naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Unless they feel such unbearable mental pain from seeing other posters' contrary opinions
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
It’s a stain on our free speech record to have banned him. Even as a skilled devil’s advocate, if we assumed he never believed anything consistently, he was valuable.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
fuckduck9000 7mo ago
Darwin was banned on the subreddit only after a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans.
As far as I know, he's never posted here, but if he wanted to, he could do so without needing an alt, since he's (obviously) not been banned since the move.
My point is, anyone can get a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans if they just comment and stick around. Like yours truly. List just gets longer and longer. But whatever. I’ve made my peace with it, it’s like senescence, the inevitability of death.
Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
That alt reads more like impassionata to me. But no, that’s not very valuable. Although as you know, I’m pretty free speechy, so not being as valuable as darwin, and antagonizing people, is still not enough for a ban in my book.
Imp always seemed more direct with his disdain. darwin would couch his with the sort of "Have you considered" plausible deniability wrt the rules, but transparently just calling people assholes. That or just terminating a convo with evasiveness.
I think there is some value in reflecting on "Maybe you just suck?". But I don't expect many people to do it when asked, and it was noticeable that despite being a sometimes quality poster, Darwin's effort levels would evaporate by the time he was issuing those queries.
Of no particular import - I also pegged guess as a darwin alt just because the posting style seemed so familiar. Not that I have a problem with it.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
I picked that one because it popped up in the feed within a post or two of your reply, and seemed a reasonable example of the fundamental problem. It was convinient, in short.
I don't have an opinion on Darwin or any other user getting banned; that's on the mods, and I decided a long time ago never to argue nor concern myself with mod decisions, other than to make a good-faith effort to abide by their rules. As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt. What I object to is the idea that he was providing a valuable service to the community by presenting alternate points of view. He did provide alternate points of view, very occasionally. What he did the rest of the time, in my experience, was degrade every conversation he participated in. As with the post I linked, he rarely provided evidence or even a coherent argument, just endless faux-polite smuggery wrapped in multiple layers of indirection designed to make engagement as infuriating and unproductive as possible while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.
Maybe my experience or my impressions are wrong. Maybe I'm biased. I don't think so, though; I spent literally years trying to get a productive conversation out of him, and came up empty. I have in fact managed to have productive conversations with quite a few other people, even in the face of profound and irreconcilable disagreements. I saw a lot of other people flame out and eat bans from trying to engage with him before a general understanding of his technique proliferated enough to become common knowledge. In any case, I object to the idea that he was a reasonable or even a net-positive contributor, and I strongly object to the idea that people just couldn't handle having their ideas challenged. He was a troll, and he burned every scrap of good-will that ever was extended to him.
As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt.
I did too, and playing @guesswho ? Is a waste of our time. This proxy accusation is ludicrous, if you want to criticize him, link him.
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield. He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
They were often arguments we could not make and had not seen before, at least a few notches above standard reddit dross. Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo. Granted, he would not be particularly nice about it, like a ymeskout, SSCreader, Soriek or gdanning might be. But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
It's not a proxy accusation. I don't care who is on the other side of that account, and I'm not expecting you to care either. I'm pointing out a specific form of behavior that I think is bad. I'm asserting that that form of bad behavior was so frequent as to be a readily identifiable calling card for one particular commenter here. I'm concluding that this made him a notably bad member of the community, such that his badness was worth paying attention to and calling out.
My goal here is to identify the nature of our disagreement. Is it about whether that type of posting was bad, or whether Darwin posted that way frequently, or whether, assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster? If we disagree over the first question, pulling up examples is a waste of time because you won't agree that the behavior is bad even if I can demonstrate it happened. If it's the third, examples again won't help much. If it's the second, then our disagreement seems to be a straightforward question of fact, like when you proved me wrong on the thirty-years war, and you're correct that the proper way to proceed is to pull up some examples.
In the meantime, I'll note that none of the people arguing in his favor in this convo are providing examples either, and in fact both of you seem to be implying that bringing up examples is a bad thing:
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield.
...note the bolded part.
We don't disagree that by the end, people made it plain in every interaction that they considered him a disingenuous jackass troll. My position is that he was, in fact, a disingenuous jackass troll, and the response he got was the best available option given the nature of his activities. If you disagree that he acted that way, then I guess that's a question of fact and I can try to put some examples together if you want.
He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
He was more than capable of making good arguments. Often, and increasingly often over time, he simply declined to.
Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo.
I hated him because I spent dozens of irretrievable hours of my life getting pissed off by his comments, trying to figure out how to respond to them productively, and then eventually realizing that it was trolling the whole way down. That matches up with the other people I saw arguing with and eventually calling him out over time. I don't remember ever seeing him "chew up" right-wingers. I definately remember seeing him needle and troll them into an outburst with an endless torrent of passive-aggressive bullshit, for which they then ate bans.
The point of linking the above comment was to demonstrate what that sort of behavior actually looked like, and I linked it because regardless of who wrote it, I think you should be able to recognize that such posts fundamentally do not belong here. Further, I think you should agree that if a poster here made a habit out of such posts, they would not be contributing positively to this forum. It's not a matter of making a valid point crudely, or lacking tact, or being a bit uncharitable. There is no meaningful, useful, productive argument being made there at all. There is no net-positive way to respond to that sort of comment other than to point out that it is a trap.
