dom, that relies on the assumption that "the caissar awards" occupied even the tiniest space in my consciousness before wannabe started advertising this (or last) year's edition!

when i noticed, the reaction was roughly "oh yeah. that thing. whatever." or something. but then i didn't bite my tongue (!) and blurted a few lines in the café on new year's eve.

but before that it wasn't on my mind at all. and btw, there are no "conspiricist impressions" - i'm not sure where that came from. there are sensing of other negative traits, though - most of the individual kind (and hence only individually applicable), but also a few on the group level.

ohio's "it's not us, it's you" reaction fails to address the core issue, which is rooted in the perception and existence of the "we" and the "you" in the first place.

let me finish by saying that i've taken notice of the invitation, but i doubt that i'll be comfortable in a club of this size due to certain existing members whose presence will be felt. still, if you'll take a moment to reflect on my words despite their perceived harshness, i'd be much grateful.

I had no idea what a 'Caissar' was, until somebody nominated me for something circa 2007. So I checked it out. I was actually a tad suspicious of all those longtime members with their mysterious forums, but I eventually plucked up the courage to join in.

I don't much care for award ceremonies. During almost 20 years of writing about film, I never once watched the Oscar ceremony. I used to get invites to various Irish and British shindigs, but I'd find an excuse not to go. Except once, when it was in France and they threw in a 5-star hotel and, um, turning them down would have been ungracious.

My interest in the Caissars is not because they're an awards ceremony, or a 3rd cousin twice removed of democracy. It's because they're part of the social glue holding CG together as a virtual community.

And yes, good glue can be invisible to the entities being glued. It's the Bondage Effect, aka The Paste That Passeth Understanding.

Statistically, there will always be dissenters from such processes. Let 'em flourish, by all means. I wouldn't waste energy trying to change the mind of such a person.

They should, however, be seen as in a different category to active troublemakers, trolls, and those who get involved with social processes in order to wreck them. *They* constitute a problem for (almost) everyone; and anyone interested in CG's community has a legitimate interest in discussing any problems they may cause.

On a side note, <frogbert>, do you really use 'ignore' so lavishly? *That* surprises me a little. Isn't it just a way to deprive yourself of information? From my perspective, such wanton ignoring is more than a head-in-sand routine; it's deliberate censorship of unseen material, the kind of thing mullahs and popes are fond of.

Hear no evil, see no evil ... but carry a profound conviction that evil is all about, even in ostensibly amicable places? Innaresting.

And it makes you miss stuff which might be relevant in the future. It's only four years to Alpha Centauri, after all.

Ipse dixit.

Well, I didn't. You and Annie may well know everything knowable.

BTW, I do hope that by manifesting here you haven't turned <Frogspawn> into a sort of shrine for the credulous.

We don't do moving statues. I'm quite good at standing still, though. Maybe optics will do the rest.

cheers

the problem dom, is that there may exist quite radically different opinions regarding which kibitzers represent a problem for the cg community - as a community. and that makes the discussion you refer to quite problematic, to say the least.

<do you really use 'ignore' so lavishly?>

Yup. I could use some of that Spice stuff about now.

The social phenomenon that I tend to call 'psycho-nationalism' *may* be the same thing that some sociologists etc call "ressentiment" -- French for 'resentment', pretty much, but used to describe groups rather than individuals.

Memo: check this concept out.

I lifted 'psycho-nationalism' from something the writer Brendan Behan said in the 1950s: "Other people have nationalities, but the Irish and the Jews have psychoses".

I'd observed that both of these 'nations' had moved on from the psycho phase, but that several others were queueing up to take their place.

"God bless [insert name of nation]!" being one of its milder forms.

Perhaps 'ressentiment' would be a less, well, pejorative way of describing this effect. Or not.

As a hack, I'm not much drawn to words that only academics use. A word should be comprehensible, or *seriously* obscure.

Basta.

*closes shutters*

Of course, anyone who wants to, like, crash here overnight, feel free.

G'♘

*exit G/D*

Are you joking?

Censorship means restricting other people´s access to information, while using the ignore feature means filtering <your own> access to information.

But I don't believe you want to know if I was joking. You're using a stock phrase to indicate incredulity.

I 'ignore' people by not reading what they say, not going to the pages where they hang out, and staying out of their arguments as much as possible. The method has some flaws, but it works for me. I hope to refine it by avoiding some of those places even more rigorously in future.

CG's 'ignore' feature works by rendering the ignored poster's output invisible to you. Its other main effect bars them from posting in your forum.

From my perspective, this simply denies oneself of information. The data may be ugly, but they're out there. Would you want to be unaware of a personal attack on you, which others can still read?

