Note that listening does not mean not engaging. Quite the opposite. It’s about the manner of engagement. Active listening and all that.
As Tom explained, he wanted to mask his identity so he’d have a consequence free place to regurgitate his talking points and have people take him seriously rather than kicking him out and ostracizing him and revoking their friendships with him once they found out the extreme right wing org he willingly worked for.
Bad faith engagement, and a shitload of it.
But you said that he wanted to post here “in a professional capacity”. What does that even mean?
Engaging in extremist paid political commentator advocacy. Spreading his paid messages to a new, unaware audience.
For free. The only price we paid was mental strain.
So you think that he was posting here in a paid capacity… To do what? Recruit people?
It’s not about what is allowed or not allowed to be talked about on these sites. This topic, the starting posts, addresses why certain topics are unique.
Everyone has a unique experience, but I just think that for some reason you think that your experience with racism is on equal footing with those who actually experience the blunt nature of that hate. I also get the impression that you might not understand why putting white supremacists and their targets at the table, presented as equals even, and trying to force that engagement is somehow a good thing.
And this does not invalidate someone’s experience, but it puts the weight where it probably should be. And you’re asking a heavy price for people to engage white supremacy without acknowledging there is a price being paid or having to pay that yourself.
And yes, it flies against the logical part of our brain that says everything should be equal. it absolutely does.
You make it sound like he was getting paid per post and per response. That sounds kinda crazy. Or is it that his job somewhere is to engage unbelievers on the intrawebs and see how they respond?
He doesn’t explicitly have to be paid, but it furthers his career to 1) make his viewpoints appear more reasonable and mainstream 2) get practice trying to spin things when faced with people not buying his dumb bullshit.
It is crazy… Because even if it were true that he had some kind of vested professional interest, the QT3 forum would be the worst return on investment ever. The QT3 forum, in it’s entirety, has how many active users? It ain’t a huge community. and active users in P&R? It’s like a dozen of us. There is no reasonable way that there is any professional reason for someone to come into this forum and argue like he did.
This is Soros level conspiracy theory crap.
This. QT3 is a perfect place for this. Not mainstream but full of people on the opposite side. Honing his rhetoric.
That’s done by… Discussing things with people.
To do that requires that you understand the arguments made by those in opposition, and either adjust your position to account for new information, or find some flaw in their statement.
There is no way that can be bad.
This is done by people discussing in good faith. Not by people intending to undermine and sow dissent. Which is gman to a T.
I think that the “bad faith” argument is often, but not always, just a lazy way to attack another person’s character. And it makes little sense here.
If arguing in bad faith, then there is no real “honing” of one’s rhetoric. You aren’t actually improving yourself or your argument.
In most cases, the observed behavior of someone accused of arguing in bad faith is indistinguishable from someone who simply disagrees with you. The fact that they don’t just change their position when you present an argument does not mean they are arguing in bad faith, because as Wumpus pointed out, that’s not how it works. It takes a while to change someone’s mind.
So if someone has been immersed in right wing garbage, they are going to have those views and talking points. Presenting them is not an act of bad faith, it’s simply what they know.
Imagine someone who had been immersed in that garbage for years, who was NOT acting in bad faith, but believed that stuff to be true, honestly. How would they conduct themselves in this forum? I would offer that they would act like gman in many ways.
Again, i have some amount of experience in this, because i was attacked by a lot of you when i first started posting here. I was never arguing in bad faith, but i was attacked in many of the same ways folks are attacking gman.
And that itself isn’t even the end of the world. It is what it is. I was quite overt in my criticism of gman. But I still don’t like the idea of banning him due to what people think his internal motivations were. Because a lot of that, is just stuff folks are projecting onto him.
Perhaps. But it was gman’s job. So he’s not the average dupe. He’s the guy who dupes others. No excuse. Bad faith.
So say you. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
I don’t think he was here in an official capacity or a professional capacity, but he definitely used the tools and approach places like his place of employment would use when engaging someone outside of their base.
I agree.
I don’t see any need to revisit what I’ve already said, but for what it’s worth, based on my own involvement with the situation and the person, both online and in person, Timex has the right idea.
There are certain people who aren’t worth engaging. There are other people who are worth engaging. We all have different thresholds for that. But I can tell you from personal experience that, for me, gman is the latter [EDIT: doh!]. I’ve since had a couple of conversations with him and if it’s any consolation, his experience here had an effect on him. The people who took the time to engage with him made a difference. It’s not my place to say more, and I might even be overstepping my boundaries saying this much. But I think it’s important to let you guys know that even if you feel the time and aggravation wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t wasted.
-Tom
I believe you meant “the latter”, I.e. that he was worth engaging. As noted, though, and as someone that tried to do so, there is a cost to the community to doing so which needs to be respected.
Thank you for sharing the update.