Banish the Cyber-Bigots?

@OCCOM BILL,

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Make that idiocy. Not one contributor on this thread has suggested reducing free speech in any way, shape or form. I suspect we are all in fact in complete agreement that even Shorteyes has and should have an absolute right to speak his demented nonsense freely.

In my view one can not support hate speech regulation, either by public pressure or government regulation, and still claim to support free speech. The best you can say is that you support free speech sometimes, maybe. Given the hostility generated by you and your mob here at a2k towards anyone who voices an opinion that you think is beneath your personal moral standard, you certainly can't support any claims to be pro free speech. You tend to come off as a pretty hate filled SOB to boot, which is a hoot given your claims of moral superiority.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

Your game of trolling and then playing martyr to free speech ignores several key things:

First of all, the concept of free speech simply doesn't mean nobody ignores you. It just means that the government doesn't silence you. If we ignore you it has nothing at all to do with free speech. This is a common mistake and many misapply this concept to any scenario where they feel they are being censured or censored. You are yet another such case.

Second of all, when you play the martyr and blame your unpopularity for your views it ignores that you are unpopular not for the views you hold so much as for just being rude, obnoxious and a jerk. You go out of your way to piss people off by alluding to offensive positions without actually defending any of them. You deliberately do things like call Pelosi a "****", call eoe a "chump", say that we run the site like the "gestapo" (because the users online counter isn't perfectly accurate unlike non-gestapo run forums) and say that the black caucus doesn't have 500 IQ points between them just to offend others. The arch-typical example of this is when you went out of your way to repeatedly call certain black folk derogatory names on a thread about racism just to piss off the black people on the threads.

You aren't a martyr to free speech, you are just an obnoxious troll. You aren't disliked because of your unacceptable views, you are disliked for being a jerk.

This isn't about free speech, this is about the predictable consequence of being a dick to those around you. Don't like it? Then don't be a troll.

1 Reply

@OCCOM BILL,

Bill,

Hawkeye isn't same as NAMBLA, and as far as we all know he isn't a rapist either. He may well be a misogynist or a racist but more than anything else I wish you'd consider that he just likes pushing buttons and getting a rise out of folks like you. It makes him feel reasonable in comparison to the invective you give him and allows him to play this martyr gig.

So when news about domestic violence comes up he might call the woman a "bitch" reflexively and take the man's side, when discussing sex he'll talk about how our laws on rape and child abuse are wrong, and he'll allude to wanting to change things dramatically.

But if you ask him specific questions and get pin him down to answers the mask comes off. He's not very well informed at all about any of the issues he is talking about, and isn't willing to take up any of those positions he alludes to. He just spits out soundbites that are aimed at generating controversy for himself. When I asked him to name specific laws that he feels are changing towards the puritanism he is obsessed with deriding he got testy and couldn't come up with any. When I asked him what his line is for the age of consent he basically said it should be where it actually is just about everywhere in the world (not that he knew). In short, his "views" are just ignorant ramblings that allude to more that just isn't there.

I wish you wouldn't play into it so much. It feeds his martyr complex and completes the troll. He posts something vague, ignorant and contrary and then takes the offense he predictably causes and applies it back to his argument when he plays victim of free speech, victim of hive mind etc.

It only helps him to get such reactions out of you. He gets to deflect the argument onto the free speech gig when in reality he just being a jerk and trying to get others riled up.

Instead try actually pinning him down to a real position. You'll often find he has nothing but vague diatribes to fall back on.

3 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

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First of all, the concept of free speech simply doesn't mean nobody ignores you. It just means that the government doesn't silence you. If we ignore you it has nothing at all to do with free speech. This is a common mistake and many misapply this concept to any scenario where they feel they are being censured or censored. You are yet another such case.

Had you paid attention you would know that I don't accept your definition of censorship as being necessarily run through the government. We have moved a lot of the administration of the collective out of government and into NGO's...outsourcing.... and your claims that it is not censorship if not done by the government betrays your ignorance of how modern democratic society conducts its business.

