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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.
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.
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.
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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