naraburns nihil supernum
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
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Unless they feel such unbearable mental pain from seeing other posters' contrary opinions
This is perhaps ironic on a thread where the OP is still frustrated years later by hearing a single user disagree with the dominant narrative here.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
It’s a stain on our free speech record to have banned him. Even as a skilled devil’s advocate, if we assumed he never believed anything consistently, he was valuable.
Darwin was banned on the subreddit only after a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans.
As far as I know, he's never posted here, but if he wanted to, he could do so without needing an alt, since he's (obviously) not been banned since the move.
My point is, anyone can get a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans if they just comment and stick around. Like yours truly. List just gets longer and longer. But whatever. I’ve made my peace with it, it’s like senescence, the inevitability of death.
Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
That alt reads more like impassionata to me. But no, that’s not very valuable. Although as you know, I’m pretty free speechy, so not being as valuable as darwin, and antagonizing people, is still not enough for a ban in my book.
Imp always seemed more direct with his disdain. darwin would couch his with the sort of "Have you considered" plausible deniability wrt the rules, but transparently just calling people assholes. That or just terminating a convo with evasiveness.
I think there is some value in reflecting on "Maybe you just suck?". But I don't expect many people to do it when asked, and it was noticeable that despite being a sometimes quality poster, Darwin's effort levels would evaporate by the time he was issuing those queries.
Of no particular import - I also pegged guess as a darwin alt just because the posting style seemed so familiar. Not that I have a problem with it.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
I picked that one because it popped up in the feed within a post or two of your reply, and seemed a reasonable example of the fundamental problem. It was convinient, in short.
I don't have an opinion on Darwin or any other user getting banned; that's on the mods, and I decided a long time ago never to argue nor concern myself with mod decisions, other than to make a good-faith effort to abide by their rules. As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt. What I object to is the idea that he was providing a valuable service to the community by presenting alternate points of view. He did provide alternate points of view, very occasionally. What he did the rest of the time, in my experience, was degrade every conversation he participated in. As with the post I linked, he rarely provided evidence or even a coherent argument, just endless faux-polite smuggery wrapped in multiple layers of indirection designed to make engagement as infuriating and unproductive as possible while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.
Maybe my experience or my impressions are wrong. Maybe I'm biased. I don't think so, though; I spent literally years trying to get a productive conversation out of him, and came up empty. I have in fact managed to have productive conversations with quite a few other people, even in the face of profound and irreconcilable disagreements. I saw a lot of other people flame out and eat bans from trying to engage with him before a general understanding of his technique proliferated enough to become common knowledge. In any case, I object to the idea that he was a reasonable or even a net-positive contributor, and I strongly object to the idea that people just couldn't handle having their ideas challenged. He was a troll, and he burned every scrap of good-will that ever was extended to him.
As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt.
I did too, and playing @guesswho ? Is a waste of our time. This proxy accusation is ludicrous, if you want to criticize him, link him.
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield. He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
They were often arguments we could not make and had not seen before, at least a few notches above standard reddit dross. Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo. Granted, he would not be particularly nice about it, like a ymeskout, SSCreader, Soriek or gdanning might be. But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
It's not a proxy accusation. I don't care who is on the other side of that account, and I'm not expecting you to care either. I'm pointing out a specific form of behavior that I think is bad. I'm asserting that that form of bad behavior was so frequent as to be a readily identifiable calling card for one particular commenter here. I'm concluding that this made him a notably bad member of the community, such that his badness was worth paying attention to and calling out.
My goal here is to identify the nature of our disagreement. Is it about whether that type of posting was bad, or whether Darwin posted that way frequently, or whether, assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster? If we disagree over the first question, pulling up examples is a waste of time because you won't agree that the behavior is bad even if I can demonstrate it happened. If it's the third, examples again won't help much. If it's the second, then our disagreement seems to be a straightforward question of fact, like when you proved me wrong on the thirty-years war, and you're correct that the proper way to proceed is to pull up some examples.
In the meantime, I'll note that none of the people arguing in his favor in this convo are providing examples either, and in fact both of you seem to be implying that bringing up examples is a bad thing:
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield.
...note the bolded part.
We don't disagree that by the end, people made it plain in every interaction that they considered him a disingenuous jackass troll. My position is that he was, in fact, a disingenuous jackass troll, and the response he got was the best available option given the nature of his activities. If you disagree that he acted that way, then I guess that's a question of fact and I can try to put some examples together if you want.
He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
He was more than capable of making good arguments. Often, and increasingly often over time, he simply declined to.
Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo.
I hated him because I spent dozens of irretrievable hours of my life getting pissed off by his comments, trying to figure out how to respond to them productively, and then eventually realizing that it was trolling the whole way down. That matches up with the other people I saw arguing with and eventually calling him out over time. I don't remember ever seeing him "chew up" right-wingers. I definately remember seeing him needle and troll them into an outburst with an endless torrent of passive-aggressive bullshit, for which they then ate bans.