But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
Yes, which is why I support the general treatment Darwin received. He said stupid or flatly malicious things all the time.
assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster?
He did post that way occasionally ( against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
So lets pull up some examples, kind of randomized.
Let’s go to darwin’s page , sort by controversial, motte/SSC comments.
1 : Arguing against a ban, I disagree with his line as always, but it’s reasonable. Productive conversation with amadan. Lower down people were already discussing darwin and whether he called people who doubted smollet’s story racist :
So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.
Ok so this is the infamous smollett thread with the classic nybbler call-out. Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behaviour in those threads? He presents standard progressive arguments at length, he’s civil. Well fine, the ‘It's called 'empathy.' -comment isn’t up to snuff, but he is being dogpiled, I think the occasional redditism can be excused.
Like, yeah, some minor public figures have their careers and lives disrupted by social power, but that's always been what social power is. Scott doesn't go home to Trump Tower because he was never that rich, but he does go back to whatever his job and level of income already was, as per the spirit of the hypothetical. And Elon Musk has far far more haters than Scott, but his wealth and power aren't affected at all. Social power can annoy a few individuals and cause damage to people who already had little structural power, but it can't do much to people with lots of structural power.
As for which team's protestors gt treated better... are you just not watching the same videos I am of protestors getting tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, savagely beaten for no reason, abducted off the street by unmarked government agents acting outside their purview, etc. etc. etc.? Like, yeah, I get that a few murals have been allowed and not every protestor has been brutalized or imprisoned yet, but I have to say your characterization of the overall structural response seems just ludicrous to me.
Disagree with the modding. Darwin is clearly in a completely different info- and argument bubble than we are, ideally he should have provided the videos yes, but still it’s important to have his perspective, and some videos no doubt exist, he's not lying or inventing a narrative as nara says.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses. Which, hey, if you're willing to do that, I have a whole lot of socialist literature about the evils of capitalism to share with you.
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant? Why does criticizing private business mean you need to agree with socialist views on the evils of capitalism? He doesn't deign to say, which means any reply is going to have to make their best guess at what he's trying to say, and then unpack the assumptions behind that supposed position, and then try to respond to them. At which point he can (and often does) truthfully point out that they're putting words in his mouth, and haven't really understood him.
Is there anything here other than 'everyone should become Christian, bleach their skin white, become fans of Nascar, and otherwise take on the attributes of the dominant culture in every way possible, and then the dominant culture will no longer persecute them'?
Because it seems like this post is coming from some weird perspective that imagines bigots as fumbling around blindly in the darkness, hopelessly looking for some dimension of difference upon which to discriminate against people, and it is only liberals who create identarian differences that separate groups out from the herd and give the bigots something to discriminate against.
This is, of course, absurd. Ingroups and outgroups form naturally, based on the smallest perceivable difference or coincidence. Bigots have no trouble finding reasons to discriminate, and will continue doing so long after everyone has stripped away every mutable aspect of their heritage and identity in an attempt to assimilate and conform. The classic Emo Phillips joke applies here. Accepting hatred of that which is different as natural, and deciding the solution is to minimize the differences between us, is a fools errand. No matter how similar we make ourselves, we will find differences to justify the hatred and mistrust that is a part of our nature.
The only strategy with a hope of success is to demand that hatred based on differences be suppressed, channeled, and regulated until the damage it causes is minimized or eliminated. Celebrating each other's differences is one part of that process.
A final thought: If anyone here agrees with Caplan's sentiments, then I welcome them to assimilate into to the dominant culture by becoming a feminist, SJW, pro-Intersectionality, anti-gender-norms liberal. As long as you only express these views out loud and no others, you'll find yourself much less persecuted and discriminated against in most parts of the internet, and you'll be fulfilling Caplan's advice.
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty. A parting shot of the uniquely Darwinian "If you disagree, that proves I'm even more right" variety.
You claim:
He did post that way occasionally (against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
Neither of these appear to be "against old enemies", much less "after taking 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles". This is how he routinely chose to initiate conversations. Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior. My question is, if they were typical, would it be fair to say that he was a low-quality poster and the hostility he was shown was well-earned? You claimed that people should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid. What would the appropriate response be to someone who made a strong habit of this type of posting?
A basic goal of the rules here is to take other people seriously, to engage with their arguments seriously, to make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying and to make yourself understood in turn. Normal conversations here start with someone laying out an argument, and other people either agreeing or poking holes in it with arguments of their own. With Darwin, most conversations start with him questioning whether you have a right to even be having a conversation in the first place. This meta-conversation is conducted in the vaguest possible terms when relating to anything constructive, with the most concrete possible terms whenever communicating disdain, contempt or dismissal, and usually through at least one layer of indirection. This is a really awful way to post.
Now, to the links you offered:
The first link is annoying because his argument is quite disingenuous for the reasons Amadan notes. By itself it's not worth arguing about though.
