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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".
"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.
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