This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
WMDKitty:
You really ought to post this apology in the Thunderdome, where the conversation occurred, rather than in the Lounge.
@anais:
Please read.
@Josh:
Please read.
I know it’s really subtle, but everyone might want to take a look at the little image I attached to the OP, and think about it.
You’re doing barbeque and everyone’s invited (but we can never leave)?
I kid, I kid. Got it.
Where are the steely knives to stab it with?
I noticed the picture right away.
I think it’s kinda cute, even though those people know nothing about barbecue.
Have any of you seen/heard the music video Lindemann – Praise Abort (not sure how to link properly yet). It’s Till Lindemann’s (Rammstein) new project. If you know Rammstein you have an idea what to expect. It’s sung in English.
I’m having mixed ideas about the song so I’m looking for your thoughts. It’s nice to have an openly pro choice industrial metal song with a bisexual ending, but it certainly wont convince anyone. I’m having fun trying to imagine Ray Comfort types taking this video as an accurate depiction of atheist lifestyle.
I want my million dollars
Sometimes, somewhere, I have seen people admonished for voicing an opinion about stuff they haven’t bothered to actually read. Not doing their homework. Expecting others to regurgitate and entire thread’s or multiple threads’ discussion because they can;t be bothered to read it themselves.
Somewhere I’ve seen people taken to task over that. Repeatedly.
Can’t remember where.
My invite to PZ’s BBQ must have gotten lost in the mail. No worry, I’ll bring baked beans,
I can’t eat red meat.
Oy, Jafafa Hots, seriously?
No, people are not generally admonished for having opinions about stuff they haven’t bothered to actually read. They are admonished for treating their opinions about stuff they haven’t bothered to actually read as if those opinions were somehow important for others to read.
People say shit all the time like, “I won’t see Sharknado 2 because the special effects in Sharknado were so realistic they gave me nightmares and I don’t want to put myself through that again.” They are having an opinion about Sharknado 2 without having seen Sharknado 2. And this is accepted here and virtually everywhere. It’s when you say, “I won’t see Sharknado 2 because the complexity of the plot is too difficult to follow in real time. Unfortunately, this results in an emotional response to the film that lags the actual events in the film, and that creates an unsettling disconnect between present emotional state and present visuals which, psychology tells us, could result in inappropriate associations with, say, violently biting heads off human bodies using our 3 rows of teeth. I don’t want to become habituated to violently biting heads off human bodies using 3 rows of teeth.”
The difference shouldn’t have to be explained.
I said I wasn’t going to read the thread and, not having examined the evidence, I didn’t make any observations or judgements about the content of the thread or the effects of that content. Instead, what I said was that I wasn’t going to come down on WMDK’s side **or** on Ophelia’s side…because I hadn’t examined the evidence and it would be stupid of me to prefer one side to the other without examining the evidence.
Then I expressed the opinion ***based on evidence that is not part of the thread I didn’t read, but part of OPs and threads I very definitely did read*** that I find it plausible – not something that can be immediately and summarily dismissed – that Ophelia would treat a commenter in ways I wouldn’t like… and that the fact that I find that plausible was sad.
Almost immediately Ophelia completely made up the idea that I had used my refusal to examine certain evidence in a conflict between Ophelia and WMDK in which I wasn’t taking sides…as a “good reason” to believe Ophelia wasn’t remembering her own words correctly.
There is **no** reasonable reading of my statement that supports that. I was treated with contempt by Ophelia and Josh – for refusing to take Ophelia’s side in a conflict in which I was uninvolved and uninterested, I would guess – which provided further evidence for my original statement:
Are you seriously saying that I have to read every thread at Butterflies and Wheels, or even any specific thread at Butterflies and Wheels, in order to have sufficient evidence of my own surprise-having tendencies to make a statement about my surprise-having tendencies and whether or not those surprise-having tendencies make me sad or happy?
I don’t give a shit about snark. Use any tone you like. But why not find some time in your writing to make a substantive comment about specifically where I’ve gone wrong in my statements? If you could include a quote, that would be even better, because that would actually be helpful.
Along the way, you might actually say what you think of Ophelia making up the idea that I did something that I most certainly didn’t do. Josh can’t find where I didn’t – or hasn’t yet. Likewise anais. Likewise Ophelia. Likewise anyone else.
So if Ophelia reads my comments, but then characterizes them as saying something that they most decidedly did not say and condemns me for those things I didn’t say, why can’t you spare just a little condemnation for her from that sauce you’re ladling over me?
You’re still bullshitting, Crip Dyke. These walls of text aren’t necessary or relevant. You fucked up with your original comments, and then you doubled-down and tried to excuse that and have your cake while eating it. That is, you wanted to be able to, simultaneously:
a. Give support to the accusation that Ophelia called someone certain names. Yes, this is what you did. You did not “scrupulously avoid judgment.” I can read beyond the surface.
b. Refuse to read the source material that would confirm or disprove this, yet still claim legitimacy for your stance.
Nope.
Jafafa Hots
Good thing that didn’t happen then, right?
Unless “deducting from past behaviour I can see this to be possible” counts.
Semi-seriously?
Dunno. I didn’t really read the whole leadup.
I think this is maybe my third glance at the thunderdrone.
@Josh:
Quote the passage that made it clear to you I was judging Ophelia.
I’ve made it clear that I’ll cop to it and apologize if you can actually cite a passage that is reasonably interpreted as you believe.
I know my intent, but am also fully aware that intent is not magic. You’re saying I “did not “scrupulously avoid judgment”. Fine. Quote the judgement. I’ll apologize if your reading is reasonable regardless of my intent.
Also, whether or not you believe I gave:
the accusation leveled by Ophelia at me wasn’t that at all. She said that I used my refusal to read the thread and/or the content of things I haven’t read **as the justifying reason** for my “claim” that she didn’t know what was going on in her own thread.
Quote me saying she didn’t know what was going on in her own thread.
Or, when you can’t quote me saying that, I suggest you consider that you should maybe have a little empathy for me and the false accusations I’m experiencing from Ophelia.
@#3 PZ,
Doesn’t seem all that subtle. Rip each other apart and eat the remains. Isn’t that the purpose of Thunderdome “Say what you want, how you want.”?
*rolls over laughing*
This is comedy gold.
I’m sorry, Crip Dyke, but at this point I really don’t know what you’re actually trying to say. While I generaly enjoy your wordy take downs, this time I’m a bit confused.. and I don’t think it’s just me, considering the reactions by Josh and Ophelia.
It’s like this: I’m sure they won’t be able to find a quote you ask them for, but if I had to find a quote saying what exactly your point in this conversation is, I don’t know what I’d choose either.
(Brony, if you’re reading… see, I just can’t help it. Maybe you’re stronger than me :) )
Crip Dyke – allow me.
Your @ 210 on the previous thread:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/26/thunderdome-61/comment-page-2/#comment-947446
Do I really have to explain why that’s an outrageous thing to say? Because instead of saying that and then proceeding, you could have just taken the 30 seconds needed to read my few short comments on that post to confirm what I said – I nowhere called WMDK stupid or anything like that. Just announcing you weren’t going to do that but you were going to suspend judgment anyway – that’s not reasonable. Adding that as far as you knew I might have forgotten is just ludicrous – the only reason that was “as far as you knew” was because you were too lazy and/or hostile to look.
beatrice
I can very well understand CD’s point. She’s being accused of saying things she didn’t say, of having made a judgement she didn’t make.
I don’T think that Josh and Ophelia are confused. They are simply taking their own accusations and go with it. I haven’t seen any argument from Josh besides “wrong, ugly, you have a duty, you must do better, you you you”
I mean, hell Ophelia even quotes CD clearly saying that she thinks that both claims are possible while not making a judgement and this is quoted as support for CD doing what exactly?
Maybe a better way to clarify – it’s the “can’t.” It’s the “can’t” in “I’m not reading that stuff, so I can’t take your word for exactly what happened.” That “can’t” is ridiculous. It amounts to:
“I dislike you so I refuse to read your blog, so I’m forced to disbelieve what you just said; forced, I tell you.”
@Beatrice
I’m mostly unsure of when there is enough impact on the wider community to warrant risking making things worse by contributing to people feeling like they are being piled on. With the slur an entire group was dragged in simply and starkly with no reason and that was a pretty good justification to jump in. This is far more personal, has more subtleties and subjectivity and might be worth letting the participants work it out on their own which is a valuable role for the Thunderdome.
@azpaul3
That is one of the purposes but it’s never this simple, and I’m not trying to make any implications about the situation here. I’m trying to list reasons for why it has been more complicated than this.
Even the Thunderdome has some rules, and something that people criticizing the Thunderdome have a hard time dealing with is that any social arena has to be able to deal with current social dynamics and things that the rules don’t cover. Larger concerns might or might not be worth moving a conflict over. That also does not prevent one person from pointing out when they think that a particular conflict is more harmful to the group than the participants might realize.
Fuck you too, Giliell.
O hai. I’d like to read up on the ongoing bloodbath. Whereabouts does it start, in terms of approximate comment numbers? kthxbai
Giliell,
Exactly. That’s exactly why I say Crip Dyke is confusing me in this instance. She made comments that were so roundabout that everyone can easily interpret them in any way they like. Josh and Ophelia are reading them as critique because that is what they expect, you are reading them differently according to your own expectations.
I get it that now Crip Dyke is saying “how you interpreted my comments isn’t right”. What I’m confused about is: what is right?
—
I do feel kinda bad for getting PZ’s message and then metaphoricaly leaving it behind, trampled in dust.
David,
Previous incarnation, comment http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/26/thunderdome-61/comment-page-2/#comment-947264
There might be parts of it at Ophelia’s, but I don’t know where.
If you’re wondering why people are no longer believing you, you might ask yourself how that happened.
+++
beatrice
I don’t think that Josh and Ophelia’S interpretation is reasonable. Ophelia just clarified that she’S outraged at the fact that CD won’t believe her, which is completely different from being outraged at the content of the claims.
@David Marjanović
First post involving the conflict, #188. Previous thread second page.
Er, that would be the Thunderdome part of the conflict I reference in #30.
Jesus fuck. That is the exact opposite of what I said. What I consider outrageous is announcing a refusal to check the comments at issue immediately followed by claims about their content.
“I refuse to read your comments; as far as I know they could be full of homophobic racist trash.” Does that seem like a fair claim to make?
It doesn’t matter. Just go with your previous impressions. Of course, the other person might be right too.
This. It’s really simple. It’s straightforward. It’s not hard to understand. That is my problem with it too. This does not require 250 words and a lot of parsing.
That must be annoying for her.
Of course, I don’t know where exactly she’s being accused of this, and I can’t go back and read so, but I think it’s entirely reasonable that she actually has said the things she says she hasn’t. (Ophelia and Josh might be way off base though too.)
:D
And yes, I am explicitly stating that I agree with Ophelia’s characterization, “as far as I know they could be full of homophobic racist trash.” That is precisely the subtext. It’s not hidden. It’s not unreasonable to read it that way, I’m not coming at it because of a vendetta. This isn’t hard to grasp, no matter how strenuously Gileill or Crip Dyke claim that I’m being vague, unspecific, and unfair. You’re not feckless communicators, so I’m not buying that you’re legitimately baffled.
If the person has a past pattern of making homophobic comments? Yep, totally.
Anthony K
1. Does CD have a pattern of saying such things?
2. Have those claims been made in a space where you know that your particular group, one of the most marginalized there is, is not very welcome or safe?
So, while I give you a C for making the analogy, it’s only a C- because you’re failing to take important factors into account.
Did everyone see in the last TD thread where WMDKitty clarified that Ophelia hadn’t called her ‘stupid’ at all and conceded that the comment seeming to imply that was poorly worded? Seems relevant, considering the “For all I know you just called her stupid and forgot” line of argument.
Hi David Marjanovic (I’m sorry, I can’t get the ´in the right spot). If you really want to wade in, Here’s the B&W thread to hit: http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/05/jennifer-cody-epsteins-letter-to-the-anti-charlie-hebdo-faction/
Taken literally, that’s a grammatical way of saying “I’m ignorant and won’t fix that,” with something that is technically unessential attached on the end, which isn’t a direct claim. But it clearly is meant to suggest one, being the only thing with any substantive content to even think about, even if the structure of the sentence is a transparent way to avoid doing so explicitly.
The bizarre part, to me, is that there’s no good reason this needs to be so difficult, or for statements like that to be so convoluted. After all this time writing comments here, you’ve had plenty that could’ve been spent on the couple of minutes it would take to read the whole thread. Or you could simply use a Ctrl-F type of search function (in just a few seconds) to check for instances of few of the alleged words used in the post, to confirm or disconfirm whatever it was that you thought it so important to pontificate about without such information. It could’ve easily been done before you wrote your “opinion” concerning this non-fact about which you have no clue, saving yourself the time of writing that painful mess of a comment. And maybe you don’t want to be considerate to your readers, but that is also saving all of us the time spent reading the pointless thing (more than once, now), because we clearly can’t have any use for things like that.
Correction: for instances of the few alleged words
The idea being that there aren’t many to check, not that you would only want to check a few out of many of them. Obviously.
I guess I’ll take a chance.
There are two separate arguments here that are dominating the back and forth.
1. Conflict over racism with respect to Charlie Hebdo that requires going to Butterflies and Wheels to follow.
2. The dispute over how Crip Dyke’s comments in #193 relate to conflict #1, specifically over .
I see some confusion over this line which I also have a little trouble with.
The bolded “for” seems to be pointing at Ophelia Benson, but given the surrounding context I believe this is meant to refer to WMDkitty’s language. Specifically language that brings up criticism of racism in the comments of posts defending artistic statements from terrorism.
I do not see Crip Dyke saying that Ophelia actually used specific language in the post on B&W. They do refer to language that Ophelia has used in the past against commentators,
…and this language does not seem to have to do with language that muddies the relationship between opposing racism and defending cartoonists from terrorists.
But that line does take an active role in shaping the conflict. It draws attention to past things that Ophelia has said that Crip Dyke and primes people for looking for unspecified bad behavior on the part of Ophelia. It plays a supporting role on the side of people currently looking at the conflict here and at B&W despite intentions.
That last bit in #42 should read,
Asking me to establish that, rather than simply asserting that it’s true, is pretty much the crux of this point of the discussion here.
If I can’t or won’t provide evidence of that, do you think perhaps I should have said nothing instead?
Ibid. I understand very well that there are some places people won’t go. The Slymepit is one. If someone with an established pattern of dishonesty, such as WMD Kitty, said that there was a particular thread in the pit where they were called stupid, and someone from there said “I didn’t call you stupid. I wrote, “blah-blah-blah” which you can see is different,” I wouldn’t jump in to assert that it’s plausible that the latter is being dishonest (and maybe the former is out to lunch too), then defend my vacuous well-poisoning by saying I won’t go read the thread in question.
What important factors? I gave my neutral opinion, based on my impressions (stating they’re based on an accurate impression of past behaviour is begging the question), so I don’t see why I’m getting dinged here.
Well, there we go. One has admitted to some rank dishonesty (while ignoring all the other fucking dishonest shit she’s said). So, there’s at least one pattern being established.
And here I was. Right in Thunderdome. Explicitly admitting that I—Josh, not Ophelia—called WMDKitty dense and thick. I solved this riddle, way back hundreds of comments ago.
This. Is. Not. In. Controversy.
This is bullshit is what this is. Fucking bullshit.
Stephen Hawking would consider assisted suicide. Not anytime soon though, bc he says “I am damned if I’m going to die before I have unravelled more of the universe.”
Oh good grief.
I also left a “…, specifically over…” in at the end of #2. If I’m going to try to take a role in settling a conflict the least I could do is be more careful with editing.
@Ophelia Benson:
And if you had bothered to cite something specific to begin with, I would have happily conceded, as I do now, that “can’t” was the right word, but that it incorrectly follows “so”. I did not intend to make a logical if-then between “i’m not reading that” and “I can’t take your word for X”.
Thus your statement:
is bullshit. There’s another explanation, an easy and reasonable explanation. [Actually there are a number – why couldn’t I dislike WMDK and be avoiding reading WMDK’s behavior on that thread? Why couldn’t I just be out of fucking spoons for the day?]
The actual explanation is this: I was composing as I typed, I didn’t proofread, and thus a conjunction word choice that implies causation was used inappropriately when a conjunction that does not imply causation would have actually expressed my intent more accurately. I was thinking of “so…” as in, “moving on…” which is a perfectly valid use of “so”. Nonetheless, it does imply causation as that is a major sense of that word. Obviously not implying causation would have been both preferable and more representative of my intent. Yet I chose a word that accurately reflected my thinking only when interpreted using a secondary definition. That’s my fault, but it’s neither lazy nor hostile.
Is that an error that deserves your scorn? I wouldn’t think so, yet you’re calling my statement “outrageous”. It’s really outrageous that humans occasionally pick the wrong conjunction while typing quickly? Really?
However, you’re making even more errors. When you say:
1. i don’t dislike you. I don’t refuse to read your blog on that basis. You’ve made that up out of whole cloth. I have never said, in any venue, that I dislike you. Not fucking once.
2. I don’t refuse to read your blog, though since you decided you didn’t want my comments to appear on your blog, I’ve been reading the comments at your blog rarely enough that I don’t remember if I’ve read any of the comments by you or others there at all since the day you started blocking my own.
3. You are truncating a sentence. EVEN IF you don’t believe that the logical connector was an error, it was part of this sentence (emphasis mine):
This isn’t even an example of an independent clause. “Any more than I take WMD Kitty’s word for exactly what happened,” makes literally no sense on its own. Therefore, for your interpretation to be remotely plausible, I would have to be saying,
If I am forced to disbelieve WMDK, I am hardly providing support WMDK’s statements. Therefore, your interpretation just doesn’t work…even allowing for the fact that my word choice with “so” was sloppy and really only works in the spoken voice where you can hear the drawn out “o” as a transition occupying space while thinking occurs preparatory to the next point.
4. Even if the logical connector appropriately reflected what I was thinking, it wouldn’t express:
What it would express is
One can tell that your position is flagrantly wrong, since I also said I wouldn’t take WMDK’s word. My treatment of your statements in ThunderDome and WMDK’s statements in ThunderDome was perfectly evenhanded.
Finally, I was so hoping that you would recognize that your quote doesn’t support your allegation. Sadly, I expected that you wouldn’t. Even more sadly, you didn’t. Your allegation was:
The quote you think vindicates this is:
“I’m not an astronaut, I haven’t visited the moon, as far as I know NASA is concealing the evidence that it is, in fact, made of green cheese” is not a conspiracy accusation against NASA. It’s a frank and honest admission that one hasn’t examined the evidence.
isn’t a positive “claim” that you “have no idea what [you] said on [your] own thread any more than the previous example was a “claim” about NASA.
When I say that I don’t know if you’ve forgotten something, it doesn’t super-double-secret mean that you’re a bad person who is too intellectually incompetent to review your own blog’s contents.
it means no more and no less than, “I’ve not reviewed the evidence. Therefore on this issue I’m ignorant. Really. Completely ignorant. You could be wildly wrong, for all I know. WMDK could be wildly wrong for all I know. I’ve not reviewed the evidence and I am ignorant of what it would eventually show if I did review it.”
You have completely made up the idea that I have “claimed” your ignorance of your own thread.
You are apparently so blocked from reading my words reasonably (possibly because of a commitment to your position, but I really couldn’t know) that even when you have a chance to go back and review, even when you are called out to support a very specific claim of your own, you just don’t get it that you’ve entirely made that shit up about me.
Brony
You will probably be better off if you stay out of it.
@Ophelia, #32:
And there were no claims about their content.
NONE.
You’ve made that up.
Jesus fucking christ.
Thunderdome 62: Even Beyonder Beyond Thunderdome: This is Tempestcup.
When a smart person trained in law starts closely parsing their own internet comments, I sometimes give up hope on the possibility of meaningful human communication.
@Anthony K:
If I can’t or won’t provide evidence of that, am I barred from typing anything that passes through my mind that is somewhat related but in no way depends on those things that I can’t or won’t attempt to prove?
You’ve got the timeline wrong. The comment we are referring to as the plausibility comment happened BEFORE Ophelia arrived in ThunderDome. I didn’t have any statement by Ophelia at that point. I had no contradictory evidence whatsoever. And yet I refused to accept WMDK’s statements as true. This is from the second to last para of my response to WMDK (#193, second page, Thunderdome #61) before Ophelia even showed up here:
While attempting to use humor to defuse emotional tension, I state right up front that I am not taking it as written that WMDK was treated unfairly by Ophelia.
The first part of that first response is also largely in support of Ophelia, making it clear that she has good reason to write about the folks using the moment of the murder of CH’s staff and the police providing security to amplify their assertions of CH’s racism.
Another problem with the timeline you present?
No, what I actually jumped in to assert was very very different, but if you want to assume for argument that this was a major point of my comment and not merely a necessary caveat, the striped paint comment actually says, in your translation,
Appending
is dishonest of you, since I actually said I had no knowledge of the thread FIRST, not later. That is the intro to the passage where I tell WMDK to her face, in comment #193 before Ophelia shows up, that I can’t take her word for what happened.
I didn’t introduce this as a defense. I stated up front that I’m not going to be an arbiter that makes or validates claims about that thread.
As an aside, will everyone please stop discussing why I don’t want to go read that thread and/or why I don’t want to read Butterflies & Wheels and/or why I would be reasonable if I didn’t want to read B&W?
The answers to these questions have already been written down, right here on FtB. On B&W to some degree, but primarily here on Pharyngula.
They nowhere involve transphobia or trans* oppression on the part of Ophelia.
What you would do if you had started off by getting your head of your ass is (1) go read the thread or search for the words in question, and (2) look at Ophelia’s words there, since those are precisely what is at issue. “What happened” is not some non-linguistic event in the past that is reported by somebody second-hand and is no longer accessible to you, so that you might have any reason to “take their word” for it. What happened is their words, and they’re still right in front of you, for fuck’s sake. You have the author, the person who made the accusation and has since admitted it was false, others who’ve actually read it to whom you’re speaking presumably for some reason or another (still can’t sort that out), and extremely convenient access to all of the relevant information right here in this little corner of the intertubes. So what the fuck is supposed to be stopping you?
Not “reasonably.” Way too literally and in such a convoluted fashion, that it is entirely about defending yourself from some very reasonable and minimal and forgettable criticism. When the Ancient Aliens dude says “could it be possible that [blah blah blah] … well I don’t really know for sure” I’m not getting tricked by his pointless word games, because I can tell from context what the fuck he is on about, no matter the literal meaning or structure that he happened to use. I think I’m being very fair and very reasonable when I do that, because that’s how language works. It’s not composed of syllogisms, and the meanings and content and purposes of statements (not just the literal structure) are themselves a huge part of how it actually works, like it or not. This is (or would’ve been) a very trivial mistake to admit, and I think I’d be over it in a minute. The tendency toward excessive wordiness and literalness and pedantry is something else — I’m still trying to understand that — but the other part is really easy.
@Anthony K:
Forgive me, I should have put this in my earlier comment to you (#54), but perhaps it serves better as a standalone anyway.
Can you find a place where I simply asserted that something was true about that thread at B&W or within that thread at B&W?
As far as I know, the only assertion that might remotely qualify was this one:
but this is only about that thread in the sense that it’s about Ophelia, and Ophelia affirms that she’s contributed to the thread under discussion. I don’t think that would be fair at all.
So
1) Where, precisely, have I made an assertion and then refused to provide evidence?
2) Where, precisely, have I made claims about the contents of the thread being discussed?
3) Where, precisely, have I made claims whose truth depends on the contents of the thread being discussed?
I don’t think I’ve done any of those things.
So if the crux of this argument is, for you, the assertion of things without evidence, I don’t understand why you’re not addressing Ophelia for making assertions that contradict the evidence and/or are made up out of whole cloth.
