naraburns nihil supernum
1yr 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.
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.
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.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
I will say that there came a point where y'all got fed up with him, and it didn't take long for him to start stacking up bans after that.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
Sure. People will believe what they want to believe. I've given up trying to convince anyone who goes on the "You're biased and you're too stupid/dishonest to acknowledge it" attack.
Come on, it's not an attack. Bias is not connected to being stupid, and while it's arguably a form of dishonesty, it requires more or less saintly levels of humility to grow past it, so it's unfair to expect anyone to be unbiased, and I never implied otherwise.
I do not think the mods were giving him a pass. I think he either had or developed a method of posting that was quite negative for the community, but very subtly so. It's one of the reasons I'm dedicating effort to actually arguing a position in detail in this thread, because what actually happened was much, much more complicated than "obviously bad poster gets away with it".
As someone unsympathetic to his general positions, it wasn't hard to pick up that something fucky was going on. But as I've mentioned elsewhere, I spent years, plural trying to have conversations with him, until I finally started getting a handle on how his schtick worked. It seems to me that the mods had a similar problem, and I really do think you need to understand what he's doing to mod him properly; otherwise, you're just banning a controversial but effortful poster because you don't like them, which is exactly the accusation being made here.
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Notes -
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.
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.
Everyone kept saying that; it was never true.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
I will say that there came a point where y'all got fed up with him, and it didn't take long for him to start stacking up bans after that.
Sure. People will believe what they want to believe. I've given up trying to convince anyone who goes on the "You're biased and you're too stupid/dishonest to acknowledge it" attack.
Come on, it's not an attack. Bias is not connected to being stupid, and while it's arguably a form of dishonesty, it requires more or less saintly levels of humility to grow past it, so it's unfair to expect anyone to be unbiased, and I never implied otherwise.
I do not think the mods were giving him a pass. I think he either had or developed a method of posting that was quite negative for the community, but very subtly so. It's one of the reasons I'm dedicating effort to actually arguing a position in detail in this thread, because what actually happened was much, much more complicated than "obviously bad poster gets away with it".
As someone unsympathetic to his general positions, it wasn't hard to pick up that something fucky was going on. But as I've mentioned elsewhere, I spent years, plural trying to have conversations with him, until I finally started getting a handle on how his schtick worked. It seems to me that the mods had a similar problem, and I really do think you need to understand what he's doing to mod him properly; otherwise, you're just banning a controversial but effortful poster because you don't like them, which is exactly the accusation being made here.
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