WhiningCoil
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User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
It's who whom the whole way down. Unless my memory fails me entirely, which it may, I can barely tell half of you semi-anonymous handles apart, TracingWoodgrains fed LibsOfTiktok false info once upon a time to in an effort to delegitimize her as well.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I do believe in good faith truth seeking. I just think that when an interlocutor has waged an information war in the past, that puts a permanent asterisk on their "truth seeking".
I've noticed this a lot. There is this strain of internet user that believes if you can create fake websites, fake images, fake users, etc to convince your political opponents of falsehoods to embarrass them, that's just good old fashioned internet fun. And yeah, I laughed too when local news reporters beclowned themselves reporting on Jenkem. But it takes a far darker turn when you muddy the waters of real, salient, political issues as TracingWoodgrains has done, and bragged about, here even.
But I donno. Maybe I have him wrong, and at some point he publicly apologized to LibsOfTiktok for hoaxing her, and has publicly expressed that he regrets waging an information war on her.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
You know, my mind pre-emptively went to "I'm gonna have to defend the Sokal or Sokal^2 Hoaxes aren't I?"
I donno. Personally, if it isn't clear already, I would never wage that sort of information war, for any reason, period. It's not in my nature to lie or deceive in such a premeditated, Machiavellian manner. Although sometimes my friends tell me I exaggerate for comedic effect. Then again, one time I was telling a story about how fat the people at Gencon were, and my friends thought I had to be exaggerating. Then they came the year after and apologized for ever doubting me.
I think a stronger case can be made for the Sokal hoaxes, in that an institution is claiming to process papers with rigor. You need to stress test that from time to time, like when internal agents try to get a bomb past the TSA.
The TSA nearly always fails too.
I think it's a lot less defensible when you can convince internet randos, even internet randos of some notoriety or influence, of nonsense. Then you are just acting like a run of the mill troll off Something Awful, 4chan or KiwiFarms. Especially when it's of specific false instances of things that are absolutely actually happening elsewhere.
Going back to the TSA example, it's almost like the test was not "Can we get a bomb through the TSA" but "Wouldn't it be funny if we convinced the TSA something was a bomb that wasn't actually a bomb?" Well no, that just makes you an asshole.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I mean, there is also apologizing to the party you wronged and swearing you'll never do that again. But that's clearly off the table since he seems to think the problem is that his hoax wasn't received well, and maybe he could have done something on the margins to address that, but it was otherwise absolutely justified. Which is largely why I regard TracingWoodgrains and the target of this piece as not all that dissimilar in the first place.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
completely unrelated
Maybe to you. But to others it's relevant when someone writes a magnum opus about the immorality of the deception of a certain person, when they have also proudly engaged in deception.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
This ain't it at all. Hoaxing the NYT would be notable for the same reasons The Rape On Campus story out of Rolling Stone was notable. There are supposed to be fact checkers, multiple sources, teams of lawyers, etc vetting a story. There is supposed to be a rigorous institution in play here, with the pretense that it can course correct for any particular individuals biases or short comings.
Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.
And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I haven't really seen it
Then you must be trying not to. I don't know how it could be stated more clearly. It wasn't exactly my opener, but I got to it quickly.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I mean, up front, I think I was clear I don't think Tracing is as bad as Gerard. At least not to my knowledge. Nobody has put together a comprehensive manifesto covering 30 years of his internet history yet. I was pointing out that they both have engaged in information war against their political opponents, and it doesn't sound like you dispute that?
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Well, luckily it's for each of us to determine fairness. And frankly, hiding behind "Hahah, I said nobody fairly compared Tracing to David" is some pretty pedantic Jiu Jitsu to pretend the things that were clearly and concisely expressed were not. It's a way of laundering you disagreement into a record of fact about what was or wasn't said.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
It's less about the NYT being a paper of record, although that makes it worse, and more about the NYT being an institution which brags about being better than any individual, versus a mere individual minus a team or fact checkers or lawyers..
Re: Stewart, good question. It's tough because Jon Stewart constantly straddles the line between comedian, news "communicator", and political commentator. And lots of people have complained, not without validity, about his whole clown nose on, clown nose off schtick. Did he fall for a hoax on his (now cancelled) Apple TV show? That's not great, and kudos to whoever got one over on him. Did he fall for a hoax giving a random interview? I honestly don't care. Is he doing a random standup bit in a club? All I care about is if it's funny, hoax or not.