Ophelia hasn’t “established” that I used my refusal to read the thread as a “good reason” to assert that she’s ignorant of the thread.
And she can’t.
If you can’t point to a single place where I made a claim and refused to provide or review relevant evidence, shouldn’t you seriously question your position here?
My work here is done. Can I have my lighter back now?
Thanks for the information, everyone.
Jafafa Hots,
Sorry, I think it blew up. You should know that putting a lighter too close to a fire isn’t a very good idea. You’re lucky it didn’t blow right in your face.
And the comments under fire, the comments that left Josh morally “astonished” all came before WMDK admitted the accusation was false.
So why the fuck is supposed to be stopping me from doing what?
Are you asking me if I’m still reserving judgement on whether Ophelia called WMDK “stupid”.
Nope. I’m not. But people haven’t been asking me that. People have just been making shit up about me and the things that I’ve said that are, as you say,
Finally, for now:
What. the. fuck. is. the. mistake?
Quote and explain the specific mistake. Josh’s “I’m astonished” doesn’t tell me what the mistake is, so I can’t fucking admit it. Ophelia flat out makes shit up (yet she is immune to your criticism), so I won’t admit to the “mistakes” she asserts I made.
You know I am happy to admit mistakes when someone actually identifies one. I have a track record of doing that, one I’d like to preserve.
When the person you’re impugning takes umbrage with what passes through your mind, you should consider not reacting defensively.
Yes, I see that part, and I concede that came first, but that is not the comment we are referring to as the ‘plausibility’ comment. You’ve got that wrong. The plausibility comment is your 210. This is obvious. There’s nothing about “I don’t know” that implies plausibility. However, the two bolded parts of 210 below do:
The rest of your comment seems to think I’m discussing comment 173, not 210, which makes no sense whatsoever. So
is untrue for two reasons:
1. I’m talking about 210, in which you say “I’m not reading that stuff.” That reads as a denial to go check out the evidence for yourself. That’s the part that’s got people upset, in case you’re still unclear on that.
2. You’ve pretty much lost your ability to accuse people of dishonesty, when you’ve written this:
You’re mad at someone for the interpretation that’s reasonable, but not the one you intended? From now on, if you disagree with me, it’s clearly because I used the wrong word while typing quickly. Calling me dishonest is just you making shit up.
@Jafafa Hots, #58:
LOL.
Really, it’s not you. But just in case it is you, maybe you should get that zippo app.
That comment was to Giliell. She seems to be aware of some established history, and appears to think that’s what was behind your comment. Ask her.
I’m out of spoons.
I did. Clearly and briefly, without putting huge demands on everyone’s time and attention by pumping out thousands of words of self-serving obfuscating BLATHER.
How about you tell me, directly and clearly and briefly, what the purpose of this was:
Keep in mind the facts I’ve already noted, about who you’re talking to, why, and how easy it would’ve been for you to fix this problem for yourself without comment.
But first, let me try one of those for myself: As far as I know, you could be an extraterrestrial, sent here to teach us all how to read and think and be super-duper-reasonable like you, pitiful wretches that we are.
You might reasonably ask me this: what the fuck is the point of that statement I just made? But I’m not attempting to be cryptic, and I certainly can explain it at length if that were necessary. Or you might just understand what the fuck the point of the statement is, and perhaps you’ll be upset about it. If (or when) I deny what’s blatantly problematic about a statement like this, or lawyer my way out of it somehow or another, that kind of sophistry is what I’m identifying as the mistake. It’s also just plain silly to have acted that way to begin with, but the “arguments” you’re putting up for it since are really the mistake that’s bothering me.
Going back and reading, is the debate over whether Crip Dyke said Ophelia 1) treats people badly in general; or 2) treated WMDKitty badly in one particular instance?
qwints,
Maybe. Probably. Dunno.
—
I just want to set this mosquito that got into my room and bit me once already on everyone here.
This is clearly gratuitous, Anthony K. It’s also unevidenced. I never once said I was mad at Ophelia (or anyone else) for this interpretation of this specific phrase.
For the record, I’m not mad about an interpretation that’s reasonable but not what I intended. For several reasons. First, her interpretation is not reasonable, as I showed in my comment #48:
Secondly, I was clearly not mad that Ophelia misunderstood my use of “so”:
Literally in my first comment after I’m aware of this interpretation by Ophelia, I state that I am happily conceding that I chose my words badly.
How do you get from me happily conceding the moment I’m aware of Ophelia’s interpretation and critique to me being “mad at someone” for a reasonable interpretation that isn’t what I intended?
Let’s look a bit more at that last part of your statement, shall we?
1. People weren’t calling me dishonest, at least not using that word.
2. I didn’t respond to differences in interpretation as anyone making shit up.
3. I was specific about what I said Ophelia was making up. There still is no evidence for the statement in question. Unless you or someone else provides some, it’s quite reasonable for me to dismiss the accusation as made up.
Anthony K
Yep, we all know. It was never in dispute. But just because you have never been at the recieving end of Ophelia being an asshole towards somebody doesn’t mean others haven’t. It also doesn’t mean that they have to justify their opinion to your satisfaction. It further doesn’t mean that they are obliged to go to places they consider unsafe to play impartial judge.
The issue isn’t whether or not I’m ever an asshole to people. Of course I am. Of course I often am. Sometimes I apologize; sometimes I don’t. But that’s not what the issue is.
And no, true: Crip Dyke is not “obliged” to go to places she “considers unsafe”; but that too is not the issue. The issue is that Crip Dyke should not announce her refusal to look at a few short comments at my blog and instantly proceed to make guesses about what I said in those few short comments. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it doesn’t deserve millions of words. It’s just a bit of bullshit, and Crip Dyke is making a fucking fool of herself over it.
Anthony K
Established history about Ophelia’s behaviour? Yes.
Established history about that particular thread? No.
If I got CD’s motivation for not going there wrong I’m sorry, CD.
Such bullshit. Nobody has said there’s any such obligation. If you’re not going to be playing at judging or actually judging, partially or impartially, then the question remains what you actually thought you were doing when you entered the conversation to offer something that has the look and feel of an actual criticism (with zero information and sloppy reasoning, no less) but which you’ve prepared with plenty of escape clauses to avoid any of it backfiring on you.
Maybe (for all I know, yadda yadda) the point is to distract from serious criticisms about what sometimes looks like Islamophobia or transphobia (or insensitivity about those issues) on Ophelia’s blog. It could be a vast conspiracy or maybe it’s not… which is the same thing as saying that’s “plausible”! But I do know this nonsense sure as shit isn’t doing anything for me to figure out anything like that.
So many words, so many useless words.
@consciousness razor:
The statement happened in a context, CR. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t simply taking WMDK’s assertions as true (and a good thing too, that I did that) in my original #193. However, it’s clear that WMDK was upset. Even though, “I haven’t read that thread and I am taking no position on whether or not your statements here are true,” is a factual and morally neutral statement, when women tell stories of victimization we’re often questioned. I felt it important to make that statement to WMDK in #193 for the purpose of other readers, but for WMDK’s sake I felt it important to make that statement in the least traumatizing way possible.
Thus I made up a silly way that WMDK could be entirely in the wrong in the worst possible way – she fucked up that other thread and then whined unjustly in this one about reasonable responses to fucking up that other thread. This was the “striped paint” comment. I was using humor to try to lessen tensions associated with a reasonable but emotionally laden statement that I felt compelled to make for the sake of ethics. I didn’t want Ophelia or any one else to think I’m assuming Ophelia did that.
So, later, when Ophelia shows up in the thread, I feel compelled to treat Ophelia in an even-handed way. I reiterate that I don’t have the knowledge to be the arbiter of what went on in that other thread and further state that I’m not going to go get it. I didn’t want to be dragged into the middle. I illustrate the impossibility of my being an arbiter with a mistake that Ophelia could actually make, simple forgetfulness. Again, this was balancing emotions. In my history with Ophelia, she has multiple times distorted what I said far beyond what I believe is a reasonable interpretation. I (mis-)judged that a mistake anyone could make – forgetting something – and that would be morally blameless would be less emotionally fraught than another striped-paint example. But I’m not in Ophelia’s head. I made my best guess at how to balance “I just told WMDK that I can’t take her word, so now I’ve got to say the same thing to Ophelia or the different responses might imply to WMDK that I consider her inherently less worthy of consideration than I do Ophelia,” and “I don’t want to engage with Ophelia in a way that raises the emotions any more than necessary.” Who knows, maybe a striped-paint example would have worked better. But I don’t fucking care.
I explicitly recused myself as arbiter to WMDK, using a silly example of my lack of omniscience (and therefore lack of ability to be arbiter) with no expectation that Ophelia would show up in ThunderDome. When Ophelia did show up, I evenhandedly used a non-silly but morally neutral example of my lack of omniscience and therefore lack of ability to be arbiter.
You may not like that I did that, but it shouldn’t morally “astonish” anyone. The point was that I displayed empathy to WMDK and attempted to display evenhandedness to both WMDK and Ophelia.
The point is not able to be divorced from the context of my #193.
I refuse to apologize for attempting to show empathy.
When Ophelia pointed out a specific interpretation of my writing that I hadn’t considered because even when I re-read my comment “so” only meant “moving on” to me, I apologized for the error that I made in the process of attempting to show empathy, but not for attempting to show empathy itself.
If people wanted to ask me what I meant, as you finally did here, I would have been happy to do that hundreds of comments ago.
Instead we had Ophelia telling me what I meant – and being so wrong that it’s clear she made at least part of it up – and Josh painting me as a moral abomination without even being clear what I’d done that was horrible…
…EXCEPT that it was immoral of me to declare I wouldn’t examine a thread and then make claims about the content of that thread.
Since I didn’t do that, what the fuck was I supposed to do? If they said, “this is where I got the idea that you were making claims about the content of that thread,” I could attempt to see their point of view, we could discuss the language, I’d be responsive to questions.
They didn’t say that. At least Ophelia asserted something that isn’t true, that simply didn’t happen. Since it’s something I never said and never intended to say, I can’t know which portion of my writing got magically mangled. There was no way for me to identify something to discuss productively.
Other people, including you, seem to come along and start with #210. That’s not how it happened. The interpretations of Ophelia and others appear unreasonable to me and only Ophelia has bothered to present a specific critique of a specific passage. When she did, I conceded bad word choice, but that didn’t address in any way her making other shit up.
Even now in her #65 she’s acting as if I didn’t concede the point she made in citing her example and providing an argument.
i don’t know what the fuck is up with people, but the evidence is right here: Ophelia can’t evidence at least one of her claims, the claim for which Ophelia did actually provide argument and evidence I happily conceded, but the vast majority of statements attacking me are non-specific and ignore the fact that people are reading me horribly unreasonable and/or making shit up.
But I’m full of bafflegab.
Whatevs.
@Ophelia:
Show me those guesses.
Plural.
I really hope everyone is wearing only their most formal of shoes right now, because some serious business is afoot.
Josh:
I didn’t think that you thought I was included in those folks you described as inappropriately ascribing trans* oppression or transphobia to Ophelia.
Suddenly I’m reading Ophelia’s #32 again, and you responding to it in #34:
When you say that “That is my problem with it,” is anything I wrote meant to be your “it” here? Because if so, I’m horrified.
CD: I don’t think you’re a moral abomination. I think you made a serious ethical lapse, and it is my opinion of you in total that caused me to be so shocked. Now I think you’re parsing within an inch of your life and doubling down. I can’t even follow most of what you’re writing as it’s so convoluted.
I’m not going to walk anyone through this again. It is not difficult to understand. And it doesn’t require any more words.
Again – not the issue.
It’s time to face the music
It’s time to make them pay
It’s time to meet your maker on the Thunderdome today
Don’t even fucking go there with me. You only needed to check for whether the quotes were made up. It’s not analogous at all to problematic cases of people “questioning” someone who’s been victimized.
Moreover, trying to keep that sort of thing in mind doesn’t require you to “balance” things by smearing the other person on nothing more than a vague hunch that you may or may not have (in this same saying-it-but-not-really-saying-it way). There are many, many, many ways you’ve could’ve been reassuring, or at least not hectoring, without getting us bogged down in any of this horseshit about what the fuck you were even trying to say.
And how did that work out? It’s hard to speculate about counterfactuals like this, but saying “Ophelia didn’t actually say any of that”, then perhaps moving on to something you could have something reasonable to say to somebody (or making no further comment, of course) … that to me seems like it would’ve been less traumatizing than your least traumatizing possible way.
@Josh:
yeah, I’m parsing within an inch of my life, but I don’t think my parsing is unreasonable. I’m finding it unfathomable that stating “I’m not going to make claims about X because I have no idea who has it right” came to be translated, “I believe WMDK,” or “I disbelieve Ophelia.”
I don’t get that at all. I’m not asking you to explain it. If you don’t want to go through it again I don’t blame you. But that’s why I’m parsing like crazy.
As for doubling down – notice, please, that I didn’t when Ophelia provided a specific criticism.
You might think I 150% downed, maybe, since when she pinpointed where she was drawing the inference of causation from I immediately admitted error and that my error caused confusion…but maintain that it’s an unreasonable interpretation if you read the sentence as a whole rather than focus on just the words “so” and “can’t”. And I think it’s only reasonable to read the sentence as a whole.
But note that I wasn’t pissed at Ophelia for that. I’m only pissed at her for making shit up, like,
I didn’t make any guesses. Ever. She hasn’t quoted me making those guesses. Now it’s up to me to make peace with the fact that she’s just not ever going to admit that those guesses don’t exist.
@CR:
Yes it is hard to speculate about counterfactuals like this, but I didn’t actually know whether Ophelia said any of that or not.
I get to choose whether or not to read Ophelia’s blog. Me. It’s my preference.
Even if I choose not to read Ophelia’s blog or choose to skip a day or a thread or a comment, I don’t lose the right to say something reassuring to someone obviously freaked out and upset **so long as I don’t speak about that content in my ignorance**.
I didn’t speak about that content. I didn’t say what was in there or what wasn’t. And I decided that I was going to say something reassuring anyway.
When your friends come to you upset and say, “My boss tried to do X bad thing to me over e-mail” do you ask to read the e-mail before you say something vaguely reassuring.
My guess is not.
Thanks for holding me to a different standard.
@CR, #83:
First, I’m not sure, but you seem to be thinking that I’m putting Ophelia in the role of potentially traumatizing questioner. For clarity, despite the fact that you might already have this down, the potentially traumatizing questioner was *me* – I had to be careful how to phrase my refusal to uncritically “just believe”.
Second:
Fuck you. I have worked in and out of shelters and in and out of the anti-violence movement for 2 decades. I have been trained, deeply, by myself and by others, to take care with my words when someone comes to me with a tale of being hurt by others. Because of the unique way in which thousands can “overhear” an internet conversation requires different responses than a private oral chat, I felt the need to make it clear no one can blame Ophelia for anything merely on WMDK’s say so. But I also took seriously my decades-long obligation to take deep care of the person coming to me.
If you want to know why I chose what I chose, then this isn’t about “going there”. My deep commitment to reassuring people in trauma, my knowledge of how sexism’s common effects in these situation, and my fierce insistence that people don’t make serious conclusions without evidence and careful thought all combined in what I wrote.
Believe me or not. But I wasn’t playing some card. I wasn’t trying to get out of jail free. You wanted to know what purpose a particular statement served. I told you.
Fuck you for telling me I shouldn’t have.
You got to choose whether or not you would comment about it, as well as what that comment would say. If you’re going to make certain choices instead of others, then it’s not problem that you have to live with the consequences of those choices. Like being ignorant of the facts and unable to speak honestly or coherently about them.
Fuck, if that happened, you would say this? “I’m not reading it, so I can’t take your word for exactly what happened any more than I take the others’ word for exactly what happened” and then you’d speculate about how it’s possible they’re “wildly off base” in their own ways, for all you know, etc. And then start arguing about this crap, when many others object to it.
That’s supposed to be vaguely reassuring…. to anyone at all?
I think I would show some kind of interest in actually knowing and caring about what actually happened. I would put that kind of expression way of ahead of some asinine demonstration of my “skepticism” that does nobody any good. And if it were publicly available, to me and everyone else, not a private email, then I definitely wouldn’t have any reason to say shit like that.
Yes. And I chose not to comment about it. Why are you and so many others imagining I did comment about that other thread?
Fuck you. You know that the internet is different. You know that here we are “overheard” by potentially thousands and that once you consider that, it’s impossible that everything in the conversation would play out exactly the same way. I was talking only about the access to written information and whether you would seek to read the email before you comforted your friend. This choice – to go elsewhere and read to “verify” what happened before saying something reassuring – has been criticized by you. But I suspect that once you step back from whatever else I’ve done to piss you off, you’d happily acknowledge that that choice isn’t actually one for which we should criticize people.
I didn’t seek to read that thread before i said something reassuring to WMDK. I didn’t say or guess what the thread did or didn’t include. I just said something reassuring to WMDK without reading the thread.
It’s a reasonable thing to do. it’s not an ethical violation – at least not on its own. So, y’know, why the fuck are you criticizing that decision? Is that really the most ethically horrible thing i’ve done here? Because if so, you’re not making a case being very concerned about my behavior.
anteprepro @78
I’m wearing monkey slippers(for real), so maybe that’s why I’m having trouble following(or caring). One question, does this mean the BBQ is off?
Jebus. Commenting about the thread (or the subject in general) doesn’t mean the same as making direct and explicit claims that tell us the contents of the thread. You can do the former without having done the latter. You got into a conversation which was about it, by commenting, and yours was (to be way more generous than I have any reason to be) a sort of meta-comment that was not intended to be an actual statement of what the thread contained or what you think it contained … which is still what it means to be “about” that.
Even if you don’t agree on that much, I assume you were commenting about something, no? Then you can take your skills at parsing and evasion, to apply them to my “it.” At this rate, I think that’s fair game. You were commenting about it — that is totally uncontroversial. But maybe nobody knows what “it” fucking is. That’s one of your choices too, I guess.
No: before going deep into vague-speculation-land, for no good reason at all. Not the same thing. As I said, there are plenty of ways to be reassuring. Frankly it’s hard to see how that could be one of them, since it looks nothing like the forms of reassurance I’m at all familiar with, but that was not my criticism.
You haven’t done much to piss me off, as far as I can remember. I don’t think I have an ulterior motive anyway, just the obvious one that I’m annoyed (and very much confused) by the way you’re handling this conversation right now. But like I just said above, once again, you’re presenting a false choice.
Is the horse dead yet? I think it is. Yep. Been dead for a while.
Agreed. Also, I think, agreed that I did the former and not the latter. Maybe you’re not saying that you think I did the former and not the latter, but that’s what I think.
My question is this: why would doing the former while avoiding the latter be wrong?
What’s wrong with saying, “I don’t know what’s in Avengers 2, but based on Avengers 1 I think your guess that there will be lots of explosions is plausible.”
Or to take something where there’s a potential conclusion of unethical behavior on the part of the content-creator, back to Bill Frist. What if someone said, “Bill Frist just diagnosed someone he’s never met by watching a videotape! How fucking unethical. You should totally read this bizarre essay by him making and justifying his diagnosis-by-video”?
In this hypothetical, Bill Frist is being accused of something unethical. Is it unethical of me to say, “I’m not interested in reading anything by Frist, but based on the fact that he diagnosed Terry Schiavo via videotape, I find it plausible that he would do it again”? Is there really an ethical obligation to read Bill Frist’s essay or refrain entirely even from meta comments, even from those comments that are based on evidence which I do have to hand?
I can’t see a difference between Ophelia’s position and answering this hypothetical, “No, you are not allowed to comment in any way, meta- or otherwise, that touches on the same topic as the essay, even if you have mountains of good evidence from other sources that proves your statement to a practical certainty, unless and until you actually read the essay.”
Her blog isn’t like a series of formulaic action movies. That hardly needs to be said. There are no ticket prices, for instance.
You also didn’t suppose that WMDK had merely guessed about what was in the sequel, which you merely thought was plausible. The false claim was actually made about it, not guessed, then you confused possibility with plausibility to make an argument from ignorance. Someone lied, you didn’t know and decided not to check (so you say), thus thinking it could be one way or another — which at best means you’re “agnostic” about it. So, your claim keeps going, therefore it’s plausible (likely or believable, not just that it might be true). That doesn’t follow. The point it, on that level, is to literally express some degree of credence in support of the false claim, which you say you didn’t want to verify. If the point were to say “I have no clue and I think nothing, except that I hope you’re okay” you very well could’ve said anything like that, or something less awkward, with no problem at all.
That’s way too highly specific to work for you as an analogy. Lots of people have called others “stupid” or been insulting to someone. Indeed, I’ll make the bold claim that literally every human being, since languages have existed, has insulted somebody else verbally. But that doesn’t mean you should expect that it’s likely they’re actually doing it in this particular circumstance. (Remember, not simply that it’s “possible” or that you don’t know — that is useless to us here, as you’re now admitting.) So, using past cases of a person doing that gives you basically no information at all. You have about as much information as if you were just told they are a human being. Human beings insult, and this person’s a human, so they probably did insult somebody. That’s about the level of what you actually have in your priors. But it simply doesn’t work that way.
Saying how likely or not is exactly what I did NOT do.
I didn’t admit that. At least, I have no idea where I would have. When I came up with a phrase as explanation/synonym for “plausible” I wrote “cannot be dismissed out of hand”.
Certain senses of “possible” do create a lower threshold than what we would expect from “plausible,” but not all. When a politician says that reducing tax rates this parliamentary session is not possible because X party controls Y votes, the politician isn’t asserting that the laws of nature forbid tax rate reductions.
I use “plausible” because it’s more clear – it’s a “possibility” but one we actually have to consider may result from our actions. it’s **possible** that the next time I touch my cat she’ll be thrown back 50′ by an electric discharge. It’s not “possible” in any sense I have to actually worry about. Plausible is more clear, but possible is a legit word to use there.
OMG I am trying to figure out what is going on but all it continues to be are walls of text from Crip Dyke most of which doesn’t make much sense. SO MANY WORDS. Blocks and blocks of texts. I scroll and there is more blocks and blocks of text, all from the same person. Three in a row at times! No one can keep up. Are you intentionally trying to confuse people so they just give up?
No. I apologize.
PZ:
I just finished reading Clive Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels. The little image fits right in with the rest of the images currently swimming about in my head.
As for the current rending and tearing of flesh going on, well…there are parent birds busy feeding baby birds outside, and I’m behind on work, so I think I’ll be doing other things for a bit.
You’re asking whether and how it’s unethical (presumably as an epistemic concern) for you to make certain kinds of inferences, based on past experiences. I don’t need to entertain the notion that you’re somehow not making inferences just like the rest of us are all of the time, but in any case that implies your purpose in the case at hand was to make them, not to do something else (whatever that would be). That means you’re talking about the sense of plausibility that I have mind, which works the same in all the important ways, something that’s close enough to it for me to make that observation about it.
If you’re not doing that but some other strange thing, then there would presumably be some (strange) reason why the line thinking you’re offering in your analogies, as well as the real case of interest, do not work as advertised. It’ll be some kind of weird mismatch between your statements and reality. You can play these games with your special definitions for all sorts of words, but at the end of the day, that’s not going anywhere for you. Call it what you will, but in fact what you were doing was making an inference and expressing something about a belief you have (or had), which is based on that. You won’t get to where you’re saying you want to go with it (i.e., the sort of conclusion you make about Frist or Avengers 2, however tentative or circuitously-formulated it may be), if you’re doing something else. And as I said, it’s fallacious if you’re doing the more straightforward thing that I tried to describe.
Crip Dyke, Josh has brought up your walls of texts twice now, long before I did… this is not unique to this Thunderdome… You were doing the same thing in the last one.
