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I thought this was just another generic bad faith poster, but now that you pointed out the actual meaning of the name, I'm realizing this very well could be Darwin just having some fun with his username. It's been a long time since I've read his posts with any sort of regularity, but this definitely fits the pattern of obviously bad faith strawmanning that I remember.
It is, in fact, very obviously Darwin.
Nothing is less obvious. What’s your evidence? He’s a progressive…. who strawmans. Which is another way of saying he does not hold the average opinion of the sub in high regard, which is normal for a progressive. So your only piece of evidence is that he’s a progressive.
As I pointed out the last time we went around on this, there has been no shortage of progressive posters in the various iterations of this forum. None but Darwin employ this highly recognizable blend of faux-naivety and assumptive closure. The point is not that the post presents arguments for progressivism. The point is that the post is written to portray the progressive position as obviously common-sense, and any disagreement in the most uncharitable terms possible.
It is in fact very common for progressives outside of this space. I’m not going to do a deep comparative behavioural analysis because it’s not worth it, I’d just caution you and others against the “assumptive closure” of assigning this identity “as obviously common-sense “.
I'm tempted to get scientific with this, and try setting up a random trial. Selected paragraphs, with the author names scrubbed off?
Eh. I'm not going to stop pointing out that it's Darwin; as some of the replies here seem to indicate, some people get it, and getting it is useful to them, in much the way I think it's useful to me. If you want to chime in that we're wrong every time, I'm okay with that.
As Arjin argued, you yourself find it useful to recognize alts. If I recall, your last spotlighted account was JewDefender, correct? I thought at first that they were genuine, but your comments helped highlight their method, and a couple more posts flipped me 180 to being positive they were a WN alt. At least in principle, we should be able to agree that calling out shenanigans is a good idea when they crop up.
Do you think the post above is a good one, and that us labelling it this way will discourage similar good posts from being made?
What really bothered me about thenether/jewdefender/foreverlurker/cake/motteposter is that he pretended to be left when he was in fact far right. In this case, if true, it’s just a progressive pretending to be another progressive. That’s not really bad faith, it doesn’t distort every discussion, so I'm less motivated to call it out.
In the original thread on darwin, I already told you that I considered your accusations of strawmanning and bad faith towards him to be light, if not baseless. And my opinion has not been changed after you nearly accused me of similar behaviour.
What bothers me about GuessWho/Darwin is that they pretend to be reasonable when they are not.
Indeed. I made my case, other people agreed, you didn't. I'm okay with that result. Do you expect me to stop stating my opinion because you disagreed with it?
I didn't "nearly accuse you of similar behavior". I said I thought you broke the rules. I've broken the rules a number of times before, so have most posters here. Avoiding doing so is difficult, but you don't like being accused, so I won't point it out in future. Darwin almost never explicitly broke the rules, which was a considerable portion of the problem.
There's things about the way you argue that I'm don't like much; we'll probably argue about them for a while. For all those objections, though, I think you argue in good faith, and I hope you hang around. Discussion with you seems productive. I don't know why you can't recognize the problem with the post above, or why you don't recognize the pattern, but I didn't recognize JewDefender's schtick either for a while, and I haven't recognized previous alts other people were sure of at all. If you get it you get it, and a lot of the people who spent a considerable amount of time talking to Darwin get it. If you or others don't, well, it is what it is. What else is there to do?
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