I find the layout of your site is inefficient, confusing, unpleasing to the eye and ever so slightly cheesy (corny). Not that I mind particularly, and it is a tiny superficial qualm, and it’s also ‘just how it seems to me’. But it does seem that way to me. What do you think? Could I be right? Wrong? Do YOU find it cheesy? Related to this, I’ve recently discovered a few pages on your site that are accompanied by the most appalling music. Wish you were here, by Pink Floyd and other middle-of-the-road seventies rock classics. Either this is because a) my taste is irrelevant, b) my taste is wrong, c) you have chosen this poor music (and the poor layout mentioned last time) for some devilishly subtle reason, d) my sense organs are picking up on something with is fundamentally fraudulent in you.

You have been attentive to what it is to be a human and you must have noticed that mostly music and reading together splits the attention, which does 2 things: i) makes the reading less effective ... ... ii) makes a stimulation craving/worried human feel better as there is no room for their sorrow. Why have you therefore included music over intense reading pages? Aweful music too. Really aweful.

Oh my gosh Richard! I just wanted you to answer me frankly what is ‘happiness’ and ‘freedom’ and look what you have done instead of focusing on that question you preferred to come back to the same old insertions! Why pretend to have a live discussion [dispute] by adding wood to the fire when it is already extinct? Obviously you are not interested in what I say (to you I am just a record player). You are not dialoguing with me, your mind is in what you want your audience to hear [read]. You shape my questions the way you like and ignored what I’d like you to tell me.

Why is that you never say hello or even hi as an introduction when you address a correspondent not to mention never address them by their name? I am asking this question most respectfully, and yet so far I have not gotten any response to that. ’tis a simple question or is it not.

 I do not appreciate you editing my messages without so indicating, and playing words games. It is dishonest. See Below.

Are you a lawyer by training or a television news editor? You are fond of taking one sentence out of a whole paragraph or page and drawing a conclusion from it. This is law 101. Or perhaps it is equivalent to the sound bites that are the current staple of news programming. One frame is snapped out of a whole sequence and you draw a conclusion from that. I object your honour. You can’t make a case beyond a reasonable doubt on a snapshot here and a snapshot there.

Well, I’ve spent enough time reading the site to know that my letter will be blocked by Richard’s ego, as No. 4’s was. Or replied to ‘predictably’ with Richard’s usual over excited egotistical arrogance, feigned harmlessness, cut and paste laziness and of course those impressive ‘big words’ that make him look like an inconsiderate idiot. Then one of his parrots will come to their guru’s defence using his cloned vocabulary and corrupted aggro attitude. Why does it not dawn on your thick skulls how alienating your exaggerated attitudes are.

I and others on this list understand the above more than you might give us credit for, but is it inconceivable that the *style* in which you do it puts people off? Any serious (as in sincere) person who comes to AF is impressed, (as I still am) with the breadth of topics under discussion and the fresh approach to reducing and eliminating human misery, but more often than not, conversations with you follow the same pattern where the other person quickly tires/ gets-frustrated and leaves/ despairs of getting any clarity in the matter. In most conversations I have had with you, I have had to sometimes shake off my impression that the discussion we were having was becoming more and more pedantic and restart without any such bias, and I am pleased with the results. I have learnt much from you. But maybe others are not that patient. Since people who visit this website and mailing list are within the human condition, is it too much to suggest that your conversational style is mostly counter-productive ...

I don’t criticise Richard for being persistent, challenging, unrelenting, refusing to let people off the hook when they’re doing something dodgy, pointing out their fundamental contradictions etc. Never have. I do think it would be possible to do all of that in a friendly and peaceful way though. I don’t much care about this style issue (I just don’t like the denial that there is an issue for many people). I resent the oft-repeated implication that an objection to the style of actualists is necessarily an avoidance reaction to the content. The two can exist simultaneously, and there can be one without the other. They are orthogonal. If someone criticises an actualist’s style, must it necessarily be the content they are really objecting to if the truth be known? I think some of the actualists, led by Richard himself, communicate in a way that needlessly alienates people who would otherwise be interested in exploring more of the subject matter.

I fixed the actualfreedom site to have better and readable fonts – http://userstyles.org/styles/4664. It is not just a personal opinion. It [Verdana] is widely considered to be a more readable font than others (such as Times New Roman).