I don't like using Ignore, and currently have nobody on my list. If I did use it, it would primarily be to keep some persistent nuisance out of my forum ... but it's easier just to delete such ravings. I rarely delete anything, in any case, unless it's grossly offensive.

The ignore feature may be useful, in a limited way, in some contexts. If a troll interrupts a live game, for example, the simplest solution may be to ignore them for a few hours. Or if - as I think may be your case - you simply 'clear' CG of a whole category of nonsense which is unlikely ever to affect you personally.

I can understand that. If it works for you, fine. One recent problem in CG is that trolling, flaming and personal attacks got more vicious in the past year, on several fronts.

And large-scale ignoring (aka Iggying) strikes me as counter-productive. I've seen more than one CG member with a large ignore list regularly post a comment in the belief that it's original (eg an opinion on the GOTD) -- blithely unaware of the fact that the same comment has been six times already by the Invisibles.

More worryingly, if somebody is actively insulting or defaming you, putting them on ignore does not solve the problem. The lesser ones may get bored and look for another target, but I assure you that the more serious maniacs just keep going. And I'd rather know if somebody is doing that to me.

OK, my categorical lumping together of Iggying with censorship was a tad extreme, but the 'see no evil' analogy is valid. And my point was that religious censors often issue their edicts/fatwas/bans without seeing the 'offending' text.

I *could* construct a case for Iggy as censorship, but I'd probably end up joking.

You are clearly not on a par with religious maniacs. If something enhances your reading experience, good luck with it. It doesn't work for me. Nor am I trying to suggest my own attitude should be the norm ... though I repeat the point that those who use Ignore *excessively* sometimes go blind.

Finally, the Iggy is a crude instrument. On occasion, I've become good friends with people here -- after we had initially rubbed on another up the wrong way and had a bout of verbals. Sometimes it's the very ingenuity of those verbals that makes one see the better side of the person. Ignoring them would just have obviated that.

On the other hand, I concede that few candidates among the current crop of idiots have much hope of making that transition.

best,

No doubt there are people ignoring me that I've never heard of ... perhaps chess purists appalled by my talkative style and off-topic digressions. That's fine by me. I can only think of three or four occasions when I *knew* that somebody had me on ignore ... and one of those was an unusual case of a person ignoring me because he enjoyed reading me too much, which interfered with his chess study program.

I suppose, if your selections are genuine idiots (etc) then there's nothing much there to miss. I can think of a few posters who never seem to have uttered anything worth reading. And some who subtract from the sum total of human knowledge and enjoyment of life.

what's the purpose? certain "serious maniacs" keep going... and going... and going. you can safely assume that they will keep going. there's no reason to keep observing the lies they keep repeating about you - and there's nothing you can do to make them stop.

Last year, as you know, certain people found new ways of being offensive.

Lunatics, asylums, and the difficulty of retaining control come to mind.

It's a pity that the rot, as it were, has seeped into your very handle.

Pinker is one of the few authors to change my mind on a key issue, linguistic relativity and the Whorf hypothesis.

Here’s an example of a superb Wikipedia page: I studied this stuff (the laryngeal theory in Indo-European philology) in the 1970s, at a time when there was only one old and quite rare book on the topic. But I studied with somebody who learned it directly from JRR Tolkien, which apparently still counts for something in the worlds of philology and hobbitry. Though my grasp of hobbitry is average at best.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryng...

And here is a truly appalling Wikipedia article. I assume I don’t have to explain why.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C...(son_of_do%C3%B1a_Marina)

Even the link malfunctions: click on the 2nd of three options for 'Martin Cortes', ie the son of Hernan Cortes and Marina/Malinche.

The main problem here is bad writing, plus dubious historiography.

I've seen worse, actually.

Anyhoo, imagine that in accelerated CG time almost four-score-and-seven years have passed and we stand perhaps on the brink of terrible things.

It's easy too look at what went *wrong* with the original vision. But a few things have gone right too.

Like the time we surprised them by constructing a complex forum system to organize the Nickel game. A heroic moment, and we were there.

G/D >

First time I've posted on here I think, but it was at the top of the forum page and I was having a look around..

Anyway, I could not have put it all better myself regarding the famous 'ignore' option ! I very rarely agree 100 percent with anything but as regards this post,I do totally and absolutely..

The 'ignore' option on this site has it's purpose, but it's abused waaay too much and when you get it being used as a 'threat' ? Well it reminds me of 7 year olds in a school playground ect..

'Ignoring' anything ultimately puts you on the road to an 'ism' of some kind. You stop learning and cut yourself off from potentially rich sources of knowledge..

I've had a tongue in cheek argument regarding the 'ignore' situation on <Wannabe>s forum concerning the voting and polls currently going on ..Ofcourse people won't vote for you if they have you on 'ignore' .. but this also reduces the quality of their vote.. A factor which is not being taken into account ..