The third link continues the above pattern. The OP is an example of a fairly high-quality post: take an old argument familiar to the community, and examine it in light of subsequent evidence. Darwin's reply, by contrast, is markedly low-effort and unproductive. As is his custom, he dismisses the argument and all the evidence backing it out of hand for the most perfunctory of reasons: Scott still has a job, therefore his harassment and retreat are irrelevant. unspecified videos have showed unspecified "protestors" having force used on them, with the implication that this force was illegitimate, therefore all the examples of officials giving a free pass to rioters are irrelevant. You describe this as an "information bubble", as though he simply had seen different facts and therefore drew a different conclusion. This framing ignores the fact that the bubble exists because he is actively creating and maintaining it. He is actively rejecting all contrary evidence presented to him out of hand because it does not conform to his chosen narrative. He makes no effort to offer a specific argument backed by specific facts: Which videos? Which protestors? Which agents? How was the violence excessive? What are the assumptions being applied? What's the law? He makes no effort to engage seriously with counter-arguments. He doesn't lay out the logic that led him to his conclusion, or give an indication of what evidence would be required to change his mind. What he does, in this argument and in most others, is chart the shortest, lowest-effort path to a flat dismissal of all contrary positions, while maintaining a minimum level of plausible deniability.
This pattern continues in his subsequent responses throughout that thread. He makes lazy and highly inaccurate assertions, people correct him with voluminous evidence, he ignores them. At no point does he contribute anything constructive to the conversation.
The second link, though, is really something.
Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behavior's in those threads?
Yes, I do.
Darwin initiates by mocking the idea that the topic matters, and that he hasn't looked at the video in question and doesn't intend to. He then drops a 30-minute video of his own, and summarizes the contents: liberalism is racist, actually, and if you don't agree then you're racist too. He doesn't actually fully endorse this argument, but thinks it sorta has a point, y'know?
Within the first two sentences, he's dismissed the object level of the discussion at hand with a sneer, and from there he launches into a serious of increasingly vague abstractions. It is difficult to summarize the point he's making, or even to say that he's making a concrete point at all, beyond "progressivism is always right". He provides no explicit argument of his own, takes no explicit position, offers no evidence. The only thing solid enough to respond to in his post is the initial dismissal.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one, retreating into questions about whether conversation is even possible. This thread has three layers of back and forth, with zero constructive contributed on Darwin's end.
Another commenter challenges the initial dismissal, pointing back to the object-level fact of discrimination. Darwin responds with several assertions, none of which he supports, then reiterates his dismissal in stronger terms. In this thread, we're now two levels down, and he's argued purely by assertion, and only about whether the conversation should happen at all.
This is not good behavior. He is not being charitable. He is not speaking plainly. He is not providing evidence for inflammatory statements. He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus. He is making sweeping generalizations to vilify groups he dislikes. And he's doing this to people who have watched him behave this way, without serious repercussions, for years.
And it is at this point that he decides to back his statements with his first piece of actual evidence, explicitly to support his assertion that the entire conversation shouldn't be happening at all. And so he cites a recent hate crime allegation, asserting that this hate crime proves that all other arguments in the thread are invalid. This is a terrible argument, as several people immediately point out. Two things can be bad at the same time, the responses to the two things differ completely, single datapoints are hardly useful, and so on. All of these are strong arguments against Darwin's position, and in fact Darwin himself regularly invokes these arguments to dismiss other peoples' statements. Here, he appears completely unaware that any such points could even be raised. His position is that the entire conversation is so self-evidently ridiculous that even being forced to point this out explicitly is an imposition on him.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
JTarrou delivers a more measured, highly reasonable, strictly-within-the-rules version of the same call-out, engaging directly with Darwin's core claims, pointing out that the risks inherent to Darwin's argument. Darwin replies with a single-line, low-effort ad-hominum, is warned by the mods, and updates to a minimal-effort accusation of bad-faith, with an insult thrown in to round things out. Jtarrou and others reply reasonably, pointing out that this incident actually does look pretty fishy, citing previous cases of bad reporting, false accusations of a similar nature, oddities in the narrative. Darwin ignores them all. This thread gets four levels deep, and at no point does Darwin contribute anything constructive. He started out sneering and he only gets worse as he goes, despite being presented with numerous well-thought-out, reasonable, mild replies.
ZorbaTHut, the mod who's been trying to keep a lid on things, tries his hand at a reasonable response. Darwin responds with a pair of progressive arguments, disavows them, then asserts that the entire discussion is the same sort of thing, just from the other side. He is still arguing that the entire discussion is illegitimate, and his only evidence for doing so is the hate crime incident. He's challenged again in this thread, and claims he has no idea whether the incident actually happened, and likewise has no idea if the original incident under discussion happened, so no one knows anything. It's pointed out that the original incident was caught on video, which he's refused to watch. He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding.
Zorba follows up with a lengthy post attempting to engage further, and gets no reply. This branch of the thread gets three layers deep, with Darwin contributing nothing constructive throughout, and in fact ignoring numerous high-quality attempts at engagement with what little there is of his argument, preferring instead to reassert his position over and over again with extreme confidence.
...And again, the behavior I'm highlighting above was not unusual for Darwin. The flat dismissal, the sneering, the smuggery, the retreats into pointless abstraction or equivocation, the rejection of context, ignoring or flat dismissal of well-reasoned counter-arguments, apparent inability to consider his own biases and flat refusal to recognize them when pointed out by others, and the general air of contempt for the entire concept of charity and engagement are the norm from him throughout his time here. The large majority of his comments could be accurately summarized as "Everyone knows Progressivism is right about everything and you're an idiot or evil if you disagree", delivered either in a pithily low-effort sentence or two, or in a few paragraphs so indirect and abstract that effective response required multiple back-and-forth replies to even pin down what he'd admit to actually saying.
