Vectors of Contagion, DU & Pontypool

[Wombaticus Rex]

AD deliberately goads people.

I like the cat quite a bit but that's hard to argue with.

[Peregrine]

I like him too, just other times he makes me want to punch the screen.
Then again people either have the choice to take his bait or walk away. I sometimes walk away grumbling & it wasn't even me he was goading

[barracuda]

Okay, this is shaping up to be a fine Monday morning. I've locked the Icke thread as it descended into a screaming match between AD and slad about anti-semitism - oh my god what a fucking mess - and Alice has lovingly endorsed the excreble writings of Gilad Atzmon.

Those darn Jews. They're troublemakers, I tell you.

[Peregrine]

I dated a Jew up until a year & a half ago & let me tell you, oh what a trouble maker
Glad I decided to sleep in...

[Wombaticus Rex]

1. Should we expand the ban on "is CIA" accusations to include people who aren't here?

2. Isn't there already a moratorium on "Fuck ______" threads?

3. Are there any changes we could make to the structure of GD to make it "move" more slowly and deliberately? In other words, to minimize the proliferation of Ctrl+C news posts that get 0 replies and keep the GD forum moving at a clip of pages per day?

This is probably a losing battle, not to mention tinkering with natural order, but I am definitely still contemplating how to preserve the magic.

[DrVolin]

That's been annoying me as well. I generally end up ignoring those threads. We could have a headlines forum for new cut and paste without significant commentary?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Or perhaps we could "clean up" every day? I like the idea of a headlines forum...if no meaningful discussion happens in 24h...I mean, it's janitorial work but I'm happy to be That Guy to get it done.

[barracuda]

1. Should we expand the ban on "is CIA" accusations to include people who aren't here?

2. Isn't there already a moratorium on "Fuck ______" threads?

3. Are there any changes we could make to the structure of GD to make it "move" more slowly and deliberately? In other words, to minimize the proliferation of Ctrl+C news posts that get 0 replies and keep the GD forum moving at a clip of pages per day?

This is probably a losing battle, not to mention tinkering with natural order, but I am definitely still contemplating how to preserve the magic.

1 - I don't think so. We have to handle those on a case by case basis, because defining the boundaries of the agency is one of those never-ending parlor games around here, and takes up the bulk of certain posters' thinking. It is fucked up indeed, though, to watch that same impulse being directed at certain targets. It reminds me of the group of posters spearheaded by Lupercal, for whom all movements such as the Arab Spring and OWS and Wikileaks are patently and obviously and automatically spook-based in nature and genesis, which is, in my opinion, a half step away from the vapid certitude of a September Clues discussion.

2 - Yep, no naughty words permited within the subject line/topic name of a thread.

3 - How do we effectively focus group interest upon a narrower scope? No idea. How do we curtail thread proliferation? Thoughts:

• a. Ask slad to consolidate her OP's under sets of pertinent unifying ribrics which make sense to her in much the way that American Dream has organised his previous outpouring of OP's into his ongoing massive humongoids.
  
  b. MOre consolidation threads. For example (!) have Jeffery start a "The Israel Thread", in the manner of "The Libya Thread" or "Fuck Obama" to focus the random posting of daily genocidal misery-making by America's greatest ally in the middle east into a more concentrated spot. Then proliferating Israel threads could at least be considered for moving under that umbrella as they pop up, seeing as how no one got excited about an Israel subforum.
  
  c. Use existing threads in a similar way as consolidating umbrellas to collect straggling OP's together more frequently. Like the Wall Street super-thread by Riddler, and Am Dream's magum opii, wide swaths of headline data intersperced with poster commentary seems to have more value in the case of ongoing issues than the cat-herding permitted by the search function and seventy four-post OP's. This is, essentially, the "clean up".

[barracuda]

Also, sometimes it seems that half the problem here lies in "poetic" thread titles which serve to obscure the topic and lead to proliferation rather than thorough, consolidated investigation. That, and the imprimateur of Jeff as the OP is why the simplicity of "The Libya Thread" succeeds as an amalgamator.

[barracuda]

'Nother idea - during periods of intense activity within a certain scope of topicality, sticky a thread of theat topic to the top to act as a consolidating snare for headline posts.

[Wombaticus Rex]

'Nother idea - during periods of intense activity within a certain scope of topicality, sticky a thread of theat topic to the top to act as a consolidating snare for headline posts.

Judo! Great damn point.

[Jeff]

Hate to wish it upon any unbombed people, but is it nearly time for an Iran thread?

[Bruce Dazzling]

Hate to wish it upon any unbombed people, but is it nearly time for an Iran thread?

The Coming Soon - War with Iran? thread has been the catch-all for a while now.

Other than that, what kind of Iran thread are you thinking about?

[Jeff]

Other than that, what kind of Iran thread are you thinking about?

None, really. Just forgot about that one.

[DrVolin]

Alice, endorsing Atzmon's view that:

...used to justify building a state in which this psychosis could be incubated using the Jews as human vehicles, then unleashed, first against the Palestinians, but eventually against everybody else.

In my opinion, the above is not acceptable. I don't think we should allow an ethnic or so-called racial group to be portrayed as a biological weapon system. The imagery is straight from Body Snatchers and both draws from and reinforces the strange ideas that Jews are a race, and an inherently dangerous one. If she had even said 'the citizens of Israel', instead of 'the Jews', or maybe even 'jewish citizens of Israel', or perhaps just 'zionists' or 'zionist citizens of Israel', which is not coterminous with 'the Jews'. But I don't feel that it is right to use an ethnic identifier in that context. These may seem like trivial differences in wording, but their impact can be significant.

The other bothersome thing is that Alice is essentially saying that Atzmon, because he has become a critic of zionism, has come out of his trance, as if he had been rescued from an abusive brain-washing cult. And it isn't immediately clear from her language or Atzmon's, whether that cult is zionism or jewishness. Which leaves open the door that many will take by default, that the cult is in fact jewishness. And given the not very subtle implications of the rest of the post, the Jews will be understood as mostly biological prisoners of that cult, from which Mr. Atzmon has miraculously and atypically escaped.

From all this, I must reluctanctly conclude that the post, at least, is fundamentally racist, whether consciously or not. I am not sure how to address this.