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I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.
We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..." At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear. And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."
For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light. So tolerance for these characters is low. And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.
Here’s an idea: Just fucking take it. Argue whatever the hypothetical is. Or don’t. But don’t censor. You are among friends here, right-winger. You don’t need to use the mods to crush your political opposition. You have your numbers, your downvotes (Turok is consistently downvoted even for neutral comments, which btw already censors him). This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.
Legit question, how does getting downvoted censor him? The sorting method on here is by newest, not by top rated.
new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.
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Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).
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Unfortunate feedback loop gets generated that the most obnoxiously combative are most likely to stick around, until you get Turoks that everyone hates and provide no positive comments, and after that point anyone even vaguely associated gets tarred with the same brush.
Extremely difficult to undo at this stage.
Let’s say there was a flipped left-wing version of the motte, same policies and everything. Most commenters downvoting/arguing for the ban of seemingly “antagonistic, bad faith” left-wingers like Turok and Darwin would not survive there.
Why wouldn't they survive? Would they succumb to the temptation to be vitriolic and disingenuous too easily, too?
ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr comes to mind. While he gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, certainly I won't cast the first stone for someone getting frustrated, he's never been such a slimeball as Darwin or seethingly hateful as Turok. I think it's quite easy to avoid the particular issues those two represent; it's that the kinds of leftist-progressive types that aren't exceedingly combative don't enjoy playing defense all the time.
The Schism exists back on reddit, the policies are only slightly stricter than here, it's derived from the same Scott-reading social milieu, and it has all of ten regular commenters, in a good month. It has one regular troll now on a yearly cycle of suspensions. Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
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I said that I disagreed with the ban (suspension, really, not even a ban).
I have repeatedly argued for "affirmative action" for left-of-center posters here. I think they should explicitly be given more leeway before mods dole out punishments, because their viewpoints are underrepresented.
Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely. And I would not have suspended Turok for anything he's posted so far.
I think 1) left wing posters should be given more leash but also 2) Turok’s seething 2005 leftist contempt has used it up.
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
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Amen to that. I wanted to express that I do not "understand the frustration". This isn't a therapy session, your feelings aren't valid.
Well feelings are always important. They aren't always "valid", if "valid" means, they should be unconditionally affirmed, or that a person's interpretation of their own feelings is always correct. But they're certainly always important -- as symptoms, as signposts, as signifiers. There's no accurate model of any interpersonal interaction that excludes feelings.
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I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't exist, but I haven't really noticed it that much on this site. Maybe my radar just isn't attuned to that sort of thing. Can you point me to some examples you think demonstrate that? The best example I could think of this is Curtis Yarvin whose prose is meandering and often difficult to parse, but he doesn't post publicly on this site that I know of.
I don't see how Turok would really pattern-match to that sort of problem in this specific post.
Mostly trolls whose names I've forgotten. That guy who keeps making alt accounts here to post WN articles and then delete them is kinda like that.
Apparently darwin was kinda like that, although I never interacted with darwin personally.
He's a nazi who pretends to be inoffensive braindead left and gets banned for ban evasion, he's nothing like Turok.
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People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
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It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.
The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.
Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.
People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.
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All your complaints just lost 90% of their credibility with this one sentence.
Do you have an actual point here?
Yes. If you think people only hated Darwin because he was unabashedly left-wing, you should consider if you're not doing the inverse. Maybe you only liked him because he was going against the grain (and maybe that's the only reason you like Turok).
If you told me "come one, he's not that bad, you just have an axe to grind against him" about almost anyone else, I could hear you out, but the fact that you think this is a plausible claim about Darwin in particular makes it extremely likely that you're the one that's irrationally biased.
I didn't interact with him that much since I didn't share his views. He was far more left-leaning than I've ever been.
Again, I request examples of your claims. If he really was as bad as you claim, you should have no problem posting examples of where he was particularly egregious instead of just broadly motioning at it.
Here you go. if you'd prefer links to actual posts rather than a compilation of links and discussion, I can probably get you that as well.
Here's the start of the Smollett thread in particular.
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I already gave you one, and again, if you don't know the Smollet thing, you don't know anything about the guy.
And if you didn't interact with him much, then how are you making the claim about "the only reason people hated him"?!