And of course, in this case, he did all the above at length and very publicly, based entirely on one piece of evidence. He mocked and insulted the people who raised reasonable doubts about that evidence. And then it turned out the evidence was extremely, hilariously, very obviously faked in the most cartoonish way possible, and the result was that people clowned on him without mercy. I think this is a reasonable response to someone who makes themselves into that much of a clown. As a mod pointed out in your first link, this community runs on a reputation economy, and he systematically trashed his reputation in the most dramatic and hilariously karmic way possible. I've seen no evidence that he learned a single thing from the experience; last I saw, he was continuing to insist that he was always right about everything, barring a few details of no consequence whatsoever, and anyone who said differently was just a hater. This is remarkably dishonest, but unsurprising given his history with us.
The thing we have going here is doomed. It's been obvious that it was doomed since at least early 2016. The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama. The further problem for any non-forced-anon forum dedicated specifically to debate of contentious political or cultural issues is that conversations are driven by uncertainty, by people looking for answers, but high-quality conversations generate answers, thereby removing the environment that generated them. The combination of these two problems means that this community, by its nature, has a limited shelf-life. People eventually burn out and leave, and they do not do so equally due to the history that accrues. None of this seems avoidable to me, but I bitterly regret that it is this way, and that there doesn't seem to be a way to ameliorate the problem. I am acutely aware of the fact that we have very few blue-tribe posters left, and that almost all the really good ones we used to have are gone. I miss them dearly. I've tried to engage fairly and honestly with them. I've tried to sharply limit the engagement I have with them, to try to cut down on the dog-pile effect. I've requested lengthy bans for myself in the past to try to minimize my own contribution to the erosion of their participation. I still treasure many of the conversations I've had with them, and believe I've learned a lot from those conversations.
I had a lot of conversations with Darwin. I spent a lot of effort trying to engage with him honestly and fairly. It never, ever worked, and I think it's a fair conclusion that this is because he straight-up wasn't interested in constructive dialog.
Don’t ask me to side with a mob against a contrarian who won’t admit he’s wrong. Although he may have been wrong – he was most likely wrong – a mob forces the issue through social pressure and the weight of numbers (and ultimately in this case, mod force) , and that is not legitimate.
That's the best part - he was the one forcing the issues. The thing about the mod force is cmpletely backwards, for a long time, they were explicitly protecting him, letting him get away with stuff that got others banned. Even that wouldn't make so many people turn against him, if he had enough grace to concede when he was wrong.
I'm not asking you to side with the mob against a contrarian, I'm asking you to provide actual evidence for your theory that people hated him because he occasionally won a spat with a counter-progressive, rather than because he refused to engage in an honest manner.
Well, let's look at a [not even slightly] concrete example.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
I linked to an example of a particular sort of behavior that I find highly objectionable. My argument is that Darwin engaged in that specific sort of behavior on a regular basis. I'm not trying to get you to agree that this is actually true, and I'm not looking to start a trawl through old posts. I'm trying to communicate why I disagree that Darwin was a valuable contributor: because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again, needling people with passive-aggressive bullshit and then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
I could be wrong, and maybe that's not him. I could be wrong, and Darwin's posts weren't actually like that back in the day. I could be wrong, and maybe that post I linked is actually totally reasonable. You and FD9000 are arguing that he was a valuable contributor; I'm disagreeing, and trying to explain succinctly why.
If I'm not wrong, and that post I linked is bad, and Darwin really did make a habit of posting like that throughout his tenure, I hope you can agree that it's reasonable to object to such behavior.
then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
This isn't a thing. He would have to 'ghost' most people because each of his comments had like 6 replies. 10 comments deep, he would need ((6^10 )/24)/ 365 = 7000 years to respond to all.
because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again
Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
If there were a user who made a whole lot of bad posts and refused to engage in good faith, to the point that a lot of people trying to engage with them got frustrated to the point of eating a ban, is it reasonable to take note of this and point it out, both to discourage them from doing it and to warn the people who haven't figured out the schtick?
Again, I don't expect to convince you that Darwin is bad. It's enough for me to establish the nature and boundaries of our disagreement: is it that there's no such thing as a bad post, or there is but noticing patterns of bad posting is unproductive, or that some posts are bad and some posters are bad but Darwin wasn't one of the bad ones, or something else. Even if we agree to disagree, it seems useful to me to be clear on what we disagree about.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the source of confusion is. We both think making bad posts is bad, but I think his posts were good, so it doesn’t apply.
His input was a genuine loss imo. He made some of the only well argued pieces from points of view we never get here, and people would dogpile him, personally insult him, and bring up everything he ever said that they ideologically disagreed with. If people were regularly as shitty to me as they were to him I’m sure I would get in more verbal scuffles as well. Part of why I don’t have conversations about American culture war issues is because people have been shitty to me the times I tried, here and in DMs, and I have limited patience for that.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity.
I disagree. He often made quality arguments and was willing to buck the status quo here from an underrepresented angle, something we should want more. He was no more inflammatory or bad faith than plenty of others here, but people reacted absolutely viscerally against him at a level disproportionate to his behavior.
