What is Aristillus?

The goal is to provide a “respectable” (this isn’t 4chan - our expectations of behavior are below), high signal (aside from containment topics), low security (but still private) forum for discussion, primarily among a cluster of people on Twitter who lean some mix of centrist, libertarian, center right, proactionary, and rationalist.

This is a low security community. Don’t say anything that would wreck your life if it got out.
Be courteous. De-escalate. Give intellectual charity.

We have had fantastic discussions on this forum. We’ve talked about the ethics of abortion; the political difficulties of space colonization and the tyrannies likely to arise; we’ve had excellent reviews of homesteading books. We talk about 3d printing upgrades, and books on learning how to be better shooters. Sometimes people get acerbic, but they’ve been mostly willing to back down.

Sometimes best hat stops by to post, too.

We welcome new posters. There is an application form that you can access at the following link.

It may take a couple days for your application to be reviewed.

Rules

Required

• Chatham House Rule: " When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule , participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed." - Obviously, feel free to ask someone to share more about their identity in reference.

Banned

• Do not share information, personal or otherwise, learned in the Discourse without permission from relevant stakeholders.
• Do not insult people. Insults are in the eye of the beholder. This provides a fuzzy area, in that some people may consider one thing an insult that others may not, or may consider it to be an insult but not from another. It is possible to affectionately call someone a moron.
• Don’t spam topics not meant for it.

Supererogatory:

• When feeling heated, de-escalate or step away. When we’re heated, what feels like operating at the same level of ‘intensity’ as our conversational partner often leads to an escalation of frustration.
• Pin the stakes of a conversation. If you’re debating about something, try to make the thing you’re debating about clear. Nothing causes so much frustration, both short and long term, as someone who is constantly moving goalposts