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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?
I saw precisely one guy link to an actual "bad" comment Darwin made, and it wasn't actually bad at all in terms of debating style. The person Darwin was debating with was far worse, funnily enough.
I don't trust testimony because people just disagreed with him since he was a leftist, and then tried to work backwards to find things they claimed were "manipulative" debate tactics. If we asked a bunch of lefty /r/politics users what they thought of the average poster on this forum, and the broad consensus was "horrible", would you trust them? I wouldn't.
Problem is, if you were one of the people who engaged regularly with Darwin, you soon got to know his tricks (and yes, he did engage in tricks). As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
It's more of a "whole body of work" thing rather than "this specific post here, this one, this one" because ain't nobody got the time to make a list and checking it twice over arguments from years back (I know, somebody will pop up with just such a list). It's like somebody new coming in to a pub and hearing about Billy 'BabyEater' McGee getting barred, and asking why, and going on about how "but all you're telling me is that he got into a fight, and the other guy was the one who threw the first punch anyway!"
Yeah, that was the last straw which gave the ostensible reason for barring him, how do you think he got the name "BabyEater" in the first place?
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All you have done is clearly demonstrate that you have already made up your mind and no matter what hoops people jump through will not be sufficient. People have already provided numerous specific examples of his bad behaviour and first you lie and say that no one provided any examples and then you say only one of them was bad and the other guy was worse. Even if that were true that just means both people were behaving badly and not any excuse for his bad behaviour.
I am not about to spend my precious time digging up dozens of links to posts about some nobody on an internet forum of no importance. This is even more true when it is years old and said person is a chronically online obsessed loser that spends 12+ hours a day posting on reddit.
Even if I did you would not bother to engage with and would dismiss it all out of hand in exactly the same way you did to all of the other dozens of examples that people already provided you with.
If you care so much about his posting history why don't you spend dozens of hours going through it and come back and write a report on it? I frankly don't give a shit if you believe his presence was a net-negative for the forum (it obviously was). All you have done is make me update towards you also being a net-negative.
Yeesh, no thanks.
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Several people linked you to many comments, and if you don't think that comment is bad, I'm still waiting for an explanation for why the comments of other posters that you linked are bad.
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do do do baby shark do do.
The only thing better than Darwin and Jussie Smollett was Impassionata betting the house on Trump going to jail, for sure, this time, definitely, just we all wait and see, by this time next week he'd be locked up for real.
How many years ago was that, does anyone remember? Ah, good times, good times!
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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.
Ah, OK, fair point on that. Thanks for the link. Now if anyone can point me to anything particularly egregious he posted on that alt I'd accept it as a point where darwin himself was egregious.
I'll admit I'm only somewhat familiar with his postings instead of intimately familiar, yet everything I saw really didn't strike me as the kind of poster who'd post obviously egregious things. This notion has been moderately reinforced as I've consistently requested an example of such behavior and people haven't been able to give it to me.
This is the second time I'm telling you, I already gave you the link to his totally good faith, absolutely not obnoxious, JK Rowling debate. FCFromSSC has links of his own can at least stop acting like people aren't giving you links?
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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.
OK, thanks for an actual link.
I... don't really see what's so bad about this particular post. I disagree with Darwin since I don't think his points are particularly correct, but I really don't see how he's being "dishonest" or "manipulative" or "bad faith". The worst part he does is claim "JK Rowling wants to ... eradicate trans people", which seems like it was originally a throwaway line that Amadan obviously latched onto because it was both inflammatory and untrue. But then Darwin clarifies what he really meant, and it just came down to butting heads over whether that was reasonable or not. Nothing else Darwin said seems particularly egregious in terms of "this is a political debate". If anything, Amadan was a total jerk in responding with statements like these:
Like, yeah, I think Darwin is wrong too, but I certainly wouldn't want to interact with a person who responded like that.
If I start saying things about "people like Ben Garrison", you call it a personal attack, and I'll clarify I didn't mean you, I just meant people like you, will you accept the logic of that statement?
It wasn't a clairifiaction, it was an obvious attempt to avoid accountability for what he said. This is obvious because even as he backed away from the "eradicate trans people" thing, he doubled down on the claims of generic transphobia, which were directly shown to be just as dishonest. Even that wouldn't be so bad, at the end of it all he managed to get something like "shit, I fucked up, you were right" out his throat, but it's something he never does.
If you think otherwise, I urge you to consider that you're irrationally biased in favor of anyone going against the grain of this forum.
Are you assuming Darwin is an otherwise good faith poster, and deserves to be treated as such despite his long history of posting here. I think it's your turn to give some links proving your point.
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
Great, because if his argument is valid, then it wouldn't be talking about anyone who's part of the conversation, just people like them. So none of what you said applies.
The issue isn't him putting words in JK Rowling's mouth, people do that all the time as part of completely normal acceptable conversations. If it went like:
- JK Rowling wants to eradicate trans people
- No she doesn't
- Oh... Looks like I was wrong, sorry.
it would have been completely fine. He'd still be putting words in her mouth, but he'd be open to admitting he was wrong, and correcting. Instead we had him making a false claim, denying that he had made it, redirecting to another claim that he thought was more defensible, but was just as false as the first one, and then claiming that any false claims he made don't actually matter because he wanted to talk about something else, even though he's the one that brought each of these claims into the conversation.
It's textbook trolling - luring people into what appears a reasonable conversation, making insane claims to get people riled up, and ducking out after the damage is done.
Again, him believing Rowling is a transphobe is irrelevant to the conversation, I'm completely fine with people holding that belief.
If you don't think Darwin's behavior objectively crosses the line into dishonest, bad faith, and manipulative, I think it's pretty clear you are just biased in favor of people who go against the grain of this forum. It's fine, I get it, you catch a tonne of shit for disagreeing with the average poster here, so it feels nice to have company, but it's still bias.
I don't think you understood what I meant on this part. My point was that the person you're directly taking to always deserves more deference than a public figure you're referring to in the third person to guard the light:heat ratio of the conversation. If you and I were talking about US presidents, and I called Trump and Biden pieces of shit, that wouldn't be great but it'd be much less bad than if I called you specifically a piece of shit. There's just no way we could have a conversation worth much of anything if attacks like that are getting lobbed at the person you're discussing things with.
For the JK Rowling stuff, again, I come back to the hypothetical of a 2A advocate:
-"Biden wants to take all our guns!"
-"No he doesn't"
-"OK but he's the Democratic president, and there are Democratic factions that want to do that"
Stuff like this happens all the time. People rarely get all that fussed over it. The fact that people are trying to attack Darwin for this points me to believe that they just disagreed with him broadly, and then went fishing for anything that could be described as "manipulative".
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