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Second of all, when you play the martyr and blame your unpopularity for your views it ignores that you are unpopular not for the views you hold so much as for just being rude, obnoxious and a jerk

I doubt that I have even mentioned popularity during the last ten months, and when I did before that it was in reference to your idiotic and anti debate popularity metric at the new a2k. I was trying to explain to you why and how you fucked up, but of course you never understood and keep being pissed off at me for having the gaul to question your wisdom. Get over it.... I am making the best of what you have, and since you have not fully implemented your plans a2k still works pretty darn well. Once people start voting and you start shifting everything to reflect a members historic popularity a2k will be fucked, and then I will leave. Assuming that you don't throw me out before that time. And to your credit you have not done it yet.

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You aren't a martyr to free speech, you are just an obnoxious troll. You aren't disliked because of your unacceptable views, you are disliked for being a jerk.

You are entitled to your opinion, as I have said several times in the past many smart people interact with me here, I am not feeling deprived.

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This isn't about free speech, this is about the predictable consequence of being a dick to those around you. Don't like it? Then don't be a troll

free speech supersedes just about everything else, including manners, of which you yourself often lack.

Feel free to start a thread on the definition of "troll", I will be there with bells on.

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@Robert Gentel,

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Instead try actually pinning him down to a real position

Bill substantially participating in debate rather than doing his customary drive-by character assassinations.....ya, that will happen.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

I don't accept your definition of censorship as being necessarily run through the government.

You are welcome to hold that view, but don't expect anyone else to take you seriously.

1 Reply

@DrewDad,

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You are welcome to hold that view, but don't expect anyone else to take you seriously

I have complete confidence that my view will substantially prevail...it is a process, which takes a good deal of time. Being in the current minority has never felt like a problem to me...Hell, Robert insists that I thrive on just that....

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

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Instead try actually pinning him down to a real position.

This is definitely his greatest weakness, which is why i have been pointing out to him how incoherent he is. I disagree with one point of yours, though. I suggest to you that he is unpopular precisely because of the views he expresses. His nasty trolling aside, before he was ever very well known here, he alienated a lot of people. When he said there was no such thing as marital rape, he lost, very likely, every woman at the site who read it, and probably a great many of the men. When he objects to the concept of statutory rape and age of consent laws, he loses even more members, of either gender. Recently, he made a wild claim, in a thread in which it was not appropriate, that men are arrested for rape after consensual sex with a partner, which partner has not objected, but that the man is convicted of rape anyway, and put for life on a sex offender list--but he failed to provide even the bad evidence of a single anecdotal example. As purely a matter of how he presents himself, he then loses the respect of anyone here who prefers that extraordinary claims come with at least some attempt at evidence.

I think what he is attempting to claim in this thread, is that he is the victim of what he now tries to allege is a growing trend online--that he is telling "inconvenient truths," but that he is not listened to because he is unpopular. That ignores that he is unpopular because of the positions he has taken on sexual matters, and that those ideas (which cannot be claimed to be truth, but only matters of his rather extraordinary opinion) were not accepted from him before he was well enough known to be popular or unpopular.

But if we go back to your point of pinning him down, that's something he will never cooperate in. In one thread he alleged that he gives as good as he gets until people stop picking on him. I and a few others laughed at that, and said that he would just slink away, rather than actually get into the mud pit to wrestle the issues for which his opinion is derided. That's just what happened, because he is not prepared to argue his point of view in any reasonable way.

You can see this in the language he uses. He has erected "the collective" as his favorite straw man monster. This is convenient because he then has this faceless, nameless menace in response to which he can do his Chicken Little routine, and attempt to portray himself as the voice crying in the wilderness. He commonly makes contentions about the issue of rape, of sex offender lists, of the nature of arrests and prosecutions for sexual acts--and for which he doesn't provide a shred of evidence, or for which he provides citations which contradict his position (see above), or don't support his position, or have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Someone once opined that he only comes here to try out his ideas so that he can "perfect" them for use in real life. I have no doubt that the world is full of people sufficiently uncritical and willing enough to believe in conspiracies by some evil "collective" who are responsible for these people's own failures in life, and to whom he might successfully appeal. I don't of course know if this is true--but there can be no doubt that his often hysterical tone, and his attempts to portray himself as a martyr to the truth, combined with the fuzzy thinking which goes into allegations about "the collective" and the rot in our society with regard to sexual matters, and, of course, his free speech rant--are all things which would be very effective with an audience of the less than fully articulate and logical people already prepared to accept such contentions and looking for someone to blame for their dissatisfaction with the world.

