Many Miles

And a bird impaled to the wall.

OMG! Way more than a total mess. The lunatics would come out! There wouldn't be sufficient moderator controls for the tsunami release of pent-up raw emotion. The server facilities would be smoked! There'd be hands sticking out of windows waving white handkerchiefs.

Not holding my breath for that one, at least not for a comment section that publishes publicly.

Hey! Don't make fun of my favorite punch line! PLUS, it's true!

Oh, don't get me started! I can hear, "Have you ever been in earshot of a grandfather joke? Call 1-800 blah, blah, blah, and get in line for your huge payout! Get what's coming to you! Call now! Don't wait! Time limits are closing! Call NOW! NOW!"

Tom you have treated me with vitriolic contempt with every braindead word you write! How is that not mean-spirited to those two working brain cells you're rubbing together? Did you lose one of them? LOL

I'm not really that interested in whatever historical soap opera of this forum. Every social platform (including real life in-person platforms) has their share of drama, not to mention foibles we learn of individuals (including our own) along the way. Just rubbing elbows in any forum where I can learn and share is the more important thing to me.

That is such an understatement. Problem is, there is so much to learn and we are so puny in the universe my fear is we're not sufficiently intelligent to learn what there is to know.

Oops. I thought Thinking was being humorous about AlanF and Billy the Kid, and I responded in kind. I had no idea this forum had a contributor "Billy the Kid". In that case I have to agree with Tom. There is no way AlanF would use a sock-puppet on a forum. Wasn't his style, at all.

I wasn't saying AlanF presented as Billy the Kid but, rather, that he identified as Billy the Kid. Isn't that considered real these days?

You know, there is a photo of him online suggesting that's a possibility! I'll have to see if I can find it. Found it.

Please don't mistake me, AlanF could dole out as good as he got, if not more. He had it in him. I'm not trying to say otherwise. Whatever warnings he got I'm sure he got them the old fashion way, by honestly earning them. As I said before, I've been down range of assertions of his before as he has of mine. I've also observed him interact with I don't know how many people over the years, including a now deceased person well-known back in the day as Friend. Those two would go after one another like nothing I'd seen before, mostly AlanF was right in his views, but Friend brought a lot to the table too. Both those men saw good in each other and ultimately they ended up collaborating on a then impressive presentation meant to leverage a known piece of internal information about a change afoot on the society's position on blood. That piece of work helped move the needle for products like Hemopure (a hemoglobin based oxygenation carrier). My comments about AlanF were really to draw a circle around the man's personality and intent. He wasn't about trying to hurt people. He wanted to help people. But he had some rough edges because of things he had been exposed to himself that caused damage, something he was always trying to help others from having to go through as he did. He was passionate about that. When I look at contributors here I see similar things.

To be clear, I was speaking from AlanF's perspective. Whether someone was, for whatever reason, failing to learn when AlanF thought them capable is something I would not know. I was just sharing a bit about how the man's mind worked and how he tended to interact with people. It was not my intent to suggest anything insulting.

I'm not intimately familiar with AlanF's participation here. But it's contrary to my experience that AlanF would attack things a person said for no reason. On the other hand, if he felt a person's intelligence was anywhere north of idiocy, he would become increasingly aggressive in his presentation of information and responses if the individual refused to learn. For AlanF, that reaction was somewhat of a compliment. It meant he saw intelligence in the person he was engaging. How what he said might make them feel was not something he'd spend much time considering, let alone worrying about. A weakness AlanF had, in my opinion, was that he tended to discount the extent of influence emotion can have on a person's ability to comprehend. Academically he'd yield that latter point, but in discussion not so much. Some individuals have such an emotional need that there are things they just can't allow themselves to learn of because it would wreck the world they depend on. A person on a ledge we should not push. I'm not suggesting that's the case with the other names you mention. One I've had some decent amount of interaction with and find them pleasant enough and not tide down emotionally. But with AlanF seeing anything through another person's lens of emotion was something he had trained himself to refrain from as a matter of learning, and learning was what he thrived on and lived for. AlanF and I have both been downrange of one another's conclusions and arguments, so I know that experience. Some of those discussions were more than robust! Thankfully we both gave one another full liberty to speak freely in our exchanges without thought of feelings. But I only know how I experienced it, not how the same would be experienced by another person. Another person could easily find it offensive, or even as an attack. Whether I agreed or disagreed with AlanF (or anyone else!) I always looked for whatever I can learn from each interaction, and there is always something to learn. That said, later in my life I have determined not to spend time suffering fools.

That's what I'd expect to see emphasized in video produced by the society. But my comment alluded to PEW research which found nearly 70% of persons raised as JW do not identify with the religion as adults, which is not something I would expect the society to produce a video of.