User blog:Cerne/Finished with the CWBB

Alright, I know I said earlier that I wouldn't type any personal or non-conworld-related entries but this makes a major exception. About a week or so ago - November 11, 2011 (11/11/11) to be exact - I got an email from the administrator of the Conworlds Bulletin Board (CWBB) at http://conworlds.org/cwbb saying that he was going to step down, pass on the ownership of the site to someone else, and leave the site. He even mentioned taking down the site, as that was probably his original plan. Now, shortly after I get this email (and I forget what time I got it) I emailed him back because I was afraid all of my conworld posts were going to get deleted along with the site. Shortly after I sent the email, I went to the CWBB and I saw a thread by one of the site's moderating staff in the general section. For reference, here is the thread. So I read through the thread and left a few replies. The OP told me the board was not going to be deleted, only moved to a new domain name. He also told me that all of my posts were backed up. The administrator still left, though. Meaning the site and its access information will be passed on to someone else. After responding in the thread, I started a PM conversation with its OP about the future of the site. Apparently the CWBB will be passed on to three people: Xhin (the OP), eldin raigmore/chiarizio, and Blake.

Warning: BIG rant ahead.

Yes, the CWBB is now partly owned and run by a pedantically overbearing machiavellian hypocrite with a self-ascribed sense of reality (see: Subjective realism/externalism) and a phobia of being wrong and/or criticized in any way possible (see: Narcissism), named Blake Rieger.

I am tired of having to see and put up with: He doesn't even have very much conworlding material; what little he does have on the board is scarce, sporadic, and cryptic. And yet that is a perfect excuse to criticize everyone else's conworlds as some sort of self-appointed authority figure. There's nothing wrong at all with constructive criticism but I also do my own research and I want that recognized instead of ignored or downgraded in the name of some idiot's delusions of grandeur. I don't care what you want to call it. It's insulting. Yet he expects you to accept it...and if you don't accept it, he'll make you accept it, either by pulling a polemic argument about its credibility and pointlessly debating to the death about it or by degrading you until you give in. There is even a rule on the board saying we need to accept criticism... Whether we actually decide to take it or not is irrelevent when the only alternative to accepting it is having someone repeatedly tell you it isn't realistic or making you look bad. Like I just typed, it's insulting when someone completely disregards your own research.
 * the excessive vanity and pomposity in his posts;
 * the blatant bigotry and all of his attempts to rationalize or justify it instead of own up to it (e.g. you can advocate women's rights all you want but if you try to rationalize physical inferiority then you're still sexist);
 * the ignorant "I don't think, I know" attitude whenever relevent or non-trivial topics come up (see: Confirmation bias);
 * the constant one-upsmanship in his arguments;
 * the opportunistic bashing and undermining of other peoples' integrity in the name of humour - and defensively vying for sympathy or entitlement when things are the other way around;
 * the inflated ego (though that has somewhat dissipated since the early years);
 * the condescending way he talks to practically everyone on the board;
 * and the way he reproves or admonishes me (and others) whenever I disagree with him or whenever I get pissed off at him, as if I am the one making some sort of mistake.

The guy doesn't seem comfortable at all unless he can control what you do on the board and the way you think about certain things like religion (see: Scientism). But don't take my word for it; try de-rationalizing vegetarianism or substantiating free will and see how far you get. Earlier years spent trying to dominate board decisions, later years spent hiding behind the titles of Moderator or Administrator to discourage board scrutiny of his actions... He actually became board administrator within moments of accidentally deleting one of my posts. Instead of admitting he had been a mistake, he justified it by being a moderator and making a "judgement call." Throughout the board's entire history I have watched Blake dupe his way higher up the board hierarchy, all the way undermining and manipulating the original board administrator and flaunting a superficial sense of higher authority and entitlement in front of everyone else, even the other moderators.

Whatever.

There is nothing I or anyone else can do about it now.

