2) Bradah (6/29/09): "My parents were the best teachers, they taught me how to treat people equally no matter where they came from. Not to be jealous and belittle anyone."

3) Bradah (6/29/09): "I despise you to even call you fellow Americans. You are a disgrace to what America is all about. I would have put a bullet in between your eyes if you were with me during wartime."

4) Bradah (6/29/09): "My Canadian friends no act like you, must be the Yugo blood running in your veins. You are a disgrace to the Canadians and Yugoslavians. They should take back that citizenship and send you where you belong."

5) Bradah (7/16/09): "Just single out a page when the hate is all over chessgames.com."

I completely agree with this -- <I reckon most times people <don't> misunderstand each other, are (astonishingly common, considering) accidents.>

Whether I understand it is, of course, another question.

In many social situations, people have developed ways of filtering out the noise (which is always present) and concentrating on the information.

Here, though, a few factors tend to prevent this: such as the novelty of the medium itself, a wide range of cultural attitudes and expectations, and varying degrees of fluency in various versions of English.

Meanwhile, I see the terrain has shifted. Part of the battle seems to have moved here. How do people know where to go? Do these things give off electronic pheronomes, or what?

<Meanwhile, I see the terrain has shifted. Part of the battle seems to have moved here. How do people know where to go? Do these things give off electronic pheronomes, or what?>

I'm here because your post showed up in a kibitz search for my name. :p

Other tools for a convenient overview of "the action" are the

Recent Chessforum Activity and Recent Kibitzing Page

Yeah, well sorry about that.

I provided a tiny amount of feedback earlier in <tpstar>'s forum along the lines that this seemed to be much ado about nothing.

This attracted a fairly lively, and I think a fairly supportive comment from <jessica> on my forum, along the lines of "blessed are the peacemakers".

It also motivated <brankat> to make some comments that landed him, undeservedly I suspect, in hot water, and that dust up is still settling down. I left a response in <brankat>'s forum to <SugarDom> more or less asking him if he'd taken leave of his senses. <brankat> is one person I hate to see attacked for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's gotten to know him.

Now I've incautiously stuck my head above the trenches.

OK...the <gawd> was a loud audible sigh of disbelief, largely at the nastiness that's spun into existence like a tornado in clear weather, proximately from the Wesley So column.

There have been flame wars at other times over the last few years in the Kramnik and Carlsen pages, and trouble seems to follow our live rating guru around the site, or he's following it.

But the nastiness that's erupted from the Wesley So page surpasseth understanding.

I really don't understand it. COnflict I can understand, it seems to be part of the human condition. Maybe it keeps us from being bored to tears with life. But chess is a stylised form of conflict and one would hope that these flame wars would be subsumed within this very civilised and institutionalised ritual of combat the game represents, and die down after people have vented their spleens and salved some of their not inconsiderable egos in the process.

Occasionally, admin steps in damp down some messes, remove offensive posts, suspend a few people for a while and generally read the riot act. On this occasion they seem to be at loss,a nd I can't blame them.

It's a nasty, diffuse conflict that's arisen here.

You expressed one of my deep seated convictions very economically when you said that <I reckon most times people <don't> misunderstand each other, are (astonishingly common, considering) accidents. :p>

This seems to be one of those times when happy accidents are at a premium.

I can't believe it's smouldering along so virulently.

Normally I can ignore these brouhahas (should be called brousobsobs at times like this), but they've spilled over to all the sites I visit, apart from my own forum...and that was just a fortuitous accident.

That just about sums up the content of my rather wordy <gawd...> comment. I thought it was self evident :)

BTW...that's the first smiley icon I've used in nearly four years here, and hopefully the last. I just don't want any chance of misunderstanding here, as I'm already in hot water with a couple of friends around here, and the happy accidents of communication seem to be derailed or delayed.

Mercury must be retrograde.

THAT"S RIGHT!!

heh

I'm supremely "ticked off" by the fact that most of my "friends" are hardly able to see through a few smokescreens, and simply haven't yet disallowed the predators as well as vultures to post at their, umm, "respective" forums. It's only perpetuating and enabling a handfull of @#$%heads, regulars from the SO page, to destabilize CG and frustrate the atmosphere around here - and are willing to take it to any length, including unspeakable threats to <brankat>, as they are well aware that a possible future ban can't really hurt them; just sign in under new usernames and on we go, they do not care AT ALL for civil dialogue and resolving of tension, NO - they are mostly getting off on venting their deeply rooted collective identity/personality issues, and vent them at all costs. (All hail the bleedin internet.)

Who doesn't enjoy that?

I - for one - I'm afraid.

Truth is, that if - as <AnnieK> correctly points out - you do a bit of homework, you will even notice that they work in "shifts" and have been harassing CG forums of all kinds <24/7> for OVER <THREE WEEKS>, that's <more than 21> TWENTYONE EFFING DAYS, continually...

FRUSTRATING A BUNCH of highly respected kibitzers, that hold certain values that I share, in high regard. Yet even they, to an extent understandibly, are blinded by the sheer brutality and just don't see the disgraceful mannerless stream of drivelous crap that has been dumped on CG for weeks now. ("If it's THIS bad they must ... And I should ...")

BS!!

Whether these types are obsessed, hurt, offended, what ever, let them choke in their pityful decaying dissolving state and ignore the freakin bastards!

At some point they'll grow tired, or they just die. In the mean time CG should have done what they are supposed to do: ban the individuals that constantly break- and fool around with- the posting guidelines.

They (the admins) haven't, prolly coz they can't handle it properly, and <have not done their homework>, yet.

