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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.
It makes me happy that nearly all those users in the Smollett thread are here and active to this day!
I'd forgotten how entertaining the Smollett thread was. Darwin lecturing de haut en bas about empirical reality in regards to one of the stupidest (but admittedly hilarious) fake hate crimes ever was just perfection.
If Smollett had just stuck to "I got jumped and beaten up by two white guys yelling slurs", he probably would have gotten away with it. Even the MAGA thing would have worked if he said one or both was wearing a MAGA hat. But he had to plan it out like a TV episode with the bleach and noose and on-the-nose dialogue, and it all fell apart.
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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.
You: show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
Me: His AAQCs
You : sure, he made AAQCs....
ez win.
I'm not convinced guesswho is darwin, because guesswho was treated antagonistically, and constantly accused of being darwin, and if you are to be believed, a 'bad faith' poster.
At this point, I'm starting to lean towards you being either Impassionata (hi, guy!) or even Darwin himself. You're doing the same darn thing of repeating the same point over and over ("Darwin had AAQCs!") and ignoring every other point being presented.
AAQCs mean nothing. I've gotten some myself, and I certainly never put any effort into the ones that got recommended. I've also gotten some bans, and I have to admit I did flounce off once myself, and those are more meaningful.
Thank you for providing an example of how silly and far-fetched the accusations of being darwin got. You don’t seem to know anything about darwin, impassionata or me. This basically confirms guesswho wasn’t darwin, he was just annoyed, I get it.
That’s called being innocent of any wrongdoing and losing fair and square, respectively.
The more you protest, the more I suspect, because this has happened before. "Me, a sockpuppet of Someone? Not at all!" (yes it was a sockpuppet).
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Meh. This would be good trolling but you're pushing it past the bounds of plausibility.
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GuessWho quite literally answered a direct question of whether he was the user darwin2500 on Reddit with "Yes, obviously."
It's possible that GuessWho is a lying liar. But I'd say at the very least, the preponderance of evidence points to them being the same person.
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
I was reading a blog post on ACX some time in the last year - can't remember what about. Something contentious, I reckon. Probably election-related.
I'm scrolling through the comments, names not even registering as I skim through. I find myself reading a particular one and feel a tingle in my brain. "Boy, this guy sure does sound like Darwin" I thought to myself, assuming he was just a 'type', after all.
I scroll up to see who made the post, and Oh - I'll be damned.
We'll never have proof of anybody's identities even when self-admitted. But sometimes a poster is so singular in their style that you can smell the person behind the comment four sentences in. Darwin was such a poster. Too weird to live, too rare to die. God bless.
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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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