I think we’re on the same page, except in that each of the analogies, the specific inference I was making was ***merely*** that X was plausible.
Plausibility isn’t inherent in the process you’re talking about, true, but it’s what I specified in both the original statement at issue and in the analogies.
I also note in passing you didn’t give me any opinion on whether those hypotheticals are or aren’t ethical. You talk about how they are different from what I did, but you don’t bother to say that they are or aren’t ethical.
@marilove:
And I already apologized. What do you want from me? Just a chance to berate me again for the same thing for which I’ve apologized?
CD
Offering a multi-paragraph opinion in an ongoing comment flame war isn’t hypothetical. Offering an opinion on commentary that you admittedly did not bother to read? Why?! Now there are Canibales,and a hundred more comments, and various dead things and gore.
Yep, it was DOA when WMDkitty rode it in here. I see ze has climbed up onto a cross since yesterday. It is odd that the atheists are always being accused of carrying out medieval religious punishments, by other atheists. In any case, Yes Jim, it’s dead. It’s so very dead.
@Tethys, #104:
Quote the opinion I offered. Let’s see if it was justified or fair.
FWIW, WMDKitty offered a very sincere apology for the “pet gay” thing over in the Lounge. Just in case anyone missed it. I commend her for doing that. In all the subsequent back and forth, it’s easy to overlook when people do the right thing in a post that gets lost in the ongoing debate.
Crip Dyke is almost impressive at this point, for a very strange value of “impressive.”
No, I shan’t be parsing these assembled Texts.
But hey what I don’t get? Why would anybody even want a pet gay?
I mean, unless the bootlicking was really extraordinary I guess.
Sorry, the comments ended at 96 when I wrote #103. I’m all for people letting the subject drop.
Commenting is offering an opinion. I’m not going to argue it on the grounds of justified, and especially not fair. Verification of facts before rendering judgement on said facts is pretty much SOP. *spock eyebrow* I don’t care who said what about whom in the comments on Ophelias blog, so I have no opinion on the validity of the comments I won’t be reading.
Really? I can’t write a comment that is solely a request for information? Or solely factual? Commenting == opinion, that’s the end? Bizarre.
What facts did I assert that could not have been known from sources other than that thread?
When, specifically, did I “render judgement on said facts”?
What was my judgement?
This is what drives me nuts about this whole thing. It’s being asserted that I’m being unethical, but no one will engage with whether what I said is reasonable, or justified, or fair. If you can’t answer those questions, how can you make any judgements at all about whether or not I’ve been unethical?
Ophelia says:
but cannot quote the guesses.
No one, of course, bothers to take her to task for making assertions and then refusing to review the evidence of my comments to actually support the idea that I made guesses as to the content of her comments.
Well done.
Hey, Sven.
You held off for a really long time.
Yaaay!!!
I missed Thunderdome.
It’s like the smoking corner. I never smoked, and sometimes the clouds of smoke would make me cough but I kept returning anyway. For the company and those interesting tidbits of conversation that somehow got reserved for that place.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/06/05/rifts-just-cant-get-deep-enough/comment-page-1/#comment-948807
@43 in the above link, chigau
Actually, you didn’t articulate any point like that, you just ambiguously said “Nerd Please don’t start”.
Brian Pansky:
Actually, Chigau did articulate the point like that, at least for those of us who pay attention, and have paid attention over many years of specific behaviour on the part of people. You might want to give that a try some day, paying the fuck attention – works wonders, really.
A person can have a point without having successfully expressed it. There is no contradiction between
“X is my point”
and
“You didn’t articulate anything like X”
but moreover, communication happens in a context. I might say something that everyone here recognizes as sarcasm ***only because*** it’s the same statement that some MRA or number of MRAs have made in all earnestness.
The exact same words, “We will never be free until we end feminism” can mean, in one context, “We will never be free until we end feminism” and in another context, “Feminism is vitally necessary to creating a free society. Also, let’s all laugh at the MRAs for a moment, because WTF, eh?”
I had no trouble understanding chigau’s statement. That suggests, to me, not that chigau failed to articulate that point, but that I’m much closer to being the intended audience than you.
It’s not a sin to fail to include you in the audience. There’s nothing at all wrong with chigau’s statement.
Unless you had a different point that you didn’t articulate.
@Caine:
As ever, you’re at least as quick on the uptake, and faster on the draw. Had I known you were comin, I’d a skipped my #117 and just baked a cake.
Mmm, cake.
So, weather…we got the summer hailstorm early – 1.5″ hail raining down for a good 15 minutes on Tuesday. Dented the hell outta one of the vehicles.
Oooh, cake. I’m good with that.
Mmm, someone else’s cake.
It’s too hot here to turn on the oven.
Caine
Golf ball effect. It’ll go faster with less drag. Proved by Mythbusters, I think, maybe.
My partner has a mean recipe for a dark chocolate Cherry Brandy Mud cake. Use only the finest Dutch cocoa. Dangerously alluring, best consumed in small quantities.
Well, it was addressed to Nerd, so he’s directly and unambiguously the intended audience. I’d say the rest of us are on equal footing on that score, if any of us are meant to get anything out of it. Presumably, Nerd shouldn’t start pouncing counterproductively on perceived chew-toys by making illogical requests of them, as has happened in the past. Maybe the rest of us should take the message that we shouldn’t start doing that either. Or maybe it’s don’t start commenting at all, just give it a rest — there’s really no way to tell, until that’s somewhat more clear with another comment that comes later on. I take it the fact that clarification is (or would’ve been) helpful is all Brian Pansky needs to have meant by saying “you didn’t articulate” it: not enough to satisfy a reasonable person who wants to understand what was actually meant by it, since articulation of a thing concerns in what way it is expressed (“clearly,” “succinctly”, etc.) as heard/read by others, not whether or not it was expressed or meant to be expressed at all. That seems like a fair reading of Brian, given context and all those niceties like that.
What does chigau often do? Say a few vague or cryptic or pointless things, that might be taken a lot of different ways, with minimal effort at making them comprehensible to anyone else, apparently assuming we’re mind-readers or don’t matter or whatever. But if somebody had merely said “chigau don’t start” at the right moment, I don’t think it would’ve been clear to a lot of people what that was supposed to be about.
My local airport authority rejects an anti abortion billboard advert.
Freeze Peach violated, claim bigots.
I have some sympathy when a moderator’s language gets a little simple, direct and of a nature that makes it hard for an outsider to figure out what is going on. I was the moderator of a serious discussion board on an image board founded after 4chan kicked out the fans of My Little Pony temporarily. When it comes to drama I’ve seen some shit. There is just no way a community should get that hostile about a purple horse getting wings.
Now that the fun has ended, I’ll pick up where I left:
Brony (from previous Tdome)
No, I meant “reactionary” as a political worldview. We don’t have anything in common with them in that regard. (“reactionary” in the literal sense is a pointless descriptor in this case everyone reacts to everything to some extent)
Oh, definitely. It’s not so much a schism between atheists as between non-authoritarians who happen to be atheists and authoritarians who happen to be atheists.
I see your point. You’re right – my comment was very privileged.
Me too, but for a different reason – I was depressed with suicidal tendencies, so low self-esteem is usually (but not always, sometimes, for short periods, I’m too confident) a part of my nature. I’m not trying to draw any comparisons here, but rather to give you a bit of background. Staying on the subject of backgrounds:
True for me as well. I despise pitters because they remind me so much of my teenaged self.
_____
On an unrelated note:
Out of curiosity, was it worse when she turned into a human?
@consciousnessrazor:
yes. Perhaps that’s all BP wanted to say. And if BP had said it that way, I would have been neutral, and if BP had add “to me” , i.e.
I would have been supporting BP.
But the frame that BP used was, “You’re doing it wrong.” But if chigau didn’t care about communicating to BP, then whether or not BP understood has fuck-all to do with whether chigau was doing it wrong or right. Since the statement was addressed to Nerd and not to BP, there’s no reason to think BP was in chigau’s intended audience.
And so what results from this is that so long as BP is using the “you’re doing it wrong” frame, rather than “it would be helpful to me” frame, then failing to address the particular communication idiosyncrasies of BP whenever you speak where it’s possible for BP to overhear becomes “doing it wrong”.
It makes BP’s understanding the measure of “doing it right”. If I’m not talking to BP, it’s hugely fucking arrogant for BP to step in and insist that my choice not to speak to BP’s particular dialect and subject knowledge is a failure of some kind that reflects badly on me or my ability to communicate.
I object to the arrogance of BP making his understanding the measure of doing communication right, not only, but certainly especially, when a message is expressly addressed to someone other than BP.
To me, when non-trans folk complain that my use of the word “privilege” in the sense with which I know you are familiar, CR, because the particular way that they misunderstand it which I didn’t intend hurts their feelings, they are arrogating to themselves the power to decide what is good communication whether or not I’m talking to them.
BP is discussing a different topic, but operating with the same arrogance.
i object.
I see. That’s always been a term I had some problems with. The negative connotation does not stick with me very well and I hear people on both sides of arguments use it a lot. I also think in terms of how people react a lot.
That sounds about right to me as well. That pattern drives me nutty trying to figure out all of the possible authoritarian-types in the atheist community and how they might intersect. Libertarian types used to an aggressive business world. The MRA contingent. “Old guard” high-ranking figures in the atheist community. I’m always testing potential assumptions to hold in my imagine like hypotheses. I would find it fun if it were not such a pressing problem but I enjoy it as much as seems appropriate.
Don’t worry about it. Fine details in how we react to stress is not something that is common enough. That’s one reason support this community, they are concerned about things in the same general category. Also I was a little sloppy too (below).
That was too simply worded. If it applies to everyone I try to be more careful, sorry about that. I know people with depression who have been suicidal and should have thought that one through better. I don’t mind comparisons because I’ve gotten used to talking through them, but it’s always a work in progress.
“Flavors” in how people respond to criticism are another one that is not really sorted well as far as “common sense” is concerned. I’m weird there too. While the situation in question did happen and did have a strong impact on me I used it to sharpen my behavior. While I get slammed by emotions the same intensity still works on the upswing. It’s hard to remember that I used to think of everyone as basically “just like me” until only five years ago. That white/male/ablist filter is hard to shake off.
That is complicated, it depends on how I saw her character was referenced and the community had “matured” somewhat by that point. And I’m still trying to build some perspective about my experience. A fandom war was something I was not thought I would be getting into and I was pretty shocked by the intensity.
The last three years have been a roller-coaster ride that I am still processing. Not only was that my first fandom ever (as a kid I had an odd aversion to the fads of the time like 80’s era wrestling and similar). Not only did I experience the schism here, but I also experienced a schism at Ponychan (staff battle, half of staff and banned people founded mlpchan). And I was a substitute teacher in Texas. And the admin of Ponychan asked me to moderate the board I spent most of my time posting in, and one of my hobbies was arguing with creationists. Because I was a trained scientist analyzing the whole thing in terms of social evolution I managed to stay somewhat sane. Memes have been carving an interesting path in my head over the years.
To answer your question The Equestria Girls did not really have as much of an impact as the regular show. That was what most of the fandom was imprinted on and I blame Disney and Warner Brothers for that. It has its fans and they passionate about it without there being much fighting like controversial changes to the original show. There really were people with very intense opinions and irrational feelings about that. That was probably the most intense drama bomb. The fighting over Derpy Hooves (a well done fan-service character inspired by an animation error) also involved some epic battles.
(I’m starting to think that fandoms are the social version of love-at-first-sight except intense craziness is multiplied by the number of people).
@116 Caine
Brian Pansky:
So there was some insider info involved that I didn’t know about, ok, I see.
I can’t comprehend what you are complaining about here. I did read the things I was responding to. I certainly can’t see it being a big deal since this was a simple misunderstanding at most, so I’ll ignore it unless you think it’s worth expanding upon. And given your vehemence here, I suspect you do think it’s somewhat important, though I can’t tell why.
@124 consciousness razor
Ya something like that, thanks. Though “articulate” might have been too strong a word for me to use, because any clear communication that specified the complaint would have at least made some sense.
Seedy
I think that Brian Pansky has you hushed.
Can I start quoting you without credit?
Just to see what happens?
.
the preceding was not meant to be read by consciousness razor or Brian Pansky.
Doubtful. There seems to be some long-term tension between you two, but I’m ignorant of the history of it.
No, it was a descriptive statement of fact: actually, you didn’t X. It’s like “actually, you didn’t eat your vegetables,” not like “you did eat your vegetables but you did it the wrong way.”
-We start with an imperative statement (don’t start) with no other definite content.
-We go to a description of something, which actually reveals something about what was supposed to be problematic and why the imperative was issued. The claim which follows is that “that was my point.”
-The response is that that wasn’t articulated (whether it was the point or purpose or intention is different). That’s true: in fact it wasn’t, not to me or to you or to anyone else. And nobody’s acting like they’re some kind of expert on “doing communication right,” nor do we need such people to know simple and obvious things like this.
magistramarla,
in
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/06/05/the-breast-that-ate-terra-haute/
Not moving this here to argue, but it’s a possible derail of the original thread.
It’s really great that your son and daughter-in-law discussed important things up front. It’s probably just the wording you used but, I hope that’s not as definite as it sounds. Women can have all kinds of personal reasons to change their minds about breastfeeding, it can be physically painful or emotionally draining . I hope your son was or would be capable of showing some flexibility and respect his wife’s decision about breastfeeding, even if it was different from what he wanted.
Brony #129
Nonsense, you were right to say that and you phrased it well.
So very true. They also tend to happen at the same age. I’m a bit of a Star Trek fan and the divide between fans of The Original Series, The New Generation and Voyager is often age-related. The first show they saw was usually the one they liked the most.
@CR:
1st, there is no long-term tension “between us”. For some reason, there’s long term tension on BP’s side. Very recently – only AFTER BP decided to hush me – there’s been tension on my side.
Why, you might ask? (Although you probably don’t care.)
BP said he didn’t want to read me because I was following him around to “troll” him.
Except we both know that trolling is about getting a reaction. It’s not about following one person in order to make that one person feel bad. BP accused me of harassment, when I did nothing more to BP than I do to anyone else on this site: agree and/or thank when BP is right in more-than-a-mundane-way (you obviously can’t create a comment for each and every previous comment that contains a single true fact with which you can agree), and then disagree and or criticize the argument when people appear to me to get shit wrong.
BP posts on pharyngula. BP, like everyone else who posts on Pharyngula, gets things wrong sometimes. I have publicly disagreed. That’s it. I made no effort to harass. I didn’t “follow BP around”.
BP accused me of something pretty fucking horrible while camouflaging the accusation as something less horrible so that the content of the accusation is still clear to anyone who knows the definition of “troll” and cares to think about the accusation, but BP can plausibly-deniably insist “oh noes, I never said anything like harassment! Just following me around to make me feel bad by criticizing me more harshly than CD would ever criticize someone else, that’s all!”
So I have a short-term beef with BP. No long term bad feeling.
Neko Case, one of my favorite musicians, has written a long essay on “Women in _______.” to mark the anniversary of a tweet Don’t Peggy Olson me Motherfuckers. It is long and a bit rambling, but it does a great job of sorting out exactly how she feels about being a woman and a musician.
Yes Neko, you are great, and a talented musician too.
@CR:
Thank you for calling me a liar. Next time I really want to know what is in my head, I’ll ask you.
Yes and no. BP conflated using insider language addressed to someone else that actually communicated chigau’s point with not actually bothering to make the point at all.
There’s nothing wrong with my description.
Your vegetables description fails because it entirely eliminates the concept of how something is “done wrong” or “done right” only in comparison to the intended outcome.
If the person is intending to eat a healthy, nutritionally diverse dinner, then “you didn’t eat your vegetables” is “doing it (dinner) wrong”. The fact that you didn’t eat them at all, yes, means you couldn’t have eaten the vegetables wrong, but the clear statement is in reference to eating dinner.
This was all in reference to chigau communicating to Nerd.
BP is asserting that BP knows what was communicated to Nerd in relation to BP’s point.
It’s arrogant. It puts BP in the center of the analytical frame even when BP wasn’t the intended audience.
===================
@chigau, re:132:
go for it. Any time.
I didn’t call you a liar (that might change….). You made a prediction about a counterfactual: what you would have done if something else had happened which didn’t actually happened. I have a hard enough time knowing about my future self, given what is happening or will happen. Having reason to doubt or possibly being mistaken about myself doesn’t make me a liar. The same applies to you.
That’s what you assert. But as I already pointed out, if you get what “articulate” means, then there’s no evidence of any such thing. If you still don’t see the difference, then you could misinterpret it that way. Or if you had access to BP’s internal thought process, you would have a different of sort of evidence of what was supposedly confused or conflated by BP. But you don’t.
So BP did know what the purpose of the statement was, but still conflated it? Why? And how do you know that? Isn’t it more parsimonious to guess that, unlike you apparently, BP simply didn’t get what was supposed to be lurking in there somewhere? That would be the reason why BP merely said that wasn’t articulated. I also wasn’t sure what chigau was intending to do at the time, and I don’t see how that’s hard to believe or understand, given the almost total lack of content in comment in question. Similarly, people don’t all eat healthy or nutritionally diverse dinners. You’d be able to complain that it’s presumptuous, if somebody is claimed to be “doing dinner wrong” when their intention was not to have that sort of dinner. Why is that we must have knowledge like that — just because you think that you did?
Also, why would chigau have any reason to clarify it with the follow-up comment, if it was supposedly so blindingly obvious to everyone to begin with?
In which case you could have said, “Maybe, maybe not” which would imply a complete lack of knowledge of the probability.
Instead you said “doubtful,” which is a statement that you KNOW that the odds are less than 50%…and an unspecified amount, but really significant amount less.
Per Merriam-Webster:
Note that the first applies to ***people or other things that can be sure or certain about something else***. A statement has no mind to do any doubting. The statement is not “doubtful” in that sense.
Not probable = p < 0.5, and implies something closer to p < .2 or P < .1 depending on context.
"Likely to be bad" is self explanatory.
i don’t know why BP would do such a thing, Why dot you ask bp?
But once chigau said what the “point” of the statement was, BP sure as hell did know the purpose.
Since BP was asserting that chigau hadn’t articulated chigau’s point, then it’s impossible to conclude that BP made that statement ignorant of the purpose of chigau’s comment.
What’s so hard about that?
For fuck’s sake, I’m the one who is doubtful about it. Yep, I just checked again, and I sure am. What’s the problem?
An honest person here, who isn’t trying to dig ever deeper to embarrass themselves, would simply retract the claim that I called you a liar. No apology needed.
I guess the hard part for you is finding an actual strawman who will actually say that, since nobody here is.
Yes. And you didn’t identify yourself as doubtful. The most logical and direct interpretation of what you wrote is that the assertion on my part was doubtful. The assertion itself.
Instead of saying,
which ***still*** doesn’t clarify whether my assertion was doubtful or whether you were feeling doubt, but which, ***even if you assume that the focus on your ability to know implies that you are attempting to clarify that my assertion isn’t doubtful without ever saying once that my assertion isn’t doubtful*** actually takes no responsibility at all for your part in the communication.
When Ophelia pointed out a part of one of my statements where I used “so” as a content-free transition word, consistent with one normal usage of that word, but without tone of voice cues that make it clear that I was using it that way and not using it to communicate causation – another perfectly normal use of the word “so”, what did I do?
I fucking apologized. Nothing I wrote was wrong, but I apologized for my miscommunication, owned my part in it.
You want any fucking credit at all? Take responsibility for your side of the conversation.
say, “Whoops. Sorry. Not at all what my meant, I wrote ambiguously. Here’s what I meant.”
As for “thanks for calling me a liar” I think that you know that what I did was use hyperbole to call attention to the fact that your statement communicated that you knew my state of mind and my likelihood to do or not do what I actually said.
If I had it wrong, as apparently I did, and you’re just asserting “well I have no idea about that”, then I was wrong to call attention to the assertion as meaning something ***that it did actually mean, but that was not what you intended it to mean***.
It would have been far more productive for me to ask for a clarification. That I didn’t is on me.
As for you portraying yourself as the noble one who isn’t digging a deeper hole: fuck you.
Is that clear enough?
Let me lay it out a little more explicitly. I don’t really give much of a shit what the causes are, of you reading BP uncharitably (as I see it). Nor do I care how long those things have been building up, what you count as “long,” nor am I interested in evaluating your version of events in which everything you did was acceptable.
I am doubtful (because sentences aren’t the kinds of things which doubt) that adding “to me” would’ve had a significant effect on whether or not you would’ve read BP charitably, that you would’ve been “supportive” of a simple statement of fact that something was articulated (to anybody, clearly or unambiguously). I’ve given a much more charitable reading, which doesn’t have the difficulties explaining everyone’s motivations (or simply describing events accurately) that yours seems to have. In return, there’s been nothing given that holds up to scrutiny, about why that just doesn’t work. Agreed? That’s now on the table for you. You have it, but for some obscure reason that you don’t specify, there’s apparently still pushback. So, BP having cast the statement in this subjective way that you think would’ve made a difference is sort of beside the point now, since we can look at how you’re responding with a concrete and explicit way to do it for real. Is that charitable reading something you’re willing to accept now, or do you still think there is some problem with it? And whatever that problem might be, why shouldn’t I think that your past disagreements probably are (or were) in some way coloring the approach you’re taking?
Once, when I had a system where I could use a hush-file, I hushed everyone but me.
That was very peaceful, but boring.
I also tried hush-filing myself.
That was weird.
The people next door have gone out for the evening.
Four of them.
from my viewpoint
male: skinny jeans, shirt, sensible shoes
female: tightish dress, jacket, sensible shoes
male: maroon total-cover robe, couldn’t see the shoes
female: trousers, jacket, hijab, sensible shoes
I don’t know where they’re going but I am very happy to live in a place where they can.
and I thought the people on the other side of the duplex were just sitting on their deck and yelling
tuns out they are sitting on their deck, watching Women’s FIFA, and yelling
carry on
I have fucking specified it. It was my original critique: BP is acting as if BP’s understanding is important in analyzing a communication between chigau and Nerd. It’s an arrogant imposition of centrality to which I object, and your interpretation of BP’s words does nothing to make it reasonable to find that BP did NOT make BP’s understanding an important factor of analysis in examining a communication between chigau and Nerd.
Let me be explicit:
It’s not that “to me” are words that constitute a magic talisman. It’s not even the particular words that BP uses to express the idea.
It’s that BP uses BP’s understanding as some sort of measuring stick. “I didn’t understand X, therefore X wasn’t articulated” really doesn’t actually save BP from this criticism even granted the more precise and narrow definitions that one might very reasonably use for “articulate” which loosely is used as a synonym for “express” but can also be used, very legitimately, in the sense of “express overtly”. BP can even be correct that the statement was not expressed overtly, but my problem is not with the truth or falsity of the statement: it’s with BP inserting his own understanding as somehow important at all.
The phrase:
isn’t preferred by me or entitled to more respect by me because I think it’s more correct or because it uses magic words. It’s because this formulation doesn’t actually inject BP to the center of a communication between chigau and Nerd. This formulation doesn’t actually participate in the problematic behavior I’m critiquing. Asking someone for help in understanding doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that your understanding matters to two people who are having a conversation that doesn’t involve you but happens within your earshot.
This is true even if the request for help in understanding is oblique, say a statement simply saying to people, “hey, this would be helpful” without it being phrased as a request with “please” and other formalities attached.
It’s not about it being read more charitably or less. It’s about the fact that that formulation doesn’t make the arrogant error I’m criticizing. So I couldn’t **possibly** have the problem with that statement that I do with the formulation bp actually used.
