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Post by nighttimer on Jul 17, 2019 14:45:10 GMT -5
Did Nancy Pelosi beat an incumbent Democrat to win her seat? AOC and Ayanna Pressley did including the 4th highest-ranking Democrat in the House. You think that endeared AOC to Pelosi?
Why did Pelosi include Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in her Rolling Stone cover shoot? Why does the first woman to ever be Speaker of the House have to share a magazine cover with two members of the notorious Squad?
Maybe because if Pelosi wants to piss off the progressives and people of color she will need if she hopes to hold onto the gavel she can't just sit around with her shit-stirring boo Maureen Dowd bitching and griping about four fresh faces in that mausoleum see runs. Democrats can't win the presidency, the Senate or hold on to the House if they think all they have to do is to appeal to Trump Democrats and the mythical moderate masses. They are a coalition party and the supporters of The Squad are part of it, no matter how some old heads desperately wish they were not.
Maybe because Pelosi is smart enough to know among her majority there are many players, but few stars. Love 'em or hate 'em, Omar, Tlaib, Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez are stars. Off the top of your head please name four newly-elected Blue Dog Democrats. Don't cheat and Google them. I'll wait.
Which I notice has somehow escaped yours and Opty's attention. Funny thing that.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 17, 2019 11:33:57 GMT -5
This kind of idiotic hypocrisy is why no one ever has and ever will take you seriously. I can't say I give a fuck about being taken seriously by someone who calls himself a "liberal" but cuddles up to racist White fucks like Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray and James Damore while talking shit about women of color like Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I'm taken very seriously by serious people like the ones who responded to me directly.
You think you're playing me as a hypocrite by referencing a post that invited you personally to try and engage in a mutually beneficial attempt at civility? An attempt you ignored until such time as you believed you could attempt to embarrass me by throwing the quote back in my face to say, "See! I told you he didn't mean any of it!"
Stupidly I made a gesture to treat you decently, but obviously you have no clue on how to respond to that sort of thing besides shitting all over it. My bad. Won't happen again. You can bet your sorry and petty ass on that.
I will give you half-credit though. This time you were man enough to come at me yourself instead of hiding behind someone else's skirt. This is the sort of dickhead behavior you've been engaged in for years now. At least you're consistent. Consistently weak.
You truly are an even bigger asshole than I thought you were.
By the way, that Axios poll on how AOC is absolute poison for the Dems both you and Trump are talking out of your asses about---yeah, it's kinda bullshit. Which explains why you posted it.
Huffington Post:
Axios can flat fuck off with their dumb-ass anonymous polls being pushed by alt-right trolls and left-wing useful idiots, so stick to your right-wing fake news websites, Opty. They are pitched at such a low-enough intellectual level that even you should have no problem reaching.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 17, 2019 9:36:51 GMT -5
Using Twitter to publicly "clap back" (God, that phrase is stupid) at others is not something that adults do; it's something that 12-year-old brats do. This kind of juvenile shit never helps us, only hurts our chances in 2020 and beyond. I don't think they're just damaging our chances in the next election; they might be damaging the Democrat "brand" for years to come. You say that as if it's a bad thing. Maybe the Democrat "brand" needs to be damaged and discarded as nothing more than a corrupted pc that has been bricked. It can't be rebooted. It can't be repaired. It's nothing but a large paperweight. So you junk it and replace it with something newer and faster and more reliable and better.
There is nothing sacred about the Democratic Party. Political parties are vehicles, not destinations, and any political party that can't handle the natural tensions, disputes and squabbles between different wings of the party without totally imploding deserves to die off. The Democrat brand was jacked up long before AOC showed up.
It is not "juvenile shit" for AOC and the three other members of The Squad to utilize social media to their maximum advantage. Why not? It's not as though the Racist-In-Chief hasn't done the exact same thing and worse in weaponizing Twitter to further his own "juvenile shit" but you won't see Republicans calling him out the way Democrats are doing with their own.
And I'm here for it. Phrases such as "...never helps US...," "...only hurts OUR chances..." and "...damaging OUR chances..." is Chicken Little hand-wringing. Consensus is only achieved through conflict, not the absence of it and if you want mindless conformity and marching in lockstep even when it leads over a cliff, maybe you should consider switching over to the GOP? Apparently, they're kind of big in that sort of gagging dissenting voices and then publicly executing them to send an example to anyone else who might consider deviating from the party line.
There is no "us." There is no "our." There's what one side wants and what the other side wants and how they find a middle ground to get some of what both want. We don't have to like each other to work with each other and when that's done, each side can fuck back off to their respective corners. Cognitive dissonance can be uncomfortable for those experiencing it, but since it is possible for two things to both be true, it works out better to work out differences instead of insisting on everyone agreeing that they are all wrong and only your side is right.
Nancy Pelosi is a smart politician, but at 79 years old, she's not the future of the Democratic Party. I don't care if that sounds ageist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Talib, Ilhan Omar and progressives like them as well as moderates and more traditional mainstream are among the next generation of liberal leadership. The old guard has to make way for the young guns and if they won't leave the stage voluntarily, then they will have to be pushed off it physically.
Should Joe Biden emerge from the fray as the Democratic challenger against Trump, he's got my vote. A diseased tree stump would get my vote over Trump, but anybody who thinks for one second those voters who supported the members of The Squad aren't taking names of the party members who are trying to silence all dissenting voices is kidding themselves. Names are being taken and paybacks will be served.
And if "clap back" is stupid, what is "ouroboros" if not pretentiously stupid? The majority of human beings on this mudball will go their entire lives and never use "ouroboros" in a sentence. Usage of a five-dollar-word when a one-dollar word will do fine isn't an indication of a high degree of intelligence. It's just showing off like a child who dances around squealing, "I know big words!"
However, your proclivity for sesquipedalian loquaciousness is duly noted.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 15, 2019 16:43:37 GMT -5
Allowing that is the case--Trump is a vile human being