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build. People get bitter and hostile in response to users who have actually tried to buck majority opinion here. I experienced this kind of thing enough from the times I tried to engage in actual culture war issues that I'm pretty unwilling to do it anymore, and I'm a very long time contributor.
Either way it doesn't matter much anymore, we are what we are here and my reply to gatt was meant to be light hearted, not a declaration of conflict or something.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build.
Whenever someone tries to make that argument, I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard. Particularly, do you know a progressive community that is as open to conservative opinions that is at least as open as we are to progressive ones?
I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard.
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
Isn't he obviously just an obnoxious troll who posts in whatever community he can get a rise out of? If he came here and posted like that he'd be banned right away for good reason.
I'm not gonna look through his reddit profile cause I've always found that thing kinda weird, but pretty much everyone here assuredly (hopefully) sounds different on the non-motte subs they visit. While he was here he was a long-time familiar face on the quality contributions page.
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
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Notes -
Ah.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
It’s a stain on our free speech record to have banned him. Even as a skilled devil’s advocate, if we assumed he never believed anything consistently, he was valuable.
Darwin was banned on the subreddit only after a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans.
As far as I know, he's never posted here, but if he wanted to, he could do so without needing an alt, since he's (obviously) not been banned since the move.
yeah yeah I know how that goes :)
First they came for Darwin....
And your point is? We are very pro-free speech, but we do have rules, it's not an "anything goes" zone.
My point is, anyone can get a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans if they just comment and stick around. Like yours truly. List just gets longer and longer. But whatever. I’ve made my peace with it, it’s like senescence, the inevitability of death.
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Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
That alt reads more like impassionata to me. But no, that’s not very valuable. Although as you know, I’m pretty free speechy, so not being as valuable as darwin, and antagonizing people, is still not enough for a ban in my book.
Imp always seemed more direct with his disdain. darwin would couch his with the sort of "Have you considered" plausible deniability wrt the rules, but transparently just calling people assholes. That or just terminating a convo with evasiveness.
I think there is some value in reflecting on "Maybe you just suck?". But I don't expect many people to do it when asked, and it was noticeable that despite being a sometimes quality poster, Darwin's effort levels would evaporate by the time he was issuing those queries.
Of no particular import - I also pegged guess as a darwin alt just because the posting style seemed so familiar. Not that I have a problem with it.
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I picked that one because it popped up in the feed within a post or two of your reply, and seemed a reasonable example of the fundamental problem. It was convinient, in short.
I don't have an opinion on Darwin or any other user getting banned; that's on the mods, and I decided a long time ago never to argue nor concern myself with mod decisions, other than to make a good-faith effort to abide by their rules. As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt. What I object to is the idea that he was providing a valuable service to the community by presenting alternate points of view. He did provide alternate points of view, very occasionally. What he did the rest of the time, in my experience, was degrade every conversation he participated in. As with the post I linked, he rarely provided evidence or even a coherent argument, just endless faux-polite smuggery wrapped in multiple layers of indirection designed to make engagement as infuriating and unproductive as possible while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.
Maybe my experience or my impressions are wrong. Maybe I'm biased. I don't think so, though; I spent literally years trying to get a productive conversation out of him, and came up empty. I have in fact managed to have productive conversations with quite a few other people, even in the face of profound and irreconcilable disagreements. I saw a lot of other people flame out and eat bans from trying to engage with him before a general understanding of his technique proliferated enough to become common knowledge. In any case, I object to the idea that he was a reasonable or even a net-positive contributor, and I strongly object to the idea that people just couldn't handle having their ideas challenged. He was a troll, and he burned every scrap of good-will that ever was extended to him.
I did too, and playing @guesswho ? Is a waste of our time. This proxy accusation is ludicrous, if you want to criticize him, link him.
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield. He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
They were often arguments we could not make and had not seen before, at least a few notches above standard reddit dross. Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo. Granted, he would not be particularly nice about it, like a ymeskout, SSCreader, Soriek or gdanning might be. But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
It's not a proxy accusation. I don't care who is on the other side of that account, and I'm not expecting you to care either. I'm pointing out a specific form of behavior that I think is bad. I'm asserting that that form of bad behavior was so frequent as to be a readily identifiable calling card for one particular commenter here. I'm concluding that this made him a notably bad member of the community, such that his badness was worth paying attention to and calling out.
My goal here is to identify the nature of our disagreement. Is it about whether that type of posting was bad, or whether Darwin posted that way frequently, or whether, assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster? If we disagree over the first question, pulling up examples is a waste of time because you won't agree that the behavior is bad even if I can demonstrate it happened. If it's the third, examples again won't help much. If it's the second, then our disagreement seems to be a straightforward question of fact, like when you proved me wrong on the thirty-years war, and you're correct that the proper way to proceed is to pull up some examples.
In the meantime, I'll note that none of the people arguing in his favor in this convo are providing examples either, and in fact both of you seem to be implying that bringing up examples is a bad thing:
...note the bolded part.
We don't disagree that by the end, people made it plain in every interaction that they considered him a disingenuous jackass troll. My position is that he was, in fact, a disingenuous jackass troll, and the response he got was the best available option given the nature of his activities. If you disagree that he acted that way, then I guess that's a question of fact and I can try to put some examples together if you want.
He was more than capable of making good arguments. Often, and increasingly often over time, he simply declined to.