I would say, if you hoaxed Fox News or maybe a perceived right wing newspaper like the Wallstreet Journal or the New York Post, they should have done better to weed you out. Good on you for exposing their lack of journalistic rigor.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Alright, admittedly, I'm 2 fingers of whiskey into my night, but I cannot follow you at all.
The only way I can pattern match your claim, is to involve entrapment. Because Tracing didn't merely catch LOTT spreading a hoax, he invented a hoax, and specifically messaged her evidence he fabricated. And I'd be totally against hypothetical police, I don't know, somehow entrapping Black people into shoplifting. Maybe they put up a sign saying "Free Watches" without the store managers knowledge or permission. I don't know, the whole comparison made little enough sense to me in the first place.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Is it Festivus already? When do we get to the feats of strength?
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Man, this reminds me of a community I used to be a part of for something like 15 years, from my childhood through my early 30's. Started off as a bunch of nerdy kids who liked a thing and created their own space to talk about it. Then we grew up, and politics got more and more involved. Then it became almost entirely about arguing politics and trolling one another's trigger points. We had a benevolent autistic overlord who owned the space and maintained strict neutrality, as most of the old internet used to. Then one user launched a coup, stole the domain name, redirected it to his own servers, and banned everyone he disagreed with. Shortly after he shut the place down entirely because banning us wasn't enough, he wanted there to be no public record of him ever having associated with us what so ever, he considered us so politically untouchable.
Canadians, eh?
Eventually most of us that got banned coalesced around a private discord group one of us set up. But it's just no the same, and many of us still grieve the loss of that community.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
By this reasoning, we should see everyone saying "well, this time TracingWoodgrains collected information about our enemies, so that's fine". This was not the reaction.
I've seen ample people (including mods) going "You seem to hate TracingWoodgrains more than you hate David Gerard, what is wrong with you?" which is at least adjacent to that reaction.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Man, tell me about it. The discord I'm on is literally just a private space for old internet friends who've known each other for 20+ years to shoot the shit and stay in touch. Share pictures of our kids without using facebook. Crap like that.
Every other Discord I've been on, despite ostensibly being about a video game, manga, tv show, youtube channel, etc still has like 20% of the conversation dominated by adults talking about the divergent gender identity, their polycules, etc and god damned children in the same discord participating inquisitively and with a mixture of yearning and conformance.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.
Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I'm arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they've been MSNBC'ed about.
I wouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn't survive the shock of it.
The fucking hubris to call that "Truth seeking" and play the victim.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Then you still don't understand my point.
I'm saying Tracing's piece on Gerard is the pot calling the kettle black. Information warfare is information warfare. It isn't truth seeking. I can only view Tracing's piece on Gerard through the lens of his past information warfare. I think other's should too. It's pertinent information about the world view of this person you need to be cognizant of as you digest their criticism of this other person.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
You keep calling it "information warfare" precisely because LoTT is on your side (because she makes fun of people you hate), and therefore a prank that made her look stupid is viewed by you as enemy action for the purposes of discrediting your partisans, as opposed to making someone who plays fast and loose with accusations and whose whole game is Internet warfare look foolish. If Trace had done something similar to someone you consider an enemy, you'd have considered it a well-deserved pantsing.
No, I call it information warfare because it was information warfare. Tracing didn't catch LoTT spreading misinformation. He targeted her with evidence he fabricated, and crowed about it like it disproved everything.
If what Tracing had done was catch LoTT spreading hoaxes he had no personally convinced her of, or did any sort of analysis of true things she shared versus fake things she shared, or approached the topic of "What are schools doing to kids?" with anywhere near the same rigor and seriousness he approached the FAA story or this Gerard story, I wouldn't have these complaints.
Instead he took a cheap, unethical, drive by potshot using lies and deception, and called it case closed.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I don't know.
Let me put it like this. Imagine a scale between complete information and zero information, and the morality of sharing anecdotes in either.
