I appreciate the sentiments, Brian, but I don't miss it. Running a forum and trying to be fair to all sides is a thankless task. Arbitrating disputes takes a lot of hours that go uncompensated, and then when you're done, half the people slam you for your final decision.
I was at the point of hardly ever voicing my own opinion on matters since managing the site took first precedence, and I decided my own energy was better spent elsewhere. It was a pessimistic time for me also, when I didn't see any real hope that my efforts would make the smallest difference in bringing attention to the importance of liberty. Those naysayers who favor the invasion of Iraq and mindlessly chearlead GWB simply because he's an official member of the Republican team and an anti-democrat regardless of how truely unRepublican his policies are, deserve to wallow in their ignorance. If they are being paid to desecrate their Rights, then they deserve to live without them.
People are free to think and decide how they will, and are also free to decide who they will and will not listen to. If they choose poorly, then in the end, it's their own fault.
Makes me want to do some more BE counts, which can be done from the LC page. To date, Badeye has posted about 59,300 times on LP. That out of a total pool of about 1.593 million posts.
He's responsible for about 3.7% of LP activity, which is about 1 post in 27 over the life of LP. And that's not accounting for the time he wasn't posting, such as prior to his arrival and the time I had banned him. He only had about 20,000 posts when I banned him so he's added about twice that count since returning in about 18 months time, which is an average of about 106 times every business day.
The ability of someone to do this really highlights a flaw in the free speech forum theory, which namely is the assumption that no participant could possibly have the resources to post these dramatic counts or that people would only post when they have something meaningful to say.
A software solution would be to limit everyone's posting to a certain amount per day or, perhaps, week. The weekly approach would allow for spikes on particular days when something significant happens.
Starwind, I thought you'd particularly appreciate BE's latest stats...
Spiders really work in today's high tech field of political discussion channels, upon www, ARC, BB, Usenet, IRC and so forth. You can slap these scripts onto any computer which forwards results to YOU over the internet, YOU the puppeteer; thus permitting more invasion upon any forum since the actual discussion(s) are outside of the known domain aliases without your IP addy.