Staring people on this site - and/or just loking at the name of the poster?

I suspected this was going on.
Personally I've never starred a post or thread.
This is like rep on other boards and is just silly because it just corrupts posters eventually and reduces the quality of debates and threads.(Do I need to explain why?)

ahh the vanity of it all
such power - and unlimited at that !
It doesn't matter how many stars you give out -- you never run out!
How great is that?
I star liberally and freely, for lots of different reasons.
Unfortunately its the only thing we can do unless you want to write up and post a reply every time someone has moved you with their post.

There are times I wished I could double star a really good comment.
Usually my stars are only for good posts; and I read them all first, but once in a while I will get caught up in starring anyone on "my side" of a particularly hot issue.
I don't think I have ever starred someone just because of who they are. Its always about what they said - or sometimes how they said it.

reply to post by Griff


Hey Griff, what's up man?

I know exactly what you mean and it reminds of a chapter I read in a Robert Anton Wilson book. In the book the author basically categorizes our thoughts and behaviors into 8 different groups he calls "circuits" or "systems" and shows how they've developed, both since we were born, and from an evolutionary kind of view. The one relevant here is our territorial behaviors, because we are actually conditioned to have "mental" territory, which is our beliefs, and when we see our beliefs challenged we're conditioned to defend them like they have actual territory themselves.

Wikipedia gives the best summary of that chapter:

The Emotional Circuit is concerned with raw emotion and the separation of behavior into submissive and dominant. This circuit appeared first in vertebrate animals. In humans, it is activated when the child learns to walk. Leary associates this circuit with alcohol. This circuit introduces a second dimension, up-down, linked with territorial politics and tribal power games (up, as in swelling ones body in size to represent dominance, and down, as in the cowering, tail-between-the-legs submissive stance; called by Robert Anton Wilson the "Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit" in reference to the anal stage of human development from Freudian Psychology).

And the whole pdf is online and linked to in my signature, but I can't honestly say I've ever read an entire book online and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either. But, it has pictures.

Anyway, hope you're doing alright. Take care.

reply to post by bsbray11


Interesting theories.

I'm doing ok. Yourself? Star for you