Leavin' out the couple things I don't know enough about to comment on:
Then again I don't follow politics on here perfectly because they furstrate and bore me, so I'm prolly missing a major issue and am making an ass of myself. 
Actually, your post makes more sense to me than most of what people have said. So it's quite appreciated.
Lol, ty.
Does the fact that admins have a certain level of power mean that they aren't allowed to react?
No - actually I would love it if admins were duking it out in the main event forum as often as everyone else (not that anyone else does anymore, very often ). When I said the bit about setting borders for narcissists, I meant that it's not reacting that's wrong - reacting is necessary - but the type of reaction. I saw Cal snipe and snipe at Odeon, and Odeon take the bait and get riled up, and then strike back with the blabberizer. In retrospect I'm not even sure it was wrong to handle it that way. I agree with what Odeon said about it being intense in the way the early days of I2 were intense, and I still think it was cowardly of Cal to have run off with his tail between his legs because he couldn't handle bringing his ideals into some kind of cohesion with the people around him. But I do have a problem with the number of members that left along with Cal, and would have liked it if that fallout could have been avoided. Odeon said at one point that he thought the remaining members were higher quality than those that left. Not only do I disagree about the quality, the whole thing makes me suspect that what he did was just to get rid of the people he personally didn't like, which I think is wrong.
Like I said, I don't follow politics a whole lot, but that's also the type of thing that you can say after any major emotional battle- "It's better that it was this way." Makes it easier to deal with havign gone through it. But, I admit that's almost me trying to mind-read, which I shouldn't (and yet, up stays the post, lol). I know that even one wrongly-worded sentence can sometimes be easy to fixate on and fester, and I'm guessing that it's been said a few times- I don't know, I don't keep count. But either way.
The issue seems to be with the idea of things being "un-intense" or "un-ideal" or something like that, and with the idea of one person having power. Yes, this place was started out of protest against another forum like that. If intensity seems to be going the way of WP, though, if history taught us anything, then wouldn't it be that there's less point in railing against the current status quo (because you don't like it, because it has changed, etc.) than in making a new forum for refugees who hate the current way things are?
Possibly. It's just that I see the cycle repeating, and the same type of people getting kicked off each successive new board.
Not to go all doomsday, but maybe there's a reason for that. I don't knwo what it is and I don't think the blame lies really anywhere, save for the way groups tend to form, to my understanding. There was always an outgroup, even here, IMO- thing is, the outgroup before was WP. Outgroups bring more cohesion to the ingroup. If a new community of outgroupers was formed, the old ingroup would be their outgroup, and that new sense of community woudl prolly help the new group's cohesion. Intensity certainly doesn't exist as a reaction forum any more; there's actual social/emotional ties, and that might be another key part of it. If this forum has become a new entity- either a stangated pit, an extended internet family, or anything else you'd like to call it- maybe the whole place is intense in name only, now. I don't mind, but then, I don't follow board politics all that much and I'm not really all that into conflict either.
And as to this supposedly being a place where people don't need social skills (a utopia or sommat, I guess?)- it seems unrealistic to not expect a large, mostly cohesive group to have norms, and to want them followed- whether or not we "should" be that way. Spectrum or NT, we're still human.
The thing is, I'm looking for a group with a certain set of norms. In particular, where conflict and aggression are acceptable, and differences are investigated and eventually understood, rather than rejected as soon as they become inconvenient. That's the direction in which I keep trying to push Intensity.
Yeah, that's what this place started toward. But, what conflict are we
supposed to have right now? This is certainly conflict. In fact, seems like we get most of our conflict now out of arbitrary annoying trolling and arguments about forum politics and what intensity should be. Not saying either is extricable at all, let alone should ideally be removed, but mayeb the ignor button will go a ways toward more the type of conflict you'd want- not just pissing each other off, but actually interacting, not reacting?
Calandale's conflict seemed more and more to be about conflicting with the system and the members, which ironically may have hlelped to expediate changes
against what he was trying for on both counts. Plus, he sorta had a way of arguing sideways, so although I think he was a terrific troll and great for getting members to react, he doesnt really follow the ideal of investigating and understanding one another's differences- which is nothing against him, but certainly somehting against making him a martyr for that particular cause. I personally found some of his posts sort of entertaining, but he never seemed to make me a target, and I might have felt differently if he had.
