I hate being depressed and sad, and that NYC crash was something that could have made me sad.
SO I just have to mute all this emotion to avoid feeling bad.
Combine this with your posts about "promoting" and the problem becomes very clear: You're more than self-centered. Nobody matters to you except you.
You don't care if others' lives are crushed so long as you're not inconvenienced. You don't care whether others lose money on stocks you tout, so long as you make money. I'd bet that if you see a "Lane Closed" sign on the highway, you zip past the line of cars in the one open lane just as far as you can, then force your way into that lane.
This is one of the problems that has plagued message-board communities. Especially the market-related ones.
When Silicon Investor got started, it was a collection of people who shared expertise for the mutual benefit of all of their fellow members. We were all in it together and for each other's benefit. As such sites became popular, though, they started attracting people who had only their own self-interest at heart. People got hurt. Then people started making it their sole function on these sites to ferret out such people. Many of them. The name Janice Shell quickly comes to mind.
Fortunately, the ferreters tend to be way smarter than the self-centered touts they expose, but unfortunately, the creeps are far more numerous, and since they have the almighty dollar as a motivator, they're far more persistent.
One of the biggest problems with message boards, frankly, is people just like you, Joe. With your obvious "It's my world and you guys are just in it" attitude, I believe you epitomize the problem with these boards and the biggest danger they contain.
Fortunately, you can do little harm here anymore. You've got your own pack of ferreters, some of whom were erstwhile bedfellows. And if you tried to change identities, I'm sure Matt would squash your accounts like so many bugs. Appropriate.
I care about the community, collectively, first and foremost, followed by each of its members as individuals. You care about neither. It's an unfortunate fact of life that you choose to be a liability to the community. Whether the community is called "InvestorsHub" or "America". Actually, it's not so much that you choose to be the way you are. It's that you don't know any other way to be, since you have no empathy within you. For that I blame and feel sorry for your parents.
God Bless America