I hated him because I spent dozens of irretrievable hours of my life getting pissed off by his comments, trying to figure out how to respond to them productively, and then eventually realizing that it was trolling the whole way down. That matches up with the other people I saw arguing with and eventually calling him out over time. I don't remember ever seeing him "chew up" right-wingers. I definately remember seeing him needle and troll them into an outburst with an endless torrent of passive-aggressive bullshit, for which they then ate bans.
The point of linking the above comment was to demonstrate what that sort of behavior actually looked like, and I linked it because regardless of who wrote it, I think you should be able to recognize that such posts fundamentally do not belong here. Further, I think you should agree that if a poster here made a habit out of such posts, they would not be contributing positively to this forum. It's not a matter of making a valid point crudely, or lacking tact, or being a bit uncharitable. There is no meaningful, useful, productive argument being made there at all. There is no net-positive way to respond to that sort of comment other than to point out that it is a trap.
Yes, which is why I support the general treatment Darwin received. He said stupid or flatly malicious things all the time.
It's pretty bad.
He did not post that way frequently.
He did post that way occasionally ( against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
So lets pull up some examples, kind of randomized.
Let’s go to darwin’s page , sort by controversial, motte/SSC comments.
1 : Arguing against a ban, I disagree with his line as always, but it’s reasonable. Productive conversation with amadan. Lower down people were already discussing darwin and whether he called people who doubted smollet’s story racist :
Links to 2
Ok so this is the infamous smollett thread with the classic nybbler call-out. Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behaviour in those threads? He presents standard progressive arguments at length, he’s civil. Well fine, the ‘It's called 'empathy.' -comment isn’t up to snuff, but he is being dogpiled, I think the occasional redditism can be excused.
3 : a modded comment
Disagree with the modding. Darwin is clearly in a completely different info- and argument bubble than we are, ideally he should have provided the videos yes, but still it’s important to have his perspective, and some videos no doubt exist, he's not lying or inventing a narrative as nara says.
And so on.
Let's do. I'll get to your examples in a sec, but here's two more:
BJ posts an excerpt and a link to an essay on blue tribe arguments for deplatforming and censorship. Here's how Darwin initiates his participation in the thread:
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant? Why does criticizing private business mean you need to agree with socialist views on the evils of capitalism? He doesn't deign to say, which means any reply is going to have to make their best guess at what he's trying to say, and then unpack the assumptions behind that supposed position, and then try to respond to them. At which point he can (and often does) truthfully point out that they're putting words in his mouth, and haven't really understood him.
Here, a user posts a long excerpt from a Bryan Caplan essay, arguing that tribal identity creates prejudice rather than combatting it. Here's how Darwin initiates his participation in the thread:
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty. A parting shot of the uniquely Darwinian "If you disagree, that proves I'm even more right" variety.
You claim:
Neither of these appear to be "against old enemies", much less "after taking 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles". This is how he routinely chose to initiate conversations. Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior. My question is, if they were typical, would it be fair to say that he was a low-quality poster and the hostility he was shown was well-earned? You claimed that people should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid. What would the appropriate response be to someone who made a strong habit of this type of posting?
A basic goal of the rules here is to take other people seriously, to engage with their arguments seriously, to make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying and to make yourself understood in turn. Normal conversations here start with someone laying out an argument, and other people either agreeing or poking holes in it with arguments of their own. With Darwin, most conversations start with him questioning whether you have a right to even be having a conversation in the first place. This meta-conversation is conducted in the vaguest possible terms when relating to anything constructive, with the most concrete possible terms whenever communicating disdain, contempt or dismissal, and usually through at least one layer of indirection. This is a really awful way to post.
Now, to the links you offered:
The first link is annoying because his argument is quite disingenuous for the reasons Amadan notes. By itself it's not worth arguing about though.
The third link continues the above pattern. The OP is an example of a fairly high-quality post: take an old argument familiar to the community, and examine it in light of subsequent evidence. Darwin's reply, by contrast, is markedly low-effort and unproductive. As is his custom, he dismisses the argument and all the evidence backing it out of hand for the most perfunctory of reasons: Scott still has a job, therefore his harassment and retreat are irrelevant. unspecified videos have showed unspecified "protestors" having force used on them, with the implication that this force was illegitimate, therefore all the examples of officials giving a free pass to rioters are irrelevant. You describe this as an "information bubble", as though he simply had seen different facts and therefore drew a different conclusion. This framing ignores the fact that the bubble exists because he is actively creating and maintaining it. He is actively rejecting all contrary evidence presented to him out of hand because it does not conform to his chosen narrative. He makes no effort to offer a specific argument backed by specific facts: Which videos? Which protestors? Which agents? How was the violence excessive? What are the assumptions being applied? What's the law? He makes no effort to engage seriously with counter-arguments. He doesn't lay out the logic that led him to his conclusion, or give an indication of what evidence would be required to change his mind. What he does, in this argument and in most others, is chart the shortest, lowest-effort path to a flat dismissal of all contrary positions, while maintaining a minimum level of plausible deniability.
This pattern continues in his subsequent responses throughout that thread. He makes lazy and highly inaccurate assertions, people correct him with voluminous evidence, he ignores them. At no point does he contribute anything constructive to the conversation.
The second link, though, is really something.
Yes, I do.
