Some of you are familiar with The World Table.
I’ve been slightly involved with it for some time now, on the periphery, and I actually announced it a few years ago at a FairMormon conference.
The World Table had a test rollout soon after that, but the unethical and hostile behavior and the personal malice of some of the posters — to say nothing of their unprincipled cunning — was far worse than the principal designers of the system had foreseen. (Having had years of experience with such malevolence, I wasn’t even slightly surprised, and I had warned my friends about it. However, they made the understandable mistake of assuming good will and honesty on the part of all of the participants, and the system wasn’t equipped to deal with what soon happened.)
Now, though, I’m delighted to announce here that The World Table has gone public on Patheos:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2015/09/alpha-testing-the-world-table.html
And this is just the beginning.
I’m hoping that it will do well, and that people of whatever views who’re willing to be civil, mutually respectful, and honest will find internet conversation more pleasant — and less grating — than it has been. As for those who cannot or will not be civil, respectful, and honest . . . well, they may soon find that they either have to mend their behavior or that, alternatively, they’ll be relegated to their own little self-created online hells, densely and solely populated with their own aggressively unpleasant ilk.
In that sense, at least, Jean-Paul Sartre will have been proved right: “Hell,” he said, “is other people.”
Posted from Rochester, New York
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