naraburns nihil supernum
8mo ago
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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.
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.
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.
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The comment mine is responding to, gattsuru’s on darwin
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.
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.
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.
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