naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
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.
assuming it was bad and he did do it frequently, he was still a good poster?
He did post that way occasionally ( against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
So lets pull up some examples, kind of randomized.
Let’s go to darwin’s page , sort by controversial, motte/SSC comments.
1 : Arguing against a ban, I disagree with his line as always, but it’s reasonable. Productive conversation with amadan. Lower down people were already discussing darwin and whether he called people who doubted smollet’s story racist :
So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.
Ok so this is the infamous smollett thread with the classic nybbler call-out. Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behaviour in those threads? He presents standard progressive arguments at length, he’s civil. Well fine, the ‘It's called 'empathy.' -comment isn’t up to snuff, but he is being dogpiled, I think the occasional redditism can be excused.
Like, yeah, some minor public figures have their careers and lives disrupted by social power, but that's always been what social power is. Scott doesn't go home to Trump Tower because he was never that rich, but he does go back to whatever his job and level of income already was, as per the spirit of the hypothetical. And Elon Musk has far far more haters than Scott, but his wealth and power aren't affected at all. Social power can annoy a few individuals and cause damage to people who already had little structural power, but it can't do much to people with lots of structural power.
As for which team's protestors gt treated better... are you just not watching the same videos I am of protestors getting tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, savagely beaten for no reason, abducted off the street by unmarked government agents acting outside their purview, etc. etc. etc.? Like, yeah, I get that a few murals have been allowed and not every protestor has been brutalized or imprisoned yet, but I have to say your characterization of the overall structural response seems just ludicrous to me.
Disagree with the modding. Darwin is clearly in a completely different info- and argument bubble than we are, ideally he should have provided the videos yes, but still it’s important to have his perspective, and some videos no doubt exist, he's not lying or inventing a narrative as nara says.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses. Which, hey, if you're willing to do that, I have a whole lot of socialist literature about the evils of capitalism to share with you.
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant? Why does criticizing private business mean you need to agree with socialist views on the evils of capitalism? He doesn't deign to say, which means any reply is going to have to make their best guess at what he's trying to say, and then unpack the assumptions behind that supposed position, and then try to respond to them. At which point he can (and often does) truthfully point out that they're putting words in his mouth, and haven't really understood him.
Is there anything here other than 'everyone should become Christian, bleach their skin white, become fans of Nascar, and otherwise take on the attributes of the dominant culture in every way possible, and then the dominant culture will no longer persecute them'?
Because it seems like this post is coming from some weird perspective that imagines bigots as fumbling around blindly in the darkness, hopelessly looking for some dimension of difference upon which to discriminate against people, and it is only liberals who create identarian differences that separate groups out from the herd and give the bigots something to discriminate against.
This is, of course, absurd. Ingroups and outgroups form naturally, based on the smallest perceivable difference or coincidence. Bigots have no trouble finding reasons to discriminate, and will continue doing so long after everyone has stripped away every mutable aspect of their heritage and identity in an attempt to assimilate and conform. The classic Emo Phillips joke applies here. Accepting hatred of that which is different as natural, and deciding the solution is to minimize the differences between us, is a fools errand. No matter how similar we make ourselves, we will find differences to justify the hatred and mistrust that is a part of our nature.
The only strategy with a hope of success is to demand that hatred based on differences be suppressed, channeled, and regulated until the damage it causes is minimized or eliminated. Celebrating each other's differences is one part of that process.
A final thought: If anyone here agrees with Caplan's sentiments, then I welcome them to assimilate into to the dominant culture by becoming a feminist, SJW, pro-Intersectionality, anti-gender-norms liberal. As long as you only express these views out loud and no others, you'll find yourself much less persecuted and discriminated against in most parts of the internet, and you'll be fulfilling Caplan's advice.
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty. A parting shot of the uniquely Darwinian "If you disagree, that proves I'm even more right" variety.
You claim:
He did post that way occasionally (against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
Neither of these appear to be "against old enemies", much less "after taking 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles". This is how he routinely chose to initiate conversations. Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior. My question is, if they were typical, would it be fair to say that he was a low-quality poster and the hostility he was shown was well-earned? You claimed that people should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid. What would the appropriate response be to someone who made a strong habit of this type of posting?
A basic goal of the rules here is to take other people seriously, to engage with their arguments seriously, to make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying and to make yourself understood in turn. Normal conversations here start with someone laying out an argument, and other people either agreeing or poking holes in it with arguments of their own. With Darwin, most conversations start with him questioning whether you have a right to even be having a conversation in the first place. This meta-conversation is conducted in the vaguest possible terms when relating to anything constructive, with the most concrete possible terms whenever communicating disdain, contempt or dismissal, and usually through at least one layer of indirection. This is a really awful way to post.
Now, to the links you offered:
The first link is annoying because his argument is quite disingenuous for the reasons Amadan notes. By itself it's not worth arguing about though.
The third link continues the above pattern. The OP is an example of a fairly high-quality post: take an old argument familiar to the community, and examine it in light of subsequent evidence. Darwin's reply, by contrast, is markedly low-effort and unproductive. As is his custom, he dismisses the argument and all the evidence backing it out of hand for the most perfunctory of reasons: Scott still has a job, therefore his harassment and retreat are irrelevant. unspecified videos have showed unspecified "protestors" having force used on them, with the implication that this force was illegitimate, therefore all the examples of officials giving a free pass to rioters are irrelevant. You describe this as an "information bubble", as though he simply had seen different facts and therefore drew a different conclusion. This framing ignores the fact that the bubble exists because he is actively creating and maintaining it. He is actively rejecting all contrary evidence presented to him out of hand because it does not conform to his chosen narrative. He makes no effort to offer a specific argument backed by specific facts: Which videos? Which protestors? Which agents? How was the violence excessive? What are the assumptions being applied? What's the law? He makes no effort to engage seriously with counter-arguments. He doesn't lay out the logic that led him to his conclusion, or give an indication of what evidence would be required to change his mind. What he does, in this argument and in most others, is chart the shortest, lowest-effort path to a flat dismissal of all contrary positions, while maintaining a minimum level of plausible deniability.
This pattern continues in his subsequent responses throughout that thread. He makes lazy and highly inaccurate assertions, people correct him with voluminous evidence, he ignores them. At no point does he contribute anything constructive to the conversation.
The second link, though, is really something.
Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behavior's in those threads?
Yes, I do.