<stonehenge> has drawn his conclusions- and I'm not going to hang around growing more and more frustrated and VIOLENT - the irony - hence (heh) I will remove myself from the problem area, which is sadly enough "my chessgames" as a whole, ergo including the pages of my friends, pals and the people I respect.

<AnnieK> I have deep respect for your immense efforts, and the manner in which you word and construct them, especially those posted at your forum were so extremely spot on it was almost uncanny. ("racism" - and the way you put the ultimate point across with [paraphrased]: "Heck, I don't even know if I care that much about the 'human race', as such...", etc.)... I read the first part of that post, thinking the exact identical, scrolled down for the rest of the post, and HUH?? Exactly, almost word perfect, what I was thinking while reading your post.

So - I'm outta here now, will close my forum, will keep contact with the friends i have email addresses of, and hope that when I check back around these parts in a few months time, that the atmosphere will have improved drastically.

<Dom> Take care, wordsmith-with-the-giant-heart... I'll be back for you!

Here I go again.

<Annie K> This is nit-picking to the Nth degree, but ... while you are quite right to label the original extended piece of Tayloriana a *conspiracy theory* (*he* might regard it as a draft of an unfinished poem with a paranoid narrator?), I still maintain that the chunk which TPS lifted was not. It was an attitudinal statement. Perhaps the kind of thing that might be said by a conspiracy-theorist, but not sufficient in its own right to constitute an example of one.

Sorry about the bastardized legalese and ersatz philosophic jargon. I'm trying to be precise, for a change. And to stick to single entendres, which is almost impossible.

Forgive me. None of this matters in the slightest. I note with slight amusement that the original piece of SD spamanoia has now vanished. I didn't do it, and the time limit for poster-deletion had passed, so I assume CG got involved.

For @#$%'s sake, don't let the cretins chase you off.

If necessary let's all form a posse and ask admin to pull their fingers out, like they've done many times before including to some of our friends here who have been responsible for far less.

I'm standing by on this one.

I had this naive idea that it wasn't so *very* poisonous, and will blow over. We've weathered storms before. But ... latest evidence suggests I hadn't really been paying attention.

<Annie K> You're perceptive. And an assiduous researcher too. You're right: I hadn't dug very deeply into this. I tend not to use those search tools very often.

<tpstar> Not a lot to discuss, is there? (Ah. The rhetorical 'discuss', meaning 'QED'). Those quotes - which I hadn't seen before - look very like examples of what you say they are.

Death threats might just be macho immature-male crap, but the use of the word 'blood' in that context is vile, primitive and deeply stupid. And, yes, racist.

Basta. The question is not "what did you do to upset these people?" ... it's more like "if people respond like this to being upset, why are they still here?" As in not banned from CG?

Is this happening in other places/forums too? Or did I call it down on my own head in some way?

And now I, too, must vanish to do some 'work'. So I'm off to the 18th century for a few hours ... they had this thing called Enlightenment which I'm hoping to borrow ...

domdaniel, sorry for intruding (or whichever way you might see it).

cg.com has <solid proof> for <really serious> email threats against me and my family - clearly as an extension to cg.com issues - (see the carlsen page) while <still> allowing the threat maker to continue as a kibitzer on cg.com.

their justification which i disagree with: the really serious offences took place <outside> cg.com. but if people get so upset by being present on cg.com - or handles their anger that stems from cg.com so badly - that they start committing criminal acts outside cg.com as a direct reaction, wouldn't it be better to cut their wire?

no matter what you or other of your friends think about me, i'm rather sure neither of you support the crazy action of people who call another kibitzer and threaten to kill him and his family. this is cg.com through my glasses.

Because I can't help. I could maybe suggest some action or other to CG ... but what? If you're being threatened in real life then banning people here won't necessarily stop it, and could even make it worse.

Of course the scumbags should be banned anyway.

I also wonder why the most virulent eruptions seem to start on player pages.

Your news is especially worrying because you and I have a double presence here - a forum, but also a player page. One presumes this is how the stalkers found you. I'm ex-directory, but even so.

I've already got a recording device hooked up to my landline. Do the same thing. Record the creeps and have them busted.

Me, I pretty much went straight from live games to forum-squatting, with an occasional detour through 'world' games. I tend to avoid player pages, especially those of up-and-coming GMs -- the 'fan' side of chess doesn't interest me much ... it's too much like being a generic sports fan. The psychoses are similar.

One problem for CG is that they form part of a larger enterprise hoping to extend the CG format to other sports and activities. Thus the fan element forms a vital part of the user base/ audience. And yet this fan zone seems to be the one most likely to erupt into violence, flames, threats, extreme behavior, usw.

What to do? I have no idea. The brouhaha *can* be ignored - delete some posts, put some users on ignore, go back to posting puns and pottering around in French defences - but that's a cop-out. I'm with <twinlark> on this (and not for the first time) -- we have a duty to defend the place against rampant cretinism.

First thing - compiling a list of relevant forums for the admins to read is my thought too - the ones I know of that are relevant are <brankat>'s, mine and of course <tpstar>'s. Although IMO it should be posted to the cg.com forum, not handled privately. All interested members should be kept informed of what is going on too, so they can make informed decisions on any stance they wish to take.

That was my favorite episode. I love <Felicity Kendall> and she is still stunningly beautiful at age 104.

She is a national treasure.

As for the "thing"-

Some may have noticed that I decided to opt out early yesterday. I erased the posts about it in my forum, and I haven't posted about it anywhere since.

Nor shall I again.

Last word- I do think it was/is possible to deal with all of this just by using the ignore function.

<Niels> I am horrified that you are considering quitting this site- Frankly, if you quit, this site would be a desert to me.

A desert.