========
I further note that you still can’t just say, “Whoops, my bad” when I point out wording on your part that doesn’t say what you want it to say. It’s one thing to say, “what I meant was…” and it’s another thing to say, “what I meant was…. But, fuckit, you’re right that it could have been taken that way, and that I didn’t eliminate that potentially problematic reading from the reasonable readings of my comment is on me. To the extent that I left that problematic reading open as a reasonable interpretation, possibly even the most reasonable interpretation, the miscommunication is on me. My bad.”
One is defensive and deflects blame. The other might be defensive, but actually takes some personal responsibility for one’s own writing.
I find it absolutely hilarious that you want other people to be more gracious in admitting error but that you can’t be even as gracious as the person you criticize.
For certain values of “hilarious”.
*deep breath*
I’ve spent the last few days processing and (more importantly) calming the fuck down.
I was caught up in a sneaky hate spiral. I take full responsibility for my actions/words, and recognize that I had no right to take it out on, well, anybody, but specifically Ophelia and Josh.
Ophelia — I won’t apologize for my opinion as I still think a lot of what Hebdo published was iffy at best. However, I should not have implied that you, personally had called me stupid, and I should not have let something that shouldn’t have been more than an annoying molehill turn into Mount Everest. That was my fault, first for not proofreading, and second for not stepping away and processing/de-stressing and responding in anger.
Josh — I shouldn’t have taken my mood out on you. At all. I should have neither called you a “pet” (dehumanizing) nor referred to you solely as your orientation (because you’re more than just your orientation). Furthermore, I shouldn’t have said what I said because it did serious splash damage to communities I care about.
Tony! — I should have just listened to you to begin with.
PZ — My apologies for dragging this into the Lounge, and crossing the line that even the T-Dome doesn’t cross.
Everyone — In the future I will disengage and take the time to process and calm down instead of responding in anger. I can’t promise perfection, but I will do my very best to remember that stepping away is the better option. Please do feel free to tell me to take a break if I’m getting upset. When I’m having a bad day, I will stay away from things that are likely to push a button.
In short, that clusterfuck? My fault entirely.
If I missed anyone or anything particularly egregious, please let me know!
chigau,
I’ve found it strange, but this small town I’m in now seems way more open and inclusive than the capital I live in.
—
But I need to interrupt heart warming messages with : omg, did that spider just jump? My tolerance for spiders has been steadily increasing but this is where I draw the line .
Sorry, the “heart warming messages” was referring solely to my own comment, not WMDKitty’s apology which I didn’t see at that point.
WMDKitty:
*headbonks for you.*
@WMDKitty
The red mist that rage attracts is a seductive thing. It shapes what we tend to notice in ways that I constantly have to watch out for, but ended up being very useful practice. It wants us to win instead of be correct. The red mist makes a smaller number of possible responses very attractive and it takes some work to learn to feel and see all of your options and find new ones. It will make us try to grab onto things about a person and what they say that have nothing to do what the disagreement is, and more to do with who and what they are (which should only be grabbed onto when relevant).
You don’t have to abandon intense responses, or even insulting characterizations. I would die of hypocrisy poisoning if I tried to suggest that. But to use them well you must control them by learning what the red mist tires to show you and what it tries to distract you from. Only you know best what those things are, why it might be showing them to you and what it might be hiding from you. I wish you luck in making your weapons more effective.
chigau #147
So jealous of them. I can’t watch Women’s FIFA anywhere around here.
_________________
Beatrice #150
There is one of those floating/gliding spiders, slowly moving through the air in my windless room. It’s light beige and very small so it’s almost transparent. Occasionally I lose track of it, only to have my eyes suddenly focus on it again.
Spiders are assholes.
Shorter:
chigau really didn’t articulate what Nerd shouldn’t start, or why.
She didn’t need to, because most people here – no doubt Nerd himself included – are familiar with Nerd’s scripts.
While I’m at it: Caine, you got angry because Brian Pansky evidently isn’t familiar with the personalities of the top 20 most prolific commenters. He’s not somehow obliged to.
It was. The best comparison I’ve seen is to South Park and Family Guy: Charlie Hebdo* is satire, yes – but it goes to great pains to ensure that it offends everyone to the exact same amount, and actually believes that’s a good thing.
* Short for hebdomadaire = weekly, a word incidentally not understood in Belgium.
Ever since we elected Obama, racism is dead.
That’s great news for Serena.
Right?
…RIGHT?
Times are looking grim these days
Holding on to everything
It’s hard to draw the line
@David Marjanović
I agree with all of that.
However:
1) that doesn’t change the fact that he’s judging a communication between chigau and Nerd on the basis of whether someone who is neither chigau nor Nerd understood. It’s an arrogant imposition of self-as-measuring-stick where it’s inappropriate.
2) When Caine says:
It’s not because BP is breaking from an ethical mandate to pay attention to the words and habits of other members of the Horde.
It’s because BP is constantly saying, “I don’t understand” in a manner that begs for spoon-feeding information.
If, in fact, BP is desperate to understand all these things that BP doesn’t understand, Caine is right that paying attention to those things would, in fact, help.
If he wants to know these things, but doesn’t pay attention to the things that would allow him to understand these things on his own, he is denying himself something he wants.
Caine, also, has expressed annoyance and irritation at BP’s repeated “I don’t understand” comments. No doubt there’s an element of, “and then you’ll be less annoying” in her prescription. Nonetheless, she’s not critiquing the violation of some mandate.
She’s observing that BP is expressing a desire to understand these things …while showing ignorance of things that BP [in Caine’s opinion] could learn without troubling others simply by paying more attention to what BP is already reading.
It looks to me like assuming BP **couldn’t** learn those things simply by paying more attention is an offensive dismissal of BP’s intellectual capacities.
But maybe I’m weird.
To be honest, I didn’t expect the racism to be so blatant.
Or the sexism even. So many men who insist on informing their audience of their personal preferences in pornographic detail… *headshake*
Point taken.
It was more or less conscious projection. I’m really not good at learning such things – especially when it comes to people I only know as letters on a screen, but not even only then.
“established pattern of dishonesty, such as WMD Kitty,”
Once again, I dispute this assertion.
I don’t do “dishonest”.
@David Marjanović
I’m actually not good at it either. It took a long time for me to learn anything significant about all the different personalities here. I got lost in the ‘nyms and didn’t remember who said what, making establishing histories or tendencies impossible. It only started to change one person at a time – in a dark moment, Sally Strange and carlie and Caine were there for me. That was memorable enough that I felt grateful enough that when any of those three said something in the future, I filed in a “one of those three” file. Eventually they even got their own files. And then comments were no longer only one indistinguishable mass. There were 3 discreet files and an indistinguishable mass. Then one more person – I don’t remember whom – did something to separate themselves. It wasn’t quite as much an effort to create this new file, but I also wasn’t as good at shifting all new comments by that person into it. Some still remained in the mass. It was the emotionally important moments that single out people that enable their future comments to be sorted. I certainly didn’t gradually build up an understanding of every one at once. I certainly didn’t get to just choose “oh, I think I should learn chigau’s personality”. It happened in a very specific way that related to how I process information and is very, very difficult for me to change. (I may, in fact, be unable to change it, though I don’t know that for sure.)
I’m perfectly aware that it may be that BP has the same problems/limitations that I do and that you apparently do.
But people who think that it’s uncharitable to tell him to pay more attention miss that there’s a definite sense in which it is uncharitable to assume paying more attention wouldn’t help. When I’m faced with questioning someone’s behavior or assuming that they just aren’t smart enough to behave differently, I tend to question the behavior.
If anyone whose behavior is so questioned wants to volunteer that they have an incapacity which makes it unreasonable for them to act otherwise, I’ll back off completely. With that information, the behavior doesn’t have the implications I thought: it’s predicated on the incapacity and not the problematic ethical thought or the motorcycle ownership or the whatever-the-heck that would otherwise be implied.
based on
I think we’re in exactly the same place. I don’t write the above for you, so much, as I write it because there are others reading and I have that same hyper-avoidance to miscommunication that leads, sometimes, to **over**communication that you have shared with me that you experience yourself.
[interjecting myself into a conversation…]
I had been aware of that. That’s why I often abbreviate Charlie Hebdo as “Charlie”. But others seem to use CH or, more baffling, “Hebdo”.
And yet, I’m not sure why I’m baffled. The London Times is abbreviated “the Times”, not “the London”, likewise the New York Times. The New York Daily News is abbreviated “the Daily News”.
Why does calling the magazine “Hebdo” not work for me? I’ll have to think about it.
Hey, everyone!
I can do a screen-capture on my iPad!
@chigau:
I can do that too: it has a camera and I have a mirror.
Crip Dyke, #165
Come on, be Sirious.
Now my nose is snorting, Saad.
If my children no longer respect me, I’m blaming you.
Sometimes, when using the iPad camera, I accidently switch from the lens that points away from me to the one pointing toward me.
I usually scream in terror.
@chigau:
I only end up screaming in terror if the lights are on.
Fortunately, I have no iPad and tend to use my partner’s only at night.
But you totally haven’t imposed yourself, which at one time was just a one-sentence comment from BP to chigau. I guess that’s because you think you’re “closer to the intended audience,” which is different from treating yourself as a kind of “measuring stick” or acting like somebody is “doing communication wrong.”
If it were just that, not making a big fucking stink about it, I wouldn’t count that as “uncharitable,” since a request like that is not in any obvious way violating the principle of charity. So, I don’t know who these “people” are who supposedly think that.
“haven’t imposed yourself” in this conversation
It’s a whole phrase. Not all impositions are arrogant. Not all arrogant impositions use self-as-measuring-stick. Not all uses of self-as-measuring-stick are inappropriate.
isn’t relevant to that at all.
If you wish to call me out as arrogant and argue that there’s a reason I shouldn’t have spoken up at all, go ahead.
But it makes no sense at all to connect that to what I had said above about BP’s behavior. …unless you’re trying to paint me as not [only?] arrogant, but a hypocrite. In that case, it’s just a tiny bit relevant that I didn’t remotely use myself as measuring stick.
I’m sure you’ll get yourself out of that paper bag there soon, CR.
That’s NOT TRUE. Not that anyone here gives a fuck.
I almost never comment in the Thunderdome, but given that I’d engaged with WMDKitty over at B&W and followed this thread therefore… I’ll add a second *headbonk* for the apology. That’s some classy shit there.
Now, to the really important thing: AlexanderZ, #135:
It’s “The NEXT Generation”, and you completely forgot Deep Space 9. A bit of a fan my ass.
Oh, right. This place is a hive mind full of PZ’s sycophants, where anyone who dissents will be banned.
@Nick Gotts, #175:
I kinda wish we actually would disagree with each other once in a while, Nick. As much as I like the support, it does get boring when everyone agrees with everything I say, day after day.
But I’m sure you feel exactly the same way.
SC@173:
Really? I guess I did not give a fuck when I posted this comment.
And I guess Nick Gotts did not give a fuck when he posted this one.
Perhaps next time you could paint with a smaller brush.
Brony #157
Hugs and well-wishing.
___________________
PatrickG #174
Hmm… embarrassing.
I didn’t forget it – it’s fans did. There are many people who love DS9, many consider it the best ST series, but you don’t get that much DS9 fandom nor much in the way of DS9 conventions compared to ST:TOS, ST:TNG and ST:Voyager. The best you can say that it has more fans than ST:Enterprise and ST:TAS, but that’s a very low hurdle to pass, considering how good DS9 was.
The most famous DS9 character is Worf, and even that only because he was part of TNG crew. Compare the love for Seven of Nine to any DS9 character except Worf and you’ll see why I didn’t include it in the fandom list.
I did say I’m only a bit of a fan.
And you prove my point as it sails right over your head.
David Marjanovic:
You certainly learned to criticize anything I say, and pronounce me wrong no matter what. I’d prefer it if you’d learn to shut the fuck up where I’m concerned, David. Work on that.
It would be really more convincing if people came up with a more original argument once in a while.
I’ve had “hivemind” and “ideologically pure” thrown at me for so long, by people who were so wrong about everything, I’m kind of desensitized.
Giliell #181
That’s because you have already been assimilated.
Your resistance proved futile.
chigau
Why do I still have to put up with this shitty body?
Where are my shiny gimicks?
Giliell
I have no idea.
If you find out, let me know.
I need new feet.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #176
I have to disagree. Only out of contrarianism, though… :)
.
Anyone will have to disagree someday in the blogosphere this resulted in so many schisms this is nym’d schrizitcism seems there’s a trend if not if not if not if not a pattern until everyone is weighted on atomic scores the solution against this is called Karmaceuticals it holds that there’s no greater solvant which already successfully dissolved communism in early 90’s and propelled that logic stick to a pre-electronic era eerie while there’s no metaphore for phosphoric minds grandma told me the early gurus were mistaken in their call for its back for they misread hell be back a-woo-la and we might really lose ground on that very basis Hell no the highway is openly responsible for lost souls dear bear killings and hell fuck where’s the drug that soap it?
SC:
i do not understand your point. Can you please explain?
Very nice evening here.
except for the mosquitos
chigau@187: lucky you! It’s little-black-fly season over here. I counted 19 bites on my arms and legs last night, and then the bites on my neck and one on my belly started itching today. My partner got one in the corner of her eye — she could barely open her eye :(
Our state’s sole remaining operational coal fired power plant had an explosion the other day and was taken offline. Now all we are running on is wind, solar and natural gas. The lights are still on.
numerobis
the blackflies thank you
because it gives me an excuse
You might have noticed that both Tony’s and my posts were made in the course of an argument over Charlie Hebdo – in which, for example, Okidemia was taking a position much closer to your own – although more nuanced, because actually taking notice of the problematic nature of some CH cartoons. But of course that would have required an ability to conceive and concede that your view is not always the only possible one that a decent person can hold.
John C. Wright proes he’s not a homophobe by spewing homophobic bullshit
Obvious content note, ‘kay?
@Crip Dyke, #86, The breast that ate Terra Haute
Only rules of some languages, not all. I am just going to drop this fun fact here:
Double negatives are nonsensical in English and AFAIK in germanic languages. In slavic languages (at least those three I know) double/triple/multiple negatives are common and they do not add up mathematicaly, but always mean negative.
For example two sentences where czech double negative corresponds english single negative (negatives are bolded):
I did not do anything. = Já nic neudělal.
I do not want anything. = Nic nechci.
This might be a record of negatives in one sentence that still makes (grammatical) sense in czech – seven negatives:
Nobody has done anything to anyone anywhere at any time and in any way. = Nikdo nikomu nic nikde nijak nikdy neudělal.
I wonder how much usage of double negatives in some American dialects has stemmed from the influx of slavic immigrants in the past. I use sometimes double negative in German or English when I have to speak fast, because my native language is Czech and that is how my brain is wired and I have to consciously try and correct this (among multiple other incompatibilites – for example Czech is very, very heavily gendered language).
Charly @193: Double (or multiple) negatives were standard in Old English and Middle English, and could be seen in Shakespeare. As H.L. Mencken writes
Here you are.
The dynamic here,* sadly, isn’t conducive to intellectually honest discussion, and I also have a strong dislike of many who comment here, so I won’t be returning to discuss the matter here.
* By the way, my comment about “anyone here” referred to the regular cast of contributors to this thread, not those who’ve come by and tried to enlighten.
Yeah, right.
chigau @190 — I’d already posted the link to the original at the NFB to my private FB page. It seems the author of the song was a frequent guest at my uncle’s restaurant. I am but a few degrees from totally obscurely fame!
Rob @194, Charly @193: multiple negative is also the norm in French — e.g. “je NE suis PAS impréssionné” / I negative am not impressed. You can optionally drop either negative; if you drop the “pas” you’ll either pass as a literary snob or be misunderstood, whereas if you drop the “ne” you’ll be a kid, or salt of the earth (which includes anyone from Quebec). Given the Normand invasion, it doesn’t really surprise me that older English would have kept that same double negative.
me @196: lest anyone think me witty, I stole that. Is it from Mencken?
@numerobis:
I remember shortly after arriving in france for a summer trip, every flabber I own was well and thoroughly gasted when people around me starting asking questions using “je” inversion (supposedly the only pronoun **not** allowed to follow the verb) and responding to my questions with “je pas”.
While I soon learned that “je pas” (sometimes – rarely! – audible as “je’n’ pas”) was simply the locals’ way of psychically smacking around tourists who thought “I don’t know” involved a **verb** of some kind, questions asked through je inversion were so common I wondered why we were taught the rule against them.
Crip Dyke @198:
I thought je inversion was acceptable for common verbs; suis-je, dois-je, ai-je, puis-je (instead of “peux-je”), etc.
@Rob,
it certainly is in Paris.
That didn’t stop my French teachers from repeating that je inversion is never acceptable, and repeating that, and repeating that from 3rd grade to end of high school.
Seriously, the first time it was done in my presence, a friend I’d met when he was a foreign exchange student in the states used “suis-je” just after we’d gotten back from the airport to his house.
To this day I remember the color of the wall behind him, the color of the carpet on the stairs, the shape of the wood handrail. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was so excited to be in France after having studied French-as-second-language for 11 years, I was so proud that this shit ***actually worked***. I mean, I could communicate with customs and everything. Wow!
And then this cast-iron rule I’d been told had no exceptions was violated within maybe 20 or 30 minutes of getting to the house where I was going to stay the summer.
Talk about destabilizing…
Laverne Cox cast as wax museums first transgender figure:
My little app tells me that in about 25 minutes, I can see the ISS pass overhead.
It may not be dark enough, I’ll let y’all know.
I saw a travelling Tussauds exhibit when I was 10 or 12.
Unfortunately, after having seen this movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wax_%281953_film%29
.
Having looked at what the interwebs says about Tussauds…
it seems to be a reflection of popular culture rendered in an archaic medium
so
waxy Laverne Cox is probably good.
.
I still have fucking nightmares about that fucking movie.
It was dark enough.
I waved.
Yay science technology and the internet!
1. Language teachers are often a tad behind actual language use
2. Language teachers simply cannot know every acceptable form everywhere. Especially not in polycentric languages.
3. Language teachers usually aim for the variety with most prestige, especially when it comes to grammar. Because while a native speaker can get away with almost anything, they will raise their heads and furrow their brows as soon as a non-native speaker does it. Especially in France.
I was just chatting about this with a friend the other day. She’s German, but her parents moved to GRan Canaria when she was a kid, so she’s also a near native Spanish speaker. The subjunctive mood is disappearing in Spanish. People use it less and less in their everyday conversations, but heavens forbid I’d do the same. Or tell my students not to bother..
+++
“When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean”
Oh, French. I have neglected it.
I should really start reading Le Monde again and maybe find some short summer course just to practice a bit.
Some young adult fiction is pretty awesome. I was bored pretty instantly with the “woe is me” bits of teenager angst in #4-5, but most of HP was quite enjoyable. #6, I thought, was particularly well done, and Snape was an excellent character.
So don’t grab anything, but if you aren’t *fluent* (with all that implies) but you have the broad vocab and the basic understandings of the major tenses, reading HP or some other YA novel/series that you’ve read in your native tongue can really help move you along or reverse some atrophy.
I’ve enjoyed reading the “Junie B Jones” books in Spanish as well. I have next to no skill in spanish. I’ve never been trained and I can’t begin to pronounce it. But I’ve had to work with clients who were bilingual Spanish/Maya-indigenous and with some monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and Guatemala. The background in French helps a bit. The exposure gave me a lot more. So while I can’t speak it at all, I can read it better than my 7 year old reads her first language (English). That’s not, of course, something I would celebrate per se. Racking up any level of Spanish with no training, however, is something for which I can be glad. Reading Spanish versions of books with a bit of smarts and sarcasm that I’ve already read in English to my kids has just been a great way to keep my mind familiar with Spanish. Then Harry Potter and a couple of other YA series have been good for my French.
I don’t know if it would work for just anyone, but I really like YA as a method to move from “yeah, once I would have called myself fluent, but my skills that language have been so disused that I need to back up a little and read something fun and not too challenging so that I’m motivated to keep on even when I get tired of looking words up” to simply automatically searching in French for relevant articles when you hear that something has happened in X Francophone country.
CD
Funny thing, I really enjoyed that. I’m often a bit bored by YA fiction where the teenagers are not actually thinking and behaving like teenagers. I found Harry’s complete teenage egocentrism refreshing.
Crip Dyke
re: je inversion in French
Where did you learn French?
Because I learned from good, solid Quebecois teachers, and the je inversion was just as acceptable… In fact, we were taught that it was actually preferable since (a) it showed a more advanced grasp of the language and (b) was shorter.
So… I learned French in Canada actually preferring to use je inversion for most (if not all) verbs). Very interesting.
@Giliell:
Oh, it was refreshing in the sense of “wow, realistic and honest” but that doesn’t make Harry likable during that phase.
@rq:
There was a special program that was limited to one or a few schools in my district when I was in 2nd grade public school in Minnesota. I got to be part of that and started my French there. Then I went to private school in Oregon for a while as a young kid (grade 3-7), and when I went to public school in 8th grade from then until end of high school, French as elective had just become available. Of course, what you learn in one year of 4th grade French isn’t much compared to high school French, but super-importantly I had been listening to French since 2nd grade and trying to replicate the sounds. So despite having a number of years of study on my peers, they were generally only about a year behind me in vocabulary…but my accent and ear were simply flat out better in a way that’s hard to even quantify when comparing my starting-in-2nd-grade accent/ear and the accents/ears of those starting in 8th or 9th grade.
Ironically, because my ear was better and I didn’t have to strain to decipher the content of my teacher’s French, I could actually absorb the grammar, etc., lessons better than my peers as well. I remember discussing je inversion with some people in my high school French classes not long after our new teacher had discussed how horrible it was. Several of them hadn’t even heard the rule because they were trying to make sure they understood which tense was being used as she described the rule.
But in any case, 1 teacher in 2nd grade in Minnesota public school special program that was preparatory to French immersion. 1 teacher grades 3-7 private school in Oregon. 2 teachers middle school (8th & 9th grades) for the 1st and 2nd years of “introductory” high school French, and finally one more teacher for high school (grades 10-12).
All of them talked about je inversion as completely unacceptable. Unless maybe my 2nd grade teacher didn’t mention it or bucked the trend. That was only 1 year and I was young enough I can’t really say. But if she did permit je inversion, she was the only one and it was only once or twice a week for one year (2nd grade). French starting in 3rd grade was every day. Maybe it’s Oregon. Maybe it’s that in Canada people actually speak French as a practical tool for communication and have to be taught how people **really speak it** as opposed to some upper class grammar rules about “proper” French.
i don’t know, but it was consistent, that’s for sure.
Crip Dyke, rq, Gilliel @various
CD, you got inversion perfect, which not only makes perfect sense, but also makes your host so unsound (to put it in a polite way)…
rq, beware that Québécois are often grammar extremists.
Gilliel, you’re so true, most French people not only suck at foreign language, but they expect foreigners to speak it straight and perfect while they certainly don’t do any effort to understand others (actually, other French included).
Actually, it’s just as if we were still living in the 50’s and there was still a valid reason to feel “entitled” (if there ever was any reason to, as if any mindblowing philosopher or writer with international fame was still alive there). Any time I ask my fellow compatriots as to who’s possibly high standing today, they still come up with people dead since decades if not centuries and fulminate after me for having made them realise we’re just all jokers today and we simply should shut up.
.
Allow me for some more French bashing active mode here. Guess what people in charge for school curricula were up to? You don’t say “running 100 meters” anymore, instead you say “producing speed in order to balance your body in motion to a target line ahead”, you don’t say “swimming pool”, instead you say “deep aquatic standardised area”, so that you don’t “swim” anymore, but rather you “move horizontally balanced with head immersed in a liquid environment”. Facepalm. I don’t know if they’re working on legalizing weed at the ministry, or if they’re just pompous elites, or simply both, but at least you’d understand why France has so many caricaturists. We’re all broke jokers.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #210
Which is the weirdest claim I would expect from French teachers. It is not only acceptable but correct and absolutely not upper class, even if you can also use non-inverted versions (both are valid).
