The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation
In today’s episode of I’m the troll, and I’m the one with made-up facts, we have this hot follow-up:
“No hope of being reunited”
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/393827-dhs-unveils-plan-to-reunite-immigrant-families
As for this cuteness:
Tripe, insults, personal attacks, etc are considered so unoriginal as to not gain copyright protections, sorry.
Does that word bother you, trumpista? Yes/no? Do you need a safe space? Yes/no?
Also, I explicitly said you should be banned for being a tribalist. Not for the views you hold. That those are apparently one and the same in your mind is just another confirmation of what you are.
The gman account has been closed. I had wanted the closing of the account to be a group decision voted among the moderators where I was the lone dissenting voice, because I was the last hold-out in terms of whether to close the account. But it’s clear to me that it simply can’t remain open, regardless of my own feelings about the matter.
So I’ve closed the gman account based on the simple fact that it’s too disruptive to the community. I’m deeply disappointed the community couldn’t handle this on its own. I’m deeply disappointed this required moderation.
There are Trump supporters out there in the wider world, and we need to learn how and whether to interact with them. We need to acknowledge them as part of the political mainstream. We need to find something other than accusations of racism if we disagree with their politics. We need to realize they will be a fundamental part of social media, because it’s a tool they use frighteningly well. We cannot cede that to them. We furthermore need to figure out how to respond to the right-wing media, which has been meticulously engineered to create a narrative for millions of people.
We had here the opportunity for all these things in a contained environment with a rational person who could take a lot more abuse than anyone I’ve seen online. He had honored the purpose of P&R, which is to firewall contentious discussions from the rest of the site. He had avoided the meltdown anyone else would have had by now in the face of insults. He was a textbook example of modern articulate non-idiot Republicans and how they’re going to talk to people. And most importantly, no one here was in any danger of having his or her mind changed. He was effectively harmless in terms of swaying anyone’s politics. Everything he typed here was something he wasn’t typing somewhere else. Furthermore, how many Trump supporters will acknowledge when they’re wrong? I have no idea, but I know there used to be one on this forum.
Accusations that the forum was somehow tainted by association are unfair. The United States is similarly tainted by association and you don’t have the luxury of demanding that those 50 million-ish people leave. In fact, the world is tainted by association. So that will be true of the entirety of the internet. Facebook, Twitter, the corner of Hyde Park, Quarter to Three. They are forums, not agendas. They will include ideas you disagree with, and maybe even ideas you find reprehensible. We are a medium, not a message.
So anyone who decided to leave (the equivalent of “moving to Canada”) or pronounced the forum toxic or pro-racist has a pretty low opinion of the people who post here and the people who run the site. If you don’t trust that we can absorb the impact of one mostly reasonable guy confining himself to one subforum…well, actually, you were right. I now share your low opinion. What’s going to happen the next time someone supports Trump here? Are you going to raise the same objections and then leave? Are you going to antagonize him until he has a meltdown and leaves the forum? Or are you going to learn to deal with the political reality of the modern world and the resurgence of the right-wing?
A few things to address from the other thread:
On the contrary, this forum has the utmost respect for privacy. When that respect was violated by a mod publicly mentioning the location of an account’s IP address, the mod promised not to access user data any longer. When that mod then accessed user data to Google someone’s real name and harass that person with the fact that he had the information – as far as I know, there were no threats of doxxing – that mod’s admin access was permanently shut down.
Those were definitely failings on my part and I take responsibility. But I’ve done everything I can to make sure they don’t happen again.
I feel very strongly that politics is part of entertainment. Since this is primarily a site about entertainment, it will necessarily involve politics from time to time. The best we can do for people who don’t want to engage in or even see political discussions is to offer a firewalled area, but I still believe it’s an integral part of this community. I wouldn’t close P&R any more than I would close the Games subforum.
I like this idea on the surface and it would be easy to implement. But it would mean P&R’s membership is basically frozen, and I don’t think any of us who post here would want that.
-Tom
You’re a most excellent dude, Tom, but gman had to go. He, like Trump, is a master at generating noise. And that caterwaul consumed every thread he focused his attention on. I’m glad he’s gone.