The point of linking the above comment was to demonstrate what that sort of behavior actually looked like, and I linked it because regardless of who wrote it, I think you should be able to recognize that such posts fundamentally do not belong here. Further, I think you should agree that if a poster here made a habit out of such posts, they would not be contributing positively to this forum. It's not a matter of making a valid point crudely, or lacking tact, or being a bit uncharitable. There is no meaningful, useful, productive argument being made there at all. There is no net-positive way to respond to that sort of comment other than to point out that it is a trap.
But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
Yes, which is why I support the general treatment Darwin received. He said stupid or flatly malicious things all the time.
Well, let's look at a [not even slightly] concrete example.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
I linked to an example of a particular sort of behavior that I find highly objectionable. My argument is that Darwin engaged in that specific sort of behavior on a regular basis. I'm not trying to get you to agree that this is actually true, and I'm not looking to start a trawl through old posts. I'm trying to communicate why I disagree that Darwin was a valuable contributor: because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again, needling people with passive-aggressive bullshit and then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
I could be wrong, and maybe that's not him. I could be wrong, and Darwin's posts weren't actually like that back in the day. I could be wrong, and maybe that post I linked is actually totally reasonable. You and FD9000 are arguing that he was a valuable contributor; I'm disagreeing, and trying to explain succinctly why.
If I'm not wrong, and that post I linked is bad, and Darwin really did make a habit of posting like that throughout his tenure, I hope you can agree that it's reasonable to object to such behavior.
then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
This isn't a thing. He would have to 'ghost' most people because each of his comments had like 6 replies. 10 comments deep, he would need ((6^10 )/24)/ 365 = 7000 years to respond to all.
because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again
Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
If there were a user who made a whole lot of bad posts and refused to engage in good faith, to the point that a lot of people trying to engage with them got frustrated to the point of eating a ban, is it reasonable to take note of this and point it out, both to discourage them from doing it and to warn the people who haven't figured out the schtick?
Again, I don't expect to convince you that Darwin is bad. It's enough for me to establish the nature and boundaries of our disagreement: is it that there's no such thing as a bad post, or there is but noticing patterns of bad posting is unproductive, or that some posts are bad and some posters are bad but Darwin wasn't one of the bad ones, or something else. Even if we agree to disagree, it seems useful to me to be clear on what we disagree about.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity.
I disagree. He often made quality arguments and was willing to buck the status quo here from an underrepresented angle, something we should want more. He was no more inflammatory or bad faith than plenty of others here, but people reacted absolutely viscerally against him at a level disproportionate to his behavior.
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build. People get bitter and hostile in response to users who have actually tried to buck majority opinion here. I experienced this kind of thing enough from the times I tried to engage in actual culture war issues that I'm pretty unwilling to do it anymore, and I'm a very long time contributor.
Either way it doesn't matter much anymore, we are what we are here and my reply to gatt was meant to be light hearted, not a declaration of conflict or something.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build.
Whenever someone tries to make that argument, I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard. Particularly, do you know a progressive community that is as open to conservative opinions that is at least as open as we are to progressive ones?
I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard.
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
Isn't he obviously just an obnoxious troll who posts in whatever community he can get a rise out of? If he came here and posted like that he'd be banned right away for good reason.
I'm not gonna look through his reddit profile cause I've always found that thing kinda weird, but pretty much everyone here assuredly (hopefully) sounds different on the non-motte subs they visit. While he was here he was a long-time familiar face on the quality contributions page.
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
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Reading through the thread, I have no idea which post you are attempting to reference.
The comment mine is responding to, gattsuru’s on darwin
Ah.
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity. Describing him as a "single user" "disagreeing" is disingenuous in the extreme. He burned more charity alone than any ten other posters you could name.
Further, the entire point of that quote is that he wasn't the only one, which is in fact the truth. Unironic support for BLM was not rare, even when the rioting was in full swing. Even less rare was "BLM is bad, but less bad than every observed response to the rioting".
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
It’s a stain on our free speech record to have banned him. Even as a skilled devil’s advocate, if we assumed he never believed anything consistently, he was valuable.
Darwin was banned on the subreddit only after a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans.
As far as I know, he's never posted here, but if he wanted to, he could do so without needing an alt, since he's (obviously) not been banned since the move.
yeah yeah I know how that goes :)
First they came for Darwin....
And your point is? We are very pro-free speech, but we do have rules, it's not an "anything goes" zone.
My point is, anyone can get a very, very long history of infractions and escalating series of warnings and bans if they just comment and stick around. Like yours truly. List just gets longer and longer. But whatever. I’ve made my peace with it, it’s like senescence, the inevitability of death.