CD
I didn’t say I liked Harry. I liked how Rowling portrayed him and was not afraid to make him unlikable.
Okidemia
What I found weirdest was that the last time we went to the more touristy areas in the Charente Maritime, people insisted on speaking English, because my French isn’t perfect (but it’s understandable, and I understand a fucking lot). Only, their English was so bad that I couldn’t understand them and then they thought I couldn’t speak English either.
I first learned French at school many years ago (in the UK, so it was hexagone-flavour French) and don’t remember ever hearing that the je inversion was unacceptable. Until right now here in this thread, huh.
Gilliel, #214
Actually, French people do not speak English, they speak Frenglish (i.e., they only literally transpose from French). It does not perform so bad, but it is still far from correct. If you add the accent (at which we really suck), it is barely distinguishable from Klingon.
Crip Dyke
I want to tell you your teachers are wrong, but obviously this was something ocnsistent over several years, so I’m just going to stay here, scratching my head, about where they got such weird ideas about that.
Okidemia
Ha, I like grammar extremists! I’d rather learn the grammar well and then fit into how people speak, than struggle with the grammar for a long time. But then, grammar of any kind hasn’t ever been a challenge to me and I really like learning grammar and grammar rules. I suppose that makes me weird.
And it really wasn’t that bad, we got lessons on different kinds of French accents and had to read poetry in Provencal and stuff, so it wasn’t all bad. :D The worst I got was from some Parisian tourists here in Latvia who called my quebecois ‘not real French’.
As it stands, though, due to lack of practice, my French is pretty much obsolete by now. :D
Also, Frenglish. I used to be good at that, too.
Okidemia
*snorfle*
Now, I’m actually really good at understanding a wide range of accents/varieties*. It usually takes a few minutes of acclimatisation, but then I get it. I am also really tolerant on non-native accents and stuff. Fuck native speaker privilege. You’re allowed to comment on my English when you can do that as well in my mothertongue as I in yours. I think the problem was that they often knew the words, but simply neither the collocations nor the grammer. Like Google translate: Take a French sentence, translate every word into an English word that can mean the same thing (though it does not necessarly do so in this context), go ahead. Though that’s not something unique to French people. I know that I often listen to my Spanish students and think: “Yes, I understand that. I understand that because I can see the German sentence behind it. Nobody in the Spanish speaking world will have a clue what you’re saying.”
*one of my personal highs was actually in France: An octogenarian goat farmer somewhere in the Provence. I was quite proud of myself when I understood that he wanted us to get the car off the road (in case the other expected car that day would want to pass during the 5 minutes we were buying cheese.) The cheese was delicious.
Oh yeah, same in Paris: if you speak French there but hesitate detectably, people will kindly speak English in the French sound system to you; it’ll take you half a minute to even recognize that as English, and then you’ll still have serious trouble understanding anything.
That’s part of the reason why I speak French faster than English now even though my English is still without question better than my French.
…Maybe you misunderstood je sais pas, which is just about always contracted to… let’s spell it chais pas.
The same happens to je suis pas. Ne is practically extinct in the spoken language, but people do use it when they write.
That’s in fact more literary than just keeping the word order of a declarative sentence intact and marking it as a question by intonation alone. J’peux en avoir un ?
…It’s also more literary than using est-ce que.
See above for English; among other Germanic languages, negative concord is common in southeastern German dialects at the very least.
Oh, right. This is Thunderdome.
SC:
I find nothing in your blog post that contradicts that assessment; having personal convictions (as the CH authors & editors evidently do) doesn’t mean they don’t think they should offend everyone equally.
And of course I give a fuck. I have no idea why you claim otherwise.
Caine:
What makes you think this is personal?!?
What makes you think I’m coming after you???
I criticize everything I see and don’t agree with if I have time or spoons at all. It’s called SIWOTI syndrome. I do not keep track of who wrote what I comment on; to do so would be evil – it would lead to unequal treatment in no time.
You are not the center of the universe or of my attention! Nobody is! For fuck’s sake!
I think you’re counting the hits and ignoring the misses. Keep in mind that I tend not to comment at all when I agree; there’s seldom a point to repetition.
Bienvenus à France:
Pour Les Anglais: […snip…]
V. Recommended attitudes:
a. This is a rude country. Expect rough handling.
b. Speaking French is more important than humility. But aspire to prostrate yourself to the superiority and generosity of your hosts at first.
c. Recognize that your words may not perfectly convey your content, especially in whatever the hell your accent is supposed to be — and that the words of French citizens may not perfectly convey theirs. When necessary, clarify what you mean, or ask other commenters to clarify what they meant. Expect the French, however, to be testy if they must do so for you.
d. When someone says something apparently stupid or vile, verify before opening fire. Express your objection and ask them to rephrase their statement. Then concede that the French way is superior.
e. Do not bring anything from elsewhere into the country. Do not talk about another country in the superlative; do not praise citizens from other lands.
David M @221:
THANK YOU for responding to people using their nyms!
@David
Well, either “je ne sais pas” and “je sais pas” reasonably could have been used in that situation, so of course I could be wrong about what was being contracted.
but in the accent of my hosts, at least, it was very clearly pronounced /ʒʊ pɑː/
Crip Dyke
Well, that seems to be the French way – write everything with as many letters as possible, proceed to pronounce as few as you can possibly manage without being completely misunderstood. Or, you know, just as few as possible.
No tangling of the tongue on langage, after all – so many other uses for that delicate organ!
chigau #203
I saw the 1980’s remake of that movie and it gave me nightmares as well.
______________
David Marjanović #221
Me neither. Sometimes I’ll force myself to write something to show solidarity, but that doesn’t happen every time. I wonder if that makes me look like a jerk? (reader input appreciated)
______________
Completely unrelated – I knew that Japan has a cat island, but I didn’t know it has a bunny island as well. Scary.
In other news, Russia takes its role as defender of the Eastern Orthodox faith very seriously:
Russian Accuses Croatia of Converting Orthodox
Okidemia @211
Oh, wooooooow. Could that be any less efficient and more confusing?
I don’t know if I’m derailing the thread by asking this, but I’ve been thinking about something that disturbs me a bit.
I play a lot of different video games, and when there’s a set protagonist who’s a woman or non-white I don’t mind, but if there are multiple characters to choose from, or you can make your own character, I always choose to play as a guy. For some reason the race of the character doesn’t matter to me as much.
I think that I tend to project myself onto the character that I’m playing as, and for some reason I have more trouble identifying with female or LGBT characters than I do with straight male ones.
With character race I don’t mind playing as non-white characters if there are multiple preset characters to choose from, but for some reason I tend to make white characters when there’s a full-blown character creation system. I think that this might be due to a feeling of distance. Whether or not it’s actually true, I still have this idea that black or hispanic or asian people have their own distinct culture that I’m not a part of. For what it’s worth, I kind of feel the same way about playing as someone who’s from another country than I am. It almost feels like I’m a white American walking around wearing the skin of a black British man, or something along those lines.
There’s probably a few flaws in how I’m thinking about this, but I’m not really trying to justify only playing as white male characters. It’s more like I’m trying to figure out why I do. I’m also completely aware that I might have some subconscious ethnic or gender biases.
Sounds like the case. Some introspection is necessary.
@ Charly #193 [& David Marjanović]
Ek sou nie so se nie!
[Afrikaans: ~”I wouldn’t say that!” , lit: “I would not such say not.” ]
Afrikaans is definitely Germanic, yet uses (obligatory according to grammar rules) double negatives. This because the town in which it developed, Paarl, is in the same valley as the town Franschoek (“French Corner”), and hence had a lot of French speaking citizens at the time. I always found this a royal pain in the proverbial, as it is awkward, and not particularly necessary.
FIFM:
sesê(The pernicious French influence extends even further!)
An episode of Babylon 5:
Our Heroes are attempting to communicate with some folks who manifest as a holographic projection of something like an Olmec head with flames shooting from its eyes and mouth.
Ivanova says something that triggers a response.
.
Ivonova: At least they’ve shown us they understand our language, they’re just not willing to speak to us in it.
Marcus: Who knew they were French?
.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5yz5rx2lHNE
yutub soundbite
@emergence:
The whole point of providing diversity in avatar-based video games is to .. provide diversity. Nothing wrong in playing a character you identify with. That’s the whole point, that everyone gets to play a character they identify with. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with playing a white male.
As a fellow clueless white male… that’s a good idea. Sucks that we can’t ever be a part of it, but hey, that’s diversity. They don’t get to be us, we don’t get to be them, and in an ideal world we’d celebrate the differences and make beautiful music together. Until Utopia comes, well, we’re missing out, but until then….
I’ll also note that if you want a “good time” (not intended as a factual statement), roll a female character in every game you play.
Following SC’s link@195 (I’ve commented there, but don’t know whether I’m so much persona non grata with SC – having failed in what she considers my clear moral duty to support her in the quarrels she had with people here – that she won’t allow it to appear):
Millions more people will have seen those images on the news-stand – out of context – than have ever read the publication. And what would you [SC] say to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and represented by grossly racist and misogynist images on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, and their families? Sometimes, no possible context can make something acceptable.
Many of the critics of Charlie Hebdo are French, and particularly French Muslims or ex-Muslims, who have a range of views on the issue; and include at least one former writer for the magazine. Nor do I buy the claim that because the staff of Charlie Hebdo were of the left, attacked the FN, and considered themselves anti-racist, that means they or their publication couldn’t be racist – in the sense most of us here, and I’m pretty sure SC, use that term – reinforcing existing racial inequalities and oppression; that’s just naive. Racism pervades French society, although in somewhat different forms than those found in the USA or UK, and as the article linked to says:
Raw story quotes a loving, loving couple going all “Oh, noes! If everyone is married, that’s the same thing as saying no one is.”
I may have their letter confused with a scene from The Incredibles, but whatevs.
The point is, they’re going to divorce because if they don’t Sarah & Nick are going to be forced (forced, I tell you!) to go down person after person to whom they are not married; sarah going down on women, Nick going down on men. Forever. With sticky-icky GayFluids being forced down their throats!
All of this is already hilariously mockable, but permit me to quote just the funniest thing ever in their letter (and reason #300,428 to learn to write clearly):
:snicker:
:snicker-snick:
Oh, fuck it, :Guffaw, you idiots. Guffaw!:
Ooh, a little Poll To Pharyngulate! In my city a local council voted to fly the rainbow flag on a permanent basis on a 6:5 vote. A News Ltd article wants readers to show their choice.
theophontes (恶六六六缓步动物) #231
[Smiling]: Sure, Afrikaans native speakers do speak English almost like French people do, and this makes discussions between the two quite… interesting! (say what?) :)
Have been to Franschoek? I had done some fieldwork over there early this millenary, and I have funny memories about running out of tobacco and therefore running a marathon through the Bush to get to the seller before a long week-end closure, despite objections from students that I might meet brown mambas downhill (I remember them saying “if you ever meet one, you’ll never need smoking again”). Eventually I got enough cigarettes to manage reasonnable crave over the week-end, and the only critters that I met were a bunch of huge buffalo ticks (they nevertheless destroyed my shoes btw).
WMDKitty — Survivor #228
Don’t ask. They would come up with worse even if it seems impossible.
That’s a very educated way of saying “intent really is magic”.
Nick
Word.
As I mentioned before, I come from a left, socialist family. I’m not ashamed of that nor do I distance myself from the underlying ideas. But the more I learned about power and privilege, the more I saw their shortcomings and their condescending bigotry dressed up as being the good guys. I do not question their motifs, but I know that I’ve been raised in that very mindset: We mean well, therefore we do well.
Lofty @237:
Done. ‘No’ is currently winning, though with only a slight lead.
Oh hey! Reddit have actually made some vague steps towards not-being-a-platform-for-arseholes. Not enough of a step, but hey, it’s a start.
Borked the link. Here’s a fresh one.
PatrickG #234
Presumably, you’re talking about multiplayer action or RPGs only. Which are a minority of games.
Regardless, that reminds of one MMORPG I played for a short while. The female character were sexier, but also generally better designed than the male characters. This meant that about 80% of the players were playing as female characters. There I also witnessed an interesting event: When one guy was trying to advertise his guild by saying that his guild president is a real girl, people laughed at him for using a woman as advertisement.
_______________________
Crip Dyke #236
I don’t get it.
AlexanderZ
The phrasing of the sentence makes it sound like they graduated high-school at the age of twenty-one.
Thanks, chigau!
@AlexanderZ:
Yeah, I should have specified MMOs. Though while MMOs are a minority, they’re still (random google result) 21% of the overall gaming market, with billions in revenue. Given that many, many video games don’t have avatars at all, I’d wager that MMOS are a significant plurality of the subset of avatar-based gaming, if not an outright majority.
That said, having been part of a long-term semi-hardcore raiding guild in WoW with women as officers and players, we did get a lot of the “Holy shit! You actually have girls?” reaction. This was an imperfect predictor of someone we really didn’t want, which led to some epic forum blow-outs/gkicks.
Tony! @240
The yes vote is slightly ahead now :-)
………………………
A satirical take on one of our right wing politicians opposing marriage equality.
It’s raining, it’s pouring…
the plants are saying “yeeehaaa”
Now that I’m trying to get into a solid blogging routine I’ve discovered that I have a lot to say about things I see involving insults and insulting characterizations. I guess it’s not so much of a surprise that a person with tourette’s would see some patterns there.
But my next post has to do with the places in society where I see tension over the use of racial epithets. Two of the areas are why can’t white people use them when the other group can, and why it’s necessary that the other group can use them. Naturally as a white person I’m in need of a perspective check.
These are going to be observations that I have made in the comments here before and no one seemed to have a problem at the time so I’m not worried about big problems. But still…
Would anyone be willing to look at a draft in email when one is ready?
Chigau @248
as are the people with allergies to airborne allergens.
We’ve finally got our marine layer back here…would be nice if we could get a bit of a shower out of it, but it’s not looking hopeful. Who knew I’d be pining for our usual June Gloom!
Brony @249
Good luck! I’m not in a posish to help you with a draft, but I salute your effort and wish you the best!
Well…I don’t have enough even to can’t this morning. An “overheard” exchange of comments in my FB feed done sucked it all away before I even got dressed for work this morning. (yes, clearly yet another adjustment of settings is indicated.)
*sigh*
Instead of venting more, though, I’d just like to thank all of the transfolk among the Horde for raising the heck out of my consciousness. Before learning from all y’all over the years, I might have “hurr durr durr”-ed along with that exchange or maybe just not noticed, instead of being reduced to slack-jawed, “WTF-did-I-just-read” astonishment and hiding the whole damn post.
So…thank you all. I don’t claim to have my head completely wrapped around how “gender is NOT binary” plays out in the lives of people who aren’t on my very cis- and het- privileged end of that spectrum. But I am S-ing TFU as hard as I can to listen to what you’re saying.
PatrickG #246
Too bad the full report is 2500$. This looks very interesting.
That really depends on how you define an avatar. In the broadest sense even Mario is an avatar.
Wow, kind of dead around here.
Anyway, this actually brings up a related issue; In these games that let you make your own character, you can’t really give them a personality, a backstory, or any motivations beyond being a blank cipher. Some games offer some limited options, like a handful of different character backgrounds or different dialogue choices, but it never feels all that substantial. Can anyone think of any games that actually let you characterize your avatar? Mass Effect comes to mind, but I can’t think of that many others.
emergence #253
We’ve run out of fundies and even the odd gun-nut or two are restricting themselves to relevant threads. I wonder if that’s because they all have learned to fear us, or that we’re just sliding into irrelevance .
That depends on what you mean by characterization. Pretty much any game with a moral choice system can fit that description, though many are fairly shallow. The top games for you are almost everything made by BioWare, all Fallout games as well as pretty much everything else by Black Isle (Planescape: Torment is one of the top games, if not the top game, when it comes to character, but you can’t design your avatar except for his attributes), but it really depends on how much you’re invested in the game – roleplaying a character in a sandbox game is a very different experience from simply playing that game to completion.
Another thing to note is that you don’t have to have an avatar (at least not in the classical MMORPG sense) to play a meaningful character. Choice of Games’ entire business model revolves around text-only games (I strongly recommend Choice of Romance), but with many branching storylines depending on your choices (many of which have moral implications). They also try to be as inclusive as possible to both different sexualities and genders, though some games are more inclusive than others. An interesting example of this is Academagia which is a mostly-text-only sandbox RPG with no overreaching goal, but in which you can make meaningful choices if you’re invested in your character.
__________________
Brony #249
I can’t help you there since I’m white myself. Have you tried asking in the Lounge?
Or, since you can do anything you want on your blog, why not write a post as is (many WP themes allow you to hide posts) and then asking for opinions. At worst you can always edit or even delete the post.
I know most of you don’t like Friendly Atheist, but this one is worth a read:
WARNING! TRIGGER WARNINGS… SERIOUSLY : HOMOPHOBIA and a really grose photo of a dead person
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/24/remembering-the-upstairs-lounge-the-u-s-a-s-largest-lgbt-massacre-happened-40-years-ago-today/?ref_widget=popular&ref_blog=lovejoyfeminism&ref_post=the-lesbian-duplex-19-an-open-thread
It’s about a massacre 40 years ago, where 32 people burned to death. I have no words.
We might have to have a going away party for this place…
Invite all the old trolls…
I’ll prepare the barbeque. Various sauces will be available.
I’m going to miss this place.
Maybe we should have a Revolution.
barricades
lilacs
chigau, hardboiled eggs?
What I find horribly obnoxious has been the trolls who should post their bullshit here in the ‘dome, but do so in the lounge, trying to prevent the proper response to their BS. The ‘dome has its place, but trolls are scared of it….
nostalgia time
Remember The Invasion of the Hovindistas?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/10/26/thunderdome-8/comment-page-1/#comment-479586
Nerd of Redhead:
As stated there, responding here because I don’t think PZ wants this level of specifics in the original post.
A number of commenters at Pharyngula tend to include not only a dismissal of the points based on evidence, but combine it with a very strong — sometimes explicit — statement of “Hence, I will only make fun of you from here on out”. Then defend that position with “well, xe didn’t link any evidence, so I was within my rights”. That just seems wildly counterproductive, almost designed to guarantee a defensive reaction that really precludes any kind of engagement,
Of course, this is a subjective assessment. I’m not claiming anything else. Moreover, my comment wasn’t specifically directed at you, though I think you sometimes do engage in the behavior (I must acknowledge that this was largely ameliorated when you stopped FLOOSHING).
Added: Whoa, I got a Posting Too Quickly error from WordPress. Never seen that before!
How does one constructively engage a creobot, IDiot, or godbot who is totally presuppostional? As is typical of many such complaints, you offer no solution. Why not?
What the actual fuck?
You obviously failed to read my comments before jumping in to question them, then. specifically excluded people spouting racist crap on a SJ blog. It’s not a giant leap to extend that to creobots on an atheist blog. You obviously failed to comprehend that I was talking about cases that were not so absolutely clear-cut, and where I think vitriol is entirely appropriate.
I’m frankly disgusted that you would misrepresent me as saying people have to constructively engage with people antithetical to the raison d’etre of Pharyngula.
Please go reread my actual comments. Try understanding them this time. If you feel I was unclear, feel free to ask for clarification. But I’m not going to bother engaging with your Strawman of Unusual Size. Yeesh.
Copy/pate error corrections, just because I want to be sure I’m absolutely clear.
(1) My comment specifically excluded…
(2) Vitriol (better written as contemptuous dismissal) entirely appropriate for the likes of racists and creobots. Not for those cases where things aren’t clear-cut.
Just so you don’t get confused, and all. /rollseyes
Nerd, during my time here you addressed your content-free “floosh” posts to a number of my friends simply because they had the temerity to want to comment on something I had written. Such posts basically served to make crappy threads more contentious and harder to moderate. In fact, not that it matters anymore, you have no idea how close you came to being the only Hordeling I actually banned.
If you think, as you implied, that such posts on your part constitute — as you implied in the other thread today — “asking” for evidence, then I just don’t even know what to say. It doesn’t come off as a request.
TD going away just as the Lounge hits 500?
Maybe that should happen on the same day?
Timing is everything.
Hi, Chris.
[one-off]
Hi chigau.
Hi Chris. I’m sorry things happened.
Ironic how you left because you found the place toxic whilst I left because the place found me toxic!
—
And hi everyone else who remembers me from the salad days.
I tell you true: I disliked none of you, and liked most of you.
‘Live long and prosper’
Hi, Chigau. Here, have this for old time’s sake.
Nerd, the point – which I wholeheartedly agree with – is that the newcomer has to demonstrate their mala fides (being an IDiot, racist, etc) before they’re dismissed out of hand as such. Offering a contrary opinion to one that you (or I, or any other regular) hold is not sufficient.
Chris
♥♥♥
Thanks, John Morales.
“The Lounge” (*eyeroll*) is not hitting 500. Teh ECO continued the threadcount from the one-and-only original Endless Thread and applied it to the stupid Lounge back when he created the damn thing. It was not appropriate and I said so back then.
And you’re still wrong, Sven.
@Sven DiMilo, #276
And in other news, Caitlyn Jenner turns 1 year old in 2016! How exciting!!!! The little tyke!
Almost like the old times.
I think I’ll join the barricades.
Windows 8.x.
You suck big, hairy, elephant balls.
What the everloving fuck were the folks at Microsoft thinking when they made you? No Start menu, a stupid-ass “apps” screen that I can’t organize to my tastes (and I just can NOT deal with the disordered layout).
I want my Windows 7 back…
And did I mention the mandatory login when starting up? Yeah, I get the purpose of having set up to do this automatically, I’m happy this thing is secure, but seriously? It takes time, and I’m impatient.
Yay!
We may not need the barricades!
I could still use a hard-boiled egg, though.
*starts pushing tables back*
You misunderstand. This time, the people I mentioned where the actual subject of my comment.
With voiced [ʒ]? That’s interesting, I’ve never encountered that. Whereabouts did your hosts live?
Yes 57.45% (1,473 votes)
No 41.3% (1,059 votes)
Unsure 1.25% (32 votes)
Total Votes: 2,564
One finds out if they are in fact totally presuppositional.
As long as that hasn’t been unambiguously answered in the affirmative, one simply finds out what exactly they’re ignorant of, and then one provides the necessary knowledge.
By no means does this always work. But it does work sometimes.
Download Windows 10 (that’s the window symbol near the bottom right corner of your screen). Remember, you’re past the Godzilla Threshold – installing Windows 10 might not help, but it can’t possibly make things any worse.
WMDKitty,
Yeah. When I got a new laptop last year and it came with that stupid OS I swear I seriously contemplated just formatting the hell out of it and installing 7. I eventually took a deep breath, installed Classic Shell, meddled a bit with it and with the registry and got it to the point where it feels like I’m working on 7. Really, you wouldn’t tell if it weren’t for the start button having a shell rather than windows logo! The only drawback is that now it takes ages to start up (I suspect it’s because of Classic Shell and it being set to skip that stupid start screen and all that), but at least now it is, you know, functional.
Not sure what to do about 10 now. I’m afraid installing it will just fuck everything up again.
Please don’t tell me our tiny tardigrade republic is dead!
Where will the hobby-horse go to die now? I cannot keep up with the lounge. My ideas are too dull for the usual threads. Is there nowhere left to fart? A sardine, recent, nasty turn of phrase has made years of witless witiness into a bad thing?
Get some perspective.
O Benign One
Have you looked at this thread, yet?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/06/13/commenting-changes-coming-2/comment-page-1
sardine?
Mmmm, fried sardines.
I just love it when a simple suggestion is ignored.
