It’s kinda like The Anvil Chorus, but more amusing.
Irony. Maybe they need a safe space?
Not exactly. Acknowledging when you’re wrong is a way of showing integrity.
Once, when I was playing a horror one-shot at a game day, I made a character who was truly loathsome–a sociopath whose back story read like a cheap thriller. At one point I apologized to another player, in character, and the GM laughed and said, “Worst Apology EVAR,” and I agreed.
Until now.
If your apology contains a negation phrase describing what you’ve done (“brief bit”), and follows up by admitting you have no intention of changing the offending behavior, because it’s too much work, that’s no apology. That’s a doubling-down.
If you think your behavior’s appropriate, don’t apologize. If you think it’s not, don’t double down. But fake-apologizing and doubling down at the same time is not good behavior.
Who told you you were on the good side? Are you always so sure that you’re on the side of good? Actually, strike that, of course you are. That’s what makes you so fucking annoying.
There’s a thread now in MPSIMS about that case where a woman was convicted of using text messages to convince a mentally unstable young man to kill himself. Needless to say this is controversial. On the one hand she did send a long manipulative string of texts, including some urging him to continue when he was backing out of it. On the other hand she wasn’t physically there, and the young man died by his own hand. On the one hand, she was convicted. On the other, it’s perfectly valid to disagree with a law or to hold that it was wrongly applied.
So it’s possible for reasonable people to disagree. It’s also possible to hold that the woman did a terrible thing and that the death is tragic while at the same time holding that no crime was committed.
But not in BigT land.
No, everyone who disagrees with him is evil. They aren’t just wrong. They don’t just hold a different opinion. They are evil and he is good and may God forgive us for not heeding the words of BigT.
BigT is far from the worst poster on this board. But his self-declared position as arbiter of good and evil makes him the most annoying. Not enraging but just annoying. It’s like being barked and growled at by a shih tzu. It isn’t threatening, it might even be cute, but it’s irritating when you’re trying to watch TV or something. I’ll never put him on ignore, because he sometimes makes a good point, but I’m worried about straining my eyes from all the rolling.
If I may piggyback on this: it’s possible to take morality seriously, and to try to be right in every moral decision, and also to do so admitting you might be wrong.
Bricker and I have disagreements. They’re sometimes pretty vociferous. They’re sometimes literally about matters of life and death: he considers my pro-choice position to enable the killing of babies, I consider his anti-ACA position to enable the killing of poor people.
Dialog with him is useful, though, for a variety of reasons:
- Maybe I can persuade him to change his mind.
- Maybe he can persuade me to change my mind.
- Even if no persuasion happens, it’s important that each of us has the opportunity to understand the underlying principles and logical structure that leads each other to their moral conclusions.
Folks are counseling humility. Humility doesn’t mean you don’t take moral positions. You can still take them; but understand that other folks can reach entirely different conclusions yet still be taking moral positions, and understand further that their logic, information, and experiences MAY actually lead to better conclusions than yours.
My take, anyway :).
And that’s another thing – just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re immoral, or bad. I think sometimes BigT you make the mistake of seeing everything in terms of black or white. Everything is either good or bad. People are rarely like that.
Actually looking up at my last post, that was a bit harsh, Pit and all. I don’t hate you, BigT I just find your assertions of moral superiority very annoying.
Why are you so angry all the time?
This is pretty much how I feel.
I’ll add that IMHO a big part of what makes BigT so annoying is that his constant moralizing doesn’t seem to be rooted in real experience, serious contemplation, or even deeply-held belief. I don’t think he’s a troll, he probably does believe that whatever he’s saying is correct, but I don’t think he’s saying it because he really cares about the message or wants to help others. He’s repeatedly been described as “sanctimonious” in this thread, and I think that’s exactly the right word for him. He’s here to put on a performance of morality, whether we want to watch it or not.
I do wish people would stop saying “Shut up, BigTard” to him, but only because the nickname is nasty and juvenile. The “shut up” part is usually well-deserved.
Yes talk about sanctimonious and self-obsessed.
I wanna be clear–you’re the “taxation is theft” guy, who regularly accuses people of warmongering for supporting either major American political party, right? Just wanna make sure I’m remembering who’s accusing people of sanctimony :).
Wrong thread. You’re looking for one where there’s a pile-on already in progress that yo can join, humpy.
Da’hell is your problem?
It’s futile asking someone what their problem is if they don’t even admit they have a problem.
How do you feel about "Shut up, BigTurd instead? At least that’s not offensive to people who are mentally disabled.