I doubt I would get very much support from the other (senior) board members, anyway. Maybe one or two people, but that wouldn't really change anything. There have been uprisings on the CWBB before but nothing has ever resulted from them. The only way anything really could be done is if both Xhin and eldin raigmore, along with most of the rest of the board, voted for Blake's demotion from any position of power - including both administrator and moderator. They might risk having to find someone else to assist with registration and spammers but IMO it would be worth it. I really do. They might not see it at first, but think of the revitalization the board might go through.

At least one member I know for a fact left the board because of Blake, at least five others have left very strong indications that they left the board because of Blake, and many more have probably left because of affiliations that Blake seems to be opposed to. He thinks he has to de-rationalize or de-validate everything he is opposed to, probably so that it will carry more weight amongst other people and therefore put his reasoning ahead of theirs. Saying he didn't like something without rationalizing it would attract too much attention and lower him to everyone else's level; given how fervently he argues with every single disagreement, I would be hard-pressed to think it wouldn't matter to him if he didn't lift a single finger in response to what he disagreed with. So obviously he's taking something personally.

If Blake had really come to the CWBB to share ideas then some personal opinions are going to come out. It therefore becomes very apparent that he's either too sensitive and takes every argument too personally, or he becomes too involved in all arguments in general, regardless of how he feels about them. This latter consideration makes sense because if you wanted a certain kind of attention from people (e.g. being considered a virtuous intellectual or a hedonistic rebel) then you would want to promote those aspects of yourself that promote the image you want other people to have of you (albeit you would probably over-emphasize them a bit). Blake is an atheist vegetarian and he wants to be known as a logical genius so obviously he promotes certain personal aspects by rationalizing them instead of doing something else, like moralizing them as would a more samaritan-like character want to do. Thing is, if I were another board member, I could tolerate a disagreement or opposition toward my views and beliefs but I wouldn't want anyone rationalizing the idea that I was inferior in some way for having them.

...oh, wait, I am another board member. So I suppose if any of my views, opinions, beliefs, etc., get in the way of Blake's self-promotion, he has to downplay them by de-rationalizing them, and therefore discourage me from posting on the board.

I get it.

It is actually like this for a lot of members. That's why the CWBB seems a lot more homogeneous now than it used to be when it comes to board discussion and constructive criticism. It is also why there seems to be a lot more type-casting on the CWBB than in other online communities (or at least in the ones that I have been to). The rest of the board seems perfectly fine with typecasting Blake as some sort of logical robot. I don't; primarily because it still promotes his personal biases and sense of self-validation, and Blake probably knows this. It is one big reason I never felt I belonged on the CWBB. Anyone who tries to criticize Blake or contradict his interests and ideals is made to feel like they don't belong on the CWBB.

It is very difficult and annoying to debate these things - or anything else for that matter - with Blake because his extremely one-sided views on reality and everything that pertains to it, especially science and logic, lead to extensive confirmation bias. This is particularly evident in his excessive use of definitive statements and the omission or replacement of certain expressive elements such as simple noun-verb independent clauses and personal prepositional phrases like "to me" (also known as Set Expressions) which are used to denote perception or reference in a statement, as well as certain modal verbs like "can"/"could" and "may"/"might" denoting uncertainty or mere possibility when it comes to open-ended and/or controversial topics (albeit ones that aren't trivial to him).

An argument can be made that a truly objective sentence requires one or (preferrably) all of these latter elements - unless the statement is unanimously agreed upon - and the omission of any of them creates some level of subjectivity. The more someone omits verbal and prepositional (dative) expressions from their statements, the more subjective their information becomes. Assuming there can never really be any unanimously agreed-upon perceptions, views, opinions, ideas, etc., then technically a completely definitive sentence will always be inaccurate to someone. Also considering the fact that there are many open-ended and/or controversial topics - even scientific philosophy does not permit us to say that any theory is ever 100% true or is able to escape sampling bias - we are left with the proposition that no definitive statement is ever objective. This shouldn't discourage them in plain usage, but those who use them should know that there will always be someone out there who disagrees with them. Add in the possibility that whoever could disagree may even be listening to such a statement, and definitive statements not only become subjective, they also become ignorant and self-serving.

