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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".
That's exactly how I understood your argument, but my point is it doesn't work if you accept the logic of Darwin's argument, because in that case it wouldn't be calling you specifically, a piece of shit. You don't even enter the conversation. It's just about people like you, which is not at all connected to you specifically.
Kinda missing the part about backing away to a claim about Biden specifically that they think is more defensible, it turning out to also be also be false, and then saying "it doesn't matter" even though they started the conversation.
I don't think it does, and I don't think anyone would say "you only hate him because he's right wing" if you got fed up talking to a guy like that after many conversations over the course of several years.
The 2A advocate would back up to claiming that Biden probably did want to take everyone's guns away, and that his more mild political positions were just a way of being palatable to the broader populace. And even if they don't then Biden's at least carrying water for the more extreme factions that want to do so. This is symmetrical to what Darwin is claiming with JK Rowling.
It's not false at all that at least some factions of the Republican party want to eliminate trans people, although this need not necessarily mean "death camps". For some it probably does mean death camps though.
I don't really see your issue with Darwin here overall:
Is it that he didn't explicitly admit he was wrong about the point on JK Rowling? Nobody every does this in debates, especially once things get heated. At best you'll get implicit acceptance as they move to different points.
Is it that his original post had an offhanded bailey in it that he abandoned to focus on defending the motte instead? See my prior post: yeah, it's a bit annoying, but it's very common.
Is it that he didn't bother to defend the bailey even though that's a prime area where Amadan wanted to press him on? You mentioned him saying "it doesn't matter" was a problem, but obviously people shouldn't be forced to defend dumb positions if they'd rather give up and just implicitly accept an L on a given topic.
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