Okay. I agree there are way worse posters in the world, but there’s substance to the OP’s complaint, and it’s not just coming from people trying to be bullies. Being on the receiving end of a BigT lecture is annoying as fuck. My first encounter with him (years ago? I’m old) was when he was getting steamrolled in the Pit for trying to get everyone to get along, which I sort of get, because I sort of do myself when people are obviously talking at cross-purposes. So I had, and still have, sympathy because the Dope (the Pit in particular) are rough places when you’re a sensitive soul. When you’re sensitive AND pretty open about your life, you learn the hard way that some people won’t hesitate to use your greatest weaknesses against you.
After ten years here I’ve become innured to a lot of it, but I think BigT is still coming along in the process. He’s past worrying what people think about him but still stuck in the belief that he’s supposed to correct every wrong (which will kill ya, buddy, take it from me.) He seems to be caught up in this self-created hell of Always Having to Be Good, which means pontificating a lot on the internet to reinforce his moral worth to himself. I’ve been there, so I can only be so judgy from that angle. If my assessment is correct, it’s way deeper than just trying to look superior, it’s trying to be superior.
I’ve always joked that I have imposter syndrome for morality. It’s not really a joke. For many years I was plagued by feelings of moral inferiority and it was a lot of work to talk myself into believing I was a worthwhile person. I wasn’t trying to convince other people, I was trying to convince myself. Aaaaany minute now people will begin to realize what a selfish asshole I am, unless I force myself to be as morally good as humanly possible…
Well, you get the idea. I suspect BigT is suffering from the same affliction.
There is a path out, a kind of ‘‘asshole exposure therapy’’ if you will, in which you have to learn to lighten up and let yourself be kind of a jerk sometimes. Not like a full-out flaming jerk, but BigT, I complained about you in the Trolls R Us thread a couple weeks ago, and some people might call me a bully for that, but that’s part of the treatment. Shit, I even put two people on ignore this year! I had to violate my own self-imposed rules a little bit. Give it a shot and see how it goes. Say something kinda snarky on the internet, DON’T stop in traffic to let someone in front of you, give work your honest ‘‘B’’ effort instead of A+, and you will learn that the world does not end when you stop trying to be perfect.
#policelivesmatter
#notalltones
This is absolute truth. I left social media at least in part because lecturing on the internet seemed to satisfy the part of me that felt compelled to act to make a difference in the world. This is called the halo effect, and is a real phenomenon. Once we’ve expressed outrage, we’ve mentally excused ourselves from doing anything else about it. I was also tired of other people lecturing at me. The funny thing is, now that I’m off Facebook I do no more good for the world than I did before, but at least now I don’t feel like as much of a hypocrite. 
Speak for yourself. Those little fuckers scare the shit out of me.
+1 for this piece of brilliance. What you’re describing there is the ideal. If more people strove toward that ideal as opposed to perfect self-righteousness, this world would be a lot less crazy.
Yes civil society is at stake when wholesale slaughter is viewed as bipartisan moderation.
Vs.
Civil society is at stake because poor rednecks who own and live out of their two pump gas station are permitted to discriminate against Black folk.
Well, then.
Better to use a chalkboard, so you can pause pregnantly and sweep the room with your glare before you X out the latter and draw vigorous circles around the former.
Thanks. I should say, on the off chance there’s someone it’s not crystal fuckin clear to, that I don’t come close to living up to the ideal of civil disagreement all the time. It’s what I aim for, but despite my atheism I’ve got got the Presbyterian mindset I was raised in, and I know I’m a sinner :).
None of us totally live up to it. But at least some of us bother to try. I remember early in 2016 when people first started freaking out about Trump’s election, I made my peace with it quite early on. The way I put it is, I know who I am, and what I feel I must do, and Trump’s election would change none of those things. I’m pissed off about it, sure, but not existentially threatened like many seem to be.
One of my dearest friends is a Presbyterian minister and he’s pretty fucking chill. Like, ‘‘Hey, let’s play Dungeons and Dragons, or, if you’re not up to it, talk endlessly about Quentin Tarantino movies, Star Trek, or Cthulhu’’ chill. We talk a lot of politics too. As an atheist myself, I admit I wouldn’t have guessed we could have so much in common. But as a moderate conservative, he’s been somewhat instructional on this method of human interaction. The way he put it is, as he gets older, he’s become more certain about what he believes but less concerned with making everyone agree with him. We talked about his love for pop culture and how it clashes with the stereotype of the stodgy religious person who avoids all things secular. He said his methodology isn’t to shun culture, nor to impose his will upon it, but to transform it from within. That is not unlike a lot of social justice perspectives I’ve read on systems change within communities. So even there we have something in common.