It all makes sense if they attended the same undergrad and had the same rhetoric professors at the same time and if they also attended the same law school and had the same legal writing professors at the same time. I mean, it could have happened that way.
I don’t agree with everything Fishbreath posted, but this is a key statement - I probably don’t even qualify as “conservative” by US standards but I definately feel the same hostility whenever I deviate from the US liberal consensus.
Yep! I can see where the rage is coming from. Trump and the whole movement surrounding him (which you characterize well) is horrible, pretty uniquely so in terms of major modern parties in western democracies.
But some people don’t agree with that, and they’re happy to bundle in lots of other things as “Trump-like” on pretty tenuous grounds.
Yeah sorry. “Many people on the progressive left” would have been a better formulation.
It’s complicated, and my previous post was glib.
Trelane said this and I agree, this sounds exactly like Scott over in that thread, and that was my exact thought when I first read your post Telefrog, so I said so (because I was also newly frustrated with that thread). But importantly, your post didn’t stop there.
I don’t think Scott is “just trolling the heck out of the crowd”, and I think that’s probably an important difference, even though I’m still not sure “trolling” is the word I’d use for what Gman was doing either. The finer points of a trolling definition aren’t important though, the point is I don’t think Scott’s doing the same thing Gman was—I don’t think Scott’s intent is to disrupt.
But Scott sure does respond to almost every single point in that thread, in a condescending way, and won’t let the discussion advance. And I was mad about it, so I threw another shot at him when Trelane made the same observation.
FWIW, I did flag one of his posts earlier in that thread for these reasons—separate and mostly prior to the big Gman blow-up—but I did so sort of “reluctantly”, not calling for action so much as just wanting a fresh set of eyes on the situation. I knew I was frustrated, so I wanted someone else to be aware of it, but I’m still not convinced what Scott’s doing needs moderation or intervention. I got a response from Tom saying they’d look at it, and that’s good enough for me. It made me feel better just knowing cooler heads than mine took a look at the situation. I’m thankful for that, I don’t have any complaints about the level of involvement or response from the moderation team.
But as far as my personal interactions with Scott go, he still pushes my buttons and I still lash out a bit in response, and I took a little selfish pleasure in seeing it’s not just me.
I think it’s a bit of both: a lot of people wanted him gone for his views, regardless of his trolling, and a lot of people, myself included, wanted him gone because of his trolling, regardless of his views. His problem was that these two groups added up, resulting in simply too many people wanting him gone.
What also didn’t help, was the fact that noone knew this guy, so noone felt a bond with him. Had he posted here about other stuff for a (long) while before getting into politics, the reactions would have been different, I believe. I mean: would any long time regular here get banned for having the same political believes gman had? I seriously doubt it.
I didn’t read all gmans statements but I actually completely agree with Tom on this. I never heard a response to my points that was over the line. He has some very controversial opinions, but he was thoughtful and articulate, and willing to engage in discussion on those subjects in a respectful manner. At least with me, personally. As I said I believe you have to treat the person with respect, but shut down the ideas that don’t deserve it. Otherwise you set a precedent that allows people to ignore/dismiss you as a person, if they disagree with your values.
It isn’t, and I’m glad you don’t think it is.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, but I hear it.
Question on this point. How do you determine he was trolling? In my mind trolling is subjective, the reason for the post, usually unknown unless the person admits to it. The clear case of trolling, is someone that makes a claim/assertion that sounds absurd and fails to back it up with rational discussion, and just slams others or just makes more and more unfounded assertions with little or no basis to back them.
Curious, where this certainty about someone else intent comes from minus the behavior of a typical troll. (and again I didn’t read ALL of his posts, so possibly missed this specific behavior?)
Christien’s Seinfeld reference was as unexpected as it was spot-on. Gman never missed an opportunity to make passive-aggressive, inflammatory statements insulting the entire Qt3 community with shit like “I guess this place doesn’t accept differing viewpoints.” Every time I read stuff like that I was really tempted to reply and had to remind myself that getting an upset reaction like that out of me was the whole reason he was here. Still, it took a herculean effort for me to resist every 👏 single 👏 time. That’s how I knew he was a troll, and a very good one. Add in the roommate and friend from TX horseshit and case closed.
I’ve appreciated Anklebiter’s comparisons of Gman to Trump because that’s been on my mind constantly for the past month. It’s the same bullshit, depressing af M.O. Always punch back harder, somehow play both tough guy and whiny victim, maintain plausible deniability while stirring up as much shit as possible. It’s grotesque on a forum and grotesquer in the White House. Sad that it works and sadder still that anyone would exploit human decency like that. Emotions are chinks in our armor. Just ask any tryhard, ‘umad?’
A lot of us in 2016 were desperately grabbing the lapels of anyone who would listen to shout, “It’s not Trump’s political views that matter! It’s his moral failings of character!!!” Same goes for Gman. It was not, Was Not, WAS NOT his political views that were the problem. That was just his trojan horse.
Thanks to Tom and Telefrog and all the mods for everything they do!
