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Turok, you really don't learn. You don't deserve the courtesy of a long and detailed explanation of why you're being banned. In fact, you seem to be expecting it, and are relishing the opportunity to be a martyr. So be it:
Permabanned.
It's lame you had to do this but I get it
I did really enjoy his ability to kick off an argument, although I get why the way he does it is against the spirit of this place
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I am opposed to this permaban.
Like it or not, class resentment drives a lot of what goes on in our world. It's very worth discussing.
Sadly Turok's discussion of class was less than worthless, and seemed to mostly be about his own unexamined class insecurities. As I said elsewhere, "It's a funny barber-pole-of-status-signaling thing. I have never encountered someone on the internet who is actually upper-class for whom "lower-classness" is an object of vitriol rather than of disinterested study." But bringing that directly into discussion would also violate the norms of this space, such that any discussion from his posts was already drawing from a poisoned well.
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Is it worth discussing in the way he's discussing it? And even if it was, 90% of the time the dude runs away when you give him a thoughtful response.
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It's certainly worth discussing. But is the community really served by having someone "start the discussion" (which I think he wasn't even doing, it strains charity too far to claim that) with sneering at other members of the community and pointing out how bad he thinks they are? It seems to me the answer is no.
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I haven't regularly checked this site in months but my impression as a lurker was that every Turok toppost was some variant of "I found this comment somewhere on the internet: the person who made it is a moron and if you would argue otherwise in the replies you prove that you are less smart than me." Apparently when he was told that unsourced twitter posts from anonymous users were not the kind of thing you make a top level post about, he took the wrong lesson and started doing it with comments from this forum.
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My guy, you asked me to go easy on Turok last time. Look how he repaid your charity.
If there's anything useful to be said on class resentment, you won't find Turok saying it.
I also asked for charity last time. Even though this post is directly attacking me, I'm honestly tempted to ask for charity again. But the fact that he is blatantly going:
Makes it obvious to me he doesn't care about the rules or respect the mods at all. Alas. I think he drove interesting discussion.
I wouldn't discount the possibility that even now he has somewhere an alt that will pick up his ball and keep running for the goal. I do not write this based on some knowledge of his character, just that this is a time-worn strategy of many who get banned.
We all come to miss at least some of the fallen for livening things up around here.
Kind of hilarious how much drama is generated here over banning people for being dramatic.
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Turok was not here to discuss it; he was here to sneer.
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Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Not as satisfying without more buildup but today is still a good day.
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I think that the main benefit of explaining a ban is not to the user (especially in the case of a permaban), but to the wider community.
So I think that it is helpful to link to the last warning (afaik).
I think another factor might be that the correct place to criticize a top level post from three days ago is as a reply to that very post. Starting a pristine comment thread on Monday in medias res with a reply to another comment seems like a really bad style. By definition, a continuation of a last weeks debate is not about current events, so my personal expectation would be that the comment would strive to be an excellent top level comment in all other regards, charitably paraphrasing a broader debate so far and then adding some useful new commentary. Instead, what he served us was re-heated leftovers from three days ago moisturized with the ketchup of his own opinion.
While most of his comment reads to me as not particularly coherent (but that might be a problem on my end), and also does little engagement with the quoted comment except to sneer and in the "P.S.", I think it is the "P.P.P.S." especially where he goes of the rails completely.
I do not think that we have many regulars who are central examples of "prole", posting long texts on a discussion site seems to select for somewhat educated people, mostly. It is not that he was correct that this was an insult which hurt especially badly, and it was just that he was banned for blatant name-calling.
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While "you do not represent the true spirit of the left, I do" has been done to the death for a hundred years, I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as ""left-wing"". While his sneering dismissal of the working class is certainly reminiscent of similar dismissals by the woke left in the past decade (e.g. Clinton's "despicables"), I think that it is stupid to give up on the working class. Wokism completely failed to engage with these people ("in my rich neighborhood, I get along fabulously with Blacks and immigrants. If you in your poor neighborhood fail to get along with them just as well, that is because you are a dirty old racist!") and then they decided to vote MAGA instead. But Trump's tariffs have the potential to be a very educational lesson for low-income voters, it is just up to the Democrats to offer these people a stomach-able alternative to populism.
Not a mod but I consider his posts to be pretty forthrightly criticisms of people/caricatures of movements rather than descriptions of movements and subsequent criticism. That is, he completely ignores the “discuss the CW don’t wage it” rule which admittedly is a tough one to police and maybe even flawed as a concept but Turok (to me) didn’t seem to even bother to attempt to follow it.
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Being reflexively anti-right-wing is not the definition of left-wing, to the point he couldn't identify posts more friendly to left-wing thought.
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I am being performatively lazy here. Turok genuinely isn't worth my time, and I'm confident that almost all of our regulars are well aware of his bad behavior. That being said, I appreciate you sharing the link to previous warnings.
For what it's worth, I don't see anything wrong in continuing a thread in a new CWR. Most users would prefer more engagement or at least eyeballs on their posts, and once the thread becomes obsolete, it's very unlikely that a significant number of people will even read anything you have to say.
Yeah I actually did appreciate the follow up. It's a shame, I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent and willing to stick up for his views. I've even defended him multiple times. He just can't seem to avoid outright asking to be banned and personally attacking people. Alas.
No, he wasn't. The only intelligence that I'd give him credit for was skirting the lines of a permaban for so long, and even that was finally quelled. Like many lolcows, he just couldn't resist having the last word and doubling down on absolute nonsense.
At this point, I'd respect more a 4chan shitposter giving me a scrolling page of n-words: at least, in this example, he isn't wasting my time.
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If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking. Turok consistently lacked them. Turok was a poster who was consistently unable to even re-state positions that were directly given to him, wildly off-base in his characterization of contemporary events or dynamics in the world, and regularly went off on tangents or tirades that were cliche decades ago.
He might have been articulate political brainrot, but he was still brainrot.
I mean, personally I'd probably drop two or three of those myself. If only because by defining "intelligence" so narrowly, you begin down the road of implying that every intelligent person must agree with you. But there is always the possibility that a person who seems closed-minded has seen further than you, and understands what an infohazard is. Or the person who seems unadaptable to you has seen further and understands what a maladaptation is. That one person's lack of "critical thinking" is another person who understands perfectly well what you are saying but still disagrees.
That said, you are correct about Turok.
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