There are tons of good discussions on this board, even in the Pit. You don’t have to take part in the insult-fests unless you want to. You can just scan past them.
Yeah. That’s good advice, which I try to follow. But it gets wearying at times to ignore the large amounts of hostile noise while trying to engage reasonably with the decent signal.
By the way, the purpose of the Pit is a formal recognition that flame wars are inevitable because sometimes people are assholes to each other, and we might as well keep it away from the rest of the people who want to talk rationally. It’s not a failure of the admins so much as a failsafe.
The Pit actually means much more to me than that. Good things can and do happen here. But I can’t promise the same experience for everyone; I’m weird. I like the emotional rawness of this place. It’s like a big lump of amorphous clay to work with. You never know what is going to come out of any given Pit thread, and sometimes you even get some control over the outcome. Look at all the cool shit happening in the SJW thread. That’s how I got to know Darren Garrison, and I like him.
It sounds like you are quite emotionally worked up about your treatment here. And that’s totally fair; I’d be pissed off if people were calling me a Nazi sympathizer also. I don’t think those are warranted accusations. I don’t even think calling you a Trump apologist is warranted, because I’ve never actually seen you mention Trump except in passing throughout this entire week. You seem thoroughly agnostic on Trump, which is baffling but less baffling than those who are clearly apologists.
By the way, I’ve been lied about here, too. Within my first few months on the board I was accused of being a lying troll after I recounted my experience of sexual abuse and the pain of living with PTSD. The guy literally said, ‘‘Fuck you. I don’t believe you’’ because I had dared to mention a positive sexual experience in a different thread. I was emotionally crippled for about three months and it took me five years to forgive the guy who instigated the whole thing. I got over it. Eventually I saw that people here are not one monolithic mob marching in lockstep, it’s just easy to get that impression due to confirmation bias.
People have definitely been unfair to you. But you are not, as the right is so fond of saying, a special snowflake.
It’s not about being a snowflake. It’s aggravation at the hypocrisy. People who advocate violence criminal acts calling others a Nazi or whatever is ridiculous. I can only imagine the source is either mental disability or the inability to be a truthful.
Agnostic about Trump? My feelings about Trump are complicated.
With regards to the Pit? With a terms of service that includes don’t be a jerk and argue civilly I don’t see the necessity of a place where all that can be ignored. Address the facts in GQ. Address the point of the thread or the debate in the other forums. Be respectful. Done.
Now funnily enough, there actually is good discussion in the Pit, but that same good discussion could be held in any of the other forums.
Moron.
I’m not gonna lie. It’s a lot easier to ignore when you’re on the left. I’m more or less in my ideological comfort zone.
Based on who has made the comments, I honestly think the source is people are pissed off because someone just died and Sailboat’s wife was hit by a Nazi terrorist. I don’t think they mean these things; I certainly have never seen any of them advocate violence in the past. I am on the pacifist side of pretty much any issue, but as I mentioned somewhere else recently, I recently read this news story and announced, ‘‘Some people should be set on fire!’’
Not really into vigilante justice or even the death penalty, I was just pissed off.
No, because this is what happens. People will get so heated that they will totally derail a thread by the time a mod gets around to it. This way, when people get pissed off, their default action is not to derail a thread but to start a Pit thread. I think it works pretty well for keeping things on-target elsewhere.
I don’t know. I’d rather know what someone really thinks. It also tells me a lot about a person if they have the freedom to insult me, but choose not to.
Well just seeing it from others quoting it, octopus, instead of complaining about how put upon and how you’re trying to have a decent level of discourse, perhaps you should re-read your own words for the number of times you insult everyone who disagrees with you.
Calling people simple minded, liars, ‘inability to be truthful’, ‘mental disability’. You’re not pure here and all too often you are not a reasonable and rational party. To put it bluntly, you’re an asshole who complains bitterly about how everyone else is a retarded asshole but you.
Then you’re mystified at how so many people tell you to fuck off.
SJW issues aside, the above is a wonderful sentiment.
Again. Another person who can’t read. I engage the topic. I insult the people who insult me. If you don’t insult me then I respond in kind. It’s when people persist in lying is when I respond.
See, you respond with insulting me. I tried to make a point, make you think about it, you insulted me.
Dude, are you Borderline Personality Disorder or something?
Let’s simplify this for you.
Person A: let’s kill all Nazis and Confederate flag carriers.
Octopus: perhaps we should respect freedom of speech?
Person A,B,c,d,e,f,g and 3/4 of the retards on this board: die Nazi scum die. How can you support Nazis. Your a Nazi. Die die die dox die1111!!!
Octopus: supporting free speech makes you a Nazi now?
People above: fuck off snowflake, Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi Nazi, vile Nazi, snowflake
Octopus I see I’m dealing with retards
chimera: why are you insulting those people?
