Well, the ATMB thread “Moderation of citations and breaking links” seemed to have reached a satisfactory conclusion, with everyone venting and giving their opinions and the mod admitting their mistake. And then @DrDeth shows up to demand “cites” that are clearly impossible, and thereby shit all over it in the manner of the classic sea lion. DrDeth showing up in any thread is about as welcome as sitting down with a refreshing summer drink and suddenly finding a cockroach in it. Has he ever made a constructive contribution to anything? (That’s purely a rhetorical question.)
I would argue he constructively contributes to every thread he doesn’t post in.
Was mordecai referring to the flounce by our late resident transphobe sisters, or was it something else?
I don’t know who he was referring to specifically, but he said they were “long-time posters”. I think the implication was that we’ve been losing valued posters, not trolls. That’s kind of the undercurrent of that whole thread.
How about fish might not be animals?
I remember that thread. Not being all that familiar with DrDeth, I’m shocked and disappointed that he would exaggerate his father’s role to that extent.
He might be confused (what else is new?) by the religiously motivated rationalization that Catholics once indulged in, which held that fish was not meat. This then became distorted by ignoramuses like him into the myth that some believed fish were not animals.
Alternatively, since he’s a raving gun nut, he might naturally perceive the essential nature of “an animal” … pardon me, “a animal” … as “a thing that you kill with a gun”. Fish are not shot with a gun; ergo, they are not animals.
In any case, I notice that he flounced from that thread after being asked twice for a cite.
I’m going to stick up for them for a little on this. “Flounce” has always been used for posters that huffily and very publicly announced they were leaving forever (and nine times out of ten then usually quietly returned a little while later). They didn’t do that - they just quietly walked, maybe for awhile, maybe forever.
I didn’t agree with them on the topic and I really wish they could have moderated the misgendering in particular (I understand why philosophically that was a problem for at least one of them). But they were both otherwise pretty good posters and I think it is really unfortunate that that this ended up being a breaking point. YMMV of course.
Also for whatever it is worth I think there was some clear daylight between their respective positions.
Yeah, my mileage varies. I think they got cut way too much slack because they aren’t White males. I’m sure they are quite lovely people aside from their TERF bullshit… no, this isn’t like having some blind spot about the virtues of Star Wars vs Star Trek or something. They were leading the charge in making this place hostile for trans people, much more insidious and persistent than the conservative transphobes. Good riddance.
They were some of my favorites until the TERF thing came to light. Really disappointing.
Makes sense. Cats spend most of their waking hours glaring at everything with contempt, anyway.
YWTF didn’t say anything, but monstro opened an ATMB thread to defend her, said she was thinking about leaving over it, and then flipped out completely when someone called her out—in a way I’ve never seen her respond before.
Thing is, monstro had previously said she accepted that trans women were women. Her issue was just that she had trouble accepting trans women who choose not to present as female. But, even then, she said she’d use the correct pronouns because she didn’t want to hurt them.
No, what seemed to happen is that monstro went off defending her sister, being willfully blind about what she was saying. She couldn’t accept in that ATMB thread that YWTF had been coming off as a raging transphobe, and even tried to defend her as saying that YWTF doesn’t understand the idea of needing to be sensitive to other people’s feelings (something that didn’t align with my previous interactions with her before she went all TERF).
It was bizarre. I’d never seen monstro respond that way in her entire tenure here. Sure, the poster wasn’t exactly nice to her, but she’d never acted so hurt before when people were mean. Then again, YWTF going TERF was also bizarre. Nothing about her previous posting suggested she’d go that way, and I’m pretty sure she had been perfectly polite to trans posters before then.
It really did feel like the situation where your older relatives become Fox News junkies. It’s just such a reversal of values.
Sorry to talk about them and not the subject of this thread, but I never really got a chance to express my bewilderment at monstro’s reactions. It really feels like she started leaning TERF to defend her TERFy sister.
Fans of DrDeth may enjoy this thread which is increasingly becoming a clusterfuck thanks to his influence.
The thread is about the ethics of meat-eating, and his point has been that a vegan diet results in just as much animal suffering as a meat based one, because agricultural land uses pesticides that kill many insects and land clearance that may kill gophers etc.
He has flat out ignored most counter-arguments, and instead is now suggesting the burden of proof is on me to show that his assertion is false.
DrDeth, you are a very badly-written bot. Prove us wrong without a shadow of a doubt or we have to conclude that to be the case.
I just noticed the way that I phrased it here the assertion seems reasonable.
What I mean is, he has asserted that 1) A vegan diet will result in many more insects, gophers etc dying than a meat + vegetable diet. and 2) The suffering of many insects is equivalent to the suffering of a small number of mammals or birds.
And is trying to suggest the burden of proof is on me to prove those assertions wrong, rather than him presenting any data to support anything he’s said.
@BigT, thanks for that backgrounder. I thought I spent way too much time in this place, but that particular bit of drama had totally escaped my notice.
@Mijin, no surprise there. As I said earlier, DrDeth showing up in a thread is about as welcome as a cockroach in a nice summer drink. But I’ve stayed the hell out of that meat-eating ethics thread. I’m by no means a vegetarian but I have strong feelings about animal welfare and some of the comments there seem intentionally provocative. I’m sure DrDeth’s contributions will help things along very nicely! 
How stupid can he possibly get? Let’s pretend he is right, and growing veggies causes tons of animal suffering to insects and gophers and whatever. What the fuck does he think the animals in the factory farms are eating? They eat crops that get grown using these same sorts of techniques and which require more land than an equivalent number of calories of veggies would, as anyone with an elementary school understanding of trophic levels would understand.
But I guess anyone with an elementary school education would also know the difference between “an” and “a”…
MMVaries. Then again, YWTF didn’t call you a wife-beater just for disagreeing with her.
Well by all means join the fun.
I’m not sure I am doing a great job. I mean, I can recognize bad faith arguments by DrDeth: attempting to shift the burden of proof, countless deflections and just plain ignoring arguments he can’t respond to…
but I am no expert on US farming.
Yeah, for years I’ve seen monstro being a great poster–smart, witty, compassionate, self-reflective–and ywtf being not so great, saying dumb things and defending them far past reason.
That’d be a hard place to be in, as a sibling. I definitely understand why monstro didn’t like hearing her sister get dumped on. But her sister often earned the dumping, and definitely did so in the transgender threads.
I’m not saddened to see ywtf go, but I’m saddened to see monstro go.