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What part of magicalkitty's posting history makes you think they are trying to make the most convincing argument they can as an exercise, as opposed to the best arguments-as-soldiers for their latest culture war stand or poke at others, to be abandoned as irrelevant when the topic passes?
I love me a good jawboning and devil's advocacy, but there is a difference between treating debate as a sport and using debate to make sport of others. Faith is as good a distinction as others- after all, if the other person has no faith to believe you're interested in the sport as opposed to making sport of them, there's not going to be a sport with them because it takes two to debate in good faith.
One of the ways to demonstrate good faith, in turn, is to hold to present and maintain sincere positions. Sincerity in turn can be demonstrated not just by elaboration upon request- as in someone who sincerely wants to be understood as opposed to someone deliberately trying to instigate misunderstandings and conflict- but also by maintaining consistency across iterations. You can absolutely provide devil's advocate / steelman positions distinct from your own position, but only if you actually have a position of your own.
To my knowledge, magicalkitty has denied being darwin / guesswho/ whatever other alts that person had. But Darwin was a bad faith interlocuter par excellence, and he had his own history of defending or deflecting accusations of his bad faith arguments on the grounds of 'just trying to adopt a position he didn't believe.' That was the demonstration, not defense, of his sort of bad faith.
The counter to that Darwin-esque behavior, in turn, is pressing the person to make clear their sincere position, and seeing if / how they either directly answer it or try to wiggle out of that challenge.
You can make whatever vague accusations you want, they're practically unable to be disputed because they're vague and meaningless.
But if you're going to claim I'm unreasonably inconsistent in my values, maybe you can show it. Should be easy to provide obvious and nondebateable examples if you aren't just making things in your head. There's plenty of deep principles I've said I support that you could look for me being hypocritical on too!
I say I believe in free trade, laissez-faire capitalism, individualism > collectivism, that people who complain about the modern world are typically just historically illiterate, that government should generally be small and stay out of people's lives (and that government oppression differs significantly in severity from "social oppression" which I don't care about as much because government claims the monopoly on violence), and that people should generally have near maximal freedom including doing things to themselves that others think is bad or unhealthy like drugs. Or whatever else.
Your choice, should be easy after all.
Given the phrase "he had his own history", it seems you are implying that I also have some big history of "just trying to adopt a position I didn't believe". So again, a specific allegation against me that you should be easily able to show right?
Right??! It should super easy to show all the times I've said I don't have any belief in the things I've said and are just being a devil's advocate on things I don't think at all or see logic in.
Cause certainly I've done that, you wouldn't just make things up I hope. Would be really bad faith to just make shit up about someone like that.
There's nothing particularly vague about my view of you. I think you regularly exhibit many of the not-late Darwin's worse tropes in your posting style, regardless of whether you are another sockpuppet of his or not.
This includes his propensity to fight the culture war by fronting a position only to drop or even deny it when inconvenient for the current culture war. Darwin also had a habit to quibble that he never did such a change even when provided past evidence, invite people to engage on his framing of the issue, and then ignore their actual position (and, routinely, follow-up posts' positions).
Like, say, taking a post on ways to counter Darwin-esque evasiveness and demonstrating a difference from Darwin-esque tactics, and then claiming that it is a personal accusation. And then challenging that the reasonableness of such a personal accusation should be demonstrated reasonable through past history to be pulled and cited. A history review which has nothing to do with demonstrating the good faith in arguments provided as a way to distinguish good and bad.
That is very much the sort of implicit accusation and argument deflection Darwin liked to pull.
I invited you to provide some of this unexplainable hypocrisy I apparently do if it's so common. I invite you to do it again. Should be easy.
Wait was it not about me?
Then why did you say
Is there another person with a name like this you were actually referring to? It sure seems like your comment was about me first and foremost!
Now I don't know who you're talking about still, but you do realize "we couldn't provide any actual proof with this other guy either" is a very unconvincing argument to be making. But hey, I realize I'm actually just the completely unrelated third person because the "magical kitty" you were referring to was apparently someone else.
I don't normally report comments but I'm definitely going it here. This "I'm not talking about you, I just said your name multiple times" gimmick doesn't have a good explanation beyond actual bad faith. Extremely childish, reflect on yourself.
Already done, thank you for repeating the demonstration of this Darwinism.
I see you feign confusion to the transition paragraphs where we stopped talking about you, shifted to the distinction of good faith versus bad faith presentations, and transitioned to the not-late Darwin as an example of the failure state and how sincerity can counter suspicions of bad faith.
Hence why the next paragraphs were-
I will note that ignoring paragraphs of intervening texts and the argument within in replies to him was one of Darwin's bad faith habits, and a non-trivial reason for why his invitations for people to engage in make-work to prove themselves were declined.
Two paragraphs of interim topic transition to general topics and then someone else can seem like a lot of things to the sufficiently motivated.
Again, this is extremely childish of you.
You
Accuse me of "Darwin esque behavior"
Define "Darwin esque behavior" as doing X
Claim you're not actually saying I'm doing X, and my reading into it is just actually just proof of the Darwin esque behavior of X, which is not the thing you're accusing me of but is also proof of your accusations.
Come on dude. You're getting blocked. This is literally Kafkaesque nonsense. Want you to back up your claims that you apparently aren't making? That's just more proof of the claims that aren't being made!
Not to mention just blatantly lying. In your own quote, literally the second to last paragraph mentions my name again.You are just blatant about this lying. Grow up.
Conflating comparison and contrast to lying is certainly a deflection to the paragraphs that led to it, I suppose.
You know what sure, I'm gonna unblock you just for this. You had the honesty to admit it actually was about me the whole time, as was obvious as your comment was about comparing me to him. Unless I guess you wanna start saying that you can "compare" one thing with nothing.
Thank you for your admission. Please don't try the "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you" strat again.
@Dean, knock it off.
You - you're participating in this slapfight too and not conducting yourself any better. If you want to block someone, block them and move on, do not loudly announce you are blocking them, do not loudly announce you are reporting them, and do not say you're blocking someone but you're unblocking just to have one last word.
Also, sigh, just to put this to rest so we don't have to hear about it forever: are you Darwin?
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