Bob,
With all due respect, there is a difference between the debate you describe and what goes on stock boards where the gurus play.
One would have to be an sightless to not see the hoards of posts that are basically, "You have sh$yte for brains, you moron for thinking that XYZ is not a fraud and that JOE BLOW who put out a PR for them is a crim. How many shares did they pay you to tout this POS, you friggin aho, criminal, thief. We will expose you and wipe you from the face of the earth."
Of course, I've paraphrased, taken out the capital letters and bold and italics, sort of cleaned it up and corrected the spelling as we know spelling and logic is not the forte of a warped and puerile mind. Even that post might be acceptable if it weren't repeated over and over. I don't think I'm being overly sensitive or critical here. As I posted previously, this does not personally bother me or frighten me, as I deal with this type of stuff successfully both online and offline. Further, I do believe there is value in getting opposing views. I applaud those who legitimately expose scams. Those who make up fraud and fraudulently try to manipulate through repetitive posting of their made-up claims and then combine that with intimidation will continue to draw my wrath. I believe the attacks are intended to intimidate and are successful at times. The intimidation is intended to scare up stock and also to get posters to back down on legitimate discourse.
Check out the ECNC thread as I posted before. (To prevent the attacks on me, my disclosure is that I neither own ECNC nor really know anything about it or the people who are long or short on it.) There was a personal attack against someone, threatening to publicly disclose his real name and to expose him for the tout and *****!$%^ (censored) that he really was. Basically, the guru's evidence was that the poster had a very similar first name to someone who worked in a law office that represented ECNC. When the guru realized, (apparently someone told him this,) that he was way off base, he attempted to retract his threat and apologize. The result was successful. The person who was threatened has not posted very often since that episode.
So - what I cite here is not in any way similar to your example of civil discourse. The stuff I cite occurs on SI on a daily basis, in one form or another. If the rule is that boards are to be governed by rules, then it's time that the rules are enforced. I don't think your new policy of self-moderated threads should allow the originator of a post to do stuff that he could not do on other threads. Otherwise, there will be anarchy.
Thank you. |