Darwin initiates by mocking the idea that the topic matters, and that he hasn't looked at the video in question and doesn't intend to. He then drops a 30-minute video of his own, and summarizes the contents: liberalism is racist, actually, and if you don't agree then you're racist too. He doesn't actually fully endorse this argument, but thinks it sorta has a point, y'know?
Within the first two sentences, he's dismissed the object level of the discussion at hand with a sneer, and from there he launches into a serious of increasingly vague abstractions. It is difficult to summarize the point he's making, or even to say that he's making a concrete point at all, beyond "progressivism is always right". He provides no explicit argument of his own, takes no explicit position, offers no evidence. The only thing solid enough to respond to in his post is the initial dismissal.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one, retreating into questions about whether conversation is even possible. This thread has three layers of back and forth, with zero constructive contributed on Darwin's end.
Another commenter challenges the initial dismissal, pointing back to the object-level fact of discrimination. Darwin responds with several assertions, none of which he supports, then reiterates his dismissal in stronger terms. In this thread, we're now two levels down, and he's argued purely by assertion, and only about whether the conversation should happen at all.
This is not good behavior. He is not being charitable. He is not speaking plainly. He is not providing evidence for inflammatory statements. He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus. He is making sweeping generalizations to vilify groups he dislikes. And he's doing this to people who have watched him behave this way, without serious repercussions, for years.
And it is at this point that he decides to back his statements with his first piece of actual evidence, explicitly to support his assertion that the entire conversation shouldn't be happening at all. And so he cites a recent hate crime allegation, asserting that this hate crime proves that all other arguments in the thread are invalid. This is a terrible argument, as several people immediately point out. Two things can be bad at the same time, the responses to the two things differ completely, single datapoints are hardly useful, and so on. All of these are strong arguments against Darwin's position, and in fact Darwin himself regularly invokes these arguments to dismiss other peoples' statements. Here, he appears completely unaware that any such points could even be raised. His position is that the entire conversation is so self-evidently ridiculous that even being forced to point this out explicitly is an imposition on him.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
JTarrou delivers a more measured, highly reasonable, strictly-within-the-rules version of the same call-out, engaging directly with Darwin's core claims, pointing out that the risks inherent to Darwin's argument. Darwin replies with a single-line, low-effort ad-hominum, is warned by the mods, and updates to a minimal-effort accusation of bad-faith, with an insult thrown in to round things out. Jtarrou and others reply reasonably, pointing out that this incident actually does look pretty fishy, citing previous cases of bad reporting, false accusations of a similar nature, oddities in the narrative. Darwin ignores them all. This thread gets four levels deep, and at no point does Darwin contribute anything constructive. He started out sneering and he only gets worse as he goes, despite being presented with numerous well-thought-out, reasonable, mild replies.
ZorbaTHut, the mod who's been trying to keep a lid on things, tries his hand at a reasonable response. Darwin responds with a pair of progressive arguments, disavows them, then asserts that the entire discussion is the same sort of thing, just from the other side. He is still arguing that the entire discussion is illegitimate, and his only evidence for doing so is the hate crime incident. He's challenged again in this thread, and claims he has no idea whether the incident actually happened, and likewise has no idea if the original incident under discussion happened, so no one knows anything. It's pointed out that the original incident was caught on video, which he's refused to watch. He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding.
Zorba follows up with a lengthy post attempting to engage further, and gets no reply. This branch of the thread gets three layers deep, with Darwin contributing nothing constructive throughout, and in fact ignoring numerous high-quality attempts at engagement with what little there is of his argument, preferring instead to reassert his position over and over again with extreme confidence.
...And again, the behavior I'm highlighting above was not unusual for Darwin. The flat dismissal, the sneering, the smuggery, the retreats into pointless abstraction or equivocation, the rejection of context, ignoring or flat dismissal of well-reasoned counter-arguments, apparent inability to consider his own biases and flat refusal to recognize them when pointed out by others, and the general air of contempt for the entire concept of charity and engagement are the norm from him throughout his time here. The large majority of his comments could be accurately summarized as "Everyone knows Progressivism is right about everything and you're an idiot or evil if you disagree", delivered either in a pithily low-effort sentence or two, or in a few paragraphs so indirect and abstract that effective response required multiple back-and-forth replies to even pin down what he'd admit to actually saying.
And of course, in this case, he did all the above at length and very publicly, based entirely on one piece of evidence. He mocked and insulted the people who raised reasonable doubts about that evidence. And then it turned out the evidence was extremely, hilariously, very obviously faked in the most cartoonish way possible, and the result was that people clowned on him without mercy. I think this is a reasonable response to someone who makes themselves into that much of a clown. As a mod pointed out in your first link, this community runs on a reputation economy, and he systematically trashed his reputation in the most dramatic and hilariously karmic way possible. I've seen no evidence that he learned a single thing from the experience; last I saw, he was continuing to insist that he was always right about everything, barring a few details of no consequence whatsoever, and anyone who said differently was just a hater. This is remarkably dishonest, but unsurprising given his history with us.
The thing we have going here is doomed. It's been obvious that it was doomed since at least early 2016. The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama. The further problem for any non-forced-anon forum dedicated specifically to debate of contentious political or cultural issues is that conversations are driven by uncertainty, by people looking for answers, but high-quality conversations generate answers, thereby removing the environment that generated them. The combination of these two problems means that this community, by its nature, has a limited shelf-life. People eventually burn out and leave, and they do not do so equally due to the history that accrues. None of this seems avoidable to me, but I bitterly regret that it is this way, and that there doesn't seem to be a way to ameliorate the problem. I am acutely aware of the fact that we have very few blue-tribe posters left, and that almost all the really good ones we used to have are gone. I miss them dearly. I've tried to engage fairly and honestly with them. I've tried to sharply limit the engagement I have with them, to try to cut down on the dog-pile effect. I've requested lengthy bans for myself in the past to try to minimize my own contribution to the erosion of their participation. I still treasure many of the conversations I've had with them, and believe I've learned a lot from those conversations.
I had a lot of conversations with Darwin. I spent a lot of effort trying to engage with him honestly and fairly. It never, ever worked, and I think it's a fair conclusion that this is because he straight-up wasn't interested in constructive dialog.
Both of these comments were fine, well above the standards of posting here. The second one I thought was just plain good, well written and makes a cogent argument that bigotry is natural rather than invented (by insert-your-political-enemies), and points out the hypocrisy of the most pro-assimilationist people here themselves being contrarians who vociferously resist assimilation.
