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Notes -
And there's the bad faith accusation. What's the theory, anyway? He's BLM shadow liaison to the australian government, moonlighting as autist whisperer?
@gattsuru
Yeah, I still don't see the problem, like I told you in that thread. Your standard for sinister behaviour is frighteningly low. Not denouncing BLM more than once or twice is bizarre and uneven behaviour apparently.
What consensus is he building, all alone and despised?
And the good thing about evidence-free claims is that one can refute them with evidence. There really is no reason to write everything in blue.
@07mk
Frank disagreement is always inflammatory.
I'll repeat the arguments from there, then: you can't proclaim law-and-order credentials if you don't care about the law, you can't claim public order as a priority if some disruptions of public order can go unpunished for years lest orderly-but-not-state response squick someone out, and you can't claim anti-violence as a principle if you're willing to excuse it at the drop of a hat when the state wants to use it.
I don't think there's anything sinister, unless you're making a left/right pun -- and even then, Aussie politics doesn't break down into the right/left divide.
But if in one case, people honking horns and blocking traffic are so bad that they justify suspension of civil rights and all the normal protections of democratic processes, and in the other case, riots that burn down buildings with people in them are nothing special and should be resolved through democratic means. Some riots, and some terrorism, it turns out, are special.
... the sentence structure for consensus-building is around the right-wing posts you (and I) are bitching about.
And part of the warning I got was that I'm not allowed to do so. So there's a bit of an eyeroll, here.
So he's seemingly guilty of mild, year-spanning contradiction, as interpreted by you. I'm not going to waste my time explaining in detail why ashlael's positions are not contradictory, suffice to say you don't have a smoking gun. And all of this has nothing to do with the downvotes you were trying to justify.
You implied he was consensus building, like the post's Red Tribe equivalent. But those posts actually have a consensus to build on. At best he's gathering a coalition of the damned.
The rule against "Consensus building" doesn't have anything to do with how many people one is immediately appealing to. "We (you and I) agree on X" can be an appeal to common knowledge to your opposite number, provided they actually do agree; if you're not sure whether they agree, it's best to phrase it as a question rather than a statement.
"We (me and others, not you) agree on X, so clearly you're the odd one out" is consensus-building, whether the others are specified or not, and whether the others are present or not. Speaking for other people is generally frowned upon.
You genuinely do not appear to understand the rules this place operates under, and you are rounding all disagreement with your flawed understanding to evidence of bias. This makes your arguments against the actual, considerable, and quite damaging bias that does exist counterproductive.
This is not an endorsement of the object-level claim above.
I think you confuse consensus building with appeal to consensus. The latter pits an external authoritative perspective against the opponent, the former excludes a perspective from the debate entirely, and is characteristic of echo chambers.
From the rules:
If you think it helpful to criticize the behavior of the evident majority here, a position I wholeheartedly agree with, then an understanding of the actual meaning of the rules the Mods have put in place and enforce will help you do that more effectively. If you're worried about the rules being used against you, understanding how they work will help you stay on the correct side of them. The mods are remarkable in their good-faith commitment to trying to inculcate the norms that page describes.
The two examples provided by the rules "As everyone knows . . ." and "I'm sure you all agree that . . ." contradict yours "We (me and others, not you) agree on X" . The reader is included in the consensus building.
"starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement." is what I said. The problem is not, referring to other people who disagree. It's assuming we all already agree. And you can't assume we all agree when you're arguing a clear minority position.
There's an easy test available: Ping a mod and ask. They haven't minded clarifying the rules in the past.
appeal to authority: @Amadan ?
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