Hi this thread is so long that I am putting it in reverse order.  This is really important to me, as I have studied the Internet as the Information Society since 2002, and worked in it during it's hey-day from 1990 to 2002.

Now I am suddenly making tech $$$ again, so I have been exceedingly busy, and my plans to evolve this group into an "action" group have been postponed.  Down side of work!!  Upside is a renewed sense of importance in the world.  I am applying all my empathy writing to mission statement of the company I am forming.

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Aren't you a member of DMA? A classic example I would say of bullying there.

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Most internet forums have lotsa mean people in them. I didn't mean on Care2. But on other places. Arguments aren't good, just discussions, you can disagree, but no one fight, because it is not good.

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sorry I saw this
"Well, I'm a bit sad because my grandmother just died"
and thought it was real. Was skimming.
My mistake.

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 I am just curious there because generaly those i belong to are staying mostly sympathetic...

I didn't mention a loss. Those were just examples on how whatever you write, you will just get attacked. It doesn't matter how relevant and serious your posts are... You are always attacked.

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The best solution for you if you want somewhere to 'talk' about this is a forum specifically for your situation.
There are groups on care2 for just that I'm sure. It sounds like you went to the wrong places to me. For instance you won't get much sympathy from a forum dedicated to (say) cars or bugs but a forum for people suffering a loss would embrace you.
I've had a quick look and frankly can't find much on here.
If you do find somewhere please let us know.
Very sorry for your loss.

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As in false stuff, slander

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It is impossible to discuss things when people spread out stuff about you for no reason at all.

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As we all know there are many variations, views, ways and perceptions and even those more unpleasant ones of how they see online communities.

Now certain types do not care and indeed lack the empathy to understand others, they see the online community in their own way, a fad if you will. Now a fad is like "the newest thing going". But when the fad gets old it is forgotten.

As most of us know those types in the online community intend to hurt ridicule and even laugh about it. But you really must learn to wipe the hurt from your mind. Learn to ignore and stay positive. Then show that positivity towards others online. Be the example to those new online.

Newer people online tend to follow the way of others online. When someone gets the negetive responses of a trouble maker anyone who happens to read it will either retaliate to it or not at all.

Their choice is highly affected by anyone else. If anyone replies to the trouble maker others join in and then the trouble maker wins.

But what happens when people stop resorting to their ways? People lose interest and concentrate more on their own things. The fad has gotten old, the trolls are now old one could say.

Seperate the bad thoughts and feelings, forget their responses and in the end you will win.

I can't read this much text unless it's a subject I'm super-passionate about. I skimmed it and well, what I mean is that these people who randomly attack people on the internet are not practicing the freedom of speech but limiting it. How can people have normal discussions and conversations if they will just get randomly attacked? "Well, I'm a bit sad because my grandmother just died" "TROLLL!" ---- "Hey, what software is the best of..." "NOOOB!" ---- "Hey, does anyone know the lyrics to this song?" "GET A LIFE!!!" ---- "I'm like really depressed and don't know who to write to" "SO DON'T BOTHER US F***ING ATTENTION SEEKER!" That is how forums look these days. If you just try to have a conversation about anything, people will attack you, randomly accusing you of being an attention seeker, a bad person, sexually promiscuous (don't know why), stupid and so on. Personally, I have a sensitive nervous system and I just want to be able to communicate with all sorts of people all over the world, but it is really difficult when whatever I write I will be accused of being a stupid attention seeker. Such insults lead to nausea, sweating, trembling and a pounding heart beat. The thing is, people never have the guts to speak to me in such a manner in real life, because everyone who meets me respects me. But people on the internet don't think of that: Whatever name they see on the screen they imagine a stupid person who doesn't deserve respect and treats them as such, even though they deserve to be treated with respect! People who bully people just make me nauseated and uncomfortable. It is not an acceptable way of acting.

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Empathy is starting to resemble a religion more and more, with the single significant exception that it is purely based on science: the science of compassion.