Plenty of people would disagree strongly with his conclusions and maybe they'd be right. Good. This place should have actual differences in opinion, rather than different flavors of right wing arguing endlessly about the best way to fight wokeness. The fact that people think these are trolls are a sign of how unused to genuine disagreement and debate the userbase has grown.
Accusing him of dismissing the views of people he disagrees with is weak and holds him to a standard no one here is held to; dismissing and mocking progressive views is the single most consistent thing this sub does.
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant?
It’s not good or original, but it is an argument. I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right. ” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty.
I gotta say, I find it extremely unfair of you not to quote the edit, which is far more conciliatory:
EDIT: Someone downpost suggested that I append a later post I made to my original post here, as they say it was much clearer in helping them understanding my position. It may be that the post above is jumping too many inferential gaps and not making my stance clear. Here's the later comment:
I'm not claiming that this is Caplan's intent or exactly what he said, but I'm saying that it is the natural result of his ideas.
These ideas are not new. They're fundamental to many of the types of respectability politics and assimilationist civil rights efforts that have always existed in the larger dialogue around these issues.
They're not evil or stupid ideas, and maybe they're even not bad advice for the individual.
But on a societal level, where these ideas always lead is a huge burden on the minorities and outsiders to do all the work of fitting in and trying not to bother anyone, with no burden or expectations on the majority because they're already dominant and seen as the resepctable, civilized default, so why would they change?
And every time this is tried, no amount of integration or assimilation is ever good enough to be fully accepted, no amount of humility is ever enough to forever avoid offense, no amount of brotherhood ever erases prejudice and systematic discrimination. Respectable black people who minimize their identity and try to appease their white neighbors still find burning crosses on their lawns, employers still point at crime statistics and demographic IQ statistics and everything else to turn down minority applications, Trump still says 'I can't stand having black guys count my money.' No amount of appeasement is ever enough to stop these things from happening.
And when they do happen, this type of thinking places the blame for that failure on the minorities who are being discriminated against, because they didn't do enough to fit in and appease, because they had the responsibility to shrink their identity in the first place, and I guess these attacks on them are evidence that they failed. It's a final and awful betrayal that excuses the real perpetrators and continues the cycle forever, generation after generation.
I'm certainly not saying Caplan is in favor of the outcomes I just described, or that he's even aware of them. But we've been down the road with this type of thinking before, we know where it leads.
The idea of 'pride' and identitraian politics is far from perfect, but it's trying to present an alternative to this endless cycle. We're all open to new suggestions about better ways we could be trying to make progress, but not to a suggestion that we try going back to the same old thing that was failing us before.
And even the non-edit part is just vigorous disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with it. Overuse on your part of ‘uncharitable’ . Darwin’s a progressive. Progressive views are uncharitable towards white males, reactionaries etc. So are anti-woke views towards them. He’s not obligated to pretend any random essay from his enemies must surely come from the best of intentions and make sense, and not pattern-match it to what his ideology tells him about those people.
Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior.
That’s where you’re wrong , I agree this is fairly typical , he acted frequently in this manner. But it has nothing to do with what you originally defined his behaviour as. Guesswho’s behaviour is bad. Darwin’s behaviour is acceptable. Nothing but personalized insults towards another commenter, bad, argument that implies white males are terrible and reactionaries don’t know what they’re talking about, okay.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one
Well if 07mk doesn’t want to watch darwin’s video and darwin doesn’t want to watch the other video, I guess they just go home and call it a lame draw. This is not the decisive discovery of the dastardly deeds of darwin.
He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus.
A consensus of one. A shaming contingent of one. This is not how those rules are meant to be used. They’re not there to protect the overwhelming, massively upvoted majority from one guy arguing against the current.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
Well obviously, it’s a great comment. I’m not usually in favour of punitive mod decisions, if you hadn’t noticed. Except for that false flag nazi alt multitude.
He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding.
I don’t like your paraphrases, I would describe them as ‘maximally uncharitable’. “stops responding” cannot count as any sort of offense, I told you. He says this:
I'm sure there's something going on, but I think it's probably highschool kids being stupid on both sides of the debate, and maybe the judge punishing his ideological opponents, and I'm saying even if that's all true, the accusations that people are spinning out from it are no more valid than the accusations I could spin out if those guys on the street were shouting 'Maga country!'.
He has backpedaled considerably from the beginning, he no longer believes they were saying maga, or that his original interpretations had any validity. We are witnessing a man slowly changing his mind, and it’s beautiful.
The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama.
What a surprise, you’re pessimistic about this community, too? Yet, the one thing that we cannot say is that our values have drifted apart, right?
I don’t know, there isn’t any bad blood with anyone I argued with. From my end, anyway.
We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
Your assessments are your own, but it seems to me that the initial reply to the Kaplan post, at least, was considerably worse. Further, have you considered his extensive explanations of how his initial post was entirely innocent and reasonable and anyone who thinks otherwise is just being irrationally hostile? If not, give it a read; if you feel up to continuing this conversation the additional context might help.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself; to my eye the stylistic tics are too numerous and obvious to ignore. I want to be clear, though: I think the question of whether they actually are darwin or not is essentially trivia. What I think actually matters is that their posts are bad in a very, very similar way to the way darwin's posts were bad. To the extent that people remember darwin fondly, I think that is because they do not actually remember what he was like. To the extent that darwin's treatment is significant, I think it's worth looking at the nature of his participation.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him. Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
I do not think the arguments we're looking at are unusually bad relative to Darwin's average output; my memory is that his posting quality was as consistent as it was awful. unfortunately, I think you do actually have to do this, for a simple reason that I hope I can now demonstrate.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right.” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so.:
Not exactly. As you imply, I'm really speaking for a more moderate and nuanced position on the whole issue.
I'm attempting to illustrate how extreme the position I'm responding to is, by drawing a parallel to another ideology which the speaker themself would probably find radical and objectionable.
Yes, I am a little worried about deplatforming in cases where corporations have monopolistic power to distort the public discourse in coercive/violent ways, and I've talked a lot about that - my hope is that we can find a technological solution using decentralized social media platforms, but that may be too optimistic and we might have to do something more drastic eventually.
But I also think that the extreme version of this ideology - coercing private entities to host speech and actions they disagree with, making it functionally impossible for people to build private spaces with the people and discourse they prefer, limiting societies ability to condemn and ostracize bad or dangerous ideas - is just another form of tyranny and violent coercion all it's own.