Darwin initiates by mocking the idea that the topic matters, and that he hasn't looked at the video in question and doesn't intend to. He then drops a 30-minute video of his own, and summarizes the contents: liberalism is racist, actually, and if you don't agree then you're racist too. He doesn't actually fully endorse this argument, but thinks it sorta has a point, y'know?
Within the first two sentences, he's dismissed the object level of the discussion at hand with a sneer, and from there he launches into a serious of increasingly vague abstractions. It is difficult to summarize the point he's making, or even to say that he's making a concrete point at all, beyond "progressivism is always right". He provides no explicit argument of his own, takes no explicit position, offers no evidence. The only thing solid enough to respond to in his post is the initial dismissal.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one, retreating into questions about whether conversation is even possible. This thread has three layers of back and forth, with zero constructive contributed on Darwin's end.
Another commenter challenges the initial dismissal, pointing back to the object-level fact of discrimination. Darwin responds with several assertions, none of which he supports, then reiterates his dismissal in stronger terms. In this thread, we're now two levels down, and he's argued purely by assertion, and only about whether the conversation should happen at all.
This is not good behavior. He is not being charitable. He is not speaking plainly. He is not providing evidence for inflammatory statements. He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus. He is making sweeping generalizations to vilify groups he dislikes. And he's doing this to people who have watched him behave this way, without serious repercussions, for years.
And it is at this point that he decides to back his statements with his first piece of actual evidence, explicitly to support his assertion that the entire conversation shouldn't be happening at all. And so he cites a recent hate crime allegation, asserting that this hate crime proves that all other arguments in the thread are invalid. This is a terrible argument, as several people immediately point out. Two things can be bad at the same time, the responses to the two things differ completely, single datapoints are hardly useful, and so on. All of these are strong arguments against Darwin's position, and in fact Darwin himself regularly invokes these arguments to dismiss other peoples' statements. Here, he appears completely unaware that any such points could even be raised. His position is that the entire conversation is so self-evidently ridiculous that even being forced to point this out explicitly is an imposition on him.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
JTarrou delivers a more measured, highly reasonable, strictly-within-the-rules version of the same call-out, engaging directly with Darwin's core claims, pointing out that the risks inherent to Darwin's argument. Darwin replies with a single-line, low-effort ad-hominum, is warned by the mods, and updates to a minimal-effort accusation of bad-faith, with an insult thrown in to round things out. Jtarrou and others reply reasonably, pointing out that this incident actually does look pretty fishy, citing previous cases of bad reporting, false accusations of a similar nature, oddities in the narrative. Darwin ignores them all. This thread gets four levels deep, and at no point does Darwin contribute anything constructive. He started out sneering and he only gets worse as he goes, despite being presented with numerous well-thought-out, reasonable, mild replies.
ZorbaTHut, the mod who's been trying to keep a lid on things, tries his hand at a reasonable response. Darwin responds with a pair of progressive arguments, disavows them, then asserts that the entire discussion is the same sort of thing, just from the other side. He is still arguing that the entire discussion is illegitimate, and his only evidence for doing so is the hate crime incident. He's challenged again in this thread, and claims he has no idea whether the incident actually happened, and likewise has no idea if the original incident under discussion happened, so no one knows anything. It's pointed out that the original incident was caught on video, which he's refused to watch. He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding. Zorba follows up with a lengthy post attempting to engage further, and gets no reply. This branch of the thread gets three layers deep, with Darwin contributing nothing constructive throughout, and in fact ignoring numerous high-quality attempts at engagement with what little there is of his argument, preferring instead to reassert his position over and over again with extreme confidence.
...And again, the behavior I'm highlighting above was not unusual for Darwin. The flat dismissal, the sneering, the smuggery, the retreats into pointless abstraction or equivocation, the rejection of context, ignoring or flat dismissal of well-reasoned counter-arguments, apparent inability to consider his own biases and flat refusal to recognize them when pointed out by others, and the general air of contempt for the entire concept of charity and engagement are the norm from him throughout his time here. The large majority of his comments could be accurately summarized as "Everyone knows Progressivism is right about everything and you're an idiot or evil if you disagree", delivered either in a pithily low-effort sentence or two, or in a few paragraphs so indirect and abstract that effective response required multiple back-and-forth replies to even pin down what he'd admit to actually saying.
And of course, in this case, he did all the above at length and very publicly, based entirely on one piece of evidence. He mocked and insulted the people who raised reasonable doubts about that evidence. And then it turned out the evidence was extremely, hilariously, very obviously faked in the most cartoonish way possible, and the result was that people clowned on him without mercy. I think this is a reasonable response to someone who makes themselves into that much of a clown. As a mod pointed out in your first link, this community runs on a reputation economy, and he systematically trashed his reputation in the most dramatic and hilariously karmic way possible. I've seen no evidence that he learned a single thing from the experience; last I saw, he was continuing to insist that he was always right about everything, barring a few details of no consequence whatsoever, and anyone who said differently was just a hater. This is remarkably dishonest, but unsurprising given his history with us.
