Rebecca PM

Here is the last message which I found I could not post: Barry Kort "Barry Kort - I am not sure if you are aware of this or not but when someone asks you to stop doing something and you keep doing it over and over again that is abuse. PLEASE think about that..." ~Elizabeth Cheung I have thought long and hard about it, Elizabeth. I've thought long and hard about it for more than half a century. And I utterly and categorically reject the theory that just because some disinterested bystander wants me to stop engaging with Sandip or Mani or any other individual who genuinely wants to engage with me in an open forum conversation on a topic of interest to them, in which they expressly invited me, that such a disinterested bystander has the right to shut us down. I will not be shut down by the likes of Lisa or Elizabeth or anyone else who insists that Sandip or Mani or Jen or Sabrina has no right to communicate in open public assembly where attendance by others is not compulsory.

I will be happy to reinstate your membership long enough for you to post that and any other comment you'd like to post before taking a break. Barry- I truly wish you had been more willing to listen. You likely have no idea how hard I have tried to steer things toward another outcome. I sought counsel far and wide and spent hours considering and discussing options. You are one bull-headed son of a gun, Barry. Perhaps this is a good time to consider whether your approach is advancing your goals.

Quote: No Permission to Add Comment or Trying to Comment on Deleted Post ~ Sorry, you may not have permission to add this comment or the original post may have been deleted.

If you would like to post a response to my decision to impose a hiatus, feel free. You very much exist, whether are not you have posting privileges in TBC. As I said in my moderator's note, I will be happy to reinstate your membership so long as you abide by the same posting guidelines everyone else his held to.

I will add this... If you intend to deny me the right to be present and to respond, then I request that there be no discussion about me or my shortcomings unless I am present to respond, to explain myself, and to defend myself from being stigmatized, alienated, ostracized, or scapegoated for the sake of the other 15,000 members of TBC.

And I want you and the members of TBC to be aware that I am disclosing that I am now feeling alienated, ostracized, marginalized, ghettoized, stigmatized, and scapegoated for the sake of the other 15,000 (mostly non-participating) members of TBC.

04/23/2015 4:48AM

I do undertand that I undertook my decision unilaterally and that you feel exiled. I give you enough credit that you surely must have know it was among the likely options.

Thanks for that consideration. I think it would be best for me to sleep before continuing our dialogue. I'd also like to post a few things in TBC unrelated to tonight's drama, just to tilt the balance in a more positive direction.

Here is a question ... Do you surmise that either Elizabeth or Lisa are gloating that I was involuntarily exiled, or mortified that they played a seminal role in precipitating that outcome?

I saw that Barry. I have ignored your request for now as I intend for all of us to take the 2 weeks to reflect on on how we can achieve a better balance between your needs and desires and the needs and desires of the group as a whole. Plus, I've got to say my patience is frayed and I'm pretty effing worn out by the entire exercise.

Good! I hope you put the time to good use. I hope you also give some serious thought to the issues that have been raised and the feedback you have received. There's much to be learned there if you can take a step back from habit and entrenched positions.

Hm. I gave up management in my 20s when I realized I wasn't willing to do someone else's bidding, especially when it worked to the detriment of those involved. Yes, I'm familiar with a hall of mirrors. Arguably I grew up in one. Definitely not a funhouse when the earliest reflections you and your siblings receive are distorted by the narcissistic and bipolar need of the mirroring parent.

I have an overnight houseguest -- an old colleague with whom I had collaborated some 15 year ago on our NSF-funded project at MIT on emotions and learning.

It's been years since he last picked my brain in search of fresh material to share with his audience at IEEE, so I went over with him the one big story that he never wrote up since I first suggested it to him many years ago.

This is the real biggee -- the biggest gap and misconception of them all -- the one Augustine quaintly called Original Sin and which I call Humankind's Original Logic Error. James Gilligan has called it our Huge Mistake.

Just a heads up, Barry, that I don't want all of the photos I'm posting tagged. I'd rather they weren't all searchable by tag. I've tagged a few but will likely decline any requests to tag the others.

I've also limited viewing to friends and H's friends. Re distinguishing me from Heather, it's not too hard. She stayed blonder later in life than I did. As kids, I was yellow blonde, she was whiter blonde. Heather studied cartography then city planning.

You're making assumptions. I was the mathier of the two of us, taking after my dad. Also, you should be aware that Poli Sci includes a fair amount of quantitative analysis, particularly at the graduate level.

I have the impression that (at least through the 80s, and probably continuing to this day), Poly Sci has not apprehended the key insight of Chaos Theory.

You may be letting your dim view of politics color your notion of political science. Political science is a social science that combines the tools of economics, sociology, and psychology to understand political structures and behavior.

There appears to be a gigantic gap in the curriculum in Poly Sci. But it's a gap that would not have been apparent prior to the contributions of Chaos Theory and Girard's Model.

She left TBC over the weekend but returned less than 24 hours later apologizing for some harsh language. I suspect that she may be wrestling with some issues.

