Of course it matters. It’s literally the main difference between a troll and a doomer.
I personally vote “doomer”, but I think the unhinged catastrophist rap is more-or-less sincere, even when it seems susceptible to being spurred into ever-dizzier heights of hyperbole.
Der_Trihs kinda scares me.
He definitely has the bug in the butt sensibility.
This really is a very good point. Most of the time I just skip his posts in recent years, and because he does the above, that is pretty easy to do. He makes no effort to, nor incites, making a thread be all about him.
So we do it for him. What’s the difference?
Being there’s about 5 pit threads for this poster.
For a long while I found him almost intolerable. More recently, he seemed to have lightened up quite a bit and I wondered if he’d gotten a serious mod smackdown or maybe found some more effective meds. Lately he seems to have reverted back to Debbie Downer on steroids and I’ve had more than enough of that.
I assume I read and watch most of the same stuff as he and the other Eeyores here. I read about small victories every day and it goes a long way to helping me keep my hope alive. Then I come here and feel awful again. Misery may love company, but as far as I’m concerned, misery and the folks that wallow in it can take a hike.
He isn’t wrong about abortion though.
Abortion is a divisive issue in American politics. Studies analyzing attitudes toward abortion have found that abortion attitudes are relatively stable over time compared with attitudes on other issues and that religiosity and partisanship are key factors influencing abortion attitudes. Recent research has also found a role for benevolent sexism in abortion attitudes. This article expands on the literature and examines the role of hostile sexism—dislike toward women who are seen as usurping men’s authority—in attitudes about abortion in the United States. Using data from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Studies, we find that hostile sexism is significantly related to abortion attitudes, even after controlling for theoretically relevant covariates such as partisanship, ideology, religiosity, and sociodemographic variables. As hostile sexism increases, people are more likely to express pro-life attitudes rather than pro-choice attitudes.
‘Benevolent’ sexism is the idea that women are incompetent and need to be led and protected.
Hostile sexism is open contempt, disdain and anger for women. It seems to strongly correlate to pro-life positions.
Having said that, I do think Der-Trihs sees sadism as a motivator when it isn’t. A lot of the evil in the world is more due to indifference than intentional sadism.
The dark triad talks about psychopathy, narcissism and machiavellianism as underlying a lot of destructive human behavior.
There is also the dark tetrad, which is just the dark triad + sadism. But most of the evil in teh world generally isn’t sadistic. Its just pathologically self centered people not caring who gets hurt.
So many hyperbolic posts in the war and ICE threads, and this little truth nugget is what he gets pitted for?
Yes, misogyny is absolutely at the heart of the anti-abortion side.
Have any of you actually done any work at or around abortion clinics? Even here, where it’s long been established as a constitutional right, protesters outside clinics say (shout, actually) the most vile shit - while holding up Bible verses. I can only imagine it’s much, much worse in a country like the US.
I’ll also point out that he said nothing about cabals in his post. He’s not alleging a conspiracy theory, just pointing out the not-so-secret motivation of these people. Or does no-one here remember “Your body, my choice. Forever”?
I could really just quote the entirety of both of @Spice_Weasel’s posts and just add a thumbs up. This is exactly how I view DT these days.
Some 20 odd years ago when I was reading his posts for the first time I do have to confess I interpreted his stances as being at least somewhat unhinged. Or engaging in hyperbole for the sake of making a point. I still think there’s some of that there perhaps, but when I think about how the right wing in the United States has descended into unabashed white supremacy, sexism, sadism and just pure chaos since that time, I can’t disagree with a lot of what he says based on first principles. A lot of the worst elements of the American psyche has coalesced around not just a particular political party, but around a single individual at this point. And I say that perfectly aware of the fact that he’s not the only one pulling the levers of power at this point.
I also want to add a +1 to those who have made the observation that DT doesn’t hijack threads. He comes in, he makes his point in his very unique way, and then skedaddles off. You never have to doubt where he stands on an issue, but he also doesn’t make a scene of it for days on end. We have a lot of posters on this board, people I like as well as people I disagree with, that get into pissing contests. That take disagreement as some sort of personal insult. He doesn’t do that. It makes it easy to skip past this posts if they don’t speak to you.
Does he come off as The Boy Who Cried Wolf sometimes? Sure that’s fair. But from what I can see the wolves really are here now. He just saw it before I did.
Or yesterday:
A Tennessee House panel rejected legislation Tuesday that would have allowed doctors to end a pregnancy to save the life of the mother without facing criminal charges.
These unbelievably backward yokels are straight out of the 17th century. It’s hard to believe they inhabit the same planet as the rest of us in the 21st.
So it’s really hard not to attribute their motives to what Der Tris was going on about. True, I’m guessing most people who are anti-abortion aren’t this bad, but evidently over half of Tennessee is.
So I’ve been reading what Der Trihs has wrote for 25 years and I’ve got a confident read on him.
His extremism is not performative. He genuinely thinks everything he says.
He’s usually on the correct side of almost every issue he weighs in on, but he’s got pathological black and white thinking. Everything is the most evil it can possibly be, no nuance. I’ve never seen any nuance from him from 25 years of posting.
Sometimes his lack of nuance is justified. Religion is nonsense. We almost always soften our criticism of religion because it’s a big social institution and it influences the way we talk, but about religious beliefs his extremist, un-nuanced views are absolutely correct. The public gets this wrong by pretending that religious beliefs are somehow more sacred or beyond scrutiny than belief in leprechauns. However, he will then follow them up with other absolute views like that every single person who follows a religion is pure evil, and that is obviously not correct. It’s not like he understands the nuance involved in this issue, it’s just that some things ARE black and white, but they’re rare. And he has no idea how to tell the difference.
