Why am I Quitting CR4?

The first and simplest reason is that the cost/benefit ratio is wrong for me. It sucks up too much time, for too little benefit.

Also, I am finding the crowd less interesting than it once was. Maybe I'm just jaded, but several of my favorite people have disappeared, and several others of my favorite people are not terribly happy with the joint, and are participating less. There are loads of people remaining here who I really enjoy, and I wish you all well.

I think the moderation has gone south.

• Questions that are not homework questions get closed. That can be really insulting for some people, and the risk in answering a homework question is much less than the risk of an insult. When in doubt, be nice. I don't think any moderation at all is required re homework: members have been doing fine, as is.

• I don't know the details, but it seems so strange to be kicking people out who, as far as I know, have made positive contributions here. I'm an advocate for free speech and not a fan of police states.

I'm tired of the GA system, and think it suggests "goodness" that often doesn't exist. At this instant, Del and I lead in GAs and I suspect that I have the highest number of GAs for a single post. The post in question is popular, but not especially well written, and certainly has a very poor brevquot value. I'd like to think that Jorrie's posts are all GAs, but the system doesn't acknowledge that. There are many others who have contributed as much to this site as I have (or more), and the GA system does not reflect that reality.

My recommendation would be to ditch the GAs, while retaining the ability to elect yourself off-topic. In fact, a key addition should be to edit yourself off topic – several times recently I've posted to what I thought was an off-topic post, failed to look at the check box, and found my post "on-topic." I could not subsequently quickly correct it.

I think the ability to have others vote you off topic doesn't support a collegial environment. Often, the OT vote is used to indicate that an answer is "bad" rather than off topic.

I think joining up with Hemmings didn't help in terms of the quality of posted questions. I came here because I was interested in engineering and science, not because I wanted to read about someone who can't figure out how to change a taillight bulb. Although I happen to be a "car guy" and earned my living as a mechanic through high school and college and continued to work on exotic cars thereafter, I didn't come here to fix cars. Is this a big deal? No. But it changes the ratio of interesting/uninteresting posts.

Finally, and most critically at this instant, is the fact that I am not a fan of intellectual bullying. I have lived in areas where religious fundamentalism is the norm. I know many fundamentalists with whom I would entrust the lives of my kids. I don't happen to be a fundamentalist, but my belief system does not allow for considering one end of the religious spectrum to be "bad" and the other "good".

So I find it unacceptable to have CR4 support a blogger who calls out an agnostic (Kevin) for writing "The belief or faith in an afterlife is counter to rational thinking." Roger Pink found that expression of opinion to be "degrading." It is a simple opinion, and was later expressed again as a simple opinion, and labeled an opinion, by Kevin, to make what was already clear, abundantly clear. (Virtually every response in the thread in question is simply an opinion. We are not so juvenile, one would hope, that we have to preface every statement with IMHO.)

Roger claims to be deeply offended ("degraded") by a simple opinion different from his own. Yet Roger is perfectly happy to write:

"Yes, religious fundamentalism is a problem. Any faith based fundamentalism is a problem." This directly insults my (our) friends and neighbors, and continues to fuel hatred. A very large segment of the US population self-identifies as fundamentalist, and (as should be glaringly obvious) a large part of the world at large does too. Posts like this, which pick on a particular religious faction, should obviously be moderated out.

He is also perfectly happy to write, in profoundly bad taste, "Black people are sometimes dumb," and "Homosexuals are sometimes promiscuous." He claims that these are "exactly equivalent" to Kevin's expression of opinion. They are not. They are deliberate distortions of the logic involved. Kevin did not single out any group, and particularly did not single out any disenfranchised minority. (Some 90% of the people in the world believe in an afterlife – you can hardly single out that group.) Kevin did nothing to perpetuate objectionable stereotypes. He simply expressed his opinion, in the least offensive possible way. And in the same post went on to say genuinely positive things about deeply religious people.

My beliefs are largely "counter to rational thinking." Most people with emotional intelligence will acknowledge the same. Having Kevin point that out to me is anything but insulting, and certainly not degrading: "corrupting to the mind or morals" "to lower in dignity, dishonor or disgrace."

Get real.

At the end of his last response, Roger wrote to me: "You get the last word, I won't comment on this subject again." Then, before I could post a response, he closed the thread. Sure strikes me as sleazy.

This is not the sort of community I want to be part of.