Uh, yeah. NOPE.
I don't have a figurehead. I run my own shit. I can personally guarantee that at least one moderator wished I would disappear off the face of the planet, even though I still supported (most) of what they said, just not all the time. You, Mr. Mac, are in no position to talk about the curtain you peered behind. You were part of the reason the site almost derailed a while back, because of a silly megalomaniacal desire to boost your post count. Nobody had time for that shit then and I certainly don't now.
So, like I said, we have plenty of resources now. We have some dedicated folks who are in a position to make new resources, if there really is no longer access to the old.
As for me being hot, I'm not even at a sizzle. And even if I were burning mad, any suggestions that I simmer down come off as paternalistic, which I'm sure you didn't intend, TB, but that's how it comes off as. There are plenty of folks who've come on the last couple of days screaming bloody murder and spouting a lot of incredibly stupid shit, who have been allowed to have their feelings validated. There is nothing wrong for me doing the same and again, let me point out, we still have a forum to do so. No, it's not laid out the same way. No, we don't have real access to our old stuff (btw, Wayback Machine FAILS MISERABLY for anything not on a front page, so yeah, SOL on that front). And, yeah, like I said, I'm pissed that my words are gone. I take pride in what I write; I fucked up. I should have saved it all, I didn't. 1000's of my posts have disappeared into the ether and I'm not happy about it, especially because JWR helped me through a really tough case of writer's block. It helped me get back to writing. It's gone. All fucking gone. But I refuse to make Rifter into the image of some evil, selfish puppet master. I certainly will not paint him with the brush of "oh, just like an elder... blah blah blah" which is the same shit people pulled on JWR every time they were reminded to act like decent human beings and grown ups.
EVERY. SINGLE. DAMNED. TIME.
The movement, as Mac calls it, is far bigger than JWR could ever be. Think about it. For the few thousand (active) members on there, how many actually overlapped here? And on reddit? Yuku? The Broad Road? How many awake and aware ex-JW's never bother to go to a meet-up or contribute on any forum, online, ever? More than we will ever know. It is dangerous (and frankly, part of the JW mindset) to attribute far greater import to a situation than reality actually dictates. Everything becomes a big fucking tsunami when you're sitting in a kiddie wading pool and the dog decides to jump in. JWR, as beautiful as it was, inhabited a very small corner of a sandbox of a yard of a neighborhood of a city and so on and so forth.
There is an ocean, much more vast. There is a world, far greater. There is a universe, stretching ever outward, unknowable and unseeable. We typed away on our keyboards and cried in our cups. We have many places to turn to, even now. Call Rifter selfish if you like, but don't forget to look at your own reflection in the mirror while you're at it.
And while everybody is here bickering, just remember, the point of all this is that regardless of JWR, the ranks of ex-JW's grows every day. That was the point, wasn't it? To watch that shit whither away? It's happening, so while I may never get over what happened to my family and is happening still, I can rest easy knowing that every day, the true death is happening in Brooklyn and Walkill and in every k-hole around the world. Their days are numbered, JWR contributed to that. Kudos.