He’s the sort of person that you don’t want on your side because he alienates people far more than he persuades. He damages every cause he participates in because of his unyielding extremity.
He often overshoots where the general public undershoots so sometimes he ends up closer to the truth than they are, but always overshoots it. For instance, he calls out basically every MAGA as being motivated by pure evil. The public tends to think republicans are just people with different opinions that are just as valid and they want what’s best for everyone just like anyone else. In that case, Der Trihs’ extremism ends up being closer to the mark than the general public (that they are closer to pure evil than good faith actors) but both sides are wrong on that one.
The abortion issue is a good example of how he works. Pro-life/anti-choice/anti-abortion, whatever you want to call it - some of those are good people that genuinely think abortion is a form of murder or something murder adjacent and want it to stop and they’re acting in good faith. Their motivations are more genuine than misogynistic. It’s a minority - if I had to guess, 20%. Der Trihs’ lack of nuance completely misses these people. Most of them are more malicious and more misogynistic and more relevantly, sex negative (but usually only towards women). Their motivations aren’t pure at all. They believe that sex outside of marriage is wrong, or at least that women who have casual sex are evil, and that sexually liberated women are wrong/evil (there are various reasons for them believing this), and that pregnancy is punishment for their behavior. Abortion, to them, is a shortcut/cheat for getting out of their punishment and so they oppose it. I would personally guess that this covers 60-70% of anti-abortion people in the US. They are pretty close to evil on this issue.
Oh, and how can you tell which is which? It’s easy. Which ones oppose the use of birth control? If you wanted to reduce the number of abortions, you’d start by reducing the amount of unwanted pregnancies. You’d support sex education in schools. A genuine “abortion is murder” believer is fine and even pro birth control. They want unwanted pregnancies to be prevented. The “sluts need to take their punishment” kinds are against birth control and sex ed, because birth control is just another “cheat” out of their punishment for having sex, and sex ed cuts into the stigma they want to inflict on society.
He’s a little crazy. He’s often on the right side of an issue but never gets the nuance right and always overshoots the truth. It’s not schizophrenia or anything like that, it’s severe black and white thinking.
I think that’s a good take in general, but it’s also what I find most galling—not the extremism of his views (I’ve been to the internet, this isn’t that shocking) but the fact that he’s an absolutely unrepentant dogmatist who can’t seriously entertain the idea of giving even an inch on any of his convictions who thinks all of the evil in this world comes from absolutely unrepentant dogmatists who can’t seriously entertain the idea of giving even an inch on any of their convictions. Even where I agree with him I think he’s the prime example of a bad argument for a cause hurting it more than a good argument against it.
I’ve always had this feeling about anyone who screams and rants at things happening in the world are usually involved in the very behavior in some way.
It’s like the guy who screams about those “gays” and is actually a closeted homosexual.
I very much doubt Der Trihs is a secret republican. Maybe you could make a case for horse shoe theory.
I hear this theory a lot but don’t see the logic of it. I don’t think that most Yankees fans, for instance, are secretly closeted Red Sox fans. They genuinely support the Yankees.
But I agree with the others that Spice Weasel is pretty much spot-on. Most of the things Der Trihs says have some or a lot of truth to them. It’s just that it’s rather screamed and shrill.
This isn’t the stuff that bothers me from Der_Trihs. He’s not right, but he’s not wrong either. These people exist. And ultimately, for all who stay pro-life, it doesn’t seem to matter what the Bible says about abortion or what early Christians believed. And the fact that women are suffering and dying doesn’t dissuade them. It is an identity marker, and that matters more.
He does sometimes say some actual misogynist things, usually along the men’s rights spectrum of it. That pisses me off.
As for his other strong beliefs? I just kinda find them tame these days. Like, no, he’s not right. He lacks nuance. But I find him less frustrating than those who insist on downplaying things. Or, conversely, those who just seem to be trying to drag everyone down and discourage fighting.
There’s a recognition of how bad things are, and an anger that seems to triumph over despair.
To be fair to the stuffed donkey, Eeyore is one of my favorite characters in “The Wind in the Willows”.
Blast that overely enthusiastic Tigger and the always amiable Pooh!
Grumpy old donkey is the winner in that series of books, though, of course, he would find a way to regret that.
Only on the Dope has it never occurred to anyone that the antiabortion movement is based on misogyny.
That’s a good point. I would not get on board with saying that pro-lifers sit around thinking of ways to torture women, because that’s probably not true. But they honestly seem to delight in wielding the power to ruin womens’ lives and health in order to enforce a puritanical code of sexual morality.
If they do relish the thrill of being the judge, jury, and executioner for a woman’s health and future, then honestly I’m not sure if there’s a huge amount of daylight between that and just being someone who enjoys inflicting cruelty on women like a kid pulls the wings off flies. Inflicting cruelty may not be the ultimate goal of their actions, but that willingness and comfort with it is definitely a prerequisite. And I do think there’s value in not sugarcoating that reality. They enjoy hurting people to achieve their aims. It feels empowering.
But I will agree that it becomes a tiresome one-note samba for Der Trihs to swoop into every thread to crush every dimension of nuance down to “they want to throw you into a blender and drink your pureed organs as a smoothie because they are ghouls who feed off the sustenance of others.” Yes it’s a useful rhetorical device, yes it’s often sort of true, but it’s very reductive and distracting in any discussion where there’s some scope for nuance or exploration.