This isn't a situation where you can make simple categorical imperatives and ignore all nuance - either direction you go while doing that will end in a bad place. This is a situation where you have to lie to the murderer but not to your spouse.
My comment was meant to point out to OP that they were ignoring a massive pile of important context and nuance, and in doing so they were implicitly embracing conclusions that they probably don't support. And yes, I said it in a flippant way, because OP was comparing the entire Blue Tribe to an evil Pope trying to brainwash and control the ignorant masses. I do tend to mirror the tone and energy of the comments I'm replying to.
Emphasis mine.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Yes, if you completely ignore the difference between government coercion and private businesses.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
Which, hey, if you're willing to do that, I have a whole lot of socialist literature about the evils of capitlaism to share with you.
He's making an accusation of hypocrisy here, trying to imply that the OP's argument is indistinguishable from socialism, so if you accept one you have to accept the other. This is absurd for a whole host of reasons, in addition to being low effort and inflammatory. And again, the mistake here would be to actually argue the point, because none of this is at all valid: he's provided no actual argument for the similarity between what he claims is the OP's argument and socialism, but in fact he is lying about what the OP's argument even is. At no point in the essay did BJ say anything about forcing anyone to post anything; in fact, he concluded that we should do nothing at all, because this behavior is self-destructive.
I stand by my original claim: That comment contained no argument at all. That is to say, a straightforward interpretation of his message results in an argument he does not "intend" to make and so will not engage productively with, and the message he actually wants to deliver is implied indirectly by interpretation of a highly inflammatory statement he claims not to actually mean. This is not mind-reading on my part, but rather darwin's own explanation of the comment in question.
It seems to me that this is a profoundly shitty method of communicating. It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the exact opposite of the sort of conversation our rules are meant to encourage. In a mere two sentences, it badly violates most of the rules in the header. When people attempt to engage productively, he claims they've misunderstood him, and that his behavior is totally reasonable, while making vague anodyne statements that imply but never actually commit to reasonableness, while mixing in further sarcastic, passive-aggressive or just generaly smug digs at them for not understanding how obviously right he is. This encourages them to continue engaging and generally results in frustration and hostility, which he paints as unreasonable aggression on their part.
And again, I emphasize that this is how Darwin opens conversations, and that comments of this nature were the norm. We've looked at a mere five threads, and four of them contained multiple instances of this behavior. Darwin was absurdly prolific; I'm confident I can present you with an arbitrary number of examples.
...You wrote more, and I intend to reply to it, but I'm past 10k characters and would like to see if this changes your assessment any. I'll break it here.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself
My eyes quickly glaze over any trans discussion, but I think there’s less than a 1% chance of guesswho being darwin, and you can quote me on that. He’s an antagonistic progressive, he's got progressive stylistic ticks, that’s basically the extent of the similarity. Other arguments include: as you say, darwin was prolific, why would he even use an alt, and keep it secret, after he did leave that time he was banned, just to make a few random comments. It's not parsimonious.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him
He did get a lot of AAQC. So you'll have to concede these aren't his best arguments, at least.
Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
There’s low-effort, and there’s content-free. Strictly low-effort posts are only really bad if they express a very common idea (for the sub), imo. As to ‘inflammatory’, it is just a function of a commenter’s ideological distance. We need to tolerate inflammation, as it is a key aspect of the body's immune defenses.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote.
Disagree, he does endorse the interpretation partly with:
But I also think that the extreme version of this ideology - coercing private entities to host speech and actions they disagree with, making it functionally impossible for people to build private spaces with the people and discourse they prefer, limiting societies ability to condemn and ostracize bad or dangerous ideas - is just another form of tyranny and violent coercion all it's own.
This is getting into way too many details of one argument. Our fundamental disagreement is whether his behaviour here is bad. What is the rule, applicable to all commenters, that he broke ? “The defendant made a short comment that implied a certain argument, but then later only partially endorsed it, and in further clarifications it became clear that he endorsed another argument more”
The fact that he is incorrect from our pov, that ‘the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it.’ is weak, is not for us to punish (through force).
You are using his own, extensive clarifications to catch him in a contradiction, when they put the lie to your other accusations, that he was just sniping, that he wasn’t engaging. Wouldn’t it be worse if he had not explained what he meant?
Don’t ask me to side with a mob against a contrarian who won’t admit he’s wrong. Although he may have been wrong – he was most likely wrong – a mob forces the issue through social pressure and the weight of numbers (and ultimately in this case, mod force) , and that is not legitimate.
That's the best part - he was the one forcing the issues. The thing about the mod force is cmpletely backwards, for a long time, they were explicitly protecting him, letting him get away with stuff that got others banned. Even that wouldn't make so many people turn against him, if he had enough grace to concede when he was wrong.
I'm not asking you to side with the mob against a contrarian, I'm asking you to provide actual evidence for your theory that people hated him because he occasionally won a spat with a counter-progressive, rather than because he refused to engage in an honest manner.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
I will say that there came a point where y'all got fed up with him, and it didn't take long for him to start stacking up bans after that.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
Sure. People will believe what they want to believe. I've given up trying to convince anyone who goes on the "You're biased and you're too stupid/dishonest to acknowledge it" attack.
Obviously I have a different perspective on what was usually happening. Anyone arguing in a hostile environment will appear more antagonistic than his best-behaved critics. Given his ideological distance to the sub, he was relatively polite. His worse critics should have been more charitable.
As to his refusal to admit he was wrong, though I accused him of bad faith for that myself once or twice, I now think it’s his business. I don’t judge him for lacking the grace to do what most of us almost never do, even when we are not facing the threats, mockery and vociferous demands of hostile ideological opponents.
It's a bit weird then, that people don't seem to have issues with any of the other progressives currently posting here. Even the ones that flamed out and left in a huff never got sufjj a bad reputation.
I don’t judge him for lacking the grace to do what most of us almost never do
That's your choice, but it seems perfectly normal that other people will choose otherwise, particularly when they disagree that this is something most people almost never do. It is very weird then to go on psychoanalytical investigations, trying to figure out what the 'real' reason for people disliking him is.
It's a bit weird then, that people don't seem to have issues with any of the other progressives currently posting here.
The progressives here (more of them than I think people realize) largely learned not to directly engage in hot button culture war debates, because no one’s trying to fight a hostile mob in an internet debate.