It provides a small set of ideas from which all feeling life extends that can be applied universally without fail. It also happens to be the basis of the updated scientific method adapted for social science.

Our best "elder" for those little lessons (besides our own selves) happens to be Einstein! (Others are helpful, but Einstein was consistent.)

By allowing religion to be science, and vice-versa, we can accept several empathic revolutionaries along with their organizations: Christ and Buddha.

We can also differentiate between religion that intends to be compassionate (no religion is perfect) with religion that is purely superstision, or supersticio in Latin. I say Latin because the religion of the most influential empire, the Romans, was pure sham: stolen from Greece and perverted into a money scheme.

For me personally, as a 50% survivor of the World Trade Center terror attack, I have to wonder were Islam stands as compassionate science. Islam has a justice system that includes the "Fatwa," what can be though of as "God's vendetta system" used primarily against women. While "radical" Islamic clerics criticize the Muslim terrorist Bin Laden for the World Trade Center attack, it is not because he killed many innocent people, but because he started a fight with a nation that in turn could, and did, kill many Muslims -- in Iraq. In other words, from what I have read, the US attack on Iraq is the Muslim reason for hating Bin Laden. If we pacifists had prevailed, and the Iraq attack was halted, then the WTC attack would have been a success.

Clearly Christianity, Islam, and for sure Judaism, are present-day struggling empires, but are the faithful of these religions as compassionate people are all innocent! So what is the problem here? It's simple: takeover by the anti-empathic.

Facilitating those take-overs is what is called "colonialization/immigration," where the anti-empathic from capital structures are sent out to other lands to over-ride local cultures and steal their natural resources. Most famous of these cultures is the Roman, form which we get all the terminology of resource rape and native extermination, especially the word Capital.

Most successful, in my opinion, at colonialism/immigration was not the culture which descends from the Roman culture, the Christian West (which combined with Rome about 300AD), but the Soviet Union. The recent history of the city of Kiev in the Ukraine is a blow by blow instruction book for colonialization/immigration (see below for more on Communism)

It is easy to see how compassion cannot be found in either Empires nor corporations, so compassion must live at the other end of the spectrum, in the community. That is where the study of constructivism provides answers for the empathic. Compassionate humanity is in the "local, natural, and historical community of knowledge." The most compassionate are the "elders" of these natural and historical communities, and, invariably, the anti-empathic attack these elders first when harvesting the resources of a region. Whether they are the "diamond" army/gangs of present-day Africa, or the Jesuit colonialists of 18th Century France in Detriot, the first act of colonialism/immigration is to rip the soul out of the community.

All these examples show how anti-empathy works, and where the antidote is best applied. In the West anti-empathic culture is dominated by the descendants of the Latin culture of Rome, and in the East it appears to be dominated by the descendants of Confucianism -- there are of course other players.

More about Communism:
Students of Communism claim Marks perfected industrialization by creating a dictoriate of the people; the cut out the "middle men" of the upper class. That just cannot be because Marks' writing predates the Industrial Revolution. Marks did all his work while sitting in libraries; he could not have been surrounded by books on technology and manufacturing, but by books on classical civilization, primarily Rome. Marks perfected the Roman state; he perfected capitalization: the accumulation of other people's resources into centers called capitals. In his language, that was called collectivism. Lenin and Stalin, in their first few years of Sovietism, "collected" all the grains, fruits, and vegetables of the farmers starving to death about 10 million people.

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I have been accused of being a troll!!! It's just a word and a perception. Some people think that anyone who doesn't agree with them is a troll.
As for Noobs that is a clicque mentality label and best way to deal with it is leave those clicques alone unless you have the stomach for it.

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Wait, I think I read that wrong:

Troll = Attention seeker
and
Noob = Beginner

Ok folks, these are labels, and labeling people is bias.  Bias is an anti-empathic disease.  I have been called both these things and for no good reason.  Everybody is a beginner at something, and everybody on the Internet gets into arguments that they probably would not have in real life.