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Well, let's look at a concrete example. Does this sort of post seem valuable to you? Because if that's not Darwin, it's someone doing a very, very good impression of him.
Leaving aside the questions of whether that is Darwin and whether Darwin actually posted like that in the past, would you agree that someone who habitually posts in that fashion is optimizing for heat, not light? @Soriek, same question.
Given his extensive participation in our sub, why do you have to pick an unknown alt as an example of his worst behaviour?
That alt reads more like impassionata to me. But no, that’s not very valuable. Although as you know, I’m pretty free speechy, so not being as valuable as darwin, and antagonizing people, is still not enough for a ban in my book.
Imp always seemed more direct with his disdain. darwin would couch his with the sort of "Have you considered" plausible deniability wrt the rules, but transparently just calling people assholes. That or just terminating a convo with evasiveness.
I think there is some value in reflecting on "Maybe you just suck?". But I don't expect many people to do it when asked, and it was noticeable that despite being a sometimes quality poster, Darwin's effort levels would evaporate by the time he was issuing those queries.
Of no particular import - I also pegged guess as a darwin alt just because the posting style seemed so familiar. Not that I have a problem with it.
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I picked that one because it popped up in the feed within a post or two of your reply, and seemed a reasonable example of the fundamental problem. It was convinient, in short.
I don't have an opinion on Darwin or any other user getting banned; that's on the mods, and I decided a long time ago never to argue nor concern myself with mod decisions, other than to make a good-faith effort to abide by their rules. As far as I know, Darwin isn't currently banned, and having spent years arguing with him, I'm pretty sure the above is his alt. What I object to is the idea that he was providing a valuable service to the community by presenting alternate points of view. He did provide alternate points of view, very occasionally. What he did the rest of the time, in my experience, was degrade every conversation he participated in. As with the post I linked, he rarely provided evidence or even a coherent argument, just endless faux-polite smuggery wrapped in multiple layers of indirection designed to make engagement as infuriating and unproductive as possible while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.
Maybe my experience or my impressions are wrong. Maybe I'm biased. I don't think so, though; I spent literally years trying to get a productive conversation out of him, and came up empty. I have in fact managed to have productive conversations with quite a few other people, even in the face of profound and irreconcilable disagreements. I saw a lot of other people flame out and eat bans from trying to engage with him before a general understanding of his technique proliferated enough to become common knowledge. In any case, I object to the idea that he was a reasonable or even a net-positive contributor, and I strongly object to the idea that people just couldn't handle having their ideas challenged. He was a troll, and he burned every scrap of good-will that ever was extended to him.
I did too, and playing @guesswho ? Is a waste of our time. This proxy accusation is ludicrous, if you want to criticize him, link him.
The real darwin was not charitable, but neither was he treated with appropriate charity by the sub. In the end he was confronted with every perceived wrong thing he ever said wherever he went, swarmed by a mob demanding he yield. He never gave an inch, but he was more than capable of making good arguments (although obviously he made some bad ones too) .
They were often arguments we could not make and had not seen before, at least a few notches above standard reddit dross. Sometimes he would chew up a careless right-winger who got ahead of himself, that’s why they hated him imo. Granted, he would not be particularly nice about it, like a ymeskout, SSCreader, Soriek or gdanning might be. But perhaps the greater abrasiveness was better for our epistemic hygiene. People should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid.
It's not a proxy accusation. I don't care who is on the other side of that account, and I'm not expecting you to care either. I'm pointing out a specific form of behavior that I think is bad. I'm asserting that that form of bad behavior was so frequent as to be a readily identifiable calling card for one particular commenter here. I'm concluding that this made him a notably bad member of the community, such that his badness was worth paying attention to and calling out.
My goal here is to identify the nature of our disagreement. Is it about whether that type of posting was bad, or whether Darwin posted that way frequently, or whether, assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster? If we disagree over the first question, pulling up examples is a waste of time because you won't agree that the behavior is bad even if I can demonstrate it happened. If it's the third, examples again won't help much. If it's the second, then our disagreement seems to be a straightforward question of fact, like when you proved me wrong on the thirty-years war, and you're correct that the proper way to proceed is to pull up some examples.
In the meantime, I'll note that none of the people arguing in his favor in this convo are providing examples either, and in fact both of you seem to be implying that bringing up examples is a bad thing:
...note the bolded part.
We don't disagree that by the end, people made it plain in every interaction that they considered him a disingenuous jackass troll. My position is that he was, in fact, a disingenuous jackass troll, and the response he got was the best available option given the nature of his activities. If you disagree that he acted that way, then I guess that's a question of fact and I can try to put some examples together if you want.
He was more than capable of making good arguments. Often, and increasingly often over time, he simply declined to.