Blake hardly ever uses such expressions when he is talking or arguing about what he really believes in, such as atheism, convergent evolution, denial of free will, and the rationale behind vegetarianism. The sad and frustrating thing is that this quality isn't specific to him at all, so you can't say it is an individual personality quirk or something that makes him unique. I see people exhibit this sort of confirmation bias in their sentences all the time. It mostly happens when someone comes from a very sheltered background and joins a larger and more diverse community. They think they have seen and done everything, so they exhibit a lot of certainty in what they say. Unknownst to them, it turns out sounding very one-sided because the people in this larger community always seem to know better, due to having more experience. More diversity in perspective leads to greater breadth of knowledge, and therefore more objectivity.

The problem is that if this diversity in perspective is given an effective means by which it can be rejected then the person has less incentive to broaden their own perspective and more of an ability to filter out those of others, which will happen if the person's views are strong enough. That is what we have at the CWBB. Among other ways to promote the validity of his views verbally, such as euphemising whole sentences to make a simple but ill-supported point carry more leverage, Blake seems to refuse treating his perspective as an isolated perspective whenever possible unless the topic is trivial to him. His views are expressed in ways to make them seem unanimous and/or generally accepted so that they outweigh any criticism or disagreements he gets. And now that he partially owns the CWBB, he has greater means to enforce these personal biases. In addition to being very self-serving, I find it also problematic when determining the validity of information on the CWBB. This is another big reason why I am leaving the CWBB. I value objective information and I do not want to be associated with an online community where information is biased to such a degree.

I actually typed up something a lot more thorough and included a lot more in-board examples of what Blake's been doing on the CWBB but that was a while ago when I had decided I was going to leave the board months earlier. Bits of it are unfinished and scattered all over the place. I don't even know what I was going to say in those parts anymore. More than anything, I suppose it was laziness and procrastination, and "writer's block" (for lack of a better word) that kept me from finishing it and sending it to Avaronald as part of my Goodbye email.

Ecch...I never manage to get anything really substantial completed. Not that it would matter in this case - Blake does edit and delete posts on the CWBB but he only claims to have done this with another CWBB member named Mr. Saturday. I don't particularly trust Blake in this regard because he can legitimately edit his own posts with his Moderator status so as to leave out the editing notification that other board members have to deal with at the bottom of the post. It doesn't leave out the possible merit of trusting him but it does make linking to older posts unreliable due to this fact.

As it stands, Blake has done an awful lot to ensure that he has remained in a position where he can do things to peoples' posts, exact rules (see here <-- the page and the rules were both made by Blake and they leave a lot of room for subjective judgement) and use his own judgement to deal with board issues like trolling and inter-member disputes. For instance, contrast what he does here (and read the whole thread) with what he does here.

Also see these images, taken from a thread that was put in a section restricted to board members by Blake:

Apparently you can click on these thumbnails to see the larger version of the image. I would suggest this because you can't really see anything right now. If you can't do this, go to my Contributions section and look for the images there.

The thread can actually be seen here but you need to be a board member to see it. If you need verification that these are real, I can give you my site login and password in private somehow. This should only be in exteme circumstances, though.

You don't need to be a board administrator or moderator to pay for its domain name. Add this to the countless other good-will things he's done, like creating the original version of the site banner, and I don't blame the other board members and administration staff for finding it difficult to get rid of Blake. So I doubt he will be removed from his position as board administrator very easily. Which is why I am not taking an activist approach. Instead, I am just leaving the whole thing altogether.

.....

So congratulations, CWBB, you have just been taken over by a malignant cancerous sociopath (See: Dark Triad) from Houston, Texas, who is probably better off now having a place where no one will stop him from being the completely ignorant arsehole he had probably always dreamt of being.

But none of this matters anymore. I am hereby through with the CWBB, with Blake, and with the chronic inactivity that board gets because of him. As of now, I will no longer go to the CWBB or talk about the CWBB elsewhere (unless someone asks). It is all behind me now, and I can breathe easily.

Thanks for reading.