Diogenes, I don’t have a beef with you, I’ve never been in an argument with you on the boards, and the vast majority of the time I appreciate your posts on the board.
But this makes me rethink my opinion of you. My conclusion from this is that you enjoy all this brouhaha that your posts seem to instigate. Why else would you take advice from anonymous posters telling you “go tell her she’s a liar?” Why would this appeal to you and make you want to take action, when you feel totally justified in ignoring all the posters who tell you “your debate methods are annoying?” I would think a person who wants to give positive contributions to the board would listen to the posters asking them to be less irritating and let that guide my behavior; and ignore the anonymous people trying to get you to insult other posters. Instead you choose to do the reverse. I’m disappointed, not that you would care.
Here’s the thing, Dio. You don’t usually lead with “I don’t take polyamorous relationships seriously”. Every time I’ve personally yelled at you about this, it’s been because you’ve said “Polyamorous relationships are [factually] more immature and less meaningful.”
And then you say it again, and again. And around repetition 11 million, you finally say “hey, it’s just my opinion”.
You’re doing it again. You are shifting the topic from “is acting as a mouthpiece for anonymous posters an assholish thing to do”, to “were the questions which came out of the mouthpiece assholish.” You do this frequently. The validity or assholishness of the questions is irrelevant. The process by which they came about was assholish.
The problem is that you don’t express most things as your opinion, but as incontrovertible facts. If you just said things like (to use your example) “I think polyamorous people are immature” and let it go at that, it wouldn’t be so annoying. But whenever another poster quotes you and disagrees with your opinion you jump in and either repeat your original statement, as if by constant repetition you will convince them that your opinion is the only right one, or say that they are wrong, because you know that you are right.
That’s not what they said. They were just suspicious. Olives was posting about a sensitive subject and they didn’t want to think they were being manipulated. It wasn’t “she’s a liar, call her out.” It was “these posts don’t add up, but I’m afraid to ask her about it.” These were posters who were generally pretty uncombative and innocuous. MPSIMS types who wanted to be supportive but were afraid they might be getting jerked around. It wasn’t some kind of sneaky smear campaign. They were legitimately concerned about being manipulated.
Once again, this was on the heels of the Kaitlyn thing as well as a couple of other highly suspicious threads. I agreed to ask the question because I thought it was fair, and because one more pile up for me wasn’t going to make any difference. I don’t crave them, but I thought the question was fair enough that it wouldn’t be too bad.
I doubt that you’re lying about it, and I don’t think it makes you a hero.
I do think it makes the people who are afraid to be upfront with their opinions and doubts pathetic.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are lots of reasons for not getting involved in an internet argument and “it’s just not worth it” is a very valid one. Even a “Huh, have you noticed this?” is fine.
But in the case of olives, if someone is too childish and cowardly to just come out and say, “Hey, olives, this seems contradictory. What’s up?” and then to go to you to satisfy either their curiosity or their desire to stir up shit, then those people are repulsive and creepy.
And, frankly, you should have told them to go fuck themselves.
Okay. And actually, your post describing how it went down doesn’t bother me. I know I’ve done stuff like that before, a PM that says, “Did you notice this? Am I crazy?”
Repulsiveness, creepiness, and various aspects of shittiness as far as stirring it, getting in it, or whatever they do with it is a big Internet attraction for certain elements of the general population.
Just stating a potentially relevant and/or overlooked fact in this somewhat amusing discourse.
But if twenty posters just come in to say “You’re wrong! Nyah!” what responsibility do they have to fucking pay attention and know that it’s already been said?
Diogenes isn’t forcing other people to lose the plot. There are people on this board who will avoid confrontation except when they think it’s something easy, and so you get massive pile-ons of Diogenes and his unpopular opinions (and yes, it has a lot to do with the nature of his opinions, not just his style or tone). It’s like some posters are reading various things and then see Diogenes say something that a few people have already taken exception to and their little brains go, “Oooh, I can disagree with HIM. This is safe!”
Note that I’m in no way saying everyone who disagrees with Diogenes is like this. He can be a frustrating poster. But I sometimes think it would be better to have ten of him, just to show that you can’t get around being frustrated by having someone banned. You have to change the way you react.
If there were ten of him, all with their own pet crazy-making topics, I would leave this message board. You could make a good point that this would indeed be changing the way I reacted, so maybe you are on to something there. But IMO this is similar to Olives’ “He was such an ass to me but I learned something from him!” thing. The fact that he is an ass and deliberately obnoxious to people does not count as some kind of unique learning experience for the rest of us. Believe it or not, I have spent my fair share of time having to deal with obnoxious asses in my lifetime. I do not feel the need to seek out further exposure to obnoxious asses in my Internet leisure time just so that I can experience self-growth as a result.
Incidentally, the reason that “A lot of people share my opinion and I know that because they sent me PMs but I can’t tell you who any of them are!” is a bullshit Internet argument that is generally mocked is because 1) it’s insanely easy to just lie and make it up, and 2) even if you don’t make it up, who cares? When I’m participating in a thread, I’m talking to the other posters in the thread, not to the invisible people that may or may not have sent one of the other posters a PM. If you can’t make your point without resorting to talking about all of your silent nameless supporters, then you have a shit argument.
This isn’t about you seeking it out, or about your self-growth at all. It’s about the board being able to tolerate different personalities. I mean, your self-growth is probably a good goal, and I like you as a poster, but you aren’t actually my prime concern here. I am!
Has Diogenes’s posting actually changed, or are so many more people riled up and aware of it and willing to attempt pile-ons because they think it’s kind of the in-thing with the current board culture? I’d suggest it’s probably the latter. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression, that people want Diogenes to be an ass and want to be part of the trainwrecks and want to be part of the crowd yammering for his head because they think it’s fun.
I very much agree with this post, especially the part I bolded. In fact, I would say that Bricker is the worst out of the bunch because he presents himself as an ‘expert’ and sometimes belatedly recants but only after several pages and with his misinformation successfully distributed. SA, Sam Stone and Dio (on his hot topics) are not taken seriously.
OTOH, if Dio is making shit up even on topics in which he’s respected (bible scholarship), well that’s just as bad as Bricker, IMO. I actually like reading his bible posts but now I don’t know if I can trust those either.
Also, having to close a thread every time someone tries to discuss one of Dio’s hot topics is unfair to the thread participants. If it happens too frequently, certain topics will no longer be able to be discussed. Mods should think about that.
This is an excellent point and the only real negative of the last several months of “Dio Show” nonsense for me. I very much value his input on those topics, but I have noticed that he appears equally confident about Bible issues as he is about highway laws. The fact that I now feel a moment’s pause on the former is the true sadness in all this for me.
ETA: Hentor, I would feel the same way, but I already know that I have to research what folks say. As soon as he said ‘a burning hell isn’t biblical’ I hit the ground running trying to find support for that statement from trusted sources. I did find plenty of evidence that he is correct.
