Neo’s thoughts — and stay longer to try to think through many of Artfldgr’s. Sure, I don’t read ’em all either — but scrolling is easy if I lose interest. I am sure Artfldgr would point out my loss of interest just demonstrates the general case of devolution of transmitted knowledge and understanding that he decries.

  13. Sensitive. Restraint of tongue, pen and keyboard is what I’m exercising at this moment. If the pathology’s involved that I’ve seen from the start of my presence here a scant few weeks ago, then, trust me, Y’all, this thread has made his February. But, giving it any rent-free space in my ol’T-Rex haid is silly. So, I won’t.

    I’m absolutely fine with my aforementioned ‘Landlord’s Site-Landlord’s Rules’. Side Note, cuz I’m a newbie at Neo-Neo’s fine site: I’m a 1944 baby, lifelong student of(primarily)Modern History–particularly 20th century tyrannies & monsters–which, after grad school, took an unexpected turn into the film industry(TV, primarily)and thus has remained my avocation & love rather than career. My experience with artists, egos, infantile behavior, NEED, blather, FICTION and Grift is close-up and massive. I’m a 35-year student of Stalin and his tender ways, as a whatcha’call diversion. Winter Park, Florida, is now home after a lifetime in the Peoples Republic of LA.

    Haven’t recently fallen off any turnip trucks, have a fine developed smell for the descriptives listed paragraph before last and will probably make no(or certainly minimal)further mention of my ‘stripes’.

    Oh, and a 30-year Neoconservative. Thank you, Jimmah Cawtah.

  14. I only wish that Artfldgr would perhaps give an overview of his points, esp for those of us who don’t have that much time. I find that sometimes I lose the train of his thinking, and don’t have the time to go back and read more. I know – my bad.

    Artfldgr – if you are reading this…. you made a comment about ‘them’ wanting to drop the earlier parts in the teaching of our history, and you made reference to 1877 as being an important date. I never found out why this so – did anyone else catch it later?? I was going to ask on that thread, but I’m not even sure which one it was.

    Thanks for this forum Neo. You and all of the commenters on this thread are awesome!

  15. “I am somewhat puzzled as to why some people feel such a deep need to take it on themselves to be so critical of lengthy comments.”

    Since I seem to have started it (this time?), I say you project or invent a “deep need”. Like you and others, when I read the whole thing, I do tend to learn stuff. But it usually takes me out of the rhythm of the main discussion. And since I am with some significant frequency led to an irrelevant or incomprehensible end, I’ve stopped mining.

    I raised the point because I would actually like to see Artfldgr start a blog and thus articulate a coherent worldview all in one place. If he has things to say, put ’em where the Google can find ’em more easily, and where we can hash them out in a dedicated comments thread.

  16. NeoConScum
    i hate this thread, and wished someone told me before i read it. // i sould not have been present or reading. // so your completely wrong. and the biggest reason i am saying anything at all is for OriginalFrank, and JuliB

    I am sure Artfldgr would point out my loss of interest just demonstrates the general case of devolution of transmitted knowledge and understanding that he decries.

    while i might try, its logically fallacious. those that experienced what your referncing to (in fun), dont try. just by taking the time to try, your in a different camp.

    i admit my stuff is hard… but for the same reason that i was given today… and it also explains why i SEEM sensitive.. (but you would have to notice what i do and dont respond to)

    this thread was started Feb 10 2010…first post is February 10th, 2010 at 3:49 pm

    i was informed that before this thread was started we all got a talking to (including me)…but at February 10th, 2010 at 2:12 pm

    i get: Artfldgr: Most of us have better things to do than to read your posts or try to rewrite them to your satisfaction.

    this from the person who says they dont read me and has been saying for me to write to their liking. who, like others, offer nothing in return for such effort, other than they are not going to tease me (so much).

    you know, if you dont pay nicki 200 a week, and comply with what nicki wants, then nicki is going to get upset and he is going to continue to harrase you till you comply and do what nicki does.

    call me sensitive (and you have) but i dont respond well to blackmail and false missives to help me. do you?