Have you argued for a position with very little support – honest inquiry, not a gotcha. I have, sometimes in here, and it’s an interesting dynamic. At first everything’s cool, but if you persist, the rudest part of the mob will accuse you of ignorance and stupidity, while the nicest will say you are obstinate and have ‘no interest in discussion’ . They progressively embolden each other and get annoyed by your refusal to admit “the obvious” until the knives really come out and you are declared a “troll”, a liar who can’t possibly believe anything so widely disbelieved. It seemed to me in those cases I was not wrong, they were.
But if I was wrong, then I guess it’s very difficult to recognize being wrong, and I have to absolve darwin. And if I was right, well then the mob knows nothing and I have to absolve darwin.
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Notes -
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.
It's pretty bad.
He did not post that way frequently.
He did post that way occasionally ( against old enemies probably, after taking about 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles) but he was still a good poster.
So lets pull up some examples, kind of randomized.
Let’s go to darwin’s page , sort by controversial, motte/SSC comments.
1 : Arguing against a ban, I disagree with his line as always, but it’s reasonable. Productive conversation with amadan. Lower down people were already discussing darwin and whether he called people who doubted smollet’s story racist :
Links to 2
Ok so this is the infamous smollett thread with the classic nybbler call-out. Aside from the fact that darwin’s wrong and proven wrong later, do you object to his behaviour in those threads? He presents standard progressive arguments at length, he’s civil. Well fine, the ‘It's called 'empathy.' -comment isn’t up to snuff, but he is being dogpiled, I think the occasional redditism can be excused.
3 : a modded comment
Disagree with the modding. Darwin is clearly in a completely different info- and argument bubble than we are, ideally he should have provided the videos yes, but still it’s important to have his perspective, and some videos no doubt exist, he's not lying or inventing a narrative as nara says.
And so on.
Let's do. I'll get to your examples in a sec, but here's two more:
BJ posts an excerpt and a link to an essay on blue tribe arguments for deplatforming and censorship. Here's how Darwin initiates his participation in the thread:
That isn't a counter-argument, but rather a flat dismissal (two flat dismissals, technically) of the argument presented. What does he think the difference is between government coercion and private business, and why is that difference significant? Why does criticizing private business mean you need to agree with socialist views on the evils of capitalism? He doesn't deign to say, which means any reply is going to have to make their best guess at what he's trying to say, and then unpack the assumptions behind that supposed position, and then try to respond to them. At which point he can (and often does) truthfully point out that they're putting words in his mouth, and haven't really understood him.
Here, a user posts a long excerpt from a Bryan Caplan essay, arguing that tribal identity creates prejudice rather than combatting it. Here's how Darwin initiates his participation in the thread:
A maximally-uncharitable summary, delivered with the standard indirection. A maximally-uncharitable description of the purported idea behind the essay. An actual, explicit argument this time, albeit one simply asserted with no specific evidence provided and no consideration of possible counter-arguments, delivered in an attitude of absolute certainty. A parting shot of the uniquely Darwinian "If you disagree, that proves I'm even more right" variety.
You claim:
Neither of these appear to be "against old enemies", much less "after taking 15 cheap shots from highly upvoted hostiles". This is how he routinely chose to initiate conversations. Again, I don't expect you to agree that these examples are typical of his behavior. My question is, if they were typical, would it be fair to say that he was a low-quality poster and the hostility he was shown was well-earned? You claimed that people should fear mild disembowelment for saying something stupid. What would the appropriate response be to someone who made a strong habit of this type of posting?
A basic goal of the rules here is to take other people seriously, to engage with their arguments seriously, to make a good-faith effort to understand what they're saying and to make yourself understood in turn. Normal conversations here start with someone laying out an argument, and other people either agreeing or poking holes in it with arguments of their own. With Darwin, most conversations start with him questioning whether you have a right to even be having a conversation in the first place. This meta-conversation is conducted in the vaguest possible terms when relating to anything constructive, with the most concrete possible terms whenever communicating disdain, contempt or dismissal, and usually through at least one layer of indirection. This is a really awful way to post.
Now, to the links you offered:
The first link is annoying because his argument is quite disingenuous for the reasons Amadan notes. By itself it's not worth arguing about though.
The third link continues the above pattern. The OP is an example of a fairly high-quality post: take an old argument familiar to the community, and examine it in light of subsequent evidence. Darwin's reply, by contrast, is markedly low-effort and unproductive. As is his custom, he dismisses the argument and all the evidence backing it out of hand for the most perfunctory of reasons: Scott still has a job, therefore his harassment and retreat are irrelevant. unspecified videos have showed unspecified "protestors" having force used on them, with the implication that this force was illegitimate, therefore all the examples of officials giving a free pass to rioters are irrelevant. You describe this as an "information bubble", as though he simply had seen different facts and therefore drew a different conclusion. This framing ignores the fact that the bubble exists because he is actively creating and maintaining it. He is actively rejecting all contrary evidence presented to him out of hand because it does not conform to his chosen narrative. He makes no effort to offer a specific argument backed by specific facts: Which videos? Which protestors? Which agents? How was the violence excessive? What are the assumptions being applied? What's the law? He makes no effort to engage seriously with counter-arguments. He doesn't lay out the logic that led him to his conclusion, or give an indication of what evidence would be required to change his mind. What he does, in this argument and in most others, is chart the shortest, lowest-effort path to a flat dismissal of all contrary positions, while maintaining a minimum level of plausible deniability.
This pattern continues in his subsequent responses throughout that thread. He makes lazy and highly inaccurate assertions, people correct him with voluminous evidence, he ignores them. At no point does he contribute anything constructive to the conversation.
The second link, though, is really something.
Yes, I do.
Darwin initiates by mocking the idea that the topic matters, and that he hasn't looked at the video in question and doesn't intend to. He then drops a 30-minute video of his own, and summarizes the contents: liberalism is racist, actually, and if you don't agree then you're racist too. He doesn't actually fully endorse this argument, but thinks it sorta has a point, y'know?
Within the first two sentences, he's dismissed the object level of the discussion at hand with a sneer, and from there he launches into a serious of increasingly vague abstractions. It is difficult to summarize the point he's making, or even to say that he's making a concrete point at all, beyond "progressivism is always right". He provides no explicit argument of his own, takes no explicit position, offers no evidence. The only thing solid enough to respond to in his post is the initial dismissal.
one commenter puts some effort into penetrating the fog, puts together an argument and provides specific claims: there is no empirical evidence to back the position Darwin is describing. Darwin's reply is "did you watch my video?". The poster says they haven't, but asks for a summary, or just the points Darwin thought were particularly relevant. Darwin declines to provide one, retreating into questions about whether conversation is even possible. This thread has three layers of back and forth, with zero constructive contributed on Darwin's end.
