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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Quoting for posterity in case you decide to delete this as you have various other things that even you later realized countered your self-sought reputation.

There are, of course, many ironies that could be noted here, but again- posterity.

From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.

Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.

To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.

I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.

Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.

Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.

You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.

I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.

People build the communities they deserve.

  • -19

I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.

Yawn. Get off your victim complex and grow thicker skin if you want to be a public writer in a community based around rhetorical argument. You just spent self-admitted weeks doing internet archeology for the sake of a slam piece, and you're flaming out of a modicum of pushback a much more recent time that you were duplicative, dishonest, manipulative, and deliberately so for another boo-post.

You've meant every word of your previous flame-outs as well, and had no intention of deleting them too until your temper cooled and your ego was pricked enough by the reputation damage to try damage control. This is merely cutting off your previous lines of retreat and preserving the record.

You have no high ground here, and your reputation is not beyond reproach. Defending your thesis on such will not protect it.

People build the communities they deserve.

How is the Schism going, anyway?

It’s going great! Here’s the most recent quality contributions roundup:

https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/1dsozbw/quality_contributions_up_to_30_june_2024/

Culturally, it has become exactly what I envisioned it being, and I am proud to have helped lay the foundation for one of the healthiest discussion spaces online, even as my own attention has moved mostly to Twitter.

Thanks for asking, and take care.

Almost every single one of these is at least half a year old? I don't think that indicates a particularly healthy community.

I get the feeling I'm one of the few posters that actually uses the QC report function (professorgerm back there), but yes, it's quite low activity, and yes, Trace has more or less abandoned it for hanging out on twitter with Hanania et al. So it goes.

It's usually a pleasant little place, except for one poster's approximately annual visit, and while I understand Trace's frustration with the motte I find his wielding the schism this way quite... distasteful.

The Steven Universe and Buddhism ones are newer, but yeah, the schism's not got a ton of activity.

I expect Trace means more healthy in terms of community norms than community, and in that sense, the people there probably do more closely match the approaches to discussion that he wants.

The Schism averages around 100 comments a month on the monthly discussion threads. The Motte is somewhere around 1000 a week, give or take a few hundred depending on current events.

You announced that you were better than everyone and were starting your own community, and it turned out to be such a ghost town flop that even you can't maintain any actual interest in it.

And I am sure David Gerard is quite likely proud to have helped lay the foundation for improving the health of the public record.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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