Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I do relate, honestly, to being a believer in a space full of nonbelievers and the sense of isolation it can provide as people attack your deeply held beliefs. The particular reply you link is obnoxious, low-quality, certainly unpleasant to receive—and downvoted, with no meaningful support from others. And it’s true—you were staking out a minority viewpoint difficult to defend in a forum like this, and receiving harsh responses for doing so.
You very badly misunderstand the situation and the comparison at hand, though. I’ve been in heated conversations before. I’ve had slapfights, I’ve had controversial posts that get a lot of pushback. That’s all well within the norm.
What is extremely far from the norm is having people en masse accuse you of being a shill, tell you your reputation has been destroyed, tell you you don’t belong in the forum, and receive mass support (see eg upvote totals) for doing so. You’re fixating on one person who respects me—and was still calling me a shill—and a handful of supportive replies, in the middle of a flood of vitriol. I didn’t link the worst ones—I linked some of the ones with the most support and one drive-by potshot in the middle of the flood. At the end of your conversation, nobody was threatening any longstanding impact or indicating that they would treat you differently moving forward. There were no spiraling ramifications, no deep-felt expressions of hatred. It’s apples and oranges.
Dismissal isn’t comparable, either. People weren’t coming around en masse to tell Kulak he didn’t belong in the community after the article. They just disagreed with it!
Like, you can see in the links—note particularly the one mentioning it was clearly costing me a lot of goodwill. People there were extremely well aware at the time that it was an extraordinary reaction in an extraordinary situation; to treat it otherwise is to badly misread it. I’m not going to act like nobody on this forum has ever faced worse—particularly around flameout posts—but I can emphatically tell you that the reaction here was uniquely ugly, of all the places that took note of the event.
I mean, one person mentioned that Zorba should talk with you about whether you want to remain part of the community. The others were just saying you should no longer be a mod. The latter is pretty reasonable on a few levels and not comparable to saying you shouldn't be part of the community.
I think the main difference is that I had no clout to begin with. If I were a mod I'm sure that one guy would have been calling for my de-modship. As-is he just advocated for less respect to be given to religion here. "Time to burn some witches". Hard to treat me differently moving forward if I am not really a character on this site the way you were--most of these people won't interact with me ever again regardless. I don't have much goodwill to lose in the first place, at least not nearly as much as you did.
Sure. The nature of the sin was different--idiocy versus dishonesty. Not to mention Kulak has never had (and certainly doesn't now have) the influence here which you wielded at the time that piece was released.
I still haven't read the vast majority of the responses to your piece. I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I just think you took the wrong lesson away from it. The bad reception was because we're highly committed to honesty, not because we're highly committed to the Right.
Reread this and think about the words you wrote, please.
You're linking one heavily downvoted jerk, but also--that's the point. Yes, being a somewhat public figure means more people have more opinions about you more aggressively. Having hundreds of people pile on you at once, many of them people you've had longstanding friendly relationships with, feels very very different than a single contentious conversation.
Anyway, since you're mentioning the reaction to the banned books list, look at it. He got some light criticism, a few people questioning his premise, quite a bit of interest. That's it. Nothing particularly notable, nothing dramatic.
There are high motives and low motives for every decision. I wouldn't flatter yourself too much here (though I also wouldn't imply that no critics had good points.) I didn't walk away thinking "these guys are highly committed right-wing partisans," I thought, "Huh, these people are willing to make and nod along to false, conspiratorial claims about me and hop in on a massive dogpile in which my character, my motives, and my membership in this space all become topics of heated controversy, thinking the worst of me and extending no grace whatsoever in a time when I could really use it." Unless you've been on the other end of something like that, I suggest not acting too much as if you know what it's like.
Similarly, you can choose to believe that it's just partisanship making people react in silly ways, but I've been around here a very long time and watched many of the best people here move on due to one or another comparable frustration. Explanations of why this forum zeitgeist was acting reasonably and nobly every time only go so far. At some point, it becomes simpler to leave than to explain, and poster after poster has made that calculation.
Anyway, that's enough talk of the bad blood. I usually don't bring it up because at this point I'm in a very lucky position on the whole and I prefer to remember the good memories here. There's plenty of good here, now as ever; I'm just some guy who's been around far too long and seen far too much.
Yeah, I don't think we're going to reach agreement on this, but I appreciate the time you've taken to discuss it.
All the best.
As a postscript, two final notes on the reaction at the time that I was looking for and finally found -- this is the full set of reactions to my original comment, and this is rdrama's reaction to the motte's reaction. Note in particular this comment and the replies below it from people who frequent both forums.
https://undelete.pullpush.io/r/TheMotte/comments/ubedpi/_/i6p0wyy/#comment-info
This post was spot on. That's what people who want to dismiss the evidence say every time now, and you helped them. LoTT has been one of the only people actually gathering and publicizing evidence of the batshit things teachers are pushing on American kids, and she was your first target, coincidentally(?) at the same time as the entire left wing organized a simultaneous assault trying to ruin her life.
Just why, dude.
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I resent the implication! I'm being taken out of context. Cherry-picked I tell yah! I'm sorry that I've provided the one bit of lame pushback against religiosity both acerbic and 2002 atheist cringe basic enough to be used as evidence of a greater conspiracy against Tenaz.
El Motte Parte Dos has a lot of religious folks these days that aren't shy about treating it as the truth and even openly evangelizing, which still strikes me as something weird for a place that is supposedly honestly truth seeking and at least rational adjacent. Can't help it if that grinds my gears.
There's no conspiracy--it's just a right-leaning post of mine that (rightfully) saw a lot of pushback.
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