The thing we have going here is doomed. It's been obvious that it was doomed since at least early 2016. The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama. The further problem for any non-forced-anon forum dedicated specifically to debate of contentious political or cultural issues is that conversations are driven by uncertainty, by people looking for answers, but high-quality conversations generate answers, thereby removing the environment that generated them. The combination of these two problems means that this community, by its nature, has a limited shelf-life. People eventually burn out and leave, and they do not do so equally due to the history that accrues. None of this seems avoidable to me, but I bitterly regret that it is this way, and that there doesn't seem to be a way to ameliorate the problem. I am acutely aware of the fact that we have very few blue-tribe posters left, and that almost all the really good ones we used to have are gone. I miss them dearly. I've tried to engage fairly and honestly with them. I've tried to sharply limit the engagement I have with them, to try to cut down on the dog-pile effect. I've requested lengthy bans for myself in the past to try to minimize my own contribution to the erosion of their participation. I still treasure many of the conversations I've had with them, and believe I've learned a lot from those conversations.
I had a lot of conversations with Darwin. I spent a lot of effort trying to engage with him honestly and fairly. It never, ever worked, and I think it's a fair conclusion that this is because he straight-up wasn't interested in constructive dialog.
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Really? You don't think "never giving an inch" even when confronted with "every wrong he ever said" might have more to do with it?
Don’t ask me to side with a mob against a contrarian who won’t admit he’s wrong. Although he may have been wrong – he was most likely wrong – a mob forces the issue through social pressure and the weight of numbers (and ultimately in this case, mod force) , and that is not legitimate.
That's the best part - he was the one forcing the issues. The thing about the mod force is cmpletely backwards, for a long time, they were explicitly protecting him, letting him get away with stuff that got others banned. Even that wouldn't make so many people turn against him, if he had enough grace to concede when he was wrong.
I'm not asking you to side with the mob against a contrarian, I'm asking you to provide actual evidence for your theory that people hated him because he occasionally won a spat with a counter-progressive, rather than because he refused to engage in an honest manner.
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What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
I linked to an example of a particular sort of behavior that I find highly objectionable. My argument is that Darwin engaged in that specific sort of behavior on a regular basis. I'm not trying to get you to agree that this is actually true, and I'm not looking to start a trawl through old posts. I'm trying to communicate why I disagree that Darwin was a valuable contributor: because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again, needling people with passive-aggressive bullshit and then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
I could be wrong, and maybe that's not him. I could be wrong, and Darwin's posts weren't actually like that back in the day. I could be wrong, and maybe that post I linked is actually totally reasonable. You and FD9000 are arguing that he was a valuable contributor; I'm disagreeing, and trying to explain succinctly why.
If I'm not wrong, and that post I linked is bad, and Darwin really did make a habit of posting like that throughout his tenure, I hope you can agree that it's reasonable to object to such behavior.
This isn't a thing. He would have to 'ghost' most people because each of his comments had like 6 replies. 10 comments deep, he would need ((6^10 )/24)/ 365 = 7000 years to respond to all.
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Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
If there were a user who made a whole lot of bad posts and refused to engage in good faith, to the point that a lot of people trying to engage with them got frustrated to the point of eating a ban, is it reasonable to take note of this and point it out, both to discourage them from doing it and to warn the people who haven't figured out the schtick?
Again, I don't expect to convince you that Darwin is bad. It's enough for me to establish the nature and boundaries of our disagreement: is it that there's no such thing as a bad post, or there is but noticing patterns of bad posting is unproductive, or that some posts are bad and some posters are bad but Darwin wasn't one of the bad ones, or something else. Even if we agree to disagree, it seems useful to me to be clear on what we disagree about.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what the source of confusion is. We both think making bad posts is bad, but I think his posts were good, so it doesn’t apply.
His input was a genuine loss imo. He made some of the only well argued pieces from points of view we never get here, and people would dogpile him, personally insult him, and bring up everything he ever said that they ideologically disagreed with. If people were regularly as shitty to me as they were to him I’m sure I would get in more verbal scuffles as well. Part of why I don’t have conversations about American culture war issues is because people have been shitty to me the times I tried, here and in DMs, and I have limited patience for that.
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I disagree. He often made quality arguments and was willing to buck the status quo here from an underrepresented angle, something we should want more. He was no more inflammatory or bad faith than plenty of others here, but people reacted absolutely viscerally against him at a level disproportionate to his behavior.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build. People get bitter and hostile in response to users who have actually tried to buck majority opinion here. I experienced this kind of thing enough from the times I tried to engage in actual culture war issues that I'm pretty unwilling to do it anymore, and I'm a very long time contributor.
Either way it doesn't matter much anymore, we are what we are here and my reply to gatt was meant to be light hearted, not a declaration of conflict or something.
Whenever someone tries to make that argument, I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard. Particularly, do you know a progressive community that is as open to conservative opinions that is at least as open as we are to progressive ones?
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
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Wait, are you talking about this guy? https://old.reddit.com/user/darwin2500/
Isn't he obviously just an obnoxious troll who posts in whatever community he can get a rise out of? If he came here and posted like that he'd be banned right away for good reason.
I'm not gonna look through his reddit profile cause I've always found that thing kinda weird, but pretty much everyone here assuredly (hopefully) sounds different on the non-motte subs they visit. While he was here he was a long-time familiar face on the quality contributions page.
I looked through the first page of Darwin's reddit profile and it is fine. Not clearly a troll.
But I do recall them being one of the more dramatic contrarian-against-the-local-contrarians on the old subreddits.
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
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