In the beginning, as helplessly dependent infants, we require the assistance of "big people" to help us to learn and to grow into efficaciously independent adults. Sadly, we often find ourselves during our formative years thrust into dislikable encounters with dislikable people from which we can plot no ready escape. Thanks to the ethics of altruism, many adults continue to place themselves into these "no win" situations by choice rather than by force. They appeal to self-sacrificial bromides such as "turn the other cheek" and other rubbish to justify their actions. Fortunately for those of us who know better, rational egoism liberates us to take effective action to set ourselves free from those annoying others. Such action requires the right to act on one's own mind and the right to own and control one's own property. Such freedoms allow us to block or boycott those despicable persons and thus limit their negative impacts on our lives.
In the realm of discussion forums, the site owner has great leeway in setting the level of tolerance of annoying people where "annoying" gets measured against the standards that owner establishes. Numerous "right" ways exist to handle these annoying people. Sometimes one can learn lessons about these right ways from unusual sources. One of these comes in The Ultimate Strip Club List or TUSCL, a forum (not safe for work!) dedicated to the art of exotic dancing. Years ago, two particularly annoying posters, "RomanticLover" and "davids," made repeated posts at odds with the spirit of TUSCL with subject lines that often SCREAMED IN ALL CAPS, such as: "How much MONEY does an EMOTIONAL CONNECTION with a stripper cost?" After numerous complaints to "Founder," he finally added an "ignore list" option for users to block from personal view the posts of selected forum members. Evidently the "starvation" strategy worked because the two most voluminously offensive members finally stopped posting to TUSCL altogether. This strategy saved "Founder" the trouble of deciding who belonged and who did not and gave members the pleasure of selectively blocking objectionable members.
In a forum like Rebirth of Reason, limits to software demand an alternative treatment of objectionable "Objectivists," namely the boycott strategy. This means deliberately neither engaging in any form of dialogue with dislikable people nor sanctioning any words they post. It amounts, in effect, to a self-generated block. Boycotting requires much greater self-discipline than blocking as one will always feel tempted to rebut some irritating statements of objectionable posters or even to sanction some of their posts. On the other hand, it offers a chance to encourage others, publicly and privately, to boycott those same persons in the hopes that the boycotted parties will eventually find the "starvation for attention" unbearable and "leave the building."
I have publicly boycotted two people on this site, one by bilateral declaration of bitter enmity and the other by unilateral declaration of intolerable annoyances. The outcome of the first resulted in his departure from this forum. The outcome of the second has thus far saved me precious time and energy.
I invite and encourage others to follow the same strategy for posters they find objectionable.
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