Some people have a nasty habit of dismissing others as “dishonest”, and make accusations of “dishonesty”, without backing up their claims.
It happened to me, I see it happening to others, and it’s eerily reminiscent of some of the things my abuser would do. He’d always assume I was trying to hide something, or cheating on him, or otherwise deceiving him.
You’ll never guess what he was doing that entire time…
So to those who fall back on the charge of “dishonesty” — *cough*Josh*cough* — you might want to take a look in the mirror before you accuse another person.
David M @284:
I don’t think I’ll ever understand this. But I’m not going to jump back on this roller coaster. We’ve gone over this over and over for years. In any case, my original comment was just to point out how much I appreciated that you responded to someone using their nym. Even if it was that one time.
Tony, regarding your #291:
I know. *sigh*
That’s partly my fault. At least twice I’ve tried to have the discussion – and then disappeared because I was too busy.
Perhaps I’ll manage to keep up with it this time:
1) I’ve never thought that politeness made sense. Consequently, I hate it. Literally. No exaggeration. As far as I can tell, it’s a random assemblage of rituals and completely arbitrary convention – like fashion, only it changes a bit more slowly. Some have backgrounds that sort of made sense several hundred years ago*, others lack even that. And that’s before we get into all the cultural and micro-cultural differences… I have no hope of catching up with those, but they’re of course an issue on the Internet.
2) I gather that many people consider it impolite not to be reminded of their names every so often. Is this correct? This sounds very sarcastic, but it’s completely honest. I’m almost 33 years old and haven’t figured this out.
3) If 2) is correct, what sense does it make?
* The first example that comes to mind is that if you’re a warrior and keep your helmet on when you enter a room, that means you expect that someone will attack your head with lethal force. Your host will be offended, because you’re basically telling him “you’re a murderous and, what’s worse, treacherous asshole” (almost everything was worse than murder in that mindset, but I digress). That seems to be why I have personally witnessed teachers in the 1990s express genuine, unashamed offense when they found that some kid was wearing a baseball cap in class.
David @293:
No, it’s not really your fault. I’ve read your responses. I comprehend what you’re saying. I comprehend the reasons you choose not to respond to commenters using nyms and/or numbers. I should have said I understand and comprehend your reasons, I just disagree with you 100% on this. I shouldn’t have said anything, bc I’m really not trying to dredge this back up again. After all, people have tried and tried and tried over the years to explain why this is a polite convention that is reasonable to follow, but you refuse to do so.
But I don’t comprehend what you and several others are saying. Surely that’s connected to the fact that I haven’t seen maybe half of the comments that tried to explain this? :-)
I haven’t been able to keep up with the Thunderdome for years. I remember at least two instances when this topic was discussed and I had to disappear in the middle of the discussion; I have never managed to go back and read up on it.
David Marjanovic
That is incorrect. When you are commenting, particularly when you are replying to something that someone said, you need to indicate to whom you are referring, not only because it’s polite, but because it will save a lot of time and energy on everybody else’s part trying to figure out just what the fuck you were talking about and who you were replying to. It’s common internet courtesy.
Really? Because I’m sure I’m not the first to explain this to you. It honestly feels like you’re deliberately being obtuse and difficult, just for the sake of being annoying. Your disappearing acts are a flimsy excuse. “Never managed to go back and read up on it” is coming off as “I don’t want to understand, and you can’t make me.”
@David Marjanović, #293
No, of course we don’t need reminding of our names. However,
1) sometimes we don’t remember that we made the comment you’re quoting – especially if its a fast moving thread, or others have said similar things.
2) not everyone has the same memory: I have people close to me who have had traumatic brain injuries. All are quite intelligent and one can write like the demon-of-writing-so-clearly-and-beautifully-as-to-put-all-your-paltry-efforts-to-shame. And yet remembering that those words are hers is something she can’t do. It’s a thing. Her brain works differently now than before. I presume that TBI is not the only possible etiology for having a below-expected ability to remember one’s own words.
3) People who haven’t read the whole thread – as is common in TD and the Lounge, but occurs all the time in other threads as well – may want to see the statement you quote in context.
4) I know my own name, but if you want to talk to me at a party, saying, “Hey, Crip Dyke, What do you think about …” is much more effective at reaching your goal than simply speaking up in a loud voice and saying, “What do you think about….” Addressing a person to catch attention is vastly different than reminding a person of their own name. In fact, it requires you to assume that the other party hasn’t forgotten their own name.
5) I don’t really think of the reason to use nym and number as “politeness”. I think of it as “linking”.
When one is writing an original blogpost and one quotes from elsewhere on the web, one doesn’t merely cite one’s source: one is expected to actually provide a link.
Why?
It facilitates communication. Sure, if you have the quote you can google the source, especially if you have a name to go with a shorter quote, but having the link is an expected part of communication because the amount of effort it takes you to add the link is vastly smaller than the amount of effort saved by even 10 or 20 people searching for your source.
I care about more communication happening with less effort and less time. Therefore I frequently add nym and number. It’s about creating the world in which I want to live.
All of a sardine.
testing
<b>testing</b>
I still don’t understand. I quote what I’m replying to, so that’s the “figure out just what the fuck you were talking about” part taken care of; why is it supposed to matter who wrote it? That doesn’t influence what it says, after all. I find this baffling!
I’m sorry, that’s circular: “it’s polite because it’s polite”.
Yes.
I’m both more and less neurotypical than people expect. That confuses lots and lots of people.
You are – and, honestly, thank you for the attempt – unless somebody did in earlier Thunderdome iterations that I haven’t seen.
Seriously, the story of my life is that people believe things ought to be obvious and either refuse to explain them or simply aren’t capable of believing that they need to be explained.
This jumping to the least charitable conclusion – so many people do this, and I’ll never understand what makes them even consider this. (No matter if I’m on the receiving end or someone else is, I see it all the time.) Sometimes I wonder if neurotypical people believe they’re surrounded by cartoon villains who do things For Teh Evulz.
Really? Huh. That’s interesting. I practically always recognize what I wrote, even if I don’t actually remember it in the strictest sense. Is that the exception? Is this one more thing where I’m not normal?
…But again, what does it matter who wrote something?
(Conversely, just yesterday someone referred to something I wrote by name & number but didn’t quote it. I don’t remember comment numbers; I had to scroll way, way up to find out which of the many things I had said in that thread the other person was talking about.)
OK; do you think this is common enough to affect several people on a blog this size?
(Honest question, not rhetorical.)
TD and Lounge are one thing, but in other threads of course I assume that people who comment have read the entire thread. Like… who jumps in in the middle of a thread and just says something without making sure their comment isn’t just repetition, at worst repetition of a PRATT? Who does that?
(Of course I’ve seen people do it. But all of them were creationists, libertarians, gun nuts or otherwise rather too convinced that nobody could possibly have said anything that would match their brilliance, let alone exceed it.)
When that’s not enough, people can still copy what I quote and run Ctrl+F on it.
Question: Should I make longer quotes, so that more context is provided right away?
1) But this is not a party where you can just overlook me. It’s a linear thread.
2) Catching the attention of someone who reads the whole thread is unnecessary; they come across my comment anyway.
(And BTW… even in meatspace I don’t address people by name much. I don’t address people much in general. Comes in very handy when I’m not sure which politeness level is appropriate, and seems to work pretty fine. …Maybe it’s related that I make much less eye contact than most people; unlike most people who don’t make that much eye contact, I’m not afraid – I just don’t see the point.)
Sure; but in the same thread which everyone has just read? And when that’s not enough, Ctrl+F is still much less of an effort than firing up Google.
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
In short: thanks for your efforts, everyone, but I’m still confused and still have questions; please keep trying.
David
Your last post is a prime example of why you need to use names. You blockquoted at least two people. We can’t tell who wrote what when you don’t fucking use our names!
It’s not that goddamn difficult!
Even if it is “polite for the sake of being polite”, what’s it going to harm you to just do it anyway?
I honestly don’t understand why you care who wrote what.
And you’re still not even trying to explain it. You keep assuming it’s somehow obvious.
But why would I? Why would I do something that makes no sense?
Why?
David Marjanović@303
Becuase you’re commenting here, and it’s in the rules.
David Marjanović
Just because it makes no sense to you doesn’t mean it isn’t sensible to attribute your quotes to the commenters in question. It makes the threads easier to follow if you aren’t David Marjanović . Other readers benefit from clarity in attribution. You do know other people read these threads too.
David Marjanović
You are a scientist. You write scientific articles. Those articles have references. When you reference something, do you just leave a quote or do you bother to give the full name of the article, the name of the author, the year it was published and the journal it was published in?
Please pretend that Pharyngula works like a scientific paper in this single regard. All you are asked to do is copy the person or person’s name/s above the quote you’re replying to. I assure you, clicking Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V is as easy is clicking Ctrl+F.
Chris Clarke #272
Thanks for the bunny clip. I missed those!
David Marjanović
Nick Gotts #304‘s link didn’t work, but he is referring to these rules, specifically section VI, item 1:
Thanks AlexanderZ@308.
theophontes
I’d love to help with the Devious Plan but I can’t read alt text on my iPad :(
David M:
Alexander Z. has a good point. Imagine a review article with no citations at all, because the authors claimed that it “made no sense” to include them because people “don’t need to be reminded of their names” and doing so is “polite, and politeness is pointless”.
David
Probably. You have that amazing brain thingy of yours. You can probably remember the things we catted about much better than I do, even the stuff I said. Just take it as a gift you have and don’t rub it into our collective noses, ‘kay?
Because others have explained to you that it’s important for them. Think of it in terms of accessibility: You may not understand why using a certain font makes texts easier to read because you only have problems when its Wingdings, but since it’s a very small thing for you to do there’s no good reason not to do it.
Also, because communication. It’s not effective communication if you’re constantly ignoring the things other people need to communicate.
@David Marjanović 293
A lot of it is arbitrary in the details because it is symbolic. But it is not random. In my experience people tend to be on the negative side of neutral and having rituals to indicate intentions, willingness to be part of the social flow and other things shows some character. I’m a person who is actually pretty dependent on some of those rituals because my nature risks offense too often. But they should have some substance to them (which would require things becoming more community specific I think).
A lot of it is also misused as in how polite language can cover up social problems. That example you posted is a good example of a politeness rule that could be dispensed with in favor for some other more relevant sign of respect (probably sign of obedience in some places) to host/teacher/etc.
Many people don’t store text the same. Many people don’t visually process the same. Other levels of perception, recognition and memory also matter. I’m not even talking about people with diagnosed arrangements of those features like me, “regular people” are just as diverse. You just have your own mental arrangement of perceptual priorities for organization and storage. Every system could use more options though because incompatible strategies probably create a lot of confusion.
For me I have a comment thread stored in my head in a hierarchical manner that goes Name/object of discussion/position in response chain/post#/paragraph/sentence. I scan comments and responses in that manner and sometimes it really mucks up my ability to respond in a fluid manner when people leave out the name. Text does not stick in my head as much as how and shy text is functionally used. I wish I was not so pattern sensitive but that is how things effect me (I’m working on flexibility). I would say the worst problem is when people only give emotional impressions of what they read and include no examples and reasoning.
Also other people watching the conversation will be less likely to place things in a larger context if they don’t know who a person is talking about right away. Some of us are very sensitive to third-party context cues because of larger social issues. Names take on a different significance there.
Otherwise names don’t mean much to me either and remembering things like names and numbers is harder for those with ADHD. I struggle to remember them because I want to absorb people’s identities as I want my identity to be known. Direct interaction with people helps to cement names in my mind and then identity characteristics follow. Names used to have more social/community meaning that helped anchor them in the mind but today they seem very arbitrary, yet are important to many because it’s impossible to convey what we are and what our history is so we present who we are provisionally. Or at least that is what it looks like to me.
If I may ask, in what way are you neurodiverse?
@300
This is a more general statement from me, I tend to see that people are acting and reacting reasonably but we don’t (and often they don’t) know the reasons. What is worse is that a lot of culture is technically unreasonable in a neutral sense due to arbitrariness, but reasonable in terms of the underlying instincts and emotions tied to things. There can be a reason and the reason has no real meaning independent of human minds.
All people self-reference when figuring our reality. Even the stuff we learn from other people is self-referenced. As a result we all act as if our experience of reality is reality. That can get complicated when there is not enough information for one perspective to be augmented by another. That is farther complicated by the nature of the interactions and the context they are in (socially activist communities deal with unknowns and frustration in particular ways). There is I believe an instinct for “social sameness” that we collectively need to figure out how to control, but many of the instincts are there for good reason. Finding the best rituals that both deal with problems or threats and give implicit information is important. Especially for people who don’t know the cultural context and history.
People who want to join the conversation in a low effort way (some honest and well-meaning but still don’t have all of the context). People who are triggered by dog-whistles and other perceptual triggers and jump in. People who give in to the impulse to tangent. Other things. It’s a common enough issue that it should be assumed that they might be present and often just pointing them to content up thread is enough. I wish everyone did read the whole thread but often that is difficult. Despite appearances I read slower than I wish I did because ADHD is associated with reading problems and my sensory hypersensitivity is connected to symbolism in language so I have to be very careful when I interpret what I see. It’s why I don’t post as often as I wish.
I’m kind of with you on this one but often don’t know where I should fall on getting people used to new conventions and rituals. Like using our software to augment our perception. It can be hard for people to create new software for interacting with the world.
David M and Brony:
This, from David M-
Is not going to work for everyone. Some people read and post from their phones. Others do the same from small tablets. It’s not always easy for some to copy comments or run Ctrl+F.
@Tony 314
Good point.
I just joined the smart phone using and have discovered that the best I can do when I want to post something big is take notes for later. There is no way I can manage a careful response and all of that formatting in something that is going to be a text-wall on a phone.
David M @ 300
It affects me. I’m nearly always a lurker and usually not part of the conversation, so you may not care if your posts are difficult for me to follow, but I’d take it as a kindness if everyone followed the name and post number convention.
It helps me to follow a conversation when I can establish discrete actors and attribute the different perspectives to them. I doubt my confusion is something that most people are afflicted with, but there it is. It isn’t just a matter of courtesy, it is, at least for me, a very practical convention.
I’m going to be brutally honest here David. You freuqnetly come across as an uncaring arsehole to people who don’t know you. Not acknowledging people by name when you quote them is not helping that situation.
David,
If you weren’t a respected regular, I’d tell you you’re behaving like an asshole.
Oh wait, did I just…? Oh noes!!! I shall be cast out forever or at least until the first occasion to complain about how horrible Pharyngula has become. What will I do now?
not fair , A.R. beat me to it.
Jesus Fuck, are people really indulging David in this shit again? This is going on the nth time, with the same result on David’s part “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me!”
It’s a fine example of a long-time regular refusing to go along with changes, as well as the rules, just like it was the first 10 times it was gone over.
Caine #320
Oooh, this sounds like a bet :)
10 to 1 odds?
How about if David adopts the name and/or comment number policy you’ll post ten new pictures of cute birds or mammals, and if he doesn’t (let’s say, by Saturday) I’ll post a picture of some cute yellow-assed birds that chirp outside my window*?
*Granted I have a very out-dated phone, so I may instead provide a picture of a very curious plant. Because plants have the good sense to stay in one place.
hey, Caine, thanks for keeping it up in the let’s shit on everyone who frequents Pharyngula thread.
I gave up after reaching a depressing combination of feeling guilty and pissed off at the same time.
How are you doing otherwise?
Beatrice @322:
I was feeling really disheartened with all that last night. I do agree that there are problems here, but I thought several people were painting with a broad brush.
But then I started feeling guilty, bc I realized that in the process of helping to cultivate an environment that felt safe for many people who are marginalized, I may have engaged in bad habits myself that drove people away or I overlooked bad habits of other regulars.
So yeah, I’m torn between feeling disheartened and guilty.
****
On completely different note:
Rachel Dolezal has stepped down as President of the Spokane, WA branch of the NAACP.
Brony:
Over in the Commenting Changes Coming thread, you said:
I don’t think I’ve read a single comment from you (and I’ve read quite a few of your comments) and thought “boy, Brony is an asshole”.
Tony! #323
That entire affair baffles me. USA isn’t the only place to have racism against minorities, but I think it’s the only place with people from the privileged race trying to pass as members of a persecuted minority. It isn’t just Dolezal, there are places online where you can buy a “true Native American” certificate and the case of Star Trek: Voyager’s advisor on Native Americans who was a complete fraud.
I can’t picture an ethnic Russian trying to say they’re actually a Tatar or Ingush, nor can I imagine an Israeli Jew claiming to be an Arab. Sure, some people convert or adopt the lifestyle of a particular people, but I can’t think of anyone engaging in such an elaborate deception.
I read somewhere that Dolezal’s deception helped her get into Harvard. Is that it? A lifetime of delusions just to get a scholarship in Harvard?
Oh, and I second Tony! 3324.
Brony, you have a very low opinion of yourself.
Holy McFuck. Really?
RE: #300, David Marjanović
IT’s simple as shit, man. this is a conversation with literally dozens of people, with multiple threads of conversation, arranged in a non-nesting manner. It can be confusing and irritating to follow. So in order to make the work of reading the thread easier for other people who are not you:
You reference the given name of the person you are addressing and the specific post number that you are responding to for the sake of clarity.
It is polite to do so for the sake of the other dozens of people to quickly understand what and who you are addressing and have an easy reference and context, both so they can *follow* a thread of conversation they wish to follow, or *skip* a conversation they have no interest in.
TL;DR: Look man, I’m sure you’ve written a paper or two in your time. Think of it this way: You are citing the source of your response. You’re just doing it at the beginning of your article instead of at the end.
AlexanderZ
Not Harvard, but Howard, which is traditionally a black university, and is known as Black Harvard. She got full scholarship to go, too.
Me too.
Brony,
If it means anything, I don’t think you’re an asshole either.
Tony @323
You can put that up on the thread, it’s still relevant. :) Or I will do it later.
@Tony324, AlexanderZ
I do have a low opinion of myself for a great many reasons.
Relevant to this is that the reality of violent, sexualized socially inappropriate intrusive thoughts and impulses unavoidably becomes part of how you measure yourself as a person. As I scan over text or language it’s like a part of me is readying every weapon that I have for every possible related eventuality AND constantly looking for new patterns. The image of someone flipping the safety cover off of a button for the activation of a weapon should come to mind. I don’t have those covers, and the buttons flash when the “safety is removed” (the safety was never there). That is always in parallel with compassionate friendly empathy filled instincts.
I’m continually reading the experiences of people who suffer from precisely what a part of me wants to pay attention to, think about, and do. Other than dropping cheat sheets on how excess dominance/authoritarianism works when I figure something out I’m not sure how to shore up my self image. I tend to have to act as if I am just as much of a threat as anyone else.
Brony,
I’m familiar with that and I know how much it sucks, I’m sorry.
Regarding Dolezal, I don’t feel like I have the right to much of an opinion as a white male, so i wont give one, but I’ve read some interesting bits of information that seem to indicate that her desire to be black existed for some time (years, likely) before she actually decided to pass a black. I have also heard some theories (admittedly from white people) suggesting that she decided to pass so as to become an “authority” on the black American experience, something that is impossible as a white person.
A.R. @333:
It’s funny that anyone would argue that, bc you can’t experience what it’s like being black by wearing blackface. As her brother said:
This just came into my mail, and it makes me very glad I don’t have teevee these days.
Tony, 334: I think the theory was that by passing as black, she could make her opinion “count” among black people, regardless of whether or not it was actually informed by the lived experience of being black in the United States. I’m also quite certain that she was aware of the privilege afforded to light skinned black people within the black community (paper bag parties being a particularly overt example) and to a lesser extent, in society at large.
Beatrice:
Thank you. I’ve been feeling the same way you do (and Tony), but I have tried my best to own up to that, and commit to doing better. It’s all any of us can do, which is why I was getting upset by those showing up simply to rehash old grudges and heap nastiness on those they don’t like.
Okay. Feeling a bit fragile. I did just get pics of a baby dove (I’m taking them, AlexanderZ!), which cheered me up a bunch. They are so adorable, and they listen when you talk to them. How are you doing?
Caine,
Yeah, things could be better here as well. But I guess we’ll muddle through.
A. R
I get the feeling that her opinion could have counted a whole lot more if she’d helped as a white ally, instead of creating a false history for herself. And the fact that she had a tendency to tell people they were too white to have an opinion on racism and discrimination (see here). That, I find problematic. It’s less the identity but all the lying about her actual past.
Oh, and Brony, I don’t think you are an asshole at all. I think you try very hard to not be an asshole, to the point of over-worrying it a bit. That is worlds better than someone who never ever worries about being an asshole.
@ Brony: At least you worry about being an asshole before the fact, unlike that PatrickG guy. *ahem*
rq: Well, it certainly would now. But I think her internal thought process was “if I code as black, black people will respect my opinions more”. Now I will make no comment as to whether that is correct or not, because I have no right to an opinion as far as that goes.
Jesus Christ, the commenting changes thread. It’s just a clusterfuck of how we’re all awful fucking people, and we don’t give a shit about the concerns of this person and that person. I feel like everything I wrote was a complete waste of time, and absolutely pointless. This is the second time I’ve been in tears over that mess of a thread, and it’s taken a whole lot of effort to keep my mouth shut over some of the things said.
A friend helped me to look further than I normally do, and to understand things from a different perspective, which I appreciated, and I took that different perspective to that thread. I now think that was a pointless waste. There is no question that the air here can get very poisonous, but people won’t even stop for a moment to realize that the air on their side is just as fucking poisonous.
Fuck it. I tried, and all I have to show are more fucking tears.
@ Caine:
I, for one, really appreciate you trying. It did end up getting really bad*. :/ Hopefully PZ will be able to extract something usable out of all that, but at this point I’m surprised he hasn’t said “Thanks for all the comments, taking underadvisement” and closed the thread. It’s on endless boil/repeat cycle right now.
* Not going to gloss over my part in that… bleh. If only I’d put things as eloquently as you did, from the start!
Caine @343:
I’m so sorry. Thanks for all you did in there.
Caine
*headbonk*
You’re one of the major voices of reason in that thread.
Caine, may I offer *hugs*?
Caine, yes, you have been a valuable voice of reason. You usually are, and thank you.
PatrickG, Tony!, WMDKitty, Rawnaeris, and Anne, thank you so much. I hope you all know that you have my heart. I’m just feeling demoralized right now, because commenting here should not be at such a high cost, for any of us.
I think the only way that thread could have worked in any sort of constructive way was if PZ was a strong presence throughout, making his expectations very clear. That didn’t happen, so instead, it’s the all too standard clusterfuck. And I really appreciate the efforts of others in that thread too, because there were plenty of people who were being voices of reason on that thread, and getting run over by those who simply wanted to yell or get into grudge matches. So thank you, thank you, thank you all for putting yourselves out there.
And I know Giliell isn’t here right now, but I owe her a couple hundred thank yous too, for making a fucktonne of sense in that thread. Gen, too.
Caine
Another ‘Thank you’ from me.
.
I’m a little surprised by the depth of the resentment from some of the commenters.
But it does show how We™ have sometimes failed to police ourselves.
.
And on a sarcastic note, maybe we should make Proclamations when we improve.
on another topic:
Why do I keep reading gun threads?
I could just delete the bookmark.
Brony:
I have to N-th everybody who’s already said “you’re not an asshole”! Because…you’re just not. I’ve read so very, very many thoughtful comments from you. Caine said it at #340: you consistently work very hard to be the opposite of asshole. It shows.
Caine: hugs if you want them. I wimped out of the “comment changes” thread after Tony! first flagged it in the lounge (at about 145 comments). That was more than enough.
Thanks to everyone else who did thoughtful and considerate heavy lifting in that thread.
