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I'm not particularly looking for any specific response, I'm just saying the things I think are true in response to accusations against me. I don't think there's any response that 'fixes' everything, and I suspect our disagreements on matters of fact are too broad for such a response to be honest if it happened. I'm just saying my piece.
If you want to ask what outcomes I would like from this, it would be great if you would refrain from falsely accusing me of endorsing fake rape accusations (hah), jumping in to conversations to talk about how awful and dishonest I am and then holding court on that topic throughout a 50-post-long comment chain, pulling up ancient comments by me to use as examples of how awful progressives are, and so forth and so on.
(I also remember you as someone who did a ton of this back on /r/SCC and /r/culturewarroundup and /r/themotte too, which is informing a lot of my strong feelings about this. But admittedly in my memory from back then you sort of blend into the group of 'generic perpetual rude antagonists' with Jtarrou, nybbler, TPO, etc. etc. So, sorry if you didn't do that and I'm thinking of one of them, in that world this response would be slightly hyperbolic towards you personally and more about a general phenomenon I experience from many sources)
Of course, I don't actually expect you to stop doing that stuff.
Regardless of how fair or true or within-the-rules-for-this-site those types of posts are, they're just fucking weird. It feels really creepy to be such an extensive topic of conversation among strangers, to know that people are keeping tabs and grudges and ledgerbooks on me that they are just waiting to pull out at any moment, that they seem to think they have some kind of relationship with me (adversarial, but real and persistent) when I feel nothing of the sort towards them and just want to have anonymous discussions of ideas.
What I want to do is just scream 'Stop thinking about me! Stop talking about me! I don't know you!'. Debunk my ideas and arguments if you think they're wrong, stop talking to me if you don't think it's worth your time, please stop treating me as a character in stories you tell.
But it's a free country and a free-speech-motivated board. If that's how you enjoy spending your time then that's your right, if that's how you relate to arguments and ideas and discussions then that's a legitimate form of human experience and you probably can't just flip it off. And I always have the option of staying gone next time if the creepiness I feel from it outweighs the benefit to me of the good conversations I do sometimes have here.
BUT: if you and other mods are going to keep talking about me like that at regular intervals, and ignoring other people who do so, then I'd like it if I stopped getting modded for 'antagonism' when making drastically less pointed and accusatory comments.
I don't really expect that to happen either, because it seems like there's a standard firmly in place by which me directing any detectable hostility at others is antagonism and people directing infinite hostility at me is not, and I'm sure each mod individually has a reason why those standards are fair in their own head that they firmly believe is true and fair. Maybe they're even right, and it's the type of thing that's hard to see when you're the one getting the spiky end of the stick every day.
So yeah, if the question is 'what do I want and expect to get', the answer is probably 'nothing, I'm just defending myself and speaking honestly'.
Having this discussion in a parallel comment chain, going to keep it localized there. You can join it if you want, but it feels pretty straightforward to me.
That link is to you responding to someone who is not me, I was never aware of that conversation. What was the point of the link?
Just this week I saw a bunch of articles pointing to him slurring his speech slightly or confusing two names and saying that's definitely dementia and he'll be cognitively declining and falling apart before election day. While I don't rule out early-onset dementia for either candidate given their ages, those are the types of mistakes anyone will make if they talk in public for dozens of hours a week and are not any strong evidence of the claims being made.
When do you personally think Trump has lied about the left, if ever?
And, don't you think it's ironic how you can't help but seize on this statement where I opened myself to the possibility of vulnerability, as a way to 'put me in the hotseat' at the end of your long post about how reasonable and constructive you want to be, especially the part where you said:
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