This is a legitimately good idea. I realize that the misuse of “gaslighting” as a synonym for “lying” has suddenly become common, but irl it at least still seems to maintain it’s gendered inter-personal context. For dudes to be using this on an internet forum is unseemly and weird. Also irritating.
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The difference between plain old lying and gas lighting is that the liar knows the person they are lying to knows it’s a lie and is seeking to coerce the person being lied to into treating the lie as fact.
It’s the right word for what is going on here.
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I am not convinced that gaslighting is occurring on either side. Without the original PMs being accessible to all (and it’s not like most people would cite them if they were accessible), people are relying on memory to refer to what was contained. Memory is unreliable. People reconstruct the past mentally, so they “remember” things in a way that makes facts fit into pre-existing schemas of knowledge. Many people have strongly preconceived notions about people on the other side. Their memory of past posts is strongly influenced by a desire to avoid the cognitive dissonance of what they think happened not matching up with what they expected to happen.
People might not even be lying.
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Sabo (short for sabotage I now assume) is full of irony and other vitamins.
This dude telling me Fidget didn’t actually say what he very clearly wrote is textbook gaslighting.
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Except Johnny does accept that! Moderate away in the main forum! Bans for all, Oprah-style. Johnny just wants a subforum that is moderated in a different way.
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Based on his past posts, I don’t think Johnny accepts the “equally valid” part. He has said things to the effect that “adults” would have certain views, with the implication being the people who don’t have those views are children or toddlers. But I will let Johnny speak for himself if he wishes to do so.
Well my bad, I mean you were posting in the Sabo ban thread criticising moderation, so I naturally assumed you were opposed to the ban. It’s a fucking full time job trying to keep up with who is for what and I frankly have no idea, so you’re right, I’m probably off base on a lot of this. Look at it from my perspective, though. You drew up the rules governing moderation, you were active in About Unstuck, you quit in a huff for reasons I still don’t really understand, you’re back here after “quitting” to argue about moderation in multiple threads. Am I wrong at the very least to conclude you’re a central force in the continuation of this entire drama?
To lay my cards on the table, I don’t really give a fuck if Sabo is banned or not. IDK if you saw it or not but 6ix and I had a conversation in another thread about whether watevs is a good poster (his view) or the most chronically under-moderated poster in the forum (my view). These views are irreconcilable. I don’t really care, my entire effort to enforce my views has been a solitary PM to Wookie quoting a watevs post and being like “how is this guy a thing”. What I want more than anything is for everyone to shut the fuck up about moderation. As I posted upthread, I have met microbet a couple times, he is a chill guy, yet he was driven to insanity by About Unstuck. The cause of this was not any particular ideas on moderation, it was the endless argument and second-guessing around moderation. I’m on the side of anyone with a plan to make people shut the fuck up about all of this. I don’t give the slightest shit who is banned and who isn’t, because as far as I can tell all the bans have at least a reasonable argument on their side.
“We need another forum where my moderation views will hold sway” is the very soul of not accepting that other views are equally valid. I know you’ll be like “no don’t you see, we can all live under our own desired moderation” but this splintering of the forum will not be the end of it. It’ll just happen all over again.
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We literally had no moderation for over a year. It changed because most people got fed up with the nonstop feuds and personal attacks. Some people’s causation of all the drama is completely backwards.
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Seems like the feuding and personal attacks got worse after adopting the 22 style of moderation and mods, no?
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It also got worse after legions of dipshits started burying this forum in garbage posts daily.
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Needs to be said, brevity and conciseness are your friends. Anyway, reading your post, I see the root of the matter from my perspective. I view Unstuck, like all of social media, as a double edged sword prone to unhealthy addiction. It’s not all awesome. Time spent here is time spent away from real life relationships, and by any reasonable metric, me and you spend way more time here than is healthy.
I despise trolling because it is an effort to skew that imbalance further, and worse, in a way that makes me feel as shitty as possible about it too. And that’s why I have empathy for someone like jmakin who fucked up about as bad as possible but in real, human way w/ his heart on his sleeve as opposed to the “Captains” who come across as posters looking to fuck around. Wookie is a good dude, just talk to him straight up like a human and he will be reasonable. He doesn’t need to be demonized as part of propaganda effort.
From what I read of Sabo’s posts in particular, he treats the rest of us like little pawns in whatever it is he is doing. Have no patience for that. You say it is cruel to permaban another human…… all that is needed for us to see that is the person in question to talk to us like a human.
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Remember how vexed you were by my vague post that just said “how do they not see it”? Well, it’s this.
You’re not making a winning argument, you’re describing the parameters of the debate. One side thinks lines should be drawn one way, and is the only valid way, and the other side thinks otherwise, that’s the debate!