And I’m the crazy one?
Yeah, because 3/4 of the people are not calling you Nazi scum. You’re overgeneralizing based on confirmation bias. And you’re pissing off the people whom you are painting with an overlarge brush. Which, as you know, is quite annoying.
The bottom of it, for me, is that I wouldn’t trust in that mob to not just exercise due diligence in outing Nazis but I wouldn’t trust them to not expand the use of their new found power against people they just don’t like what they are doing, Nazi or not Nazi.
As I pointed out on post #23 that’s how things always play out, Octopus opposes this doxxin mob idea, Chimera sort of implies he is partial to Nazis and White nationalists, next someone picks that up and will call him a Nazi sympathizer, then he becomes a full fledged Nazi and off the mob goes.
You don’t think people will be labeling people Nazis in order to hurt people they don’t like? There are already plenty of examples of exactly that.
The violent reactions against Far Right morons only serve to raise their status and self-validation.
But nooo-ooo, can’t resist feeding the Troll.
What happened in Charlottesvile could had been: bunch of short bus, pro-inbreeding social rejects march to express how hateful and stupid they are, vast majority of people mutter “fucking retards” and move on; now on to the weather. But no, one dead, many injured instead.
Well, done. :smack:
Some people had been chomping at the bit to crack open heads on their opposite camp, and at every step we see this reactions that play wonderfully in their hands. It’s bloody aggravating to feel like Cassandra, to see how things will play out and then see them coming true.
I do think that, which is one of the main reasons I oppose it. Just had a long discussion about this with Sr. Weasel (not doxxing per se, just the dynamics in the US right now.) We’re setting up a dangerous dynamic in this country right now. An overtly racist, ideologically violent alt-right and its many apologists, supported by a populist President, vs. the self-cannibalizing, increasingly radicalized left. I specifically addressed the dynamic I’m seeing on this board, of free-speech advocates, however tone-deaf and obnoxious, being labeled Nazi sympathizers. And then there are those of us stuck in the middle trying to make sense of it all. And most people on this board are infinitely more reasonable than the average bear.
I’m young, okay, I’ll give me that, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. I’ve never seen a dynamic like this, this pronounced, I’ve never seen what blind populism looks like, I’ve never seen actual Nazis advocating the death of black people and Jews - basically, if you watch the VICE documentary, they are clearly saying, ‘‘We’re not being violent right now, because there are too few of us, but once we have the numbers we will exterminate the vermin.’’ I’ve never seen that, and I’ve never seen such a rapid radicalization within my own camp, a swing toward, if not outright violence, an intolerance for dissent (I’m not talking about Nazism, I’m talking about ‘‘hey let’s not punch Nazis because violence is wrong.’’) We’ve got people on the right and left showing up to these events ready to do violence, we’ve got white supremacists who have been clamoring for war for decades, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m someone’s enemy. I’m getting fucking nervous, okay?
I don’t even have a real opinion. I don’t understand what the fuck is going on. I have no point of reference for this political climate whatsoever.
As Sr. Weasel said, ‘‘Maybe this is what reasonable people felt like in the 1960s.’’ I said, ‘‘I hope it is reminiscent of the 1960s and not the 1860s.’’
I’m trying to avoid hysterical hand-wringing as much as possible, but I just don’t understand what’s happening.
There’s one thing I’m quite certain of, fighting hate with hate is a stupid way to act.
Maybe this guy is unto something?
How many “Bash-the-Fash” reactionaries do you think have convinced Nazis and Racist of being more tolerant of other people? If anything, IMHO, they breed and feed them; and vice-versa, of course.
I had a friend in high-school, one day I went to see him at his home and he had a large Nazi flag hung against the wall, he was buying into Nazism; he is still my friend now and he is certainly well to the right of the spectrum, but for example straight-he today often voices his support and defense of LGBT people instead of support for Nazism.
I don’t know how he would be today if instead I had punched him in the face when I saw that flag and all his friends (except any who would approve of Nazism) would have ostracized him, but I know that more likely than not if you turn someone into a pariah only to be accepted by people who share one particular antisocial ideology that is a recipe for radicalization.
I would suggest that (a) you’re just now seeing beliefs that have always existed, (b) that your statement above seems to me to explain what you see as “radicalization” on the left, and (c) that you probably underestimate the extent to which the leftists you disagree with feel that racism and Nazism are an ongoing, powerful, and direct existential threat to them.
ETA: (d) There are very few to any fictional properties I can think of with Nazis that advocate reasonable dialogue and non violence towards them, and many many that involve punching them. 
“Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.”
That is either a very uninformed view of what happened in Charlottesville, or stunningly naive. They never intended to play nice and they didn’t, regardless of the counter-protesters.