Refugee thread!

[Dr H]

Yet, from the perspective of Meliorism, no.  The important component (the knowledge and wisdom) has gone. The town council wanted to build a by-pass and some things had to go.  But there is a reason why even uninhabited medieval castles or Edwardian palaces don't get demolished.  That forum was an historical record, a reference library; recorded and time-stamped.  It had an identity of its own.

This act was more than vandalism, not just carving a love-heart into a tree, it was the destruction of the tree itself. It was the digital version of genocide... memeocide.

Like Alexander destroying the Avesta, like the demise of the Library of Alexandria, like ISIS bulldozing Nineveh, like the fire at the National Museum of Brazil... future historians will have nothing but a footnote and some salvaged wreckage to work with.

<shrug>  TTA was a great forum, well managed, and full of interesting people.  Still -- maybe it's my Buddhist background --  I never expected it to last forever.  

I agree that the casual tearing down of a long-standing community of that intricacy is, in some sense, irresponsible.  And the rapidity with which it was done was just plain rude.  It doesn't seem unreasonable that Seth could have given something like six months notice, so that there would have been time to explore the option of possibly relocating en masse, rather than having to jump overboard and swim for our lives.

Still . . . things change.  When I was very young I had actual "pen pals" -- people with whom I exchanged real paper letters, via post.  Eventually we all grew up and one by one stopped writing to each other.  Did anyone preserve all those adolescent missives somewhere, for posterity?  I've no idea.  If they did, it might be mildly interesting, but I never really expected anything like that.  It was fun while it lasted, then we moved on to something else.  

When the Amazon fora died, I was a little disgruntled, but many of us found a new home in TTA, and that was good for a while.   Some never did reappear; we remember them, but move on.  C'est la vie.


As far as destroying the historical record, or burning the library, I wouldn't be so sure about that.  For all convenient practical purposes that's the way it may be for us.  But TTA had international participation.  All those posts went through a lot of servers to circulate among the members.  It would be hard to believe that most, if not all of the content hasn't been backed up dozens, if not hundreds of times, in multiple places.  We may never see any of it again, but it's not too difficult for me to imagine some future digital archeologist unearthing the bulk of my posts on, say, single malt -- replete in all their glorious misspellings and typos -- at some distant future date.

Well, hell -- that's one future archeologist that will at least have a job, and not have to live on the streets selling drugs.  That counts for something.