Whether or not you agree about the issue of his popularity and his opinions, i think you would probably agree that there is so little substance in his claims that he will always attempt to avoid being pinned down on what he claims, and that he will reliably slink away if the kitchen gets too hot for him.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

Had you paid attention you would know that I don't accept your definition of censorship as being necessarily run through the government.

You are still all over the place. Censorship certainly can be non-governmental, but the concept of free speech simply is restricted to the government for a reason.

You don't have "free speech" to spray graffiti on someone's wall. And yes, they can paint it over and "censor" you.

Of course private censorship exists, and the point is that it's obvious that it should exist. Part and parcel of individual freedom is the freedom to choose to ignore someone, or the freedom to choose not to pay for someone else's speech.

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We have moved a lot of the administration of the collective out of government and into NGO's...outsourcing.... and your claims that it is not censorship if not done by the government betrays your ignorance of how modern democratic society conducts its business.

Again, you don't begin to understand this issue. I've simply not claimed "that it is not censorship if not done by government".

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I doubt that I have even mentioned popularity during the last ten months, and when I did before that it was in reference to your idiotic and anti debate popularity metric at the new a2k.

First part's simply not true, and as to the second part make up your mind, you change between saying that it's "anti-debate", but can't bring a single bit of evidence for that position, to saying that it's just not finished yet and doesn't impede debate.

Consistency and truth clearly don't mean a whole lot for you, so which is it? If you claim it's "anti-debate" then I'll again ask you for data to support this allegation and you'll again not have any.

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I was trying to explain to you why and how you fucked up, but of course you never understood and keep being pissed off at me for having the gaul to question your wisdom.

No, I am pissed at you for being a jerk, plenty of people "question my wisdom" without being a jerk. But your M.O. is to just piss people off.

So, for example, instead of complaining that the view counter does not exclude robots (which just about no forum's software does) you claim it is like the "gestapo". You go out of your way to be a dick.

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Get over it.... I am making the best of what you have, and since you have not fully implemented your plans a2k still works pretty darn well.

You don't have the slightest idea of what my "plans" are, and here you go again saying that your accusations are for the unfinished "plans" when you can't bring a single datapoint to support your initial accusations of it actively limiting debate.

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Once people start voting and you start shifting everything to reflect a members historic popularity a2k will be fucked, and then I will leave. Assuming that you don't throw me out before that time. And to your credit you have not done it yet.

Oh you martyr you. I hope you do leave, you are just a troll that provides nothing of value. You don't "debate" you just toss out vague rants that you can't begin to substantiate.

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free speech supersedes just about everything else, including manners, of which you yourself often lack.

Feel free to start a thread on the definition of "troll", I will be there with bells on.

No, this is a perfectly good thread to discuss cyber trolls. It's about online censorship and cyber bigots. There is no basis for you to be pulling the off topic card here and you are trolling right now by aping my requests to keep other threads on topic to try to deflect criticism.

You are a troll. In a discussion with a Pelosi supporter you can't just state your qualms with Pelosi, you have to do something like call her a "****" just to try to offend people.

In a discussion about racism you call blacks idiots over and over to piss of the black people in the thread (one of whom you took to calling a "chump" as well).

When Tia Tequila's story broke you didn't just doubt her story, you call her a bitch and predictably offend people who believe her.

When you have problems with the site software you don't reasonably criticize it and bring data to support it, you go for hyperbole and say it's like the "gestapo".

You are like a walking Godwin's Law. You are a troll. And you aren't unpopular because of your positions, where you can't often stick to anything specific to defend, you are unpopular because you are a troll.

And part of your gig is to play martyr after you've gone out of your way to offend others. Here you go again saying that "free speech" (again, not related at all to being rude on a message board) supersedes manners but this isn't about free speech at all, you are trying to hijack that cause for your rudenss and trolling.

You could just have easily stated your positions without the deliberate attempts to offend others. You aren't debating, you are trolling. And when people start calling to stop feeding the troll you just switch to another troll, which this thread is all about: free speech. It's just a sophisticated game of trolling and yes, you are nothing more than a troll.

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@hawkeye10,

Bullshit. Your view will not "substantially prevail" because it is not founded in reality. Democracy has not been "outsourced," and nothing has changed with regard to the status of speech in privately owned places. It is in your interest (with the less critical members of our society) to attempt to confuse the line between public behavior in privately owned spaces and free speech in public places, but that doesn't equate with proof that your claims are reasonable.