Another commenter challenges the initial dismissal, pointing back to the object-level fact of discrimination. Darwin responds with several assertions, none of which he supports, then reiterates his dismissal in stronger terms. In this thread, we're now two levels down, and he's argued purely by assertion, and only about whether the conversation should happen at all.
This is not good behavior. He is not being charitable. He is not speaking plainly. He is not providing evidence for inflammatory statements. He is shaming. He is attempting to build consensus. He is making sweeping generalizations to vilify groups he dislikes. And he's doing this to people who have watched him behave this way, without serious repercussions, for years.
And it is at this point that he decides to back his statements with his first piece of actual evidence, explicitly to support his assertion that the entire conversation shouldn't be happening at all. And so he cites a recent hate crime allegation, asserting that this hate crime proves that all other arguments in the thread are invalid. This is a terrible argument, as several people immediately point out. Two things can be bad at the same time, the responses to the two things differ completely, single datapoints are hardly useful, and so on. All of these are strong arguments against Darwin's position, and in fact Darwin himself regularly invokes these arguments to dismiss other peoples' statements. Here, he appears completely unaware that any such points could even be raised. His position is that the entire conversation is so self-evidently ridiculous that even being forced to point this out explicitly is an imposition on him.
Nybbler calls him out explicitly, and is promptly warned by a mod. Darwin ignores him. That comment is worth its own discussion; I can see the mod's point, but I think if that comment is over the line, it shouldn't be over by much. Making solid, pointed predictions about verifiable reality is one of the more useful things here.
JTarrou delivers a more measured, highly reasonable, strictly-within-the-rules version of the same call-out, engaging directly with Darwin's core claims, pointing out that the risks inherent to Darwin's argument. Darwin replies with a single-line, low-effort ad-hominum, is warned by the mods, and updates to a minimal-effort accusation of bad-faith, with an insult thrown in to round things out. Jtarrou and others reply reasonably, pointing out that this incident actually does look pretty fishy, citing previous cases of bad reporting, false accusations of a similar nature, oddities in the narrative. Darwin ignores them all. This thread gets four levels deep, and at no point does Darwin contribute anything constructive. He started out sneering and he only gets worse as he goes, despite being presented with numerous well-thought-out, reasonable, mild replies.
ZorbaTHut, the mod who's been trying to keep a lid on things, tries his hand at a reasonable response. Darwin responds with a pair of progressive arguments, disavows them, then asserts that the entire discussion is the same sort of thing, just from the other side. He is still arguing that the entire discussion is illegitimate, and his only evidence for doing so is the hate crime incident. He's challenged again in this thread, and claims he has no idea whether the incident actually happened, and likewise has no idea if the original incident under discussion happened, so no one knows anything. It's pointed out that the original incident was caught on video, which he's refused to watch. He says maybe there's something there but not really, and then stops responding. Zorba follows up with a lengthy post attempting to engage further, and gets no reply. This branch of the thread gets three layers deep, with Darwin contributing nothing constructive throughout, and in fact ignoring numerous high-quality attempts at engagement with what little there is of his argument, preferring instead to reassert his position over and over again with extreme confidence.
...And again, the behavior I'm highlighting above was not unusual for Darwin. The flat dismissal, the sneering, the smuggery, the retreats into pointless abstraction or equivocation, the rejection of context, ignoring or flat dismissal of well-reasoned counter-arguments, apparent inability to consider his own biases and flat refusal to recognize them when pointed out by others, and the general air of contempt for the entire concept of charity and engagement are the norm from him throughout his time here. The large majority of his comments could be accurately summarized as "Everyone knows Progressivism is right about everything and you're an idiot or evil if you disagree", delivered either in a pithily low-effort sentence or two, or in a few paragraphs so indirect and abstract that effective response required multiple back-and-forth replies to even pin down what he'd admit to actually saying.
And of course, in this case, he did all the above at length and very publicly, based entirely on one piece of evidence. He mocked and insulted the people who raised reasonable doubts about that evidence. And then it turned out the evidence was extremely, hilariously, very obviously faked in the most cartoonish way possible, and the result was that people clowned on him without mercy. I think this is a reasonable response to someone who makes themselves into that much of a clown. As a mod pointed out in your first link, this community runs on a reputation economy, and he systematically trashed his reputation in the most dramatic and hilariously karmic way possible. I've seen no evidence that he learned a single thing from the experience; last I saw, he was continuing to insist that he was always right about everything, barring a few details of no consequence whatsoever, and anyone who said differently was just a hater. This is remarkably dishonest, but unsurprising given his history with us.
The thing we have going here is doomed. It's been obvious that it was doomed since at least early 2016. The basic problem with any non-forced-anon forum is that conversations generate history between the participants, and sooner or later that history turns into bad blood and drama. The further problem for any non-forced-anon forum dedicated specifically to debate of contentious political or cultural issues is that conversations are driven by uncertainty, by people looking for answers, but high-quality conversations generate answers, thereby removing the environment that generated them. The combination of these two problems means that this community, by its nature, has a limited shelf-life. People eventually burn out and leave, and they do not do so equally due to the history that accrues. None of this seems avoidable to me, but I bitterly regret that it is this way, and that there doesn't seem to be a way to ameliorate the problem. I am acutely aware of the fact that we have very few blue-tribe posters left, and that almost all the really good ones we used to have are gone. I miss them dearly. I've tried to engage fairly and honestly with them. I've tried to sharply limit the engagement I have with them, to try to cut down on the dog-pile effect. I've requested lengthy bans for myself in the past to try to minimize my own contribution to the erosion of their participation. I still treasure many of the conversations I've had with them, and believe I've learned a lot from those conversations.
I had a lot of conversations with Darwin. I spent a lot of effort trying to engage with him honestly and fairly. It never, ever worked, and I think it's a fair conclusion that this is because he straight-up wasn't interested in constructive dialog.
Both of these comments were fine, well above the standards of posting here. The second one I thought was just plain good, well written and makes a cogent argument that bigotry is natural rather than invented (by insert-your-political-enemies), and points out the hypocrisy of the most pro-assimilationist people here themselves being contrarians who vociferously resist assimilation.
Plenty of people would disagree strongly with his conclusions and maybe they'd be right. Good. This place should have actual differences in opinion, rather than different flavors of right wing arguing endlessly about the best way to fight wokeness. The fact that people think these are trolls are a sign of how unused to genuine disagreement and debate the userbase has grown.
