I agree that it should be closed. When DT responded to my “Who exactly are these people?” by debating the issue again rather than just giving a list of poster names or such, I reported her post. A mod explicitly told us to stop debating the issue in the ATMB thread.
And now we’ve gotten our wish. After a false start stoppage as reported by @DavidNRockies.
Probably permanently this second time, but it just happened a moment ago, so we’ll have to wait and see.
It is a mess and I know the only Moderator for ATMB is busy currently, so I am overstepping a bit with the Modnote earlier and now closing it until he has chance to review.
As I mentioned, we’re now close to making a consensus decision on @Aspidistra. Please don’t discuss moderation here and please wait for the decision to come. In other words, please DNFTT. Starting the thread was OK, but it went sideways fast.
One poster drove it that way. Before then, it was doing its job of letting the mods know some posters’ feelings on over-leniency quite well. ETA - I feel this is a meta-comment on posters behaviour in the thread, not on the actual moderation, @Miller
Could driving such threads into the ground and causing them to be shut down be the direct goal of some?
I strongly suspect this is a large part of it. Part is possibly also performative, and another part is the classic sea-lion effort to be super-duper polite in “butter-won’t-melt-in-their-mouth” as they goad people into anger and hope that those people (including some that have posted here and in the sister thread) get notes or warnings.
So yes. Trolling.
Even if the person is fully sincere and not motivated by conscious trollery at all there’s still a problem.
Someone who has a belief injected into them by a propaganda effort like Faux is not a conventional intellect. The belief is like a black box. It is immutable, it is correct, and it is utterly unexplainable or understandable or decomposable by them. They can’t explain it, they just know it; and they know it is absolutely incontrovertibly true. Kinda like the ancients thought matter was indivisible so a hunk of e.g. iron was iron all the way down. What else could it be down there? The only thing they can do with a magic injected belief is repeat it. And repeat it, and repeat it.
It became self-evidently true to them by being repeated until their logical mind gave up and accepted and incorporated this immutable meme-virus into itself. The virus gained a home and that mind lost the ability to think at all on that topic. It can’t think; it knows.
A person / belief like that is, of necessity, a one-trick pony when they encounter an actual-facts-and-logic-required situation like what we have around here.
- They can repeat their fantasy beliefs mindlessly but politely, and we call that “sealioning”.
- Or they can repeat their fantasy beliefs shoutily angrily and we call that “Being a racist / sexist / whatever-ist jerk”.
- Or they can repeat their fantasy beliefs baitingly and we call that “trollery”.
It’s all just repeat repeat repeat. The only thing that changes is the emotional tone icing on the basic repeat cake.
I wanted to repeat this point. Especially in contrast to what I posted immediately prior. For the record, and not that it excuses them, IMHO both Aspidistra and Demontree are sincere in their beliefs, even if I find them completely wrong and abhorrent. I do not mean to suggest that they are trolling by professing feelings they don’t claim. I do suspect, as I said that they are ALSO trolling, by trying to disrupt those threads, by clinging to the tiniest shreds of legitimacy that they can come at from the edges, and are likely getting some emotional enjoyment out of seeing the frustration and anger they generate.
So yes, not trolls in the sense that they are posting beliefs they don’t hold to get an emotional response, YES trolls in that they are actively trying to skirt the rules, and disrupt and shut down threads.
Very possibly a distinction without much merit in terms of results, and we have countless ATMB threads about being sincere in one’s beliefs doesn’t change things, but I wanted to be more clear about my analysis of the posters in question.
[snip, but feel free to read the whole post first tho if you haven’t yet]
I utterly cannot grasp NOT considering an issue from ALL angles, trying different viewpoints and perspectives on for size, and trying to poke holes in my own most dearly-held beliefs. So what is “conventional” if the vast majority of humankind is NOT capable of such rigorous analysis?
I don’t know that they are incapable. I think most are just unwilling. Remember Lek@tt? His belief that near death esperiences were real, proof of an afterlife, and that he had an NDE were central to his life. But, that belief was clearly unexamined. He refused to acknowledge the scientific method as valuable or to even consider any scientific evidence, unless he thought it proved him right. That mentality is sadly quite common. How does the saying go “You cannot free slaves who revere their chains.” ?
Honestly? I’m not sure even this is true. As noted above I think they’re just very, very stubborn about their strongly held beliefs on the topic and cannot not engage. And they think they should have the freedom to do so. It’s tired topic territory like ‘race realists’, but many people hate the very concept of tired topics because the topic isn’t tired to them. Also there is also the unlimited free speech angle.
When I was much younger on this board, I very much fit into “people should be free to discuss anything they want” group. It is only gradually that I realized that maybe that wasn’t such a great idea, particularly when it came to potentially dehumanizing topics. But many, many people never get there and I’m not sure that is so much a moral failing as a clash of world views. “Fairness” (why can’t I talk about what I want?) trumping empathy.
I could be wrong of course, but I think it is a bit of coin flip in this case. Also, perhaps irrelevant because sometimes rules are rules and ‘problematic posters’ are now a thing.
I’m not even sure we’re disagreeing honestly. I don’t think they consider themselves trolling of course, they’re fighting for their POV or freedom to speak their mind. Shutting down a thread, or forcing their POV into the thread despite the rules is a righteous vocation as far as such people are concerned. Again, the whole “fully sincere and not motivated by conscious trollery” in the line I quoted from @LSLGuy above.
But I don’t think it can be argued, given the published TOS, the repeated mod notes, the warnings, and at least a dozen or so ATMB threads that they DON’T know they’re breaking the rules. Just that (very possibly sincerely) they feel the rules shouldn’t apply to THEM. And that, that is trolling. It’s also so very human.
Eh, enough, it’s not our problem, and rightly the mods are figuring out how to thread the needle on open discussion, tired topics, and providing a place where posters of multiple POV can communicate safely.
yeah. Both have answered questions in the past with variations of ‘I cannot answer that as my honest answer would violate the rules.’
The response to which should be ‘Thank you for your non-answer answer, which by it’s construction also clearly breaks the rules, I’ll report your post for you.’
I think this is valid for Aspidistra. But Demontree goes beyond it. Look at the ATMB thread, where she complains about how she can’t discuss transwomen in women’s sports. Multiple posts explain that isn’t the case, even providing an exact example of how to do it.
And she goes right back to the same argument. At some point you have to accept that she isn’t just arguing a deeply held belief; she is being disingenuous and trolling.
I’m not disagreeing. But you named both posters. I thought we avoided doing that in this thread. No linking. No @. No names
That’s valid, but of course you can name the posters who are discussed here, or else we would have very strange conversations where almost nobody knew who we’re talking about.
Oh. oops. I thought we avoided using their names in case they did a search on them.
Never mind.
Oh really? Why pretend? We both know perfectly well what this is about. You want me to have an abortion!
Enough with your red zone crap