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Yeah, I'm a noob of a few years here and I enjoyed the article on Gerard (not least because it was well-written and must have taken ages to compile) but when you start talking about the "mandate of heaven" I really think you might be taking things over-seriously.
The Motte has always had plenty of assholes. Sometimes they go away, sometimes they blow themselves up with their own egregious assholery. But there are many people worth reading and interacting with here, as well.
It’s tongue in cheek with a hint of seriousness. There were always better and worse discussion spots, interesting people will always gravitate towards some or others of them, and it’s worth noting where things are happening when. Other places are just a lot more exciting than here these days.
You’re right that there are many worth reading and interacting with here, but to be frank, there is precisely one place online where I have to play nice with people as unpleasant as the worst people here. Rdrama creates a more functional environment around this stuff, for heaven’s sake. Twitter creates a more functional environment around it.
These days, I have more reasonable and good people to interact with than I know what to do with. The ones here mean more to me than most places, because I’ve been around here a long while, but many of my favorite people have moved on, many driven off by the same malcontents who now try to enforce twisted purity tests here, and there is nowhere else among my regular haunts online that feels as dysfunctional and unfun as here. It’s very simply not worth it to put up with them any more, and this forum is no longer the only place I can fill the need that caused me to post here.
See you on the other side.
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Yeah this has the flavor of "ox goring is good, but now that my ox is gored I feel uncomfortable." That's normal. And feels shitty. But it happens, and then you get through it and keep going.
You don't flee. Fleeing makes the critics right.
Same as it ever was. I started really noticing with the discourse around doxxing/hacking. I didn't completely get into it in my recent post about Assange, but that was a very solid undercurrent. Whenever there was a new hack, a new release, a new doxx, it seemed like no one was asking, "Is this type of hacking/releasing/doxxing okay or bad in general?" Instead, it was always, "Who was hacked/doxxed/had their business released? Are they 'good' or 'bad'? Then, I can decide whether this is sunlight being a disinfectant or a grave crime against the right to privacy and security." The flip-flopping was obvious going back to the Ashley Madison hack. "Serves those cheaters right," was met with, "...but there are good reasons why a regular person would want to use Ashley Madison," which was met with, "...and there were scary government email addresses in the hack, so screw those guys." Basically no one had any sort of consistency, right on down the line. The complete polar valence switch on Wikileaks when they hit the DNC was just too insanely high-profile for anyone to not notice.
Even today, I just fired up reddit this morning to be informed that "gay furry hackers" hit the Heritage Foundation, with claims of it having something to do with Project 2025. The vast vast vast majority of people will simply dutifully line up on their side of this one, as well. I'm sure this phenomenon has been going on for centuries before I was cognizant enough to see it, but damn if it isn't sad. Especially because the most common reaction to feeling shitty about your own ox being gored seems to be, "Well, now I'm going to go off intently trying to make them feel this shitty, too." Revenge is a much more fundamental human emotion than principle.
In this case I mean more specifically the whole "everything is on the table for discussion except for the one thing that makes me sensitive" type problem which is understandable but so hard to deal with.
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Ashley Madison's advertising was clearly aimed towards people for whom using it would be unethical, and the vast majority of users were such people. Ethical edge cases like some openly poly person who wanted to use it are a rounding error.
It's like claiming that it's okay for someone to be in the hitman business because if you're trapped in a building with a killer on the loose, you can call up a hitman and get him to kill the killer. Maybe, but that's a very noncentral hitman job.
By this reasoning, we should see everyone saying "well, this time TracingWoodgrains collected information about our enemies, so that's fine". This was not the reaction.
I've seen ample people (including mods) going "You seem to hate TracingWoodgrains more than you hate David Gerard, what is wrong with you?" which is at least adjacent to that reaction.
"What is wrong with you?" disingenuously adds a moral and emotional valence to my statement that was absolutely not there. My position is more or less what @ControlsFreak stated, and what I said very plainly: your objections to what TracingWoodgrains did to LoTT (and lack of objection to what he did to David Gerard) are 100% conflict theory and 0% principled objection.
@Jiro is, of course, wrong and misses the point. No one here has objected to Trace doing a piece on David Gerard because pretty much no one here likes David Gerard and if anyone but Trace had done the piece, they'd be blowing it up with AAQCs. But, like you, they hate Trace (for being a gay furry who started the Schism and once pranked LoTT) more than they hate David Gerard (who's a more remote figure to most people here).
I don't think this is anywhere near a fair formulation.
Well, to quote whining: luckily it's for each of us to determine fairness
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Then you still don't understand my point.
I'm saying Tracing's piece on Gerard is the pot calling the kettle black. Information warfare is information warfare. It isn't truth seeking. I can only view Tracing's piece on Gerard through the lens of his past information warfare. I think other's should too. It's pertinent information about the world view of this person you need to be cognizant of as you digest their criticism of this other person.
You keep calling it "information warfare" precisely because LoTT is on your side (because she makes fun of people you hate), and therefore a prank that made her look stupid is viewed by you as enemy action for the purposes of discrediting your partisans, as opposed to making someone who plays fast and loose with accusations and whose whole game is Internet warfare look foolish. If Trace had done something similar to someone you consider an enemy, you'd have considered it a well-deserved pantsing.
I agree that Trace probably did target LoTT because she is not on his side, but I completely disagree that pranking a shitposting account like LoTT is at all equivalent to the years long activities of Gerard, or Trace's reporting on them. What exactly is your accusation here - that what he says about Gerard cannot be trusted because he's a partisan? That he's only reporting on Gerard for purposes of "information warfare" (against whom)?
All the claims of LoTT being unfairly "stung," equivalent to the police putting out a box saying "Free candy" and then arresting people for shoplifting, are transparently specious.
You know what, let me take a second stab at this.
I didn't bring up Tracings previous bad acts when he shilled his blog here talking about the FAAs diversity nonsense. Because none of Tracings previous bad acts had to do with anti-meritorious discrimination.
I didn't bring up Tracings previous bad acts when he posted about the furry nazi witch hunt, because to the best of my knowledge he never championed a witch hunt against crypto-dissidents in other communities.
Maybe my definition of information war is obscure or not obvious to you. The second paragraph of this post I made is more or less exactly what I mean. I view it as categorically immoral behavior, and it's behavior both Tracing and Gerard have engaged in to different severities and quantities. But they both have. It's inarguable.
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No, I call it information warfare because it was information warfare. Tracing didn't catch LoTT spreading misinformation. He targeted her with evidence he fabricated, and crowed about it like it disproved everything.
If what Tracing had done was catch LoTT spreading hoaxes he had no personally convinced her of, or did any sort of analysis of true things she shared versus fake things she shared, or approached the topic of "What are schools doing to kids?" with anywhere near the same rigor and seriousness he approached the FAA story or this Gerard story, I wouldn't have these complaints.
Instead he took a cheap, unethical, drive by potshot using lies and deception, and called it case closed.
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