Accusing him of dismissing the views of people he disagrees with is weak and holds him to a standard no one here is held to; dismissing and mocking progressive views is the single most consistent thing this sub does.
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We are far from the content-free insult comment you tried to pin on him at first. Your examples are not even 10% as bad as guesswho’s comment.
It’s not good or original, but it is an argument. I can’t believe this discussion has logically arrived at a point where I’m supposed to make “Darwin’s 10 shittiest arguments ever” for him, which I am positive I am 100% opposed to.
“Well, I think it makes a rather big difference whether the state enforces censorship, or private persons. For one, no one gets put in jail. For two, the option is still there in theory. Obviously government censorship is far more absolute. And it would violate people’s right of self-association to force them to provide services to just anyone. If Jeff Bezos only wants to sell diverse literature, that is his inalienable right. ” Or something? I’m going to take a pass on the connection to communism, but I’m sure an argument can be made somehow.
I gotta say, I find it extremely unfair of you not to quote the edit, which is far more conciliatory:
And even the non-edit part is just vigorous disagreement, there’s nothing wrong with it. Overuse on your part of ‘uncharitable’ . Darwin’s a progressive. Progressive views are uncharitable towards white males, reactionaries etc. So are anti-woke views towards them. He’s not obligated to pretend any random essay from his enemies must surely come from the best of intentions and make sense, and not pattern-match it to what his ideology tells him about those people.
That’s where you’re wrong , I agree this is fairly typical , he acted frequently in this manner. But it has nothing to do with what you originally defined his behaviour as. Guesswho’s behaviour is bad. Darwin’s behaviour is acceptable. Nothing but personalized insults towards another commenter, bad, argument that implies white males are terrible and reactionaries don’t know what they’re talking about, okay.
Well if 07mk doesn’t want to watch darwin’s video and darwin doesn’t want to watch the other video, I guess they just go home and call it a lame draw. This is not the decisive discovery of the dastardly deeds of darwin.
A consensus of one. A shaming contingent of one. This is not how those rules are meant to be used. They’re not there to protect the overwhelming, massively upvoted majority from one guy arguing against the current.
Well obviously, it’s a great comment. I’m not usually in favour of punitive mod decisions, if you hadn’t noticed. Except for that false flag nazi alt multitude.
I don’t like your paraphrases, I would describe them as ‘maximally uncharitable’. “stops responding” cannot count as any sort of offense, I told you. He says this:
He has backpedaled considerably from the beginning, he no longer believes they were saying maga, or that his original interpretations had any validity. We are witnessing a man slowly changing his mind, and it’s beautiful.
What a surprise, you’re pessimistic about this community, too? Yet, the one thing that we cannot say is that our values have drifted apart, right?
I don’t know, there isn’t any bad blood with anyone I argued with. From my end, anyway.
Your assessments are your own, but it seems to me that the initial reply to the Kaplan post, at least, was considerably worse. Further, have you considered his extensive explanations of how his initial post was entirely innocent and reasonable and anyone who thinks otherwise is just being irrationally hostile? If not, give it a read; if you feel up to continuing this conversation the additional context might help.
I am quite certain that guesswho is darwin, and I think it's reasonably likely they'll either admit it eventually or a solid consensus will emerge among the rest of the posters, including yourself; to my eye the stylistic tics are too numerous and obvious to ignore. I want to be clear, though: I think the question of whether they actually are darwin or not is essentially trivia. What I think actually matters is that their posts are bad in a very, very similar way to the way darwin's posts were bad. To the extent that people remember darwin fondly, I think that is because they do not actually remember what he was like. To the extent that darwin's treatment is significant, I think it's worth looking at the nature of his participation.
In any case, we've looked at five threads, and it seems to me that at in at least four of those threads, we're pretty far from Darwin being a high-quality contributor who got snippy with people who were rude to him. Would you agree that in those threads, we've seen him initiating with low-effort and highly inflammatory posts, and that other posters expend significant effort attempting to have a civil conversation without much success?
I do not think the arguments we're looking at are unusually bad relative to Darwin's average output; my memory is that his posting quality was as consistent as it was awful. unfortunately, I think you do actually have to do this, for a simple reason that I hope I can now demonstrate.
This is an entirely reasonable interpretation of Darwin's initial comment, and it seems pretty similar to the interpretation several of the posters went with when formulating replies, which were then ignored. I think what you wrote would have been a much better comment than what he went with, considerably less inflammatory, and somewhat higher in content. Unfortunately, the problem is that this is an argument you are imagining, not the argument Darwin actually is making. He absolutely is not claiming that Bezos or any other businessman has a right to sell whatever they choose. He absolutely is not arguing that private censorship is okay (or wrong), or even agreeing that state censorship is wrong (or okay). The argument you are imagining does not exist in that thread.
That may seem like a strong claim. Fortunately, I can prove it pretty solidly, because in that very thread darwin himself very explicitly said so.:
Emphasis mine.
...In other words, he doesn't actually endorse anything he wrote in that original comment. Nothing you described above was at all the argument he claims to be making, which is unsurprising since the argument he claims to have been making cannot be straightforwardly derived from what he actually wrote. Everyone in that thread who assumed he was speaking plainly and in good faith wasted their time, as you did just now, because he had zero intention of actually prosecuting the argument he implied he was making. His actual argument was that agreeing with BJ's position necessarily makes you either a socialist or a hypocrite, because the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it. That's the entire content of his original post, according to a detailed explanation by the man himself.
Welcome to arguing with Darwin.
Given that his own explanation of his comment completely contradicts your understanding*, it's worth looking at what he actually said in some detail.
Did the original essay ignore the difference between government coercion and private business? No, in fact, because the essay is solely about why "book burning" is a bad thing in the abstract, not about whether people should be prevented from doing it, much less how this prevention might be accomplished. His final conclusion is that "book burning" is a loser strategy anyway, so there's no point in worrying about it. Darwin completely ignores the argument BJ made, preferring to substituting an argument that he himself finds more convinient. He does this, by his own admission, because he was annoyed that BJ was saying something negative about his preferred ideology.
