beautiful beautiful post and I so get what you mean

Hmm. That's interesting. Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to lay it all out as you saw it.

It's sad. I wonder if it will recover or just move on to the Kool-Aid phase next.

- NonE

fourvoicechord wrote:

Okay, its a long story, so prepare to read a tale. 759 was the great blow up podcast by "night-so-nice Stef". When Niels was banned there was alot of posting going on on the FDR forums. Alex "smackism" in particular wrote a great deal on the boards about it, and even went so far as to suggest that Stef himself was the "gun in the room". There was alot of back and forth over whether Stef had done the right thing or not. (My position at the time was that Stef was right in banning Niels, but I will state here for the record that I retract that opinion. Alex questioned the banning the whole time, and he was right, and I was wrong. Maybe I'll post more on this later.)

I had the exact same experience: I thought Nielsio should have apologized and that in absence of such an apology Stef was right in banning him. But then thanks to both Alex and Nielsio (and my own experiences with Stef) I realized that there was a lot more to the story and I now no longer think Stef was right in banning Nielsio.

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Something really bizarre and wrong happened when Stef banned Niels. It wasn't the first time he had banned someone from the boards, but this time it was problematic, since Stef (and Christina) didn't even try to see it from Niels's point of view. There seems to have been some rivalry between Greg and Niels (I never paid that close attention to it) but Stef twisted it around to say that Niels was "abusing" Greg and everyone else on the board by expressing anger over Greg's posts on a thread that Niels started (as I recall, Greg was being insulting). Niels's "abuse" of Greg consisted, according to Stef, of demanding something (of Greg--namely, respect) while he himself was not willing show this himself. He was therefore (according to Stef) putting a moral principle as a standard, but not obeying the standard himself. But in the whole situation, Stef was himself projecting, contradicting himself, and doing some splitting of his own. For example, in the podcast cited above (or one of those from around that time) Stef ridiculed Niels's statement that Greg's post had a certain "tone". How can you have a "tone" over an internet message forum? he asked. However, it was because of this very "tone" that Niels was getting first ganged up on, and then banned.

the thing is, FDR'ers and Stef himself will use different tones as weapons, but they are a lot more sophisticated (and hence dangerous) than outright saying 'Get the fuck out off my thread'. And so they are able to reject the latter as abusive while defending their own versions of more subtle nasty statements.

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The conversation which resulted from the banning turned into a sort of uproar. Some interesting folks who hadn't posted for a while chimed in, the soon-to-be philosopher Kings circled the wagons for Stef, and so on, as you might well imagine whenever a significant number of posters on that board over there actually dare to disagree with Stef when he makes one of his colossal blunders. I remember Alex and I were hanging out alot during that time, and we must have spent hours and hours discussing it, the board culture, property rights on message board forums, the psychology of the whole thing, etc.

I think Alex was right in saying that Stef wanted to ban Nielsio all along, that he was looking for an excuse not long after the start of the conflict. He wanted to protect himself and Greg.

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But Stef did not handle himself very well through the course of this. Apparently the pressure of his decision to commit himself full-time to FDR, the hypocrisy of banning Niels and perhaps the fear of being called out on it, and all the posters who were questioning and disagreeing with him were too much. He had an implosion. That was podcast #759.

and he has had more since, but yeah this was the first real one.

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In this podcast, he blamed everyone who was questioning him on the Niels banning for everything that seemed to be going wrong for him in every aspect of his life. Alex, Niels, Putty Tat, and some others were all called “Trolls” who were “borderline personalities” who, now that Stef was moving forward with something that was really meaningful for him and was going to be good for the whole world, were determined to wreck his endeavors and bring the Conversation down. He yelled, bitched, swore, fumed, insulted, whined and pouted. It was like your boss on a really bad day venting all of his frustrations by having a go at everyone in the office, whether they actually did anything wrong or not. He stated that he—and he alone!—was taking on the most monumental task in history: he was taking on the three greatest sources of evil this world has ever known—the family, the state and the church. He likened himself to a man who was going after a whale (or was it three whales?) with only a pair of swimming trunks and a hunting knife between his teeth.

incredible, no? but yeah, i think that was the spirit he lived and worked in after he made the decision to go full-time with FDR

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He lambasted Niels in particular, saying of him something like he’s “some guy who lives on the other side of the world who he had never met and didn’t mean anything to him anyway”, he had some nasty things to say about Putty Tat as well, though I can’t remember what he said about him. In short, he threw all the compassion, reason, openness, curiosity, detachment, empiricism, consideration and friendliness that he over and over again admonished everyone else to show out the window and instead indulged in a mighty temper tantrum. All of the splitting, megalomania, culitishness and religiosity, hypocrisy, blindness and pettiness that he accuses all of us “trolls” of is there manifested by Stef himself, loud and in your face. To top it all off, he then engaged in further ad hominem attacks in the first of his so-called “premium” podcasts (which were passed around to other lesser- and non-donators anyway) saying that because certain of the people who disagreed with him were not living their life according to certain “normal” standards, (i.e. still living with parents, no job, whatever) it was clear that whatever they had to say could be therefore disregarded. Later on he even forced someone for apologizing for listening to or passing around one of his stupid, rip-off premium podcasts against his “wishes”, as though his preference constituted an absolute right to the intellectual (if you can call it that) property contained therein.

did David apologize for that or did he just delete his thread? in any case, it was a brilliant 'pro-active' defense/offense by Stef in responsew to David's and my accusation that Stef violated confidentiality in that Premium podcast

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So after that, the whole culture on the FDR boards really changed, in my opinion. I think that it was really then that FDR was no longer a place to explore, learn, share and grow in ideas, but a place to slavishly follow the thoughts and dictates and agendas of Stef. It was then that I realized that Stef is basically a fairly brilliant but caustic and hostile (beneath that friendly exterior) charismatic with an inflamed ego who has passed beyond the realms of liberty, libertarianism and even philosophy and into the territory of creating his own new religion.

hell yeah...
and with his own apostles (Greg, Nathan etc.) and Bible (UPB book)

Yeah,

Me letting Greg under my skin and getting angry was bad and I learned from it (though not through what came from FDR), but what Stef then in response did was utterly mindblowing. He judged me for not keeping my cool and handling the situation in a smart manner, but at the same time he put out hours and hours of lies, distortions, false self defensiveness, bullying, anger and hypocrisy.

And that's where the divide comes in. Either you recognize that and you realize there is a huge problem with FDR/Stef that needs to be faced, or you relish in it and you stay as deep in the shit as Stef was/is.


In retrospect it's interesting to see how unadvanced we all were back them (I'm talking about compared to what I've learned since then, mostly from Buddhism). All it would have taken to fix the situation back then would have been to say: "Niels, do you think anger is a good way of solving problems? Do you feel you have a choice in the matter to become angry or not?".

But apparently noone back then was quite there and most were involved in ego-games. And until now FDR hasn't developed in this way either. It was but a week ago where Stef referenced to others as "Ron Paul lunatics"; showing that he has no empathy/understanding for others, and still enjoys anger.

Love it!