Oh, the irony…
If someone had said to me privately, “That hurt my feelings”, I would apologize profusely, because I never intended any such harm.
If the usual suspects pit me for what was pretty clearly a minor slip A YEAR AGO, and I get hauled into the pit so the usual subjects who have called me everything from a racist to a transphobe to a liar can come in and ‘tsk tsk’ at me, well, that deserves nothing but contempt. And that’s exactlty what I think of it.
“Fellow traveler”? Really? 
Listen, snowflake-The fact is you get treated a shitload better here than any left-leaning poster would on the right wing boards. The mods here bend over backwards to accommodate those on the right in an effort to try to keep this board balanced, and I would say a majority of those here that lean right don’t take advantage of their effort…although, in my opinion that majority has shrunk recently.
Why don’t you grow the fuck up.
Pffft. Personal acquaintances deliberately harassing a sensitive teen in her real-life social circles with gross personal insults and exhortations to kill herself is a very far cry from participants in a voluntary association of anonymous random adult strangers in a virtual discussion forum criticizing the specific misbehavior of another participant.
What we are seeing is a massive drama-queen tantrum.
Oh, bullshit. For someone who claims to be so concerned about respect for others’ feelings, you sure seem pretty oblivious to the obvious reasons why Johanna in particular might well have been angered by your misgendering a trans woman if she didn’t know you did it unintentionally. Even if the post where she noticed it was made months ago.
More drama-queenery. It’s easy to see from the many perfectly civil interactions that many of even your severest critics have with you in more neutral forums and topics that nobody’s on a mission to harass or ostracize you. The criticism you get is behavior-specific.
Get your ego out of the way and acknowledge the fact that some of us are just sometimes sincerely irritated by posting behavior from you that we sincerely consider irresponsible and/or unethical.
He had that opportunity a few months ago when Johanna corrected him in that thread. Not even in the pit. It would have been so easy to say “oh gosh, that wasn’t my intent, I misspoke.”
Can’t fight back? What in the high holy fuck are you talking about Sam? What do you think you are doing with your little childish temper tantrum? Or do you mean something along the lines of “Why if this wasn’t a message board but face to face, I’d kick your ass?”
I even still think it’s lame to dig back for something you posted a year ago to pit you for, but seriously Sam, go fuck yourself and your martyr snowflake routine.
How many people have now suicided by mod here due to the pile-ons in the pit?
But sure, I’m the problem. Just a ‘snowflake’. But I’m still here, putting up with shit that caused others to flame out. I’m just tired of it.
I don’t know-How many?
My God, you’re still on this bullshit? Who are you, Marjorie Taylor Greene? Porn on a laptop is not a news story.
If you were really as decent and honest as you pretend to be, you would have apologized at the time you made a mistake. I can’t ever recall you doing it when it was a liberal that called you out.
On the other hand, possibly exposing that porn to minors might be a news story. Hey, Sam, someone might get in trouble over the contents of that laptop yet!
Just highlighting this particular little spurt of vehemence because ISTM that it’s characteristic of a general culture split, so to speak, in conservative vs. liberal attitudes.
Conservatives often seem to regard apologizing, especially for unintentional misbehavior, as a sign of weakness or humiliating subjection to “the enemy”. Liberals, ISTM, are more likely to treat apologizing as an expression of self-actualizing power, demonstrating commitment to principle.
Apologizing for an unintended accidental violation of one’s own ethical code says in effect “I’m strong enough in my convictions and my character that I can acknowledge and regret having made a mistake”. For conservatives, on the other hand, that self-actualization seems to be overshadowed by the fear of “enemies” being gleefully triumphant over one’s perceived “humiliation”. Which, TBH, seems to me like a much less mature attitude to take.
None, AFAIK. Has any banned poster ever actually claimed that they were “driven” to violate Board rules to banning point just because they got flamed in the designated flame forum?
Or is this just another conservative “My bad behavior is all your fault!” defensive excuse? Party of personal responsibility, indeed.
(And extra drama-queen points awarded for the repeated insistence on the “suicide by mod” idiom, in an attempt to boost the emotional impact by falsely suggesting association with real suicide prompted by real harassment.)
Quick poll about SS, are you still responding to him, despite repeated proven dishonesty because:
- I don’t use ignore on anyone.
- I do want him banned, so wait for him to break the rules as he often does.
- I want to know what people in the RWNJ sphere are thinking and it’s easier than going somewhere else?
- His knowledge in other fields offsets his blatant lies and dishonesty on anything touching on RWNJ points.
- I keep hoping he’ll realize he’s being a hypocrite and I like slamming my face into the wall in service of this hope!
0
voters
Obviously, if you have him on ignore, like myself, then you can vote based on your feelings PRIOR to giving up and putting him on ignore if you feel like it.
How about “suicide by self-entitlement”?
Hey, some of us are entertained by the responses.