I don't want to spook her. We were friends briefly, but she unfriended me at some point when she was going through a volatile or skittish phase and never refriended me. I basically let her take the lead in terms of how much contact/closeness she wants.

Hope you're enjoying it or getting something useful out of it in any case. I have to say that quite a few people in my online universe seem to be struggling at present. Worrisome.

You called it "triggering" as I recall. That means people have undisclosed fears that are being aroused. I wish people would just candidly disclose their innermost fears so we can conscientiously endeavor not to inadvertently arouse them.

Years ago, I tried to demonstrate amusing ways to candidly disclose my own innermost fears, but the meme didn't catch on. Maybe I need to revisit it and update the medium.

https://sites.google.com/site/barrykort/the-insouciant-kangaroo

That is indeed a big one for many, many people. Sadly, there is often some history there. Divorce, break-ups, betrayal, death, they are all forms of abandonment. Everyone experiences it sooner or later.

I'm heading off to bed. Scott and I have a big hike planned for tomorrow. Taking advantage of our empty nest while Luke is away. I'll have to read Forsaken tomorrow evening. Thanks for touching bases. It's been a while!

Question for you ... Are you getting postings from otherwise inactive members who post nominally relevant links to commercial secondary scraper sites? Over on NIG, I keep running into people posting links which turn out to be scraped from legitimate mainstream sites (e.g. NY Times, Psychology Today), where the original bylined article is duplicated without attribution or credit. It's clear these secondary scraper sites are purloining otherwise legitimate stories and reproducing them along with advertising. For all I know, there are hundreds (or even thousands) of agents on FB engaged in this illicit practice. Do you know if FB is aware of this issue? We need a systematic way to recognize, identify, and report these scraper agents.

I don't think I've seen much along these lines. If you can shoot me an example, I'll take a closer look. I do pick up posts that are "curated" via paper.li, but I post the original. I don't tend to post scoop or the like.

Sobia Khan is an example of an individual who posts links to a secondary commercial scraper site called womenshealthcare.in which features purloined stories from mainstream media.

Sobia Khan is the latest in a series of individuals who have nearly identical M.O.'s in posting links to such sites.

Here, for example, is a search of NIG for that particular scraper site ...

https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindbrain/search/?query=womenshealthcare.in

You may have observed (or discovered) that Sandip deleted Ioanna's intemperate remarks on Sandip's TimeLine, personally blocked her, and also removed and blocked her from NIG.

Sandip and I exchanged PMs but I certainly didn't suggest any course of action. He seemed to have already decided his course of action by the time we talked.

But I don't think the Ioanna Valinorse pseud was the actual founder. I was the Admin with the least tenure. According to the FB documentation, an Admin with less tenure has no power over one with more tenure, and no appointed Admin has any power over the true founder.

Except for the old Pinned Post, I had never seen any activity from Ioanna during my tenure there. I thought she had abandoned the group after turning it over to Sandip.

Ioanna had two pseuds in the group. I eventually discovered her real acct (real last name) but that acct was not associated with the group. I'm not sure which of her fake name accts was the one she used to create the group.

Why do you suppose Sandip coaxing me to be the enactor of the changes we had long been discussing, to reorganize the management after he appointed Tania and me to work with him? I'm still mystified by that.

I can't shed any light on Sandip's decision. Again, Barry, I'm sorry that things played out as they did. I need to take care of some work of my own. I hope you can move on and find other enjoyable and productive outlets for your time and energies.

The most likely hypothesis is that Ioanna could have threatened to derail his professional status as a matter of revenge. I would have been immune to such a threat, since I'm retired. But that's just a wild guess in hindsight.

Your speculation about newer admins being unable to act on older admins doesn't fit with Sandip blocking you. Having left the group and then been added back by Tania, Sandip had less admin tenure than you did.

That quote ties into the walking dead / sleepwalking / zombie meme of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. The reason I bring it up is that it ties into Sandip's Twitter handle. I am now curious as to why he chose that Twitter handle for himself, and why his overarching vision is to promote Happiness. If Happiness is an overarching life-goal, what must the current state be? And why so?

Jesse has alluded to a very rough childhood quite a few times and we've corresponded a bit about it, but I never knew the specifics. Thanks for sharing his blog post, Barry. No one comes out of a situation like that unscathed.

Yes, I know. His recent posts don't sound much darker than usual. Concerned about the state of the world, racism in particular. Are you FB friends with him?

We were never FB Friends. I hardly knew him. I think maybe twice in the last two years we cross-commented on some random topic. I didn't recall him at all when that kerfuffle occurred with him and Stephanie in TBC a while ago.

"Oh. Is there a reason I can pass along to others?" ~BK "Just looking out for my own mental health. Need a break from toxicity. And, as obvious, my messenger is still active." ~JW "Do you need any emotional support from those of us who care about you?" ~BK "I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm guessing I'm looking for fewer inputs at the moment simply so I can not be in an entirely reactive mode and am able to breathe." ~JW "Feel free to call on me or Yutiel or Anne-Marie if you feel the need." ~BK "Will do." ~JW