Well, it comes with being me, so to speak.
He makes his own example.
It's actually kind of funny who needs to be reminded of what. It's also kind of sad. Like this:
Would we have needed to escalate to permanent banning? That is, consider his question:
Tiassa: … efforts to accommodate you, over time, in the name of not suppressing free speech, contributed significantly to people's perception that they can behave poorly.
DMoE: Tiassa, if I am the significant contribting cause of Members exhibiting such poor behaviour in their Posts, then shouldn't I have already been Permanently Banned?
I mean, he did call himself "Dumbest Man on Earth", so we ought not be surprised if he doesn't know what the phrase "efforts to accommodate" means.
Meanwhile, he can try providing examples of his "10.023971 Posts Per Day ... solely in the interest Promoting True Real Science and the Full Time Practice of The Scientific Method." Because as I look through staff notes, a discussion from 2013 stands out, in which we considered a performance rife with the appearance anti-Semitism, and I even documented a basic troll formula:
(1) Say something stupid.
(2) Take personal offense to the response.
(3) Now this thread is about me.
That one is still in somewhat frequent use, around here, but the occasion had me recalling the third season of
Family Guy, and the commentary on the network's objection to jokes about Jewish people. It was a weird standard, as Seth MacFarlane explained, because FOX didn't have anything to say about trashing Catholics. Still, the point of the Jew jokes was straightforward:
The presence of anti-Semitic jokes in the script was only an endorsement of anti-Semitism if you believed Peter Griffin an admirable sort. He's not. He's the Dumbest Man on Earth. And how he behaves is part of that joke. His actions are not to be admired. And our own DMoE was playing the routine poorly. The reference point offered up by once of my colleagues—
a discussion about Syria↗—is also where I landed with a rough search before scrolling through enough of the staff discussion to find the link;
same page↗, even. But his Jewish media conspiracism entered the thread
over a week before↗
He's not quite sealioning, in that old episode, but the term had yet to be coined. In the moment, looking back, there's actually a lot going on in that thread nearly seven years ago, but it's true, time and experience have justified certain skepticism about the behavior; at the time, staff concerns about this manner of conduct were not persuasive enough to even move forward toward figuring out what to do about it. We got distracted by the difference between attacking the idea instead of the person; something or other always pushes aside discussions of what to do about problematic behavior. These days, I can watch another member play DMoE's sort of game with white supremacism, albeit with a pretense of being even dumber.
At some point, our application of the principle of charity insisted despite pretty obvious evidence to the other, but those are obscure and occulted details. Time and circumstance, history and hindsight, tell us a lot of what we saw really was what it looked like. Like I
told DMoE↑, it's not all on him. There are a lot of people who have behaved in pretty apparent ways, and among these behavioral ranges they are, in fact, easily offended by challenge. And there has, over the years, been enough concern on behalf of this behavior that has remained functionally permissible; one really must screw up particularly. The same thing I said to my colleagues, back then, holds true now: It's not really about banning people, but that only begs the question of what to do. This time later, that question remains largely unaddressed.
And, as I told DMoE, there remains a question of how a science site would be inherently unfair. The ban cycle, through basic infraction, takes something like fifty-five days, to achieve permanent dismissal, and can be cut to about twenty-five under extraordinary circumstances. The common objection to figuring out to do about problematic
behavior is the proposition of suppressing
political views, and over time, this counterpoint really does seem to view behavior and political views as inseparably intertwined.
And there you have it. If, given that many chances, someone behaves incorrigibly, what do we do? Because here is how it works out that a science site is inherently unfair:
Some arguments are harder to justify according to rational assessment of evidence than others. If an advocate is unable to achieve that argument, should people be allowed to recycle identifiable irrationality in lieu of rational discourse? Reading through DMoE's Jewish media conspiracism can demonstrate the point: Discussing Jewish representation in "media" is not inherently inappropriate discourse, but what, really, do people want to discuss? The same old anti-Semitic crackpottery? I'm not at all surprised, these years later, to find people pushing typal white supremacist tropes in a similar manner. The one thing we wouldn't want to be seen doing, apparently, is "silencing" people by requiring some manner of rational argument. Of course, how do we require them? At the end of the line, of course, are permanent potentials, but the question of what goes on in between merely exists.
What does such policy abstraction mean? It means people are supposed to hash and thrash it out in the threads. And if I say fallacious and provocative behavior is protected in particular cases for the sake of particular aesthetics, that's not absolute or even explicit; rather, it's what is left after all this time.
And if we add in infinite reiteration to guard against the slippery slope of tyranny, what makes it hard to describe is how straightforward it is. If, in Argument 1, we reject Presupposition A for being observably false, that ought not in itself silence Argument 1. Moreover, rejecting Presupposition A in Argument 1 ought not in itself silence that other Argument 2, over there. And I know that sounds unbelievably simplistic, but that's how it goes and has been. Knowing, then, that particular fallacies are fair game for potentially infinite reiteration, you have to choose whether or not to engage the discussion. After all, fight tooth and nail to finally put this one to rest, and you still have to deal with the next typal advocate who wants to show up and go there anew as if they don't know the history of the question.
And it's true; as this goes on, many people cut to the chase, and in such an environment, someone, somewhere, is certain to feel bullied.
And how people feel is how people feel, there is a way things go; some of what people have to say is more or less supportable than others. It wasn't even two years ago, for instance, that someone decided to pitch particular identity tantrum, but did so in a manner that so fulfilled type it seemed merely an exercise in reciting the stations of his cross. Moreover, the timing was hilariously, awfully, absurdly apropos. Beyond that, though, it's easy enough to accept we were dealing with a real person in particular emotional distress, so the whole thing is kind of tragic. He made a point of behaving atrociously, yet it is easy enough to imagine the rejection his behavior met felt like bullying.
I can think of someone else who wanted to go with rape/DV surrogate masturbatory-fantasy temper tantrum as disruptive accelerant to an already heated and sparking discussion of sexual harassment and violence, and as that sort of deliberate, supremacist, abusive provocation is apparently okay under our rules—(I was actually surprised, that time)—you can only imagine the response he and another drew for that one felt rough. We haven't heard from him publicly in over eighteen months. It's true, though, as I look through his last few posts, they don't age well.
Over time, there are all sorts of stories about people who feel poorly treated but require a blithely ignorant narrative unbelievable for anyone so ostensibly concerned about a given subject.
It's nearly seven years later, but it's true, accommodating DMoE's performance with the Jewish media conspiracy tinfoil is an example of what people can find here contributing to beliefs that it's okay to behave poorly. And some people crashed on for problematic behavior will, indeed, feel bullied.
Compared to what has gone on since, though, that old episode feels nearly rudimentary.