What you thrive on is the appearance of martyrdom. Like all phony martyrs, though, you're only interested in the image, and not in actually suffering for your beliefs. And, tediously, once again, you do not suffer here for what you believe, you are not excluded from participation here, and you are not prevented from airing your views. It's just a matter of your views being ridiculed, and you wanting to whine about it and claim that you are the noble victim of an unreasoning persecution based on your unpopularity. We know nothing about you other that what you post here. If you are genuinely unpopular here, it is because a result of the reaction to what you've posted, to the ideas you express, because there is not other basis upon which it can be based.

You don't employ logic in your claims, and provide no evidence for them. You employ straw men such as "the collective," and you constantly misrepresent yourself and your ideas. You say that it isn't a problem for you to be "in the current minority." That implies that you hold views which, while not the most popular, are at the least widely held by others. I have no good reason to see you as anything but a self-created minority of one.

Tell us about democracy again, and the coming revolution because no one guarantees you that your ravings will be taken seriously.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I suggest to you that he is unpopular precisely because of the views he expresses. His nasty trolling aside, before he was ever very well known here, he alienated a lot of people. When he said there was no such thing as marital rape, he lost, very likely, every woman at the site who read it, and probably a great many of the men. When he objects to the concept of statutory rape and age of consent laws, he loses even more members, of either gender.

If you try to pin him down to either of the positions that everyone thinks he holds on those two things you'll find that it was just vague insinuation aimed precisely at being controversial.

So he said that there's no such thing as marital rape, but then concedes quietly that being physically forced would be rape while continuing to insinuate a more untenable position.

Same with age of consent laws, when you pin him down he agrees to an age of consent line that is pretty much in line with where it actually is. There are legitimate qualms that any reasonable person can have about our sexual offender laws and he hijacks those to allude to something more sinister. But if you pin him down, there's nothing there but the vague rhetoric and a willingness to have others think he's a pedophile to then play the martyr.

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I think what he is attempting to claim in this thread, is that he is the victim of what he now tries to allege is a growing trend online--that he is telling "inconvenient truths," but that he is not listened to because he is unpopular. That ignores that he is unpopular because of the positions he has taken on sexual matters, and that those ideas (which cannot be claimed to be truth, but only matters of his rather extraordinary opinion) were not accepted from him before he was well enough known to be popular or unpopular.

Well, he's so vapid that you'd be hard pressed to find him actually stick to any position and actually argue it. He just issues vague decrees against the "collective's" way of thinking but if you push him to actually outline a real position it's usually pretty pedestrian. He's being a man apart by alluding to more than is really there.

Sure, some of his positions may well be downright offensive when it comes down to it. He likely holds real misogynistic views towards women, but most of what he's unpopular for here is just vague allusions where he basks in the controversy.

People who have taken much more offensive positions didn't engender the same levels of distaste from the community because they weren't all about offending people in the community. And people who were just pedestrian political trolls engender the same kind of distaste.

His positions may well be offensive, but the majority of his unpopularity comes from his M.O. Plenty of people here who we don't even remember to think about, much less dislike, have held much more controversial views.

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But if we go back to your point of pinning him down, that's something he will never cooperate in.

I've seen him do it a couple times when repeatedly asked. But that isn't the reason I advocate it. When he's clearly overstated his accusations he really does run away, and that alone makes it worth it in lieu of the invective that he spins into his martyr mantle.

Time after time I've called him out and he just disappears from the thread. It says much more about him than any of the epithets will.

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Whether or not you agree about the issue of his popularity and his opinions, i think you would probably agree that there is so little substance in his claims that he will always attempt to avoid being pinned down on what he claims, and that he will reliably slink away if the kitchen gets too hot for him.

And that is what I recommend is the community response for any troll. Refute the arguments to not leave the nonsense unquestioned, but buying into the emotional bait with an emotional response gives him what he wants and manages to make the threads about him. Then the rest will be his martyr posturing.

However if you just ask him to back up his garbage, or just emphatically show it to be garbage he'll almost invariably just disappear from the thread instead of concede error.