Of course, it wouldn't be very persuasive for him to straightforwardly say "This abstract question is dumb, let's talk about a different concrete issue instead". What he does instead is frame his comment as an accusation: "you completely ignore [x]", rather than as a statement of his own views: "I think [x]". Because he does this in as inflammatory a manner as possible, people are too busy reacting to his snarling tone to notice he's pulled a switcharoo on the actual argument being made. Further, the frame of the discussion is now whether the OP did or did not ignore something important about an issue the OP did not even address; meanwhile, in darwin's mind, he has not even offered an opinion of his own at all, so he has zero reason to respond to those like yourself who "misinterpret" him as having done so.
He's making an accusation of hypocrisy here, trying to imply that the OP's argument is indistinguishable from socialism, so if you accept one you have to accept the other. This is absurd for a whole host of reasons, in addition to being low effort and inflammatory. And again, the mistake here would be to actually argue the point, because none of this is at all valid: he's provided no actual argument for the similarity between what he claims is the OP's argument and socialism, but in fact he is lying about what the OP's argument even is. At no point in the essay did BJ say anything about forcing anyone to post anything; in fact, he concluded that we should do nothing at all, because this behavior is self-destructive.
I stand by my original claim: That comment contained no argument at all. That is to say, a straightforward interpretation of his message results in an argument he does not "intend" to make and so will not engage productively with, and the message he actually wants to deliver is implied indirectly by interpretation of a highly inflammatory statement he claims not to actually mean. This is not mind-reading on my part, but rather darwin's own explanation of the comment in question.
It seems to me that this is a profoundly shitty method of communicating. It is hard to imagine a more perfect example of the exact opposite of the sort of conversation our rules are meant to encourage. In a mere two sentences, it badly violates most of the rules in the header. When people attempt to engage productively, he claims they've misunderstood him, and that his behavior is totally reasonable, while making vague anodyne statements that imply but never actually commit to reasonableness, while mixing in further sarcastic, passive-aggressive or just generaly smug digs at them for not understanding how obviously right he is. This encourages them to continue engaging and generally results in frustration and hostility, which he paints as unreasonable aggression on their part.
And again, I emphasize that this is how Darwin opens conversations, and that comments of this nature were the norm. We've looked at a mere five threads, and four of them contained multiple instances of this behavior. Darwin was absurdly prolific; I'm confident I can present you with an arbitrary number of examples.
...You wrote more, and I intend to reply to it, but I'm past 10k characters and would like to see if this changes your assessment any. I'll break it here.
My eyes quickly glaze over any trans discussion, but I think there’s less than a 1% chance of guesswho being darwin, and you can quote me on that. He’s an antagonistic progressive, he's got progressive stylistic ticks, that’s basically the extent of the similarity. Other arguments include: as you say, darwin was prolific, why would he even use an alt, and keep it secret, after he did leave that time he was banned, just to make a few random comments. It's not parsimonious.
He did get a lot of AAQC. So you'll have to concede these aren't his best arguments, at least.
There’s low-effort, and there’s content-free. Strictly low-effort posts are only really bad if they express a very common idea (for the sub), imo. As to ‘inflammatory’, it is just a function of a commenter’s ideological distance. We need to tolerate inflammation, as it is a key aspect of the body's immune defenses.
Disagree, he does endorse the interpretation partly with:
This is getting into way too many details of one argument. Our fundamental disagreement is whether his behaviour here is bad. What is the rule, applicable to all commenters, that he broke ? “The defendant made a short comment that implied a certain argument, but then later only partially endorsed it, and in further clarifications it became clear that he endorsed another argument more”
The fact that he is incorrect from our pov, that ‘the only possible response to private censorship is nationalizing the platforms. That's it.’ is weak, is not for us to punish (through force).
You are using his own, extensive clarifications to catch him in a contradiction, when they put the lie to your other accusations, that he was just sniping, that he wasn’t engaging. Wouldn’t it be worse if he had not explained what he meant?
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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?
Don’t ask me to side with a mob against a contrarian who won’t admit he’s wrong. Although he may have been wrong – he was most likely wrong – a mob forces the issue through social pressure and the weight of numbers (and ultimately in this case, mod force) , and that is not legitimate.
That's the best part - he was the one forcing the issues. The thing about the mod force is cmpletely backwards, for a long time, they were explicitly protecting him, letting him get away with stuff that got others banned. Even that wouldn't make so many people turn against him, if he had enough grace to concede when he was wrong.
I'm not asking you to side with the mob against a contrarian, I'm asking you to provide actual evidence for your theory that people hated him because he occasionally won a spat with a counter-progressive, rather than because he refused to engage in an honest manner.
Everyone kept saying that; it was never true.
I see how you would se e it that way, but surely you can see how "we have investigated ourselves, and found us free of any bias" might ring hollow to anyone on the outside.
I will say that there came a point where y'all got fed up with him, and it didn't take long for him to start stacking up bans after that.
Sure. People will believe what they want to believe. I've given up trying to convince anyone who goes on the "You're biased and you're too stupid/dishonest to acknowledge it" attack.
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Obviously I have a different perspective on what was usually happening. Anyone arguing in a hostile environment will appear more antagonistic than his best-behaved critics. Given his ideological distance to the sub, he was relatively polite. His worse critics should have been more charitable.
As to his refusal to admit he was wrong, though I accused him of bad faith for that myself once or twice, I now think it’s his business. I don’t judge him for lacking the grace to do what most of us almost never do, even when we are not facing the threats, mockery and vociferous demands of hostile ideological opponents.
It's a bit weird then, that people don't seem to have issues with any of the other progressives currently posting here. Even the ones that flamed out and left in a huff never got sufjj a bad reputation.
That's your choice, but it seems perfectly normal that other people will choose otherwise, particularly when they disagree that this is something most people almost never do. It is very weird then to go on psychoanalytical investigations, trying to figure out what the 'real' reason for people disliking him is.
The progressives here (more of them than I think people realize) largely learned not to directly engage in hot button culture war debates, because no one’s trying to fight a hostile mob in an internet debate.
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Have you argued for a position with very little support – honest inquiry, not a gotcha. I have, sometimes in here, and it’s an interesting dynamic. At first everything’s cool, but if you persist, the rudest part of the mob will accuse you of ignorance and stupidity, while the nicest will say you are obstinate and have ‘no interest in discussion’ . They progressively embolden each other and get annoyed by your refusal to admit “the obvious” until the knives really come out and you are declared a “troll”, a liar who can’t possibly believe anything so widely disbelieved. It seemed to me in those cases I was not wrong, they were.
But if I was wrong, then I guess it’s very difficult to recognize being wrong, and I have to absolve darwin. And if I was right, well then the mob knows nothing and I have to absolve darwin.
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