I’ll take “What is none for $500?” Sam. If you are so childishly incapable of controlling your actions that you get yourself banned, the problem is you, not the rest of the world.
Party of personal responsibility my ass.
ETA: Sorta ninja’d by @Kimstu, but no doubt that’s just proof of our hive mind.
Fair enough @Skywatcher, fair enough.
The poll choices didn’t exactly align with my views, but more or less, my take is
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Yeah, I don’t bother with the automated “ignore” feature, I’m fine with ignoring people manually, so to speak.
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Yeah, I still find Sam’s conversation quite reasonable and informative on many topics, some of them even relating to current events or politics. You just never know whether or when you’re suddenly going to fall into one of his massive sinkholes of ideologically fueled misinformation and ignorance. And then it usually takes an annoying amount of time and effort to dig the conversation out of it.
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I don’t really have much hope anymore that Sam himself will learn to spot his own ideological sinkholes of misinformation and ignorance, but I continue to think it’s important to draw other posters’ attention to them. Sifting truth from bullshit is tedious and unpleasant work, but it’s becoming an ever more crucial skill in today’s in/misin/disin-formation-riddled world.
I actually believe Sam made a typo about gender in this particular instance.
It doesn’t excuse the endless lies and other bullshit.
Here’s the thing Sam, I’ll acknowledge when you say something good and I’ll even stand up for you if it looks like you’re being treated unfairly. You just don’t offer that many opportunities (that I see anyway).
I am, politically, on the same side as you. I make arguments for many of the same things and, you’ll note, I don’t get into trouble and largely don’t raise the ire of anyone.
So when you say that you’re being hounded for your beliefs, I can say factually that you’re lying to yourself. Yes, it’s impossible to argue against a horde of a thousand people and, yes, a lot of them are crazies and idiots who wouldn’t accept that grass is green, if it went against what they want to believe, but such is life. The important thing is that, that’s not “being hounded”. I can’t convert the idiots, either, but I don’t have an ongoing Pit thread about me and I’m not sad nor frustrated that the community does not love me. I don’t have people on my own side doing a face-palm and trying to patiently and caringly try to make me understand what I’ve been doing wrong all this time.
You should really consider the simple and real possibility that there’s no personal animosity, no hatred, no organized, partisan hounding, and that it’s really just as simple as reading what’s on the tin: You make a lot of factual errors and sloppy, myopic arguments. You do a disservice to yourself and to our shared viewpoint.
On the left, everything is someone else’s fault. If you are a criminal, it’s because your parents mistreated you; if you’re bad at math, it’s because the system is racist against you; if you’re rich, it’s because you profited from the system, stole from others, and were given everything by your parens. But you and I are on the right. That means that when you say something that is factually untrue, it’s your fault. You did it. You’re to blame. And the only resolution is to stop doing it. And if you don’t and can’t, and you continue to suffer for the choices that you’ve made, then that’s good. People should reap the rewards of the good things that they’ve done and they should suffer the damages of their bad choices. You can’t really complain about it, it’s the way that life should be.
But so, let’s look at (part of) what you said that I quoted above as not just right-wing folk, but specifically as honest right-wing folk. (Only “part of” because I don’t want to make a 50,000 word post.)
First, let’s imagine that we’re a police officer. We have an informant - Meredith - living in the bad area of town. We go talk to Meredith, to see if there’s anything I should investigate and she says, “Word on the street is that Mrs. Carter is a witch. Her husband came out of the house, face all swollen and foam coming out of his mouth. He walked a few feet and fell dead. I heard people say that she’s growing all sorts of weird plants, no one recognizes, and goes to one of those occult book stores.”
And we note, first, that this is nothing more and nothing less than “word on the street”. It’s wrong to call it bullshit. It’s also wrong to call it fact. We can be pretty confident that Mrs. Carter is not a “witch” but we could theorize that she’s a poisoner (maybe even a poisoner who thinks of herself as a witch). We could also theorize that Mr. Carter had an extreme allergic reaction to something and his wife is every bit as distraught over his death as a wife ever could be.
Word on the street is gossip. Gossip is often true, it’s also often false. And so long as you’re very clear that it is nothing more and nothing less than gossip, it’s completely fair to use as part of an investigation. It has no prosecutorial weight, it casts no meaningful reflection on the subjects that it discusses - because everyone sane knows to not take gossip all that seriously - it merely give us hints about what things would be more relevant to take a glance at so that the world is kept lawful and sane.
And, being gossip, if we wanted to predict how much of it would turn out to be precisely true, it would be little to none. That’s the sane person’s expectation. Realistically, all we should expect of it is that sometimes it will put us on the tail of something worth looking into and that end result will probably only loosely connected to the gossip. But that’s okay because the first steps of any investigation are always going to be to take non-invasive reasonable steps. Is there actually a body? You can go to the coroner without offending anyone. Does the cause of death seem suspicious to a doctor? You can ask him and, with gossip as your source, be perfectly satisfied with any answer. Do we have a record on Mrs. Carter? It’s sitting there for you to know on your computer, back at HQ, and no one will ever know that you typed in her name if she’s innocent.