EDIT: Also, to any conservatives who feel put off by the anger of those of us who didn’t vote for our current president, please do come post in P&R and be a little patient with us. Keep in mind that a lot of our raw-nerve emotions are intentionally, skillfully created by Trump and a hyper-profitable media machine of manufactured outrage. Talk to us reasonably and we can do the same in return! I swear it.
Tom’s reason for keeping Gman around as long as he did is a noble one. It would be nice to have a little forum healing after this whole headache… maybe it can be more of our reasonable conservatives posting in P&R.
I mean, given that the guy created three different accounts and pretended to be three separate people, it should be pretty obvious at this point that it was 100% trolling.
The painfully obvious “roommate” excuse was the biggest non-post/thread-related sign, then confirmed by the Texan with a PhD showing up right away after he was banned.
Yeah, those maneuvers were clumsy as hell in light of his master-jewel-thief skill in other areas.
That was all so weird. When Tom said he believed Gman about the original “roommate account” story, I believed Tom. Tom met the guy!
But that post-Gman account? I mean, that had to be Gman again, right? And it makes the original roommate account story that much harder to believe.
Ultimately, Tom has interacted with Gman in person and I haven’t, so if Tom still believes the explanation about the roommate, 1) it doesn’t matter what I think, 2) I’ll trust Tom. Maybe Tom’s since changed his mind, and at this point it doesn’t matter.
But to have all of that look so suspicious and then pop in what that “PhD” account was such a ridiculous move I actually laughed.
I just saw that other accounts post. I’d like to believe good intentions…that’s my default. I agree though, it feels a little… contrived?
Still not certain it was a troll, a very articulate one if that’s the case. However, its not my call, and I do feel generally no one has been abused/treated grossly inappropriately. The whole thing has left a bad taste though…
The “playing the tough guy AND whiny victim” is a brilliant observation, @rrmorton. That’s exactly what Trump does. It’s infuriating. It’s like Jay-Z said in “99 Problems”:
You know the type, loud as a motorbike
But wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight…
I have a Ph.D. and can assure you that gman was a dumb poopy fart butt.
It was either a sock puppet, or it was a collaborator who was effectively a sock puppet, designed purely to stir things up further.
I think that was the point at which he demonstrated himself to be a bad actor in all of this.
But even with that in mind, I still disagree with how many people behaved.
If anyone here didn’t disagree with how some other people behaved, I’d be amazed. We all behaved in different ways in a stressful situation. How could anyone agree with every approach?
Out of genuine interest, what did you see as a correct response to gman?
My response was to denounce him once as a troll and then stop engaging, other than perhaps the occasional “why are people still replying to this?” comment. In general that’s how I was taught to deal with trolling way back in the days of usenet.
I would have suggested that, for those who thought he was trolling, the correct response was to just ignore him. And to be clear, not the “Hey guys, he’s a troll, stop talking to him!” and then posting about how he’s a troll and folks should stop talking to him like a hundred times. Because there were a LOT of those posts, and it exacerbated the problem, because it ended up flooding threads not only with his garbage, but with way MORE garbage.
For talking to him, I had at one point adopted a tactic of just picking individual things he said, and responded to them in fairly short, concise ways. Saying, “This part is objectively false.” Now, that was just because it prevented the over-branching that became a problem, and also forced him to acknowledge those specific things, because they were literally the only thing in the post.
But ultimately, the whole situation illustrated a problem that we have here, whether folks want to admit it or not.
When it comes to many of these issues, there are very few, if any, dissenting voices in the entire sub-forum.
So when a dissenting voice appears, you end up getting something of a feeding frenzy. Part of this is because it’s actually INTERESTING to encounter that kind of voice, even if they are saying stuff we hate. I mean, it’s at least something of a challenge. There’s something to DO, that is often absent from discussions where everyone agrees.
For instance, look at some of the Trump threads. There’s very little in terms of discussion that happens in them. It’s just a series of “Holy shit, look at what Trump did.” and then responses of amazement at how fucking awful he is. I guess it’s informative on a superficial level, but it’s not really debate. It’s not deep.
You need to have an advocate for Trump if you want to dig into that crap in any depth. You need someone to take up that mantle.
I’m willing to accept that gman maybe wasn’t the guy to do that. But I’m also at a loss to define what behavior we could expect from a “good” Trump advocate. I fear that the best intentioned Trump advocate in the world, by the very nature of what he would be advocating, would be met with the exact same response.
The initial response to him would be the same, as he’d be pushing out a view on many things which many folks would find abhorrent, so you’d get a ton of responses to him. He’d likely respond to them, which would result in a situation where over half the posts in the thread were his. Unless he were some great philosopher king, he wouldn’t be changing his opinions immediately, so he’d be viewed as ignoring points made by others.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a situation where someone comes here with those views, and it doesn’t end exactly the same way. I think that’s indicative of a problem, and I think that we can do better.
Why is this necessary though? Why do we need to debate about the dumpfuckery that Trump and his administration do every single day? For example, why do we need someone to argue that taking little kids away from their parents is a good idea? Why do we need to hear someone explain to us in detail why an inane trade war with China will help out the U.S.?
Do we also need someone to promote the virtues of the Nazi party? I totally get that it’s great to hear different points of view, etc. But these are almost universally despised points of view.