[MD] [LS:9743] The social level.

[Ant McWatt]

Mary Friend commented August 26th 2014:

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During a hiatus of 2 months I deliberately set the Lilasquad to open
posting, in anticipation of being unable to moderate.  Yes, there is one
individual who posts extravagantly under multiple emails.  Now that I am
back, this has stopped.  I apologize to all who normally post reasonably,
including Bo, John, Dave, 118 and others.  
 
The deluge of bizarre posts are my fault as administrator and  should in no
way be construed to reflect negatively on other posters.
 
If I may be permitted one comment, the degree of smugness demonstrated by
Arlo, DMB, and Ant is unbecoming.  There is no place for this attitude in
the high country of the mind.
 

Ant McWatt comments:

Mary, 

Just for the record but I certainly did not mean to sound smug concerning Bodvar's out-of-character behavior.  Apologies if this seemed to be the case...  Otherwise, I've known Bodvar for about 20 years now so, above all, I'm worried about him and, to be fair to both Arlo AND DMB, I personally didn't detect any hint of smugness from their recent MD posts about this issue either.  

Best wishes,

Ant


Original Message from Dave Buchanan, August 25th 2014:

Arlo had said:
 
As Bo has refused to stop hounding my personal email, I thought I'd make
this response public. ...And then I went to Google groups and read the the
posts to LilaSquad. ...What a bunch of incoherent, unintelligible, and
outright moronic nonsense. The majority of contributors appear to be
schizophrenics who've gone off their lithium. I am not exaggerating here...
Horse and DMB (anyone else with a functioning frontal lobe), if you haven't
you simply must check this out:

https://groups.google.com/forum/&!forum/lilasquad
 
 
 
dmb then said:
 
Yes, I'm aware and it really is as bad as you say. You're not exaggerating.
I still have at least two cyber-stalkers from that particular nuthouse,
including Bo, even though I've repeatedly asked them to leave me alone. 
 
Every celebrity gets their fair share of psychotic fans, I suppose, but
Pirsig gets way more than his fair share. I guess that's because Phaedrus is
brilliant, heroic, and insane (sort of). It seems to celebrate the
misunderstood genius, which makes for a much better self-image than the
medically diagnosed guy with average intelligence. I mean, it's easy to
understand and to sympathize with them as afflicted souls - but that
certainly doesn't mean their philosophy is worthy of the name. 
 
I go swimming in larger ponds and sadly, this kind of mental illness is
fairly common. I see it almost every day and I have to remove someone from a
philosophy forum several times each week because of it. Many of them are
"religious" in bizarre or fanatical ways. It's pretty depressing, just as
you'd imagine.