There is a fight going on regarding the Internet Infidels Discussion Board. Details can be found here, at A Load of Bright. I’m not privy to any details, and I don’t think I want to be. Those folks just need to learn to get along.
From Daylight Atheism:
Here’s my conclusion, and if you read nothing else of this post, read this:
So long as the current management persists, I will no longer be supporting the Internet Infidels organization (www.infidels.org). I will also no longer participate in or support the Internet Infidels discussion board (www.iidb.org). I strongly recommend that all my readers do likewise.
If you’re still reading and are interested in the gory details, I’ll try to summarize what brought me to this point.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Hi Greg – thanks for the mention.
I wish I hadn’t had to write that post, but the situation on IIDB had gotten too bad to ignore. The fact that the board’s regular posters were opposed to the administration’s actions by a greater than 95% margin shows pretty clearly who was in the wrong, I think.
IIDB has made some policy changes (a few board administrators showed up in the comment thread to mention them), but as far as I’ve heard, they’re not doing anything about the initial wrong that precipitated this fiasco, namely the banning of Janice Rael. Therefore, my comments on the matter stand as written.
That’s why many of us have moved to Rants n Raves with our lovable Stopper, isn’t that right Ebon?
Quite so. 🙂
“The fact that the board’s regular posters were opposed to the administration’s actions by a greater than 95% margin shows pretty clearly who was in the wrong.”
How was this measured? There was a petition signed by over 200 posters which asked for a particular admin to resign (compared to another petition which had far fewer signers asking him not to resign), but IIDB has over 2,500 active members.
The controversy has clearly been damaging to IIDB, which has lost many significant regular posters, but there are clear differences of opinion about what and where things have gone wrong. In my opinion, Internet Infidels was fully in its rights to remove Janice Rael from its board and from IIDB, though they could have handled it much better. Working with the admins and mods to craft and approve the board’s November 5 statement was a step in the right direction, but then they repudiated that statement and have failed to live up to its commitments, with a change of strategy that’s at least temporarily being extreme in its intolerance of dissent, even suspending people for quoting from that November 5 statement, which has been hidden from public view along with many threads of criticism. On the other hand, many of the protesters have also behaved abominably, and acted in a way that really has merited their removal from the board, such as making unsupported accusations of fraud and tax violations, and posting insults and personal attacks. The worst offenders on both sides have made themselves look bad.