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I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
he was the most progressive commenter
he was a capable debater
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
Ah, come on. He was able to finesse the rules within an inch of their lives so that the people responding to him ate bans while he just slid on by with clean hands. Eventually it all caught up to him, but he wasn't the one on the receiving end of the rules enforcement.
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We are all "there", because most of the posts on the Motte are still available. You don't have to appeal to faded memory through the mists of time, you can just look up compilations of his actual posts, or go digging through the posts themselves.
And the one you left off:
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like, or explain how my examples are poorly interpreted.
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.
I'm not convinced darwin2500 needed a permaban, but if you want a long-form discussion of why he was a bad poster, I wrote one here (and against some of his AAQCs here). And it's not like that was some all-encompassing list; many of his worst behaviors were well after that summary, and I didn't even include all the bad behaviors before that summary (open question: can Darwin2500 use CTRL+F?). _Viking's "Stop posting like your account is actually run by multiple people who don't talk to each other." kinda sums it up.
There's (unfortunately) a number of posters that you could pick out for each of darwin's individual ticks except from the right here (well, most of them), but there are very few, if any, that manage to combine all or even a sizable section of them all on their own.
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In the first place, it was not that he made a bad prediction. It's that he went all-in on that prediction, treated anyone who took the other side with scorn, and then did not seem to learn anything from being proven spectacularly wrong.
In the second place, I linked you an extremely long thread in which I looked at a number of his debates in excruciating detail, breaking down the nature of his technique and pointing to examples of him admitting that this was indeed his technique. Your response is that I have "literally zero arguments."
Since you seem to have missed the very long comment chain of voluminous arguments, I will link them again. Here they are, this is a link, please click it if you would like some arguments. or perhaps will that now be too many arguments, and no one has time for that, and it's necessary that we confine ourselves to vague generalities while accusing others of insufficient specificity? It's so hard to hit that proper amount of detail, in my experience.
Darwin did not acquire his fanbase by making "uncommon, solid arguments". He became notable for engaging people in extended conversations, only for them to discover that he did not believe he was making an argument at all. The link above goes through a number of examples, but the JK Rowling debate with Amadan is a really good example as well.
These are not unusual examples. He was like this all the time, for years. And sure, he made AAQCs as well, and he was very good at riding the line without quite going over, which is why he lasted as long as he did. But his behavior utterly trashed his reputation, and other people learned to ride the line right back, and now he doesn't hang out here any more.
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Yes, I was there too. There's nothing obvious about it. There are plenty of capable debater progressive posters around here that don't get banned. Even Darwin didn't stop posting here due to the ban, he was posting here until fairly recently, and only tapped out after he made dishonest claim, briefly tried pretending he didn't actually make it, and saw people are buying it even less than his excuses for the Jussie Smollet fiasco.
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Hard disagree. Darwin had a particular style of bad faith in the way he argued his left-wing positions that made left-wing arguments appear dishonest and manipulative, and that's why I personally was glad he didn't come to this site and stopped interacting with GuessWho once GuessWho revealed that he was Darwin2500 from Reddit.
Do you have a clear example of this? Because every time I saw people get into heated arguments with him and accused him of "bad faith" or being "manipulative", it was mostly just the two sides not understanding each others' positions. I didn't follow him super closely so maybe there are some clear counterexamples, but I have a somewhat strong bias towards the null hypothesis that people just didn't like him because they disagreed with him, so they claimed he was "bad faith". Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".
I haven't interacted with Darwin in a really long time, like since before the thread was exiled from /r/ssc.
He clearly was not ever arguing in good faith. Like people would be talking about how progressives use X as a Motte and Bailey eh would make bizarre claims of never seeing any real progressives trying to reap the Bailey and then when people ample evidence of progressives exploiting the Bailey he then picks one or two and tries to handwave all of the evidence away by dismissing those. Some standout examples were the time there was some argument about video game journalists and someone quoted someone that reviews video games for Arstechnica and he argued that that is some tiny site no one has heard of and it doesn't count because his byline said he was a "hardware reviewer" instead of a reviewer for games. Or the time he claimed to be really familiar with some controversy and then said that this one guy that had OP-eds in The Guardian and the NYTimes about it was a nobody and "a tutor from South Africa" according to some result on like page 5 of Google results. It was especially egregious because there were multiple tweets from him linked and his bio on twitter had his bonafides in it.
