◆ PARALLAX

[staff] Pinned. The same argument turns up every few weeks, usually from someone who just found a struck-through name in a four-month-old thread and decided we are running a memory hole. So, once, plainly:

We almost never delete posts. If a thread is up, what was said in it stays up -- including what was said by members we later banned. You will see their handle struck through and a BANNED tag on the post. That is on purpose. The record is the record, and leaving it up is the honest thing: you get to judge the ban yourself instead of taking our word for it.

A ban stops an account logging in. It does not reach back and tidy the past. We are not in the business of making people unpersons.

What gets you banned here, after warnings, is short, and none of it is 'holding a weird theory': hoaxing presented as real, posting another member's real name, address or employer, threats, and the one everyone argues about -- refusing to ever stand down a personal accusation when you are asked for cause. You may believe this board is a federal honeypot. You may not spend a weekend naming forty members as paid agents and act shocked when the door hits you.

This thread is where we log the contested ones. Read them before you decide who was silenced and who was a liability.

You want to log me? Log this. My cell ran four degrees hot for eleven days with the input current cut, palladium loaded in heavy water, and not one of you clipboard men has set foot in my workshop, because you are afraid of what your own calorimeter would say.

SkepWell. I have answered you three times. A sealed flow calorimeter proves nothing, a blank run proves nothing, NOTHING proves anything to a man whose salary depends on not seeing excess heat. You are not a skeptic. You are a priest with a multimeter.

Here is my measurement method: come to the workshop, put your hand on the jacket, and if you still call me a liar you can drink the heavy water out of my cell and we will see which of us the truth poisons.

Go on. Ban the engineer. It is what the OWNERS of this board pay you for.

[staff] That is the third time you have invited me to poison myself, Algernon, and the second time this week you have called a member a paid liar for asking you a question. I have been more than patient. One clean calorimetry run was all anyone ever asked for -- I even offered to lend you the flow cell. You had six months.

You are done here. Not for believing the cell makes excess heat -- plenty of people here believe stranger things and keep their accounts -- for the threats. The posts stay up. People can read them and decide for themselves whether it was the calorimeter I was afraid of.

Fine. Since this is the honesty thread, here is some honesty. There are at least forty paid accounts on this board and I can read them like a menu.

Tell: registered after March 2001, perfect grammar, never once wrong about a source, shows up inside ten minutes of anyone posting a real document, and always -- ALWAYS -- with the same patient, sorry-for-your-loss tone. That is not a person. That is a desk.

I am not going to pretend I do not have the list. Occams is on it. SkepWell is obviously on it, he is staff, that is the whole point. Curator_EU, on it. The nurse, on it -- the gentlest cover they ever built. You want me to stand them down one at a time? I will not. Standing them down is what they WANT, it launders them. A name on my list stays on my list until it explains the timing of every reply it has ever made.

If you are clean you have nothing to fear from a list. The fact that you are all so frightened of one is the tell on top of the tell.

I am on your list, so let me answer as an exhibit. A list of names is not an argument, it is a mood with a spreadsheet. 'Replies fast, cites well, stays calm' describes a paid agent and also describes a competent bored person with a good connection, and you have no method that separates the two -- which means you do not have a method, you have a grudge with administrative ambitions.

I have debunked half this board to its face and I am still here, because being wrong about a sighting is allowed. Being told you are a federal asset every time you ask for a source is not a debate, it is a loyalty test with the polarity reversed. I have nothing to prove to your menu.

see this is where it gets genuinely hard for me, because i am the board's designated paranoid and even i think the list is junk. and YET.

here is the part that keeps me up. the only posters this place ever actually bans are the ones who get loud about who is watching. not the channelers. not the moon-cheese guy. not the forty believers who think i am a lizard. the people walked to the door are the ones counting accounts and timing replies. you can call that a coincidence about tone and threats. maybe it is. i am only saying that IF you wanted a room where the watchers got laughed out and the believers got a comfy chair, this is exactly the room you would build -- and unmask is getting banned tonight for noticing it badly.

he is still wrong about the nurse though. leave the nurse out of it.

None of you can answer ONE question so you ban the men who ask it. watch.

water finds its level. the level is FLAT. i have stood on the south coast with a decent level and a long lens and the far shore does not drop where your curve says it must. not a foot. not an inch. explain that without telling me my own eyes are NASA assets.

   eye -------- horizon --------
        (where is the drop?)
   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        flat. every time.

and before Razorback wheels out his ship-and-mast trick, save it. refraction is the word you reach for when the model breaks.

you want to know who funds the lie? ask [staff: member name, town and employer removed -- THIS is the line, Len, not the flat earth] why a man on THAT payroll spends his evenings defending a globe. there. now ban me, it only proves it.

every thread here is the same thread once your eyes open. i do not blink. you cannot stand that.

[staff] Locking this as a reference and updating the log. Three contested bans, all upheld on review:

-- Algernon_Quint (11 Jun): repeated threats, including telling staff to drink the heavy water out of his cell. Not the cold fusion. The threats.
-- unmask_the_shills (19 Jul): named 40+ members as paid agents in one weekend and would not stand down a single one when asked for cause.
-- Len_Hutchins (02 Sep): posted a member's employer and town. We cut that line and left the rest, so you can see exactly where the line sits. The flat-earth content was never the problem.

All three posts stay up, struck through, because the policy is the policy. And for Spook, who raised it in good faith: we did not ban these three for noticing watchers. We banned them for threats and for putting real people's real lives on the board. Those are different things, however much they rhyme.

[later edit, 27 Nov] Two more for completeness: BlueBookBurner (banned twice, last in August) and -- after the honeypot thread -- Mothman_Archivist, who moved from theory to naming members as 'intake assets'. Same rule, same reason, same struck-through name left exactly where he put it. The honeypot thread itself stays up. Read it. That was always the point.