Originally Posted by Frith

Thank you, Clippo, I know understand why certain people on this forum are so badly treated. Religion and ignorance combined have caused many wars, many executions and centuries of human misery. I am appalled to see that this trend looks like it may be attempting a come back. Through democracy of all things. Democracy was developed so as to prevent it. It seems mob rule, dumbing down, falling standards and the death of the scientific method are threatening the once rational west. (The west hasn't been rational for that long, only since the Enlightenment and even then it was an uphill struggle. The men of the Renaissance were far worse off, their brilliance only briefly tolerated before the Bonfire of the Vanities.)

I'm sorry to see this on a British forum.

I have always envisioned a world where education triumphed to create nations living in relative peace, an environment largely free of human devastation and the solutions to problems relegated to the scientific method and, where applicable, to intelligent compassion so that people, their psychology and their science, their instincts and their aspirations, could become reconciled to the very difficult nature of our self-awareness as royal apes and not as servants of our own tyrannical superstitious inventions.

I have endured almost constant antagonism since I came on here. I eventually realised that certain people here hate education, fear the establishment, believe you can have no government, think the state is some sort of evil entity out to get them, believe shadowy forces control their lives, detest women, attack individuals with impunity because they feel like it and are invariably supported to the hilt by gaggles of nasty henchmen.

Every individual who is just a degree off centre right is condemned as a "fascist". Everyone else is a "communist". Libertarianism has been hijacked. So what is left? Writing on here is actually a harrowing experience. You don't expect what will happen to you, it just sort of creeps up on you and you keep being made to feel that you have done something wicked and are part of some plot that often involves the secret service in the minds of certain posters.

This is weird and so you don't believe you are reading this and keep posting, hoping it's just a misunderstanding on the part of a few. You wait in the hope they may be disciplined. Instead you are set upon, or left outside to be devoured by whatever hounds are roaming round the castle keep. If you complain, they think you're a joke, and say so and their friends join in to throw insults at you.

I can only imagine what this does to people's sense of sanity. If it were not for the fact that Britain is in trouble and genuine knowledge is dying under a barrage of false lunacy from the internet, I suppose some of us would have stayed away for good by now. We can't help feeling it our duty to speak out. I have learned that you may as well cast those pearls because the more you try the worse things get. It isn't good for you. It makes you feel ill. And it tends to fuel the fires of madness. The Khmer Rouge often comes to mind, when doctors had to disguise themselves in case they were murdered by stupid aggressive revolutionaries and were unable to treat the sick in case people found out they had been educated and were therefore members of a hated class.

I sincerely hope a country like Britain isn't heading for a twenty-first century version of the peasant's revolution. Already increasing numbers of unenlightened people fear vaccinations because they have no idea how they work and listen instead to the myriad mad rantings across the internet instead of finding out how these scientific discoveries can save millions of lives. Some people are literally returning to the dark ages, by choice. Very sad to see this happening, but any attempt to intervene results in paranoid attacks, accusations of fascism and that creepy feeling on the back of one's neck.

Akria simply has a high IQ. That doesn't make him a monster, an adult or a fiend working for the State. I merely have an English doctorate. That doesn't make me a moron, a spy or a target for abuse. But it's becoming more and more difficult to get away from this kind of thing. The disease of bad manners combined with ignorant aggression is spreading. Unless something is done to properly educate people, violence will spill over and I can't help feeling that its first victims will be those who love truth. But then, hasn't it always been this way? I am beginning to think humanity prefers ignorance and superstition. Perhaps it offers more chance for power, the kind that is the enemy of knowledge.

Originally Posted by Ayn Rand

"Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good."

Originally Posted by Aardvark

He?

YCHHT, it is implied in your alias that you might know something of the truth, but this isn't always apparent.

There is a lot of bullying on this forum and it is easy to fall foul of a small group of people who use the words nazi and fascist to attack anyone who disagrees with them. The word 'envirofascist' is a classic case - it is used to attack anybody who expresses any form of sympathy for the theories supporting the concept of MMGW. Overt eurosceptics are attacked for being 'pro-EU' when they disagree with the almost extreme views of some posters. Moderate BNP members are called nazis with impunity; it's not possible to moderate moderators on this point.

I have been abused and insulted on many occasions, but fortunately I rise above most of it seeing it as childish and intellectually immature. An insult from some people is almost like a compliment - I'd hate to be complimented by Noakes Frith is being sensitive because she (?) feels that her well founded opinions are drawing a lot of unnecessary flack. Many highly qualified and well educated people are insulted and attacked when they post on matters on which they might be considered to be well read and 'expert' and lots of people have withdrawn from the forum on that basis.

Debate on the forum is only as good as its weakest intellectual link. Unfortunately that puts us into semi-retard mode in some threads.