The empathic model is simple in that it looks for an emotional connection to facilitate a "happening"  (old school term from the 60s)

Further more, a troll is a victim of troll-busting, which was the bashing of the homeless.  The term really originates from the fishing term, trolling, which is the equivalent of the trawling, or dragging with nets, but with hooks.

Police troll, or use "trolls," to catch pedophiles on big perv infested sites such as Yahoo; I usually see them referred to as "obvious trolls," or obvious fishing.

One thing that we cannot tolerate is the "calling of names," which also happens to be against the "term of service" of Care2 -- which Care2 follows in the final analysis of suspensions.  In a sense the terms of service are equivlant to the rights of the constitution, and can be depended or at least used as a defense strategy.  The single most important document in the world is the US Bill of Rights, from which all rights in the world are derived, it is part of the Constitution which is the law of the land; we can depend on the military to defend the bill of rights, while we expect the police and prosecutors to defraud it; this is an important distinction as it tells me how important it is to support the military rank and file, as well as many officers.

In the empathic model people do mean things because their empathic neurons are disconnected, damaged, or were never there to start with.  The first two conditions are fixable with nurturing and nutrition.  The latter is not fixable, and is the cause of all suffering on Earth.  Natural disasters are of course unstoppable, but their aftermaths are were empathy can help.  The Katrina hurricane was a natural disaster, but the aftermath was a man-made disaster, and was very likely an attempt at racial genocide by the Bush family and the core Republicans.

But when we look closely at the failings in the rescue, Black and White were attacked equally: the anti-empathic attacking the empathic, or anti-empathy.

I have recently begun a project to show anti-empathy on the Internet by initially focusing on the Wikipedia.  The Wikipedia is the number 10 website in the world, and is an "information fortress" run just as any fortress in history, fascistically.

I have been in discussions on two wikis that interrelate with the Wikipedia, or are shameless clones.   One is Camerapedia, which I like but I feel is complaint to the fascism of the Wikipedia as they share information.  The other is Wikihow, which is a shameless Wikipedia clone run purely with unempathy, and is probably a disgused attempt at a commercial Wiki, as its owner created the eHow site, which he sold.

Only the writing on the Wikihow site is available, but it may soon be censured; it is about "home canning with a microwave."  The writing from Camerapedia is on a goggle mailing list group (psuedo UseNet group) and is an excellent source for purely negative information about GNU.

I say purely negative with conviction here.  Starting last summer I started to have doubts about the "open systems" world after an email conversation with Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU.  He doesn't get the concept of the public domain, which is the world's shared property.

Traveling along the GNU line, we run into a masochist/sadist named Hans Reiser who is known for two things: writing the best filesystem software ever, and killing his wife.   I believe that Reiser is simply the tip of the iceberg with respect to "open source"  anti-empathy as we find it in the Wikipedia.  I also believe that by following this trail we will find the reasons for the failure of Linux, and with it the reason for the success of its nemesis, Micro$oft.  If what I am beginning to learn is to be believed, the unthinkable may be true: the open source/GNU community may be factors worse the completely illegal Microsoft monopoly.  I had a lot of writing posted on my blog about this, initially connecting the killer Cho's acts to the disease of aspergers.  Initially I wrongly connected it to autism, but I now know that autism and aspergers are unrelated.   Apsergers is often disguised as autism to allow true anti-empathy, which is genetic, to "slip through the net."  More fishing terminology.

While we are at familiar terminology, the reason that anti-empathy seems so overwhelming when it is in fact unusual, is that the majority of them empathic travel "under the radar" to avoid becoming empathic "blips" on the anti-empathic radar, often manned by the authorities.