    All discussions go down the same long-winded ratholes, with the same appeals to superior knowledge, the same certainty of historical justification, the same condescension towards those who disagree, the same conspiratorial paranoia, the same complaining and whining about not being appreciated, and the same occasional cries of vindication.

    i answered, but it was way too big. instead lex said it much better:
    how can you say this: When every other time you post you claim not to read artfldgr’s posts? I read his posts and find your characterisation grossly innacurate – unlike some, his posts are backed up with data, not the kind of fuzzy opinions and generalizations which anyone can write to try and make themselves sound intellectual.

    so i am constantly torn here by people who want what i have to offer, and are willing to tolerate that i am not a professional historian, author, or even a person who wishes to have accolages and such (had them all my life and so i dont like them)

    i am very sensitive to lies, manipulative methods, false information, ommissive games, lack of referenmces in a debate, and really get annoyed at alternatives that prevent any resolution and moving on to the next place.

    so no, i dont think that because you read me, didnt find something you liked and then went away as akin to be a luddite and such. not at all. you gave it much more effort than the manipulators, social cache people, posers, name callers, and so forth.. and after not liking it, you didnt make it a point to eradicate that flavor from the world

    very different behavior, that definitely says the oppposte of what you said i would think. i am very complicated in my thinking, and i get into very deep abstractions that are incredibly hard to understand espeically if your not used to it with practice.

    and for JuliB: my deepest apologies. you are why i shouldnt have compromised what i thought was right, and remove the points to make a short post to make them happy. sad thing is that since they didnt read me, they never learned what they were missing. and instead of them learning, you got punished! hows that for bad methods of others inducing behavior that then makes you forget your place and act similarly, rather than superiorly. sorry.

    and you made reference to 1877 as being an important date. I never found out why this so – did anyone else catch it later?? I was going to ask on that thread, but I’m not even sure which one it was.

    your right. i left it open. i wanted people to go look. to find answers themselves. to show that i know, not because i make things up and guess, but that i know bcause when i see a question like that. i go and look

    when you google search just that year, what comes up? well its not one thing actually..

    1877 was a big year for marxism and such… it was also a year for other thigns too. for instance. Compromise of 1877…it happens at the end of the civil war… which just before that 1876 was the hayes tilden stuff in which the democrats and the knights of the white camelia went around and murdered and hunted down blacks and blamed it on the white sotherners. (look up hayes tilden pinkerson landry parish… that will get you to history you didnt know)

    anyway… if you start at 1977, the democrats with the kkk are erased. hayes tilden stuff disappears. and you can bury more, things like the Compromise of 1877

    Under the terms of this agreement, the Democrats agreed to accept the Republican presidential electors (thus assuring that Rutherford B. Hayes would become the next president), provided the Republicans would agree to the following:

    To withdraw federal soldiers from their remaining positions in the South
    To enact federal legislation that would spur industrialization in the South
    To appoint Democrats to patronage positions in the South
    To appoint a Democrat to the president’s cabinet.

    Once the parties had agreed to these terms, the Electoral Commission performed its duty. The Hayes’ electors were selected and Hayes was named president two days before the inauguration.

    here is whats on the net:

    Why did the Democrats so easily give up the presidency that they had probably legitimately won? In the end it was a matter of practicality. Despite months of inflammatory talk, few responsible people could contemplate going to war. A compromise was mandatory and the one achieved in 1877, if it had been honored, would have given the Democrats what they wanted. There was no guarantee that with Samuel J. Tilden as president the Democrats would have fared as well.

    see how they changed the history? the democrats were going to win with tilden. why did they give away the election for a few things in return? ah… but if they would have pressed it, the radical republicans who were on the blacks side would have then exposed their kkk and landry parish stuff.

    that yes tilden won, but only because of a reign of political terror unleashed outside the perview of southern whites!!! so what did they end up getting out of it?
    To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the “Great Betrayal.” Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money. No serious move to restore the rights of black citizens would surface again until the 1950s.

    the blacks thought that hayes and republicans betrayed them!! they gave up all support of the republicans, and fell into the laps of the people who used political terror to change the vote!!! what kind of terror. the testimony of pinkerson was by his wife. they had forced him to watch them drown his baby in the pond out back. then they forced him to watch them cut the breasts off his wife… then they tortured him to death. the wife survived…and so it was her testimoney and many others that the dems were willing to give away the election for to supress. then, they used that agreement to twist it aroud again, and get all the blacks to side with people who thought evisceration and vivisection was a good way to change a vote!

    in other areas, its the year of Marx letters with engels, and”Ancient Society”…the piece ancient society by lewis H morgan is what got multiculturalism and such going.