I did have another idea. What do you all think about suspensions as a way to deal with people who don’t abide by the rules or commit other offenses? Say one to three day suspensions. PZ could simply put someone on moderation for the one to three days, and for every time the person does something to merit it, another suspension. PZ could also put a cap on suspensions, so many, and then you’re out. (It could be a large number.) Anyway, I was thinking that suspensions might be a good way to deal with people, especially the long-term regulars (and yes, I include myself in that), and it might be an effective way to get people into better posting habits.
Caine @353:
I like the idea in theory. The only problematic aspect I can see is that this might require more of PZs time (something I imagine he doesn’t have an overabundance of).
Chigau:
*Snort* Oh, I can see the pitchforks a comin’. :D
Funny Diva, thank you.
Tony! @ 354:
I think it would save time overall. PZ already said he’d prefer to deal with trolls, which requires someone to notify him, then he gets the hammer out. This would be the same thing, basically. A monitor or any member of the commentariat can send an Alert: to the mod group, and PZ can carry out a suspension. This would not only reinforce better behaviour and habits, but it would also deal with massive derails in threads, prevent pile-ons, all that stuff.
Of course, I wouldn’t be the one doing it, so you may well be right about it being too time consuming.
Caine, you did good work in the Commenting thread, and so did many others. It was a clusterfuck, the thread had lots of tension, emotional turmoil, and there was a lot of misunderstandings and passive aggression. (Beatrice’s comment at 322 describes what I felt about it all as well). And yet it was “civil”, for some definitions of the word, which is a start. More importantly, several people offered good input, and showed a willingness to change and an understanding of the problem. I don’t think the effort you put in will be in vain. Ultimately, we can just hope PZ combs the thread for good ideas and we can move forward from there, and see what further discussion is needed, what steps need to be taken, what changes made. We can all just hope for the best, and hope that if/when there are more specific talks, they aren’t as messy.
I just can’t even with that thread. *hugs* and supportive gestures to those who waded in.
Caine: That’s a great idea. Seriously. If PZ is good with it, I think it would go a long way toward fixing some of the problems here. Perhaps a warning could be issued, something like a “voluntary cool-off from this thread before you get your arse suspended”?
Just as I was about to write off the Commenting Changes Coming thread, Jeff W comes along with something to say. It’s worth reading (so is Anteprepro’s subsequent comment).
I like the idea of suspensions myself. Might teach me to not be so goddamn trigger happy sometimes if I got targeted by one of those.
Also, completely in agreement with Tony!. Jeff W’s comment was amazingly something. Haven’t seen anteprepro’s yet, but I’ll preemptively judge as excellent, because priors.
P.S. It looks so strange with other punctuation, but I can’t not use the exclamation point on Tony!’s name. That would be wrong.
PatrickG @361:
No idea why, but this made me chuckle. Thanks.
Caine @335:
I remember reading about that horrid show. It’s similar to an equally vile show on the BBC.
@ Tony!: Chuckles are good. :)
@ anteprepro:
I know I certainly lost sight of that towards the end of my commenting. Hopefully PZ got a good mix of humor and horror from the thread. Both would be illustrative. :)
@David Marjanović, regarding putting in names and comment numbers:
One of the the various things I have in mind that you have said repeatedly over the years is that it is a scientist’s job to communicate clearly. If one person misunderstands what the scientist said or wrote, that failure is on the individual, but if multiple peers of the scientist misunderstand, then the scientist did not do their job, and needs to clarify. So it seems inconsistent to me that you seem willing to ignore multiple calls for greater clarity on your part.
As to what makes it polite — saying that people can search the text to find the original author means that you’re ultimately saying that they have to work more to understand the context of what you’re writing (and as noted, when reading on certain platforms, this might be a lot harder than you might think). Putting in more context (who wrote it and where) is more work that you are doing to make it easier for people to follow along and understand you. It may seem a minor thing, but consider it analogous to holding a door open so that others close behind you can enter as well. Sure, they could open the door themselves, but you are showing consideration and making a minor effort to reduce the amount of work that they have to do. To extend the analogy (given some of the examples above about different text parsing skills and memory abilities), not everyone finds it as easy to open the door as you do — they might be burdened with packages, or in a wheelchair, or just be small and slight while the door requires a heavy effort to move.
You seem to be reluctant to change on the matter because it seems arbitrary to you, but to many others it looks like a minor effort that you’re unwilling to take, and seem unable to realize is not such a minor effort on the part of those following you to cope with.
Caine
Let me join in with the hugs.
The best way to think about the commenting thread is that it is more for the benefit of PZ, rather than trying to convince individual people. As much as you try there is no reaching some people at all (my response to the thread was the opposite of yours – some comments made me grin evilly at the stupid mischaracterization of some comments people and in some points about comments that looked like nothing more than trolling) but hopefully PZ would come with new rules like Moses from Sinai (and then promptly smash them on our heads).
You did your best, and it was evident to me (which is my interpretation, and it could be wrong) that at least one or two comment came at a big personal price to you. It takes a big person to makes sacrifices for the sake of other, and you’ve set a good example. Whether others will follow, well… it’s their loss if they won’t but there is little to do about it.
Yes, but I’m not sure that is something that’s likely to happen. He is a busy man and even if he weren’t, he doesn’t come off as a micro-manager.
I sincerely hope that there would a change to the monitor system that would encourage more of their participation, but would still protect them so they won’t burn out or see Pharyngula as a second or even third job.
I have a feeling I’ll end up on the receiving end of that, but it’s a great idea.
Since the Thunderdome will be changed, there is no reason to restrict offending commentators to it as punishment. This leaves a temporary ban as the only solution when it comes to moderate to heavy violations.
Caine
Thanks and hugs right back.
I’m done there. I just can’t anymore. I understand why PZ said “no names, no examples”, but people promptly used it to simply air their grudges and no, no talking back. The vaguely defined “regulars” have been declared the baddies so everything that gets thrown at them is ok. We’re not people. There are folks there who really do have legitimate concerns about the climate, and who engaged in serious and productive discussion. I tried to do likewise, but it’s not working.
I have no idea what PZ will do, I’ll see. I’d hate to lose Pharyngula, since it is also a support group, but I’m not going to play whipping girl.
@ AlexanderZ:
True, so far as it goes. But PZ has made it very clear that he has (at least) two goals: (1) providing a safe space for people typically disenfranchised (e.g. sexual assault survivors, targets of racism, etc.) and (2) educating people on issues relating to (1).
So, yeah, it’s for the benefit of PZ. But only insofar as he’s trying to balance two very difficult goals. Either one is hard to do. The two together? Well, that’s what benevolent overlords are for. There is something to be said for arbitrary guidelines, at least in a space provided gratis.
I’ll note in passing it’s why I don’t give credence to fears that new guidelines will support truly abusive behavior. I am not trying to minimize those concerns, but PZ’s very clear on this space being toxic/shark-like to those who bring in unacceptable -isms. If the new guidelines don’t support that goal, I foresee a revision of policy that’s so quick it would cause collective whiplash.
@ Giliell:
Hugs from me if you’ll accept them. I was a bit abrasive to you in that thread, and I hope you’ll accept my apologies.
.. by which I mean: sorry I was abrasive to you. I swear, notpologies are contagious.
Giliell @367:
This was probably my biggest frustration with that thread.
Patrick G
Thanks. No worries. I wasn’t talking about you. I found your comments constructive.
Giliell
Good to see you here.
I’d like to apologize for the hostility of my comments to you in the gun-nut thread, particularly my last comment which was over the top.
An outbreak of peace on Thunderdome?
Caine, ALL the hugs to you, if you want them. And Giliell too. I agree with everything Giliell had said in 367, and then I especially agree with what Caine said: The only way for a thread like that to work is if PZ is present throughout and prevents it from becoming a free potshot day against “the regulars”, which is what it currently is. I, too, am feeling extremely frustrated and dejected. I’m willing to help change the climate so that it’s less toxic, and I think it can be done without giving up the safe space and community it has become, but like Giliell said, I’m not willing for some nebulous group of “regulars” to become whipping boys and girls without being able to defend themselves. I honestly think some of the goings on in that thread was toxic and abusive, and with one or two exceptions, it wasn’t coming from “the regulars”, but from the very people who complain about how toxic and abusive this place is. Hmm. Maybe I should post that there.
Has anyone else seen this?
Don’t confuse critical thinking with dogma (or: the new progressive religion), by patrick miller.
I dislike his equation of “ethical behavior” with “religion”, but it certainly looks like he’s making some points that might be worthwhile considering.
Or is he splitting hairs in a problematic way, and building a strawman social justice person? I’m really not clear about all the reasons for the infighting that lead to the Recent Unpleasantness, but does this essay perhaps at least approach the possible reasons for the problems?
I find this statement very problematic. I know this is not a friendly environment for me now, but please consider the validity of the claim made, that regulars were declared inhuman in the new comment rules thread. People disagreed with you, people gave examples of instances they felt threatened or dismissed or bullied, and your answer is to come here playing the inhuman gambit? The you disagree with me that means you dont think Im a person gambit? What happened to Pharyngula? Were did measured critical thinking go?
Oh Poopeyhead-
Incredibly rare underwater footage of a deep sea squid giving birth to glowing babies.
rorschach @377:
Several people in that thread lumped the regulars together like one monolithic entity that did bad things. Painting with such a broad brush isn’t treating anyone like an individual.
Tony mate, don’t tapdance around, in your opinion were regular commenters treated inhumanely in that thread or not? And if not, will you call this hyperbole out, or is your standing with the in-group more important? Because that is a symptom of the problem here.
Owlmirror @376:
From your quoted material-
This seems like he’s making a big assumption on the part of the person making the criticism. If I call someone out for saying something homophobic, it’s likely going to be because I felt their words were hurtful (to me or someone else). I don’t think (though it does remain possible) that my doing so stems from a place of “me good”, “them not good”.
I’ll answer, although I’m not Tony. Yes, they were. Most notably by Chas/Sven and, I think it was you, who said we’re all assholes trying to fix the asshole problem.
And that is dehumanising you how? Saying you’re not people? You know, my government is dehumanising asylum seekers right now, anyone brown trying to escape from their hellhole to us is deemed “illegal”.
All anyone did on that thread was disagree with you, and point to the fact that an in-group is not suited to fix an in-group problem. Pathetic hyperbole, and skepticism 101 fail is what that is.
By lumping all of the so-called regulars together and slating them all assholes that can’t be redeemed (as per your 319 in that thread), yes, that is dehumanizing. No, it’s not on the same level as what your government is doing. That doesn’t make it not dehumanizing.
You, Roscharch, are one of those that complain that this place is so hostile and toxic, yet you feel it’s okay to post something toxic and hostile like your 319 in that thread, or saying
? Where’s the principle of charity and everything everyone is going on about, that the Horde supposedly lack but the people complaining supposedly have?
Thanks, everyone. I’ve read the entire thread since my last comment; I don’t have time to reply right now because I spent the rest of the morning on the latest gun thread, but I promise to be back within 24 hours (quite possibly less). In case anyone’s wondering, I haven’t taken another look at the thread about the changing rules yet.
Beatrice, I honestly don’t understand what you’re afraid of. Absolutely, when I come across as an asshole, do call me out; I don’t necessarily notice (let alone understand). To spell out the obvious: I don’t want, in fact, to come across as an asshole.
Brony, for what that’s worth, I can’t remember seeing you behave like an asshole.
Caine, please accept these two quokkas. Sure, I criticize you a lot, but that’s orthogonal to the fact that I also have a lot of sympathy for you.
Oh, I wanted to mention: I take the point about phones and tablets. I’m not used to those, so I completely failed to consider them. :-( :-( :-(
rorschach #383
Well, MY government is torn between considering all others as cancer or merely as vermin.
There is more than one way to portray people as less than human. You’re on the very mild end of that spectrum, but you’re still firmly there:
1. You have treated a diverse group of people as a monolith with no room for exception.
2. You have insulted a group of people not for their individual behavior, views or opinions, but just for belonging to a certain group.
How does that align with “skepticism 101”?
A question you’ve been using the word “floosh” here recently. What does it mean?
I looked it up on Urban Dictionary and I don’t think it means what it says it means. :\
______________________
Brony #331
I honestly don’t know how to respond to that. You’re dealing with things way beyond anything I can comprehend.
I can only say that I hope you have the support you need.
______________________
David Marjanović #386
I’ll await your response. I have a dog in this, or rather a bird.
What an utterly absurd and stupid statement to make. Who did I insult, and what for? Is this like how religious people feel insulted for pointing out they are wrong? There won’t be anyone here to back me up, so I will say that you seem to make an excellent drone AlexanderZ.
Just curious, what government would that be? And your hyperbole better align with your IP address.
Here you’re doing it again. AlexanderZ couldn’t have come to his conclusions independently, and you can’t just address his arguments. No, he must be a drone from the Hivemind.
Can I just remind you of the comments you made in the commenting thread? To whit:
Are you arguing that this wasn’t insulting a whole, ill-defined group just for belonging to a certain group?
You said it. Ill-defined. I had no group in mind because Pharyngula isn’t a group. Not yet anyway. This is what that thread was about right? I had bullies in mind. I take it they felt addressed.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hyperbole
@AlexanderZ #389:
Google on:
site:freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula floosh
Example: “Your immature OPINIONS are *floosh* sent to the toxic waste disposal system”
It’s an immediately recognizable part of Nerd of Redhead’s typical idiolect when responding to what he considers to be trolls. Although, I see that it was mostly used before 2014.
In context, it’s obviously an onomatopoeic synonym for “flush”, as in a toilet.
Hello chigau!
Get ready for concerned posts about passive-aggressiveness anytime now! Oh no, wait.
Caine
Can I add my appreciate to the pile?
I would like to. Because I really appreciate your sensible voice in that thread.
As a somewhat more silent – I suppose by now – regular, I haven’t been finding it easy to express an opinion or to voice a suggestion. I’ve really appreciated your words there, and your thoughts and ideas.
Also those of others in that thread. It was exhausting to follow. Probably not nearly as exhausting as commenting and responding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior
Speaking of assholes trying to fix the asshole problem, is your hypocrisy accidental rorschach, or is it just more of an attempt to provoke a reaction?
The idiomatic spelling of ‘FLOOSH!’, recall, comes as a legacy from its predecessor in Nerd’s boilerplate, ‘POOF!’ [e.g. ‘your OPINION is *POOF!* dismissed, loser BOY’] As I recall, the change was due to concern that ‘poof’ could be construed as an anti-gay slur in some anglophonic regions.
chigau, I actually had an ex-wife do that to me. In the midst of a simmering week-long argument, she sent me an e-mail containing only that link. Did I mention that here? I can’t recall.
Sven
I’ve been accused of being passive-aggressive a few times.
Not once has it been for behaviour that meets the actual definition.
I know I personally would appreciate a little more explanation with the links, chigau. I’m not sure quite how to interpret them.
Rorscharch, the fact that the group is so ill-defined is a problem, because that means you can just say “oh, but I didn’t mean those regulars, only some, if the shoe fits put it on”. Which is pretty shitty style
If you have a grudge against someone, whatever. Don’t interact with that person, or call them out when they are actually being toxic. But sniping at some people because they may or may not belong to a group you personally don’t approve of, and then denying the possibility that they could have come to insight about how their behaviour affects someone else and genuinely trying to find out how to change that, is toxic and harmful behaviour. Sniping at someone like that when they had done nothing to earn it in that thread (which is still one of the current rules, I’ll add) and then shouting “abuse! toxicity! hivemind!” when they do snipe back is clearly toxic and abusive behaviour. Which makes you complaining about toxic behaviour allegedly being condoned here (without examples, note) rather hypocritical.
Nobody said “all”. Well, you did. You said ‘all’.
And as for me, I said “earnestly discussing”, not “trying to fix”.
For the record.
Also for the record, several of the discussants over there (not ‘all’, several) have, in point of fact, been quite nasty, supporating assholes, to me, personally, in the past, most of them multiple times. So I stand by the comment and I don’t even repudiate its snideness. *shrug*
As for The Problem, Chris Clarke and I agreed once that it involves a notable lack of nuance.
[e.g., spnning critical comments about ‘regulars’ into ‘out-of-control bashing of each and every individual Regular’]
Well there’s not a lot of nuance involved in claiming the group of (unnamed) regular commenters are nasty and toxic, then sniping at them when they hadn’t done anything to earn it in that thread and then shouting “see! toxic I tells ya” when they do respond with sniping. It’s also not “civil” to attack the commenters (“you’re an asshole/they’re assholes!) and not the behaviour (“that thing you did here specifically was an asshole move”), and then complaining about “toxicity” and “hostility” when people react badly to that in a thread where people were told that they can’t snipe back.
That’s straight up shitty behaviour, and calling it is not one of the things that make this place toxic.
As someone who lurks a lot but doesn’t comment that much I think that a significant step in the right direction to reducing incivility would be for people to focus on modifying their own behavior rather than pointing out where others are doing it wrong.
Chris61, I find your idea interesting. Could you expand on that a little bit, maybe using an example of what you’d like to see someone do in general, and what you would like to see someone do when someone else is beinghostile, unfair, or misrepresenting them?
David @ 386:
! There’s a fascinating being, with a great name, too. I’ll have to do some reading about them, because this is the first time I’ve ever heard of them, and that’s the best gift. Thanks.
Ignore the hostility and correct the misrepresentation.
David,
I was being sarcastic, since some people have the need to come around and moan about being persecuted, supposedly because of criticizing (a) regular(s).
And thanks for the hugs!
Chris61 @ 405:
I really wish the words civility / incivility would disappear, they aren’t helpful. Not only that, they escalate everything and make it worse. As I wrote in the commenting changes thread (#379), in response to “Civility is not anti-thetical to Justice” :
Not necessarily, no. However, a friend pointed something out to me which I think is important. I think civility is both too loaded and too loosely defined by most people to be a useful frame for this discussion. A much better one is ethically. The commentariat needs to treat new/unfamiliar people, even those who are disagreeing, in an ethical manner. That also means not using safe space as a brute cudgel to smack down new/unfamiliar people, disagreeing or not.
Chris61, the problem with ignoring hostility is that abusive people then take that as a free pass to be hostile and abusive to people who are then not allowed to fight back. I don’t think that’s quite fair. Perhaps an example would help me to understand better?
Sven @ 403:
That’s true. It’s also true that you have been a quite nasty, supporating asshole to some of those people, personally, in the past, sometimes, multiple times. That is one of the things so hard to swallow in that clusterfuck of a thread – people complaining and pointing fingers are not presenting the whole picture, and while many of us were openly admitting to past bad behaviour, the rest were smugly accusing while acting as if they never, ever behaved badly.
@411 Gen
I’m speaking strictly from my own experience here but in my experience people engage in escalating hostility because they don’t have a rational counterargument to the point being raised. As an observer I’ve never found that escalating hostility makes me think badly of the person who is the subject of the hostility but only of the person engaging in the hostility.
rorschach @380:
Yes. The reasons why have been explained by Gen and AlexanderZ, though you appear to have dismissed them both.
I think rorschach @383 is in character.
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN!!!???
Seriously, though, his weird false dichotomy @380 and his ‘Dear Muslima’ @383 kind of make it clear he’s not interested in presenting any sort of good-faith argument.
I can’t consider changing a thing that I cannot clearly perceive.
I don’t mind getting treated as an opponent (in an abstract sense, I doubt that I am a “regular”), and there is clearly a separation of “sides” here. There are many ways that a person can describe me as an opponent or an “enemy” in a non-literal sense that I could take in stride. I think that it’s perfectly fine to appeal to a group with problematic characteristics without it being dehumanizing. I would think of it as “deindividualizing” to appeal to a filter detecting a group, which would only be useful if I knew what the filter was detecting and what it’s accuracy and sensitivity was.
I think that for things to get into the realm of dehumanizing the person or group is connected to characteristics that are literally not human instead of a human group with particular negative characteristics. I can appeal to ‘pitters, or conservatives, or libertarians that way. I would be comfortable with someone claiming that I was exhibiting a characteristic of a group as long as I could get an idea about the specifics. If an asshole was self aware enough about what they were doing they could in fact fix the asshole problem. Former assholes certainly could fix the asshole problem. In fact is not an asshole or assholes focusing on changing behavior that has to occur? It’s not all orders from people with the filters.
The problem for me at least is in:
*Clearly pointing to the behavior (statements, implications of statements, larger context of a behavior, etc…)
*Showing why it’s a problem.
I know that a lot of that went on over in the commenting changes thread (and I’m looking at them now to figure out who is referring to what as best as I can). I know that there are people tired of pointing out the same thing again. But if the disagreement is going to move over here could people at least give post numbers? That way I can try to match the impression of the comment with the comment for myself.
Both sides are present here so the non-literal appeals to specific behavior are not very helpful without examples.
“Good person” = “posses positive attributes and does positive things“.
“Bad person”= “possesses negative attributes and does negative things“.
“Asshole”= “person who engages in specific behavior that offends for specific reasons and/or hurts people for specific reasons and is resistant to changing that specific behavior. May or may not enjoy offending others.”
“nasty”= “person who engages in mean behavior or obscene behavior and/or the underlying specific beliefs that allow the behavior.”
The above seems non-specific but human to me.
“cancer”, “vermin”, “toxic” can definitely be dehumanizing unless attached to specific things in a way that makes their use obvious.
@Caine 410
I agree. “Civility” is more of a statement of how someone feels about a collection of behaviors. What matters is why they are civil. Ethics would get us into the situational morality that we want to figure out. Ethically is how someone feels about behavior based on behaviors that arise from personal rules of conduct.
Unfortunately I find that many people don’t functionally understand what ethics are (in general society-wise, not in here because I can’t judge specific people yet). It’s all buried in the religion for the most part and I virtually never hear the word used by the general public. It’s a good idea though so hopefully we can develop some ethical principles for specific kinds of interactions around here. And give them some decent names.
Owlmirror #394 and Sven DiMilo #399
Thank you for explaining that!
___________________________
Caine #410
I occasionally read a blog by a professor/lecturer with a Phd in philosophy who specializes in ethics and ethical behavior. Just from reading a few of her posts it becomes obvious that “ethics” is only slightly less confusing than “civility”. One thing that is obvious is that ethics having nothing to do with this discussion since we are not a well defined group with strict rules of application which has a unique privilege and/or a clearly defined responsibilities.
___________________________
rorschach #390
Gen has already said everything I wanted to say about the first part of your comment, so I’ll reply to your question to satisfy your curiosity.
Israel. Miri Regev (then Likud MP, now the minister of Culture and Sports) has called asylum seeker and all Africans (Sudanians in particular) a “cancer in our body”. Yitzhak Aharonovich (the minister of Public Security) called Arabs rats. If you think that’s hyperbole then I can go deeper into the rabbit hole. A few years ago a book was published (Torat Ha-Melech or The Kings Rules/Torah/Commandments) which advocated the killing of all non-Jews including children (provided a Jew believes they’ll may grow up to harm Jews). When the two rabbi authors were detained by the police ALL of Israel’s Orthodox rabbis protested against their detention and they were supported by Likud and Mafdal (now Bait Yehudi) MPs, all the way up to Benjamin Netanyahu under the guise of “religious freedom”. The politicians (most of them, Michael Ben Ari, an MP from various parties, supports the book fully) did distance themselves from the actual suggestions of the book and claimed their support was only on the principle of religious discourse. However, it later turned out that all those MPs have personal relations with those rabbis, and that Netanyahu frequented the yeshivas where they held their speeches and even called them (among the other orthodox rabbis and pupils) his “torah marines”.
Oh, and the rabbis were, and still are, state officials, one of whom is responsible for a military yeshiva (i.e. the pupils there serves half the usual term in the army and half in the yeshiva).
Since you seem to know my IP, I’m sure you’ll have no problem finding the relevant info as well as many more examples of similar attitudes and expressions.