He also would also claim to have personal knowledge (or his spouse does which somehow counts as him knowing too) of literally any subject. The domains were always changing and for it to be true he would have been a true renaissance man with a very storied life instead of someone that spends 12 hours a day arguing on reddit. I'm surprised no one compiled a list of all of the jobs or things he claimed to have experience with, but I wasn't about to spend the time going through his comment history to do it.
Having people with different viewpoints is great, but it isn't enough. If they aren't here to honestly engage in discussion and are just here to troll they are negative value. Darwin demonstrated time and time again that he was not interested in engaging in good faith discussion. The mods bent over backwards and tied themselves in knots to justify his bad behaviour because they desperately wanted more progressive voices. All of the while pretending they would never do that but also writing essays about how it makes sense for the mods to look the other way when a minority voice in a space misbehaves all of the time. It was obnoxious and his behaviour and the defense of it is why I never bothered with the splinter community that kept him.
If you or anyone actually does have a list like this, it would be helpful. People keep handwaving that he was doing all sorts of nefarious debate tricks but nobody can actually point to any examples. Nobody has receipts, so they broadly fall back on "trust me bro".
"Engaging in good faith" seems to be synonymous with "only disagrees with me within certain bounds".
I'm not about to spend hours going through 5 year old comments of someone to find specific comments. That would be a gigantic waste of time for numerous reasons. The first is that this matter is so no real importance. The second is that you have already not accepted the testimony of numerous people recounting their personal experiences with him. Furthermore, several of them did provide receipts and here you are lying saying that no one has! Why exactly would I bother knowing that no matter what I post you aren't going to acknowledge it? Also when you make similar claims you do not bother to substantiate it yourself?
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I don't have any examples off the top of my head, since, again, I stopped interacting with him after he revealed that GuessWho was his account, and part of what made TheMotte better than the Subreddit for me was the lack of that user. You can probably find plenty of examples if you just go to GuessWho's user profile, where I see that his last comment was like a year ago here.
I've read and interacted with Darwin2500 a lot both on the OG SlateStarCodex site and on Reddit, and as someone who's ideologically aligned much more to him - back in ye olde dayes of Trump's 1st term, I'd say there was basically no daylight between our political beliefs - than to the modal commenter in these places, I couldn't stand his arguments for being so transparently bad faith and dishonest that it made our side look either evil or stupid or both. There are plenty of great arguments that can be made in favor of left-wing/progressive ideology, and Darwin2500 basically never made them, in favor of overt, blatant bad faith, off the top of my head, often using Bulverism and the non-central fallacy (i.e. the Worst Argument in the World, as coined by Scott Alexander).
Besides this, you've also said elsewhere that plenty of right-wingers have resorted to making series of personal attacks on you without getting modded. Do you have any examples of either? I don't read every comment on TheMotte or even most of them, or even most comments that you personally make, but I don't recall a single example that matches this description.
Did he actually say that GuessWho is his account, or are people just assuming that? Can you link me to where he said that? Also, I'm reading through it and nothing really seems that bad at least without diving more into the context.
Sure, in this interaction the guy claimed my arguments were so bad that I was "living in denial", and he repeated this over and over and over. Then we have Gattsuru who did this. Then we have Zeke who continuously accused me of being "dishonest".
Yes, he did. On what grounds are you telling people "the only reason they hate him" if you're not familiar with his posting history here at all?
I'll grant you that Gattsuru's antipathy for you is somewhat strange, and for the good of both of you, he should just ignore or block you if he can't. If you think the lack of immediate moderatory action is evidence of some bias, you're wrong. It's standard procedure to be a bit more lenient for quality contributors, this is exactly how Darwin was allowed to post here for years with almost no mod actions against him.
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"When I said 'people like JK Rowling' I didn't mean JK Rowling"? The Jussie Smollet thing?
What? Can you link this so I can see it in context? I just don't understand what I'm supposed to see here.
Sure, here's the JK Rowling debate (starts second post from the top). Surely you're familiar with the Smollet thing? If not then I don't know if you followed the conversation this guy spawned much at all.
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