In the world of perfect information, where we know for a fact that say, 0.01% of teachers are pushing gender nonsense on kindergarteners, all the material your school uses to talk about sexuality in middle school and highschool are public, and you can count on the administrators and teachers to be honest with you about how your child is doing, any fears you may have over an anecdote you read about crazy shit going on in a school can be easily put to rest. A person sharing crazy anecdotes nonstop might catch a few people in their trap, but most people would probably trust their local school having seen their teaching materials and curriculum first hand. Additionally, the person sharing crazy anecdotes in a nation of 330m people, with full knowledge of the actual statistics, knows full well what they are doing.
Then you have the world of zero information. Where the schools operate in a cloud of secrecy, refuse to disclose anything, there are no statistics, and nobody will talk to you. Suddenly those anecdotes carry a lot more weight. In the absence of any other evidence, the anecdotes are all you have. Additionally, the person spreading those anecdotes has no clue whether they are ginning up fear of a minority of horrible instances that have come to light, or they are exposing the tip of the iceberg!
Right now, especially near me, we operate closer to a world of zero information than perfect information, and it's the schools own damned fault. Things have gone so damned far parents are trying FOIA request the materials schools are using to teach gender to their children, and the schools and the courts deny their request! Locally our own schools get caught lying again, and again, and again, and again. And in this light, if anecdotes are all you have, it's the schools own damned fault for their secrecy and deception.
I don't hate you at all. I feel nothing at all about you. When I'm not reading your words on a screen I largely forget you exist. I wasn't even sure I was remembering the right person! But I do have a mostly still functioning long term memory, and perhaps a slightly Kantian sense of honesty which you've offended.
The fact that you can explode with so much narcissistic rage at a guy who struggles to remember you going "Wait, aren't you that guy who did X?" with "YOU'VE BEEN MY MOST DEDICATED HATER FOR YEARS! FUCK YOU! YOU RUINED THIS PLACE!" is astounding.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
You know what, let me take a second stab at this.
I didn't bring up Tracings previous bad acts when he shilled his blog here talking about the FAAs diversity nonsense. Because none of Tracings previous bad acts had to do with anti-meritorious discrimination.
I didn't bring up Tracings previous bad acts when he posted about the furry nazi witch hunt, because to the best of my knowledge he never championed a witch hunt against crypto-dissidents in other communities.
Maybe my definition of information war is obscure or not obvious to you. The second paragraph of this post I made is more or less exactly what I mean. I view it as categorically immoral behavior, and it's behavior both Tracing and Gerard have engaged in to different severities and quantities. But they both have. It's inarguable.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
Maybe. Or maybe the fact that the Democrat's nakedly lied to the American people about Biden's fitness to serve for years brings shame on the party, regardless of who the candidate ultimately ends up being. They all stink of complicity. Some more than others, granted.
I remember my father, a lifelong Republican, talked about how the only time he ever voted Democrat was for Carter, because of how deeply ashamed he was of the entire Republican party after Nixon. He regretted that vote until the day he died, but he was still demoralized enough at the time to have made that decision.
WhiningCoil
11mo ago
I do wonder if long term Ozempic use won't result in some pretty disastrous unknown unknowns. Personally, if it were my nation, I'd go with diet and exercise. Maybe after your nation tops mine in life expectancy for a generation or two I'll get on the Ozempic bandwagon.
It sucks getting old. After being pretty fit my whole life, doing competitive martial arts, and non competitive cycling, running, weight lifting, kettlebells, etc, but mostly eating whatever I wanted, on my 40th birthday my annual physical came back that I was borderline prediabetic. Lucky for me I have a wife that gardens fresh vegetables, raises backyard chickens, and makes delicious, healthy, homecooked meals. I also got more serious about indulging in sugary foods, limiting it to about once a week or less. Also cutting out most snacking and not eating outside of an 8 hour window, usually except for one day a week.
Honestly, the changes don't bother me. My household long ago transitioned away from eating out, almost ever. We also as a rule don't bring any junk food into the house. No cookies, chips, etc. Out of sight truly is out of mind.
We'll see how that works out for me come my 41st birthday.
That first year Juneteenth was a federal holiday, it was the exact same day as Father's Day. It's like the feds were daring us to notice.
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