by Far from being the "Clear Thinking Oasis" which RDF began as, only to become a polluted Black Lagoon, RatSkep appears to pride itself in being "The wee timorous beastie that crawled out of the black lagoon".
I sometimes wonder if the very rapid launch of this forum was due to higher powers. Not of the Divine kind, but of the National Security Agency kind....A sort of 'honeypot' or 'honeytrap', to attract the old guard of RDF, & the constant drizzle of miscreants, liberationists, anarchists, freethinkers & truthers of all kinds. Those freedom seeking people who are a thorn in the side of all despotisms & psychopaths.
As the Chinese sage said; "hold your friends close.....but hold your enemies closer"
After a suspension of 6 months Galaxian is back. My presence was mainly on the 9/11 thread. Because that thread is emblematic of the dumbing down of society. Of how smoke & mirrors, spin, & cheap conjurer distractions & disinformation can be used by malevolent authorities to make otherwise reasonable people brain-dead. Of how this society has now been so domesticated & tamed that most people are afraid to inquire into the reality of things. Of how that repression is so successful that a considerable number even adopt the position of their overlords, in a macabre version of the "Stockholm Syndrome".
But, as with most political things, we cannot know for certain whether RationalSkepticism is a cruel trick foisted on us by manipulative organizations or a truly well-meaning forum. But what is clear is that it has been hijacked by intelligence organizations, as many such sites have been.
To begin with; contentious, dangerous topics, such as the 9/11 thread, are relegated to the backwaters of the forum where few are likely to see them. They're even mocked by the administrators; a smug pre-judgement & declaration of how the glitterati view the subject. For example, the 9/11 thread gets double whammy in that it is placed in the "Conspiracy Theory" board. Itself a subset of the "General Debunking" board. So the prejudiced POV of the Forum's governing body is already made clear" "Hey, members, this is a derision free-for-all, do your worst!" This lamentable lack of open-minded truth seeking is further reinforced by the biased moderation, where on nearly every page the trolling & insults of the RatSkep RatBags is ignored by the moderators, or at best simply tut-tutted, while the merest anger shown by the Truthers is punished by formal cautions & suspension.
It gets worse. We have several sock-puppets on the forum. Not merely sock-puppets of a banned member, but sock-puppets of one member operating under several names at the same time. Sometimes even posting on the same page with two or more identities. The resources of the forum cannot detect masking of multiple membership by one disinformation agent.
To add insult to injury, we also have artificial intelligence web-bots as members. The Turing test has now almost been passed by AI programs when quizzed in general, wide ranging, conversation. When the scope of the test is restricted to a topic such as 9/11, the Turing test is much easier to pass. Thus there are now members of this forum, as well as others, that are not even human beings, but computers programmed to ridicule other members & generally play the buffoon in order to demoralize any opposition to official propaganda, such as about 9/11. Again, even assuming that this forum is a genuine sincere attempt at the free exchange of thought, it would be impossible for its technical staff to discover which members are human & which are machines.