They think a group of posters are fostering a toxic environment and will drive off “good” posters, I think (yes, fuck it, I’ll use myself, if you’ll allow me some hyperbole) they, Wookie, Skydiver et al, are fostering a toxic environment, some anti-intellectual shitposting hellscape of proud non-readers (Ikes is fucking posting, that elephant is bigger that the fucking moon at this point) and already have actually driven off “good” posters. That’s the debate!
Wookie is being driven insane by About Unstuck, I’m being driven insane (again, allow me my flourishes) by seeing people like Sabo derided and othered, with his mental health mocked, and then having them pretend like it never happened (the latter way more than the former) along with a litany of other things, and now, this glorious cherry on top, the whole I-never-read-it-but-let-me-tell-you-all-about-it Top Secret PM thing. These are the same people that screeched about Big Guy Glasses mischaracterizing the Mueller Report and were shocked that trumpers could have the brazen audacity to opine on a thing they haven’t read. I’m being driven insane by it so what’s the solution there? Stop posting and leave the forum? What’s Wookie’s solution, Skydiver’s solution, Jman’s etc? THAT’S THE DEBATE.
You’ve succinctly described what JT and Co, and now me, have accepted as the parameters of the debate, and it took like 3700 posts to even get this far. I really, really hope you realize you’re describing all sides. I won’t being up theory-of-mind again but maybe I should, because the alternatives are worse: some sort of malignant narcissistic privilege or something to where they can’t even fundamentally grasp the concept that somebody could disagree with them. Them just assuming that everybody who disagrees with them is automatically wrong would be a step up at this point. You can at least work with that.
Here’s some more juicy SECRET PM juice, replace Wookie with everybody, I guess:
p.s. I’m the opposite of being driven insane, I actually find this all super interesting, hence my involvement, but I stand my everything on a non-emotional intellectual level 370%.
p.p.s. MORE IMPORTANTLY, I don’t want to put words in any the mouths of any of my fellow Captains Of Chaos if they don’t think as strongly as I do. But, like I just said, I do firmly think believe everything I’ve said even if I’m not emotionally attached. That’s why I’m probably just going to be done here, slowly evaporate away, when this is all settled, like, lol, proud non-readers and non-thinkers are a dime-a-dozen on the internet. This shit ain’t special anymore.
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I like you, but this is pretty toxic and unnecessary. You’re asking for people to be treated like worthwhile humans, but going out of your way (literally, with a p.p.s.!) to do the opposite.
Be the change you want to see, etc.
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It’s been days of name calling, but everyone is walking on egg shells to call him out.
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I’ve witnessed him in debate many times. I would say (and I feel reasonably confident we can arrive at a consensus here) that there are a lot of times where it’s clear that his interlocutor is failing to notice some unstated premise of theirs, has not properly understood an element of his argument, etc. Small-ball stuff which, if Sabo were to helpfully point it out, would greatly improve the free flow of debate and discussion. And generally speaking, he doesn’t do that. Does that have a detrimental effect on the quality of the discussion, from the point of view of both readers and interlocutors? Probably.
Like I said, as far as I can make out, he is in fact here to advocate for a particular position. If he considers it more useful to that advocacy to refrain from that kind of, let’s call it ‘fair play’ massaging the discourse, that’s his business. I can’t see it warranting a perma.
This is not an accurate account of ‘gaslighting’, which hinges on causing the victim to doubt their own memory and perhaps even sanity. Someone being bullied into going along with a lie is being abused, but they are not being gaslit.
I wouldn’t mind people dropping the term, either. Does anyone remember like ten or so years ago, how people kept comparing Republican voters to battered spouses? That was kind of gross in retrospect, right? I kind of feel similarly about this. 99.9% of the use cases of ‘gaslighting’ ITF are just “lies but I want to emphasise it and maybe be snarky” and we won’t be losing a ton if we ditch it.
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Knowingly lying about something in an attempt to convince someone of the lie is colloquially known as “lying.” That’s why we call it lying - it’s when you lie!
Gaslighting is a form of abuse that takes place between partners or family members. It is an expression of power. Also, something that men do to women. It is literally impossible for a guy to be gaslit by strangers on the internet!
People use that term because they want to make something sound more important and nefarious then it really is. Bullshitting on a politics forum isn’t a big deal, sorry to break it to you. Interestingly, misrepresenting something in this way is also lying (or gaslighting, I guess).
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It’s cute to watch someone try to be purposely edgy, and instead just look dumb.
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Always seems like the opposite to me. He is here to advocate against positions or ideas but never has the willingness to advocate for anything.
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I want a forum where both CaffeineNeeded and Sabo are, if not welcomed and made to feel comfortable, at least tolerated.
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