Yeah, i can’t disagree with the ultimate action, but like Tom I’m disappointed with how things turned out. I think a lot of folks acted poorly, not just gman.
I guess the thing that exacerbated this issue far beyond “Trump supporter gets shouted at” to me, at least (and I may well be wrong, and that’s fine) is that it felt like someone who walked into a yard with a bunch of dogs and bonked each one on the nose and then got upset about all the dogs barking at him…and decided the best way to deal with that wasn’t to let things chill, but rather to go around bonking each dog on the nose again.
That’s probably not the best analogy, but hopefully the bigger point is sorta clear?
At any rate, I know from their posting histories that other folks here who are conservatives and/or Trump supporters and thus are folks I’m going to disagree with on politics actually like a lot of the same movies/music/games that I like. So I know that there are things that we share in common, and that when they post in politics, they’re doing so out of their own beliefs, and not deliberately stirring shit up to stir shit up. Well, at least not more than any of us do on occasion. :) And…the stuff that we share in common we know that even if things get heated, it’s typically out of good faith expression of belief and ideology, and outside of that thread we can agree and get along great.
I think that was the other difference for at least a few of us here.
Your logic on people having to learn to deal with Trump supporters is not wrong, but you might not quite understand how people view this forum. Maybe it’s less of a place to talk to random people, and more of a friendly place, a haven, a place to go for comfort (usually). Not a place to go to have to deal with someone you find abhorrent, even though you really might need that ability in real life.
I forget to add the words “my modest proposal” to signify that I was being facetious, me bad. I actually hate the idea, forums without new members and fresh blood become stale and die.
I share your deep disappointment, and since you are a better writer than I’ll just say ditto as to why it is so disappointing.
The people here are intelligent, mature I find it hard to believe they couldn’t put up with one polite Trump supporter. In hindsight, maybe I should have challenged you all to prove me wrong about this place being an echo chamber.
If you aren’t familiar with Alex Haley Playboy Magazine interview the American Nazi leader. This is worth a read. If Alex could spend several days talking to somebody who called him Nigger and wanted to ship him and all the other blacks back to Africa surely people should be able to put up with Gman on a bloody internet forum.
The right decision was made, finally, but I’ll be very bluntly honest here. I think significantly less of the moderators than I did before this. This was an entirely avoidable situation.
I agree in principal that the forum should be able to tolerate an outspoken Trump supported, but gman was just the wrong person to test this. The forum has handled other people with an amazing compulsion to answer every post made to them while studiously missing the points in those posts, but it couldn’t handle someone who combined this trait with political views that so many feel obligated to refute vigorously. So we can have an obsessive, or we can have a Trump supporter, but an obsessive Trump supporter (who happened to be disingenuous besides) was just too much. I’m sorry this was such a mess.
That’s well said.
My appreciation for the moderators here has gone up, but it’s a shame that we couldn’t find a way to ignore one person.
FWIW, I’m lolbertarian-conservative and just leave folks alone, because it’s, well, the internet… I’m disappointed that some folks let this affect them emotionally and I hope that they can come back. Even gman if he doesn’t go hog wild around the place.
I value and appreciate Tom and the rest of y’all.
Thanks for the eloquent piece, Tom.
-Hal
Well said, Hal.
I’ve stayed out of all the gman threads, but I’ve followed them, frankly because watching a train wreck is fascinating. It amazes me how many people could not resist feeding a clear troll. The guy was pretty damn transparent about it, and I’m not referring his political bent or support of trump. But trolls will be trolls. The more amazing thing was the compulsive behavior of people who professed to just want him gone. He would have been, on his own, if people could have just resisted hitting “reply”.
Don’t be too much of a jerk. Think of the other people in a thread as if they were in the same room with you.
I know everyone probably crosses this line in here at some point. But gman was a habitual line stepper. I don’t think he crossed the line with his views as much as he was looking to fight, not discuss.
It’s not reasonable to expect 100 people to have the same reaction as one person. A hundred people have a hundred different lines that can be crossed, and it only takes one response per post to make trolling worthwhile. That’s why it always works, and that’s why forums need moderators.
There were a large, large number of posters who compulsively responded to the guy, while explicitly saying that he was a troll and that he should leave.