I hated him because I spent dozens of irretrievable hours of my life getting pissed off by his comments, trying to figure out how to respond to them productively, and then eventually realizing that it was trolling the whole way down. That matches up with the other people I saw arguing with and eventually calling him out over time. I don't remember ever seeing him "chew up" right-wingers. I definately remember seeing him needle and troll them into an outburst with an endless torrent of passive-aggressive bullshit, for which they then ate bans.
The point of linking the above comment was to demonstrate what that sort of behavior actually looked like, and I linked it because regardless of who wrote it, I think you should be able to recognize that such posts fundamentally do not belong here. Further, I think you should agree that if a poster here made a habit out of such posts, they would not be contributing positively to this forum. It's not a matter of making a valid point crudely, or lacking tact, or being a bit uncharitable. There is no meaningful, useful, productive argument being made there at all. There is no net-positive way to respond to that sort of comment other than to point out that it is a trap.
Yes, which is why I support the general treatment Darwin received. He said stupid or flatly malicious things all the time.
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Really? You don't think "never giving an inch" even when confronted with "every wrong he ever said" might have more to do with it?
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What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
I linked to an example of a particular sort of behavior that I find highly objectionable. My argument is that Darwin engaged in that specific sort of behavior on a regular basis. I'm not trying to get you to agree that this is actually true, and I'm not looking to start a trawl through old posts. I'm trying to communicate why I disagree that Darwin was a valuable contributor: because I remember him posting in that specific style over and over and over again, needling people with passive-aggressive bullshit and then invariably ghosting whenever someone actually engaged with effort and good faith.
I could be wrong, and maybe that's not him. I could be wrong, and Darwin's posts weren't actually like that back in the day. I could be wrong, and maybe that post I linked is actually totally reasonable. You and FD9000 are arguing that he was a valuable contributor; I'm disagreeing, and trying to explain succinctly why.
If I'm not wrong, and that post I linked is bad, and Darwin really did make a habit of posting like that throughout his tenure, I hope you can agree that it's reasonable to object to such behavior.
This isn't a thing. He would have to 'ghost' most people because each of his comments had like 6 replies. 10 comments deep, he would need ((6^10 )/24)/ 365 = 7000 years to respond to all.
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Sure, I remember it differently - same place we were in at the start of this conversation. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but you're not going to convince to me by linking to some random comment from somebody else. I don't think that comment is good. There are lots of comments I see here regularly that I don't think are good, or in good faith, but I don't publicly call users out or complain about them the way I see people do for him.
If there were a user who made a whole lot of bad posts and refused to engage in good faith, to the point that a lot of people trying to engage with them got frustrated to the point of eating a ban, is it reasonable to take note of this and point it out, both to discourage them from doing it and to warn the people who haven't figured out the schtick?
Again, I don't expect to convince you that Darwin is bad. It's enough for me to establish the nature and boundaries of our disagreement: is it that there's no such thing as a bad post, or there is but noticing patterns of bad posting is unproductive, or that some posts are bad and some posters are bad but Darwin wasn't one of the bad ones, or something else. Even if we agree to disagree, it seems useful to me to be clear on what we disagree about.
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I disagree. He often made quality arguments and was willing to buck the status quo here from an underrepresented angle, something we should want more. He was no more inflammatory or bad faith than plenty of others here, but people reacted absolutely viscerally against him at a level disproportionate to his behavior.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build. People get bitter and hostile in response to users who have actually tried to buck majority opinion here. I experienced this kind of thing enough from the times I tried to engage in actual culture war issues that I'm pretty unwilling to do it anymore, and I'm a very long time contributor.
Either way it doesn't matter much anymore, we are what we are here and my reply to gatt was meant to be light hearted, not a declaration of conflict or something.
Whenever someone tries to make that argument, I always have the same question: can you name a community that does more than us in this regard. Particularly, do you know a progressive community that is as open to conservative opinions that is at least as open as we are to progressive ones?
No, for our faults we're probably still the best forum you're gonna get on the internet. That may say more about the rest of the internet than us, but we still deserve a little credit.
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Wait, are you talking about this guy? https://old.reddit.com/user/darwin2500/
Isn't he obviously just an obnoxious troll who posts in whatever community he can get a rise out of? If he came here and posted like that he'd be banned right away for good reason.
I'm not gonna look through his reddit profile cause I've always found that thing kinda weird, but pretty much everyone here assuredly (hopefully) sounds different on the non-motte subs they visit. While he was here he was a long-time familiar face on the quality contributions page.
I looked through the first page of Darwin's reddit profile and it is fine. Not clearly a troll.
But I do recall them being one of the more dramatic contrarian-against-the-local-contrarians on the old subreddits.
A true Mottezan at heart! He was definitely pretty contrarian and ruffled folks regularly, but also made the rare articulate defense of positions we don't see too often here, which I thought made for some interesting discourse.
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