I’m buzzing off.
Rossignol:
You think that because you’re an ignoramus.
(Seems you in character, too.)
I wanted to thank everyone for the kind words, I just don’t know how to relate to them. Hearing that I am too polite and don’t seem like an asshole is not something I know how to process.
Odd tangent, bear with me. There is this effect they found where clenching your fist will actually effect how you store memories. There is a place where your body and perception connect with society. That place is the strongest part of what I feel about things and it is in both “sending” and “receiving”. It’s like fire.
Those black lines on the screen are like fire. Not just aggression, but joy, sadness, passion and terror. Finding the words is one of my passions right now. How do you get to know fire? How do you figure out what fire thinks of you? What I get out of reading comments here is a thing that only becomes certain after the conversation has died out and new topics have everyone’s attention. Fire leaves an impression but it’s one that is hard to draw subtlety from, so when I think about how I appear to people it is through a lens that is filled with intensity. An intensity that takes a lot to learn to deal with properly when you interact. It often feels like a straight jacket, but later in life you discover that it’s more of a swiss army knife.
So thank you. Finding out that I do not seem to be an asshole is nice to know. I just don’t know what to do with that yet.
I always made it a point of honor to not be an asshole to anybody who hadn’t been an asshole to me first. But it’s true, I have absolutely zero interest in earnestly discussing the Asshole Problem with a bunch of other assholes. So sue me. I have pretty much weaned myself completely from the comments here and I’m happier for it.
Brony:
<sigh<
The very same people who think you’re not an asshole think I am an asshole.
Obviously, I don’t dispute their perception. Nor can I deny it is true, under their Weltanschauung.
How much heed you pay to others’ evaluation of your merit is up to you, but be aware that such relief as you feel about their approbation should entail a potentially equal amount of dismay about their possible disapprobation if you are an intellectually-honest person. ;)
Sven DiMilo
OMG.
You actually believe that about yourself.
I do. Show me a counterexample or shove your comic sans up your supercilious ass.
@John Morales 421
I would be grateful if your next comment specifically pointed to precisely what gave you cause to question my intellectual honesty. One big problem I encounter is lack of apparent reason for some things that people do. Often those reasons stand on the razors edge of being really good or really bad.
You seem to need me to see something about people here and you don’t seem familiar with what I posted in the commenting changes thread. My comment in #308 should tell you all you need to know.
@ John Morales:
As someone who thinks Brony is not an asshole, part of that is because Brony at least appears (to me) in their comments to be trying to not be an asshole. It’s possible Brony’s a malevolent genius in this regard, but whatever assholishness may be present is significantly ameliorated therefore, leading to more charitable readings therefore.
I’ll note that the [meta] tag has always signified “asshole” to me. Of course, it’s the kind of asshole I enjoy, so …. take that however you want. :)
Curses, that first therefore was supposed to be chopped out. Damn you, copypasta!
Brony:
You’ve made the usual mistake most people make when reading me — attributing an imputed judgement to an universal claim.
What makes you imagine I expressed that I had cause to question your intellectual honesty?* :)
Let me rephrase my (main) point: unless one is not intellectually honest, then to the degree one feels validated by others’ approbation, one should feel proportionally invalidated by others’ disapprobation. This has implications.
(Does it help you to understand me when I phrase the same sentiment in the abstract person?)
—
* FWIW: Had I not included that clause, my proposition would not have been universally true, so that my post would have been wrong.
PatrickG:
As a pragatic heuristic, this is defensible. As an entailment, it is fatally flawed; it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
(Or: Whyever would a non-asshole bother to try not to be an asshole? ;) )
John, given the raucous discussion we all just had, I should think the advantages of presenting as a non-asshole would be self-evident.
Adding: Brony could possibly be a Machiavellian asshole. But if they’re that devious, and they never actually act like an asshole, I’ll just concede defeat as to accurate identification. After all, given the stakes inherent in a blogger’s comments section, an asshole who doesn’t, well, asshole is fairly well equivalent to a non-asshole. If Brony somehow leverages this into taking over the blog, I’ll reconsider.
Basically, if it doesn’t fart like an asshole…
They are, PatrickG.
Alas, the “advantages” to which you refer are that people like you can be fooled, so that you fail to perceive false negatives.
Put it this way: why do you imagine JAQing is a technique? ;)
(Or: the advantage preferentially advantages dissimulating assholes)
PS PatrickG@430, you too seem under the impression that I somehow have intimated that I imagine Brony is an asshole. This, even after I noted that very problem above!
(Or: You make the very mistake I noted @427)
@ John Morales 427
(#427)
You are avoiding specifics. That is useless to me.
(from #421)
This is a judgment of specific people, you simply do not name them. That gave me cause to look at judgments with respect to you. This,
(from #421)
This does not put you into the universal realms. Real things happened here on pharyngula. Point to them. Otherwise I can take the same position with respect to you. If it’s just your worldview whatevs right? This is not universal to me, this is ephemeral, tasteless so far. The universal is useless if it cannot be made concrete and useful.
(from #421)
A “general universal observation” is not useful without being rooted to reality. Since you had not seen my comment in the other thread it is reasonable for me to want to know what thing in perception led you to want to *randomly* give me this piece of advice. It requires more information to know why I should seek information that would just happen to be the sort of information that would be used to judge someone’s approbation.
(back to #427)
Which part is the clause? Because people don’t just appeal to things with no reason and you are not making much sense. Something led you to bring up my intellectual honesty. Some actual thing on this board in the text. Point to it please.
Maybe that is the problem, you are going in the wrong direction. Be concrete.
@PatrickG430
That would be demon.
John, I merely used Brony as an example. Your initial comment indicated that a set of people (a) viewed you as an asshole, and (b) did not view Brony as an asshole. Hence, Brony was a handy example. In retrospect, that was rude to Brony. /sorry
I will note that your style in this last series of comments would make me think you were JAQing off, if I weren’t familiar with you from years of reading comments. I mean, you have responded to a great number of comments with semi-innocent, semi-leading questions recently. :) In a strictly text-based format, presentation is king, with experience serving as a long-suffering court vizier.
Also, Brony is an angel. /runsaway
*sigh*
That feel when you know the thing you’re looking for is there, but you just can’t find it.
The subsequent feels when you find the thing, and it was right in front of you the whole time.
@PatrickG
I’m not bothered at all by your example. I’ve always just thought that if I had a problem with how another was referring to me I could handle things myself. It’s more complicated than that with most people, but most people are not as fortunate as I am to have science give me what I need to think of myself as an object.
Demons to some, Angels to others.
Brony @433:
I was specific; it is unfortunate that my specificity was useless to you, but that is a consequence of your ability to apprehend me much more so than of my ability to express myself.
It’s not a judgement, it’s a fact. Ask each and any of them, if you doubt me.
I ovbiously overestimated your nous.
Aneurotypical you may be, but your intellectual capacity is… less impressive to me.
(Yes, that is a judgement, not an universal claim)
…
One last bit:
You don’t even know to what universal nor to what utility refers, do ya?
(Hint: utility is relative to something, but universals ain’t relative to anything)
Anyone see the problem with this statement? I’ll wait. Maybe Chigau could post a helpful google link.
For shame.
Rorschach, 439
Why don’t you just tell us what your problem with the statement is instaed of implying that we’re all too stupid or dishonest or unsckeptical or huvemindy or whatever (you won’t even state that clearly) to figure it out or say something about it.
What you are doing here, with your insinuations that we’re stupid and not sufficiently… Whatever it is you want, is something I consider to be toxic, and with bonus added vagueness and chances for gaslighting (“I never said you were stupid or whatever, but if the shoe fits…”) So spit it out, and be clear and specific. Stop hiding behind innuendos and implications.
Sure Gen, I’m happy to do that. Although I would have thought that you self-acclaimed critical thinking champions, weren’t you so invested in putting me down personally, could have figured it out for yourself.
Less than human, or inhuman, is pretty straightforward. It means =|= human. To suggest there is more than one way to state =|=human is the same as saying there is more than one way of saying not stamp-collecting.
Said by someone who doesn’t know me, based by few comments on the internet, implying some kind of undefined spectrum of, what exactly? It’s a nonsensical statement at best.
Let me ask you Gen, if my comment had been made under the nym of garglefrass, would you have had the same reaction to want to put me down and make me look stupid?
PatrickG @434, since I’m binging out tonight:
Your demonstrated ability to detect at least one false positive is creditable.
Quite some time ago, I learnt (the hard way) that
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.bears little relationship to reality*; thus my circumspection.You might recall how once I was more forthright. ;)
—
* And this is the least-moderated thread here!
Rorschach, I can say with absolute certainty that no matter what nym you used, I would have taken issue with it. It’s your actions, of accusing “the regulars” of being The Problem and of hostility and toxicity, while you yourself engage in hostile and toxic behaviour, which is what I’m taking issue with, not with you as a person. I don’t know you. I just know what you’ve written here. My memory is too bad, and frankly I’m just too disinterested, to know who’s hating who and why over here. The person who said that you were on the mild end of the spectrum clearly referred to your behaviour, as was made clear by the numerous quotes of exactly that behaviour that I provided. The person doesn’t need to know you intimately for that assessment to be made from the words you have written.
I strongly disagree with you on the dehumanisation angle, and I’ve already explained why. It seems we will not agree on that point. The point that you are engaging in hostile and toxic behaviour while accusing others of not only doing the exact same thing, but being either dishonest about their desire to change it or unable to actually stop being assholes, though, still stands, even if I were to concede (which I don’t) that no dehuminisation took place.
And your not-so-subtle little dig :
is also exactly the kind of hostile and toxic behaviour I was talking about. It was unnecessary, and played the man (or woman) rather than the ball, and it does so for seriously no good reason other than to say “you’re too stupid to figure it out for yourself”.
Could you please provide evidence of my toxic and hostile behaviour? Other than daring to comment?
So…
My nose didn’t let me sleep well enough, so I stayed in bed too long and don’t have time to write a complete answer now. :-( I’ve caught up with reading this thread, though.
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
So, first, two things out of the way:
o_O
O_o
o_o
O_O
You know who else used that exact metaphor?
*raises hand*
Well, no, John. I, for one, think it’s far too simplistic to think you’re an asshole. You do have one evil streak to your personality: you’re capable of consciously annoying people and enjoying it. But very often you’re just misinterpreted because your statements are so cryptic. There’s a lot that you think is obvious which isn’t obvious at all; you need to explain a whole lot more.
(The story about the math professor comes to mind who reportedly explained a proof in a lecture by saying at one point “It is obvious…”, interrupted, spent the next 20 minutes scribbling calculations on the blackboard, then said: “Yes, it is obvious” and continued to explain the proof.)
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Three days ago something big occurred to me (thanks ultimately to a Facebook message by John Morales).
I consider a thread* a single conversation, no matter how long it is and how much the topic drifts and branches. Everyone hears what everyone says, no two people talk at the same time, everyone can react to what anyone has said. In meatspace this is difficult to set up; the closest would be to sit in a circle.
Maybe other people – maybe most other people – instead have a more realistic meatspace situation in mind: sitting at a long table, where practically never more than four people participate in one conversation, and every conversation with four people in it soon falls apart into two conversations with only two people in it.** Several conversations occur at the same time, the people in one don’t even notice what’s being said in any of the others – the conversations just happen to take place in the same room.
If the second situation is written down as a linear thread, things get confusing. And then suddenly it makes sense that you’d use names and numbers to jump from one comment to the next in the same conversation so you can (at least for the moment) ignore most or all of the others. In the first situation this whole issue doesn’t arise: there’s only one conversation, so you trivially follow it by reading the comments in chronological order.
Am I getting it now? Do people here have the second situation in mind? (WMDKitty in particular – you got so angry and couldn’t explain why.)
…And as I write this, it occurs to me that nested comments and reply buttons must have been invented by someone who had the second situation in mind. If the first situation is written down as nested comments, then in order to follow the conversation you have to climb up and down every branch on the tree, and the next time you visit the thread you have to climb up and down every branch on the tree again just to see if any of the twigs have grown longer or branched further… a non-problem in the second situation, where you can just stick with the one branch (or three even) that interests you in particular.
I have to run. But, as the second most famous of my fellow countrymen has said: I’ll be back.
* Perhaps not Lounge and Thunderdome. But even in these and their predecessor I long tried to read every single comment without interruptions, and actually managed for years, in part for this reason.
** I so loathe when that happens. I want to hear all interesting conversations, and I’m not capable of listening to two people at the same time. People will even suddenly talk to me when I’m very clearly already listening to an existing conversation… <headshake>***
*** …Yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m unusually reluctant to open a conversation or speak up at all in meatspace, and this is one of the reasons: I don’t want to interrupt people, not just when they speak, but also when they listen or when they think about the next thing to say. Consequently, I often don’t get to say anything as people assume I’m just trying to decorate the background with my presence and ignore me. Praise Gore for the Internet.
Oh. I’ve only caught up till comment 441.
I was under the impression that I’ve already amply done that, but all right, I’ll copy and paste it.
From your 319 in the original Commenting Changes thread:
Implying that “the most vicious of bullies on Pharyngula” (whoever that is, you won’t say, you’ll only say “if the shoe fits…”) are dishonest and/or lying in their stated desire to change or are incapable of change (another dehumanization technique, but that’s not what we’re arguing about now).
From your 339 in the original Commenting Changes thread:
Implying that everyone who’s trying to fix the problem are assholes and incapable of changing their assholish ways, regardless of what they said
From your 383 here:
Attacking the man rather than the ball, for no good reason other than to insult.
From your 390:
Again, attacking the man rather than the ball for no good reason other than to insult and show how superior your intellect is
Again from your 390:
Implying that everyone here is part of some HiveMind and can’t think for ourselves, because we seperately came to conclusions that disagree with yours
Again from your 390:
Actual implied threat and hostile order. I wanted to shout “Or what?! What are you going to do?!”
From your 395 here:
Again implying that everyone here is a hivemind and the only reason we’re not posting that Chigau is passive aggressive is because that would go against hivemind think, not because we think what she didn’t wasn’t actually passive aggressive
From your 439:
Again with the sniping at Chigau, and the implication that everyone who doesn’t object is either stupid or part of some HiveMind
Your 441:
which I responded to in 444 to say, and I quote,
Here’s what I said about your behaviour:
From my 402:
And here again at 440, where I said specifically what you’re doing that’s toxic and hostile:
And then of course 444, which I already quoted.
This isn’t about you disagreeing. It’s about you behaving in a toxic and hostile fashion, sniping from the sidelines while expecting everyone else to just shut up and take it, and when they don’t you misrepresent them to say, and I quote again from your 377:
So you misrepresent the point to say that people were reacting to other people disagreeing, where disagreement wasn’t the issue at all, behaviour while disagreeing was. You want to be able to snipe at people in an unfair, toxic and hostile manner, and then when they react, spin it that everyone’s upset because people just disagreed and that they are all so hostile and toxic.
That’s toxic and hostile behaviour displayed by you, Rorscharch. Not years in the past, during fights I don’t even care about. Right here, right now, in a thread where you accused other people of being assholes who are dishonest or otherwise incapable of change. When you say “assholes trying to fix the asshole problem”, perhaps you should also look in the mirror, or at the fingers pointing back at yourself and realize that The Problem doesn’t only lie with “The Regulars”.
Sorry, that last post was in reply to Rorschach‘s 445.
David Marjanović @446,
Thanks: I stand corrected. Since at least one of the people who don’t think Brony is an asshole also doesn’t think I’m necessarily an asshole, my claim was wrong.
(Yay?)
True — though thanks to Dan Fincke I’ve realised I much prefer using that power for good rather than for evil*, and indeed seek to avoid doing it in general.
It’s a capacity, not a habit, and not one about which I’m unaware.
(Alas for me, whilst that used to be an advantageous trait here, that is no longer the case; the environment here has changed)
Indeed. FWIW, my adoption of parenthetical rephrasings/allusive adumbrations came about after you made a similar observation, years ago. Leaving aside the circumspection aspect to which I referred @442, I still have a go at clarification when I think it’s merited (cf. #427), but I’m not obsessive about it any more.
—
* It’s a Nietzschean thing.
So you say. I dared to disagree with you and your reply completely went off the rails, attacking me personally.
Why? I don’t regularly comment here anymore for one. I care about Pharyngula but the dominant in-group rejects me and anything I say. And as Chas put it, I have zero interest discussing the asshole problem with other assholes, because I dont think it’s a valid path to improvement.
Here we go again — everyone standing in a circle with a gun at each others’ heads.
I agree that Rorschach and Morales have said some spiteful things. I agree that everyone tends to respond to spite by dogpiling on them. The solution is not to have the thread descend into long wrangles in which each and every one of you provide proof positive that the other is undeniably an asshole.
Instead, you need to just stop. I or a monitor will come along and say that this is not productive, quit calling each other rude (even justifiably rude) names and move on…and if you won’t, I’ll take steps to end it.
In other news, the Thunderdome will close this afternoon, and re-emerge under a different name with new expectations of appropriate behavior. I’m just struggling with what to call it right now — suggestions would be appreciated.
Well I disagree. I’m trying to be constructive and name the things I see as a problem. I thought that’s what you wanted us to do.
My suggestion would be to lose the Lounge and Thunderdome, make commenters equal, no special spaces anymore.
Declaring the “regulars” to be assholes is most definitely a spiteful thing to say. I agree with you that there are things that need to change around here, but that isn’t a productive way to do it — I’m not going to condemn a nebulous gang any more than I’m going to condemn you.
Lounge and Thunderdome are not reserved for special commenters. They’re open to everyone.
“Assholes trying to solve the asshole problem” is a ruder way of saying “mistakes were made but not by me”, or pointing to the fact that asking a pool of people with ingrained disagreements to solve this same problem is not likely to be successful. What does it matter if the tone is rude? It’s pointing to the problem. You need to solve the commentariat problem PZ, not the bullies disguising as sheep now.
It’s really hard to figure out where the lines are.
Let’s say there are four people in a thread who are being assholes.
Calling each of them out specifically will be called: picking on someone, dogpiling if other people join in, singling one person out to serve as an example.
Calling out the behavior, but being vague about who it is doing it will be called: not giving enough data, tarring everyone with the same brush.
Calling out both the behavior and people in generalist terms will be called: unsusbtantiated claims, unhelpful.
Any or all of which could also be called spiteful. I think I agree with what PZ just said – there’s no way around it but to stop it outright.
PZ #452
“THE OFF-TOPIC THREAD”
Almost every forums has one so newcomers won’t be at loss about its purpose.
I am telling YOU that “Assholes trying to solve the asshole problem” is dismissive and unproductive, and that claiming that “bullies” are disguising themselves rather than acknowledging a problem and sincerely trying to change is defeatism.
I’m also pointing out that you’re going to complain about “people with ingrained disagreements,” I’m going to hand you a mirror and ask you to take a long hard look.
I am also telling you that this line of bitterness will end, now. Right now. I am not saying your grievances are unjustified, but I am saying that I will not tolerate ongoing feuds.
The Love Shack?
Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnn roof… rusted.
This works for me, sounds good. Thanks PZ.
Further warning: I also will not tolerate anyone else charging in and providing explanations and evidence for why Rorschach is an asshole. We’re all assholes here.
PZ
I nearly forgot! Please keep a link in the new thread to this one, like you do you when you open a new Lounge. I know that the new thread is supposed to be a fresh start but not every comment here is invalid and I’d hate for them to go to oblivion.
Now I have an earworm…
+++
The Salat Bar? For mixed appetites?
I was going to suggest ‘The Crying Room’ but now I think “THE OFF-TOPIC THREAD” is a good idea.
No worries. Understood. No more from me on this.
You know we had TET since 2009, that’s a pretty long time considering, back then Pharyngula had Wesley Elsberry, Scott Hatfield, truth machine, SC, and later Sally Strange, Spokesgay, Erin, Jadehawk, Owlmirror, all these great commenters. They all left. As you said, people move on, but people also stay emotionally invested to the blog, like me, so don’t blame me for still caring ok.
Sven:
Sigh. Well, you, Rorschach and John are all ably demonstrating why change is desperately needed around here.
PZ, I would like to answer that. The people who have left the blog out of frustration and the hostility shown long ago are why change is needed now? Are you sure? Want to think that one through? I wont get my hopes up.
PZ @ 452
42
(Or something else a la Douglas Adams. Maybe Terry Pratchett.) I guess I’d like something a bit light-hearted, especially after wading through such hostile territory.
Rorschach @ 467:
Yes. Please note, I did not say those of the old guard are the only reason, they aren’t.
My suggestion: Room 42.
Jesus, now I’m using military terms. Okay, I’m out of here for a while, because I’m not helping.
PZ: As for names, is there any reason it can’t go back to The Zombie Thread/TZT?
You dont fool me Caine. The prime minister of my country is a sociopath, and I recognise the similarity. Goodbye Endless Thread!
My suggestion would be to not have a Lounge or Thunderdome again.
Now it’s “sociopath”?
Sorry, Rorschach, you get to be the first recipient of a temporary suspension: you’re out until I get back home on Monday.
The Zombie Thread was the old name for what became the lounge, so no.
Uh, PZ, the Lounge used to be The Endless Thread (TET).
TZ Magazine?
We could try a new format here. Something more than mere comments. People can present in the form of an article on whatever strikes their fancy, but presented in fair and balanced way, with links and citations.
Thunderdome & TZT have hosted some very interesting running discussions that were well argued and presented with interesting links. We shouldn’t throw the (zombie) baby out with the bathwater if one aspect was overly personal or agressive.
And no talking about Rorschach while he is gone! Right?
The Last Resort
I have a question about pile-ons. I just composed a comment to Krog Marc (KM) in the That’s a slightly better apology thread. I did so upon reading one of their comments, but not any responses to it. After I hit ‘submit’, I noticed that several other people also criticized KMs comment. So I kinda feel like I added to a pile of critical comments of one person. For lurkers, this might look like a bunch of people-many of whom are regulars-criticizing one person. And yet, I took the time to compose what I think was a well-articulated comment that addressed something that KM said that bothered me. Is that enough to balance out the possible pile-on? Or should I have read the entire thread first to see if my criticisms of KMs words were already addressed? Or should I simply not have said anything?
A.R and Theophontes, I think it’s best to move on, not try to recreate the past in any way. Now I really do have to get out of here, work calls.
The Mended Drum!
+++
Tony
I was wondering about that myself.
I tried to be very specific, not attack the commenter and deleted parts I felt that had already been addressed by other people.
Giliell @ 482:
I love that, so much! Oh, PZ, please consider this.
Perhaps “Vogon Poetry”?
@ Caine
Oh indeed, I am all for killing it.
However, when it re-animates, we hack off any of the offending bits before it makes its gruesome way through teh interwebZ once more.
Thirding “The Mended Drum” for the new thread name. :D
No sniping at Rorschach while he’s gone. OR after he’s allowed back in.
Hey, “The Mended Drum” is excellent.
Don’t worry about pile-ons. They’ll happen naturally, and as long as it’s a group of people independently coming to the same conclusion, it’s not a problem. It’s when everyone decides to hammer on, each for the 3rd or 4th or eleventieth time, that it gets ugly.
Tony! #480
No matter how articulate your comment is, if it repeats what others have said, it looks like piling on.
—
I’d prefer The Broken Drum ;)
Maybe we could have something like the NHL’s “third man in” rule.
Fuck you. If you believe that, you’ve lost the fucking plot entirely. The asshole here was chigau. My comment, the adjective employed therein, and its metaphorical suggestion were measured and appropriate responses.
If you or PZ want to quote me in comic sans and tell me I’m deluded I’ve got exactly the same for you or PZ, and I will not feel bad about it.
But now having again confirmed why I’m happier to stay away, I’m back to staying away.
ta
NEW THREAD, and new purpose.