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@Robert Gentel,

As I explained the last time we discussed the troll, I simply disagree. It is my opinion that your attempts at meaningfully addressing his garbage lend credibility to it. And Shorteyes will continue to peddle his demented misogyny completely independent of whether or not Set or I ridicule him for same. I respect (though I disagree with) your decision to tolerate trolling members, even when they are almost universally despised by all. I know there are members who appreciate seeing the cowardly would-be bully getting thrashed, and I am also aware there are members who put the thrashers themselves on ignore out of disgust. The simple truth is; both behaviors are caused by and will disappear with the troll ( or not at all.)

I don't know if he's an abuser, a rapist, a pedophile, all of the above, or just a pervert with a demented outlook, either. But I'm content in my assessment that his continued presence is a net-loser (both on A2K and planet earth). He's not the kind of jerk people love to hate. He literally, purposely disturbs too many decent people, especially women, and I despise him for it. I wouldn't attempt to reason with someone exhibiting this behavior in my establishment, I'd show him the parking lot upside down.

My opinion is quite opposite from yours in that I believe if the troll received nothing but ridicule and shunning for his efforts, he would be more likely to find another venue. His incoherent "positions" are not worthy of taking apart piece by piece... and frankly I believe most are contrived with virtually no actual thought as they serve only as vehicles to troll. You stated:

Robert Gentel wrote:

But if you ask him specific questions and get pin him down to answers the mask comes off.

But this isn’t true. On the occasions he doesn’t slink away from the clearly demonstrated falseness of his "positions"; that’s when he puts on the victim mask. Shortly thereafter, he returns to his original twisted bullshit on another thread. His martyr complex is fed more by your willingness to engage him, and your calls for others to do the same, than it is by any quantity of calling a spade a spade. Not one intelligent member is fooled by his laughable appeals to pity anyway, and it is precisely your calls for engagement that allow the moron to believe anyone is buying his obvious bullshit.

1 Reply

@OCCOM BILL,

OCCOM BILL wrote:

It is my opinion that your attempts at meaningfully addressing his garbage lend credibility to it.

I guess we just disagree then, because I think the over-the-top stuff does exactly the same, especially if you consider that folk may come along and read a relatively benign comment by hawkeye followed by such vitriol. He is a self-styled "revolutionary" and then gets to do the persecution complex routine.

For readers who don't know why you are doing that it only makes him seem reasonable by comparison.

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I don't know if he's an abuser, a rapist, a pedophile, all of the above, or just a pervert with a demented outlook, either.

Those are the things I am talking about, I don't care if people argue with him but calling him those names is not supported by evidence and makes it look like the opposition to him is unreasonable (especially to those who don't get why the exaggeration is taking place).

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My opinion is quite opposite from yours in that I believe if the troll received nothing but ridicule and shunning for his efforts, he would be more likely to find another venue.

That would be a first on the internet, at least as far as I've seen. Trolls are primarily motivated by the desire for attention, good or bad. I'm not saying that good attention is going to make him go away, but bad attention certainly won't either. It just lends credence to his persecution complex and makes him feel all the more revolutionary.

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His martyr complex is fed more by your willingness to engage him, and your calls for others to do the same, than it is by any quantity of calling a spade a spade.

I don't care if people engage him. I just think that if they choose to do so there are better ways. In any case, we'll probably have to agree to disagree on this, and I can live with having failed to convince you.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Fair enough. A very agreeable disagreement.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

you are correct that limiting debate will not eliminate the unwanted ideas, that instead it will drive them underground. You are wrong about the wisdom of judging speech and ideas based upon the emotion that they stir in you, or your guess of the motivation of the speaker.

I really don't know where I made the argument you credit (and discredit) me with.

We made a wrong turn when we made hate law, and the self censorship of hate speech is a compounding of the error.

Agree completely.

The yard stick for an idea is how well does it correspond with reality, and how helpful is it towards solving a problem. Those who police speech are usually either trying it ignore reality, or change it. Neither will work, and both harm language. Attempts to police language also diminish the collective, as individuals will increasingly come to the conclusion that the collective does not "get it", that if one wants to be real one must find an underground subcommunity, which will certainly tend to turn subversive.

The result of continuing to be unwilling to face reality, and talk honestly about reality, will be revolution.

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@Setanta,

"Rapist Boy?"

Good grief you're a pathetic, self-absorbed twit, and I admit I am unable to resist telling you so.

(I've tried. Lord knows I've tried, but you demand retort)

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