But predicting that the gossip will mostly not be 100% precisely accurate is, a) not an amazing feat of prescience, and b) is not the same thing as calling it bullshit. Bullshit and gossip are different things and I suspect that you realize that. If you’d be happy to accept that what Meredith told you is rank gossip but you have a passionate commitment to calling what Steele gave us “bullshit”, when everyone else is calmly telling you that it’s gossip and has no weight pre-investigation, then that was you being stupid not them being wrong.
Now, secondly, let’s imagine that I write down a series of predictions, “Joe Biden will die from old age, Donald Trump will die from a coronary disease, Elon Musk will be the first person in the 21st Century to walk on the moon” and so on. If I write down a wide variety of predictions that are all of reasonable probability, I’m going to have a pretty good opportunity to be able to one day say, “I told you all that I knew Musk would walk on the Moon! You didn’t believe me but I was right!” And, sure, I was right on that one thing but that doesn’t mean that I was basing it on much real wisdom and insight. More importantly, it ignores all of the other predictions that didn’t come true. Throwing a thousand darts at a dart board and getting a bullseye doesn’t make one a darts Olympiad. Thinking otherwise is not realistic.
And if the predictions are largely personally subjective, like, say that you were to proclaim, “Jane can’t make food as good as my Mom!” Well, you’re always going to be right because you’re never going to agree that Jane can cook better than your mother. So if we’re asking whether a particular batch of gossip, in the mind of Sam Stone, is “gossip worth paying attention to”, well then, sure, whatever you expected it to be is probably going to pan out in your own mind. Quelle surprise.
Thirdly, let’s go back to your possession of Meredith’s gossip saying that Mrs. Carter is a murderous witch. You checked your computer and discovered that there’s a file on Carter that shows she was previously investigated for murdering her previous two husbands (by poisoning) and a shopkeep that she was rumored to be having an affair with. You also have a report from a man who runs a small business selling chemicals to schools for chemistry classes, from a few weeks back, who noticed that several of his orders from a Mrs. Carter seemed to have a suspicious pattern of being precursors to known undetectable poisons.
And now if I, before knowing any of this, was already going around banging pots and pans and crying out, “Meredith is a liar! It’s all lies, she just hates Mrs. Carter! You can’t believe her!” Well…is that position based on anything? Or do I just like Mrs. Carter and that’s the start and end of it? Even if Carter ends up innocent, if I didn’t have any real reason to believe in her innocence but personal wishes and dreams, then I was still effectively wrong regardless of the eventual outcome. It’s like if I was to go into a house I’ve never been to before, owned by someone I’ve never met nor heard of, and predict “There are no Coca-Cola products in this refrigerator!” If there aren’t, that’s just me getting lucky, not me knowing something. My technique was completely wrong and I deserve to be considered nothing better than “wrong but lucky”.
When we come to the part where we start to hear about the prior deaths, the chemistry store, etc. and I’m still spending all of my time banging pots and pans, decrying Meredith, and somehow never seeming to comment on all of the other things that were in-line before the police ever requested their first search warrant then I’m an idiot. Sure, maybe Carter is eventually shown to have not killed this particular husband or maybe there’s never sufficient evidence to charge her for it. Maybe, it’s reasonable to think that she might not have done it. But being open to or partial to her innocence, on the basis of a lack of concrete evidence, is a much different thing from ignoring everything that was found and looking pointedly and solely at Meredith, to the exclusion of everything else. That’s just being dishonest and deceitful - and knowingly so.
So again, be a right-wing person. Take responsibility for your actions.
Be honest and truthful and maybe the others will not love you - I am never on anyone’s list of favorites posters - but you won’t feel like the world’s out to get you.
The world is not out to get you. It’s caringly pointing out the places where you’ve been less than honest and less than diligent in your research, and giving you the choice to be a person of good repute and see the rewards of a life well-lived…or not. You can be a Republican of integrity…or not. That choice is yours and you do make a choice every time you post a cite and make an argument about what sort of person you want to be. It’s not your parents or your society or your community making you do it, either way. It’s only on you.
We live in a free world. You’re free to choose poorly. If bad things come of it, that’s yours to own and to fix. I hope you do.
Do I feel anything for shodan, or Slacker, or damuri, or YWTF, or Martin_Hyde, or any of the other racist, transphobic,trolling assholes who are no longer here because they were outed for their bigotry? Naah. Not a thing other than delight at their absence.
And I will delight when it’s you, too. You’re so clearly already circling the drain. And it’s glorious.
I didn’t realise we somehow had control of all those other posters’ fingers…