Ok, folks, I am beginning to realize that this group, and the empathic model originated in my mind; the Interent culture makes me solely reponsible for this group as I am the named ower.  I have been active for social interaction on the Net since 1990, and I have been active on Care2 for longer than I care to think.  Everything I do in this group that may seem regrettable is the result experience, mostly with the Katriana rescue group which I know for a fact directly connected with congress to help change the path of the "man-made disaster."  If y

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Havn't looked at the petition yet but in all walks of life there are going to be the ignorants who will speak up without knowledge to back it up. Noobs. Then there will be the hecklers and bullies. Trolls.
There is really not much that can be done except to leave them to the more experienced to deal with. Getting the cyberpolice in on the act will just make the iterent as bad as the real world's Big Brother mentality.
Personally I'd prefer a kind of peer system where certain people can be called on who are known for their experience and knowledge of a group or website to sort out these situations. Not some global authoriuty figure who knows nothing of the workings of a forum but someone who knows intimately the members and the groups aims.
I believe it is called a moderator?
I have had people come to me who feel they are being bullied or picked on in groups and will try to sort it out how I feel would be best.
Please no more cyber police especially not in care2!!!!

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Signed, but ...

From the empathic perspective I am afraid that there is not a lot we can do.

I say this because the Internet is purely digital communication with out emotional communication.  Since people without empathy communicate digitally, as they have no emotional communication facilities, then they feel perfectly at ease and can do as they please, which is often hurting others semi-anonymously.

By trying to create rules the situation gets worse; Care2.com is a perfect example.  At some point enough people complained about harassment that Care2 Inc did something; they hired a cop.  Now she goes everywhere, including this group, censoring text with prejudice and suspending without real reason.  That happened to me, but for less than 24 hrs, and for no reason that the Care2 representative could give me.

As I keep saying, the vast majority of people are fully empathic, but are forced to "limit" their empathy because of pressure from the unemphatic, who are basically immoral and ruthless.  The Internet is different; I feel that the ratio of empathic to anti-empathic may be 50/50.  So the Internet has become quit the anti-empathic hangout, and the Internet sites have a huge influence on society, such as the Wikipedia, which is not loved by this group.

The original Trolls were homeless homicide victims of skin head Nazis in Southern California, so you can think of cyber-bullies as Nazis.

Extending this idea, I think it is the nation that takes a hard empathic line against anti-empathy that succeeds the most from our perspective.  Bhutan could be the best example; it is the most animal friendly nation on Earth, a truly Buddhist nation, and probably preserved it's empathy by resisting a colonial/immigration surge from China.

I have been doing a lot of writing on anti-empathy on the Internet, and also reading about colonial/immigration issues faced by Vietnam when Ho Chi Minh (which are completely different from "wandering" or "traveling" issues), but my material is still embyronic.

I am at the moment focusing on the Wikipedia and its clones, the recent conviction of the famous Linux programmer Reiser for the homicide of his wife, and the recent "death" of Linux.  After a recent Ubuntu install, I am beginning to think feel that Linux is now Windows, and perhaps worse from the users' perspective. I believe that this makes imperitive the L4 operating system initiative that is led by society rather than corporations or technological agendas.

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They are a real pain. Yup Ive had a few of those scum come after me as well. They never can admit they are wrong. All one can do is ignore them. But not everyone on the net knows how they think, it is those people that trolls will target the most.

They have many tactics.

This works for me.  I think all people should be treated with respect (unless their behavior dictates otherwise).   But then
I don't anger easily.  Unless someone is trying to hurt a child
or an animal.
shoshana

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Hey, sorry, I don't know if you're allowed to promote petitions here, but in case you are, well, I'd like to tell you about a petition I started, you see, I was so sick of discussing serious topics or asking serious questions in a forum and just getting stupid random insults as response. Many people in forums just randomly call people troll or noob for no reason at all and that is very offensive. So, this petition is to urge administrators of various forums online, to take internet harassment and random insults more seriously. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/stop-harassment Troll = Attention seeker Noob = Beginner who doesn't understand (obviously it is quite annoying if you're talking about your dead grandma or asking for advice on a software or anything and people just randomly throw these words at you)

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