    Morgan studied the American Indian way of life and collected an enormous amount of factual material on the history of primitive-communal society. All the conclusions he draws are based on these facts; where he lacks them, he reasons back on the basis of the data available to him. He determined the periodization of primitive society by linking each of the periods with the development of production techniques. The “great sequence of inventions and discoveries;” and the history of institutions, with each of its three branches – family, property and government – constitute the progress made by human society from its earliest stages to the beginning of civilization. Mankind gained this progress through “the gradual evolution of their mental and moral powers through experience, and of their protracted struggle with opposing obstacles while winning their way to civilization.”

    further along…

    Commenting on this outstanding book in the light of which he had written ‘The Origin of Family, Private Property and State’ which again contains a summary of the important facts established by Morgan in “Ancient Society,” Engels says, “Morgan’s great merit lies in the fact that he discovered and re-constructed in its main lines the pre-historic basis of our written history; so long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force.” In a letter to Kautsky (February 16, 1884) he says, “There exists a definitive book on the origins of society, as definitive as Darwin’s work for Biology, and it is, naturally, again Marx who has discovered it: it is Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877. Marx spoke to me of it but I had other matters on my mind and he did not return to the subject. This surely pleased him for I can see by his very detailed extracts that he wanted to introduce it to the Germans himself. Within the limits set by his subject, Morgan spontaneously discovered Marx’s materialist conception of history, and his conclusions with regard to present-day society are absolutely communist postulates. The Roman and Greek gens is for the first time fully explained by those of savages, especially the American Indians, and this gives a solid base to primitive history.”

    it was when it all started to come together. if BC is before christ, and AD is after christs death, then AM, is Marx as the second coming of the prophet of man… so why teach history before marx when marx has laid it all out?…

    again, if you never read thsi stuff, and didnt know that history of hayes tilden… then you might actually take up the position africans have and thing they were betrayed… over and over again through history, you can see that by giving others false thoughts you can create the conditions in which their efforts are redirected to your ends, and they having no one to blame, attack or return to when actions have consequences.

    if you wish to follow it through russian history. then 1877 was the start of the fall of the tsars and the begining for lenin and stalin and such. how? it was the year that russia and the ottoman empire… though across the ocean grace ingalls was born. the daughter of laura ingalls wilder. (ever notice she has a feminist name?)

    anyway… the point is that prior to that time, the history was more about the founding fathers and such acts that estblish what the constituition means and why its different…from the time of hayes tilden forward its been power games and such… hayes tilden showing how far they went.

    The Betrayal Of The Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes To Woodrow Wilson
    http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Negro-Rutherford-Woodrow-Wilson/dp/0306807580

    if you continue to follow the DARK THREADS… you find out that the win of hayes was undone by the loss of the respect of blacks. it woud have been better for people to have been honest and let tilden have it, then show the world the kkk and democrats.

    this was the birth of american progressivism. that the progressives are the communists and socialists and liberals before there were communists socialsits and liberals (of the new type)

    Robert Marion La Follette, Sr. nicknamed “Fighting Bob” La Follette ….A 1982 survey of historians that asked them to rank the “ten greatest Senators in the nation’s history” based on “accomplishments in office” and “long range impact on American history,” placed La Follette first, tied with Henry Clay. so why dont you know him? because if you knew abotu the history of the progressives, you would say what the heck?

    hayes tilden created the same hatred of republicans for false reasons that we had for bush today… that then repeated back then to give us FDR. who came AFTER hayes? Woodrow Wilson. and HE is who gave us things like the federal reserve (Which was headed by a soviet spy!), he gave us our “progressive taxes”. when taxing the common man was UNCONSTITUTIONAL… [only those that owned companies and made money off the backs of others were allowed to bet taxed. funny, isnt that what the tax was supposed to do?] so 1877 sets up marxs letters, the start of the fall of russian aristocracy, the hayes tilden in which a judo move created a win for wilson. and it was wilson that planted the seeds of the destruction of the republic that is happening to day.

    [edited for length by neo-neocon]

  17. PS..
    last time i had a blog i had liberals find my home..

    not again.
    not even to make people feel better.

    i live someplace else now
    i refuse to let them visit me, my wife, and family.

    google and others force you into a thing in which those with connections can pay or get information.

    given that i have been visited
    i am not paranoid as to what might happen
    i am preventing what happened before
    from happening again.

    I am way too easy to find
    and given my ties to luminaries and things
    i have way too much to lose IRL

  18. Artfldgr, a very minor historical correction (see, I read your whole comment attentively!): Grace Ingalls was indeed born in 1877, but she was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s youngest sister, not her daughter. (I’m not sure why you call her name “feminist.”) See wikipedia:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Ingalls

    L.I. Wilder’s daughter was Rose Wilder Lane, born in 1886, a crusading journalist described as one of the “founding mothers” of libertarianism. She was a gifted writer and editor who certainly edited and may have almost ghost-written her mother’s classic “Little House” books.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane

  19. foxmarks: I said “some” have a deep need. Not everyone—or even most—who have remarked on length of comments have a “deep need” to do so. But some seem to—the ones who say it over and over again.

  20. NeoConScum and Foxmarks, I’m just on a flyby, but have heard good things about neoneocon’s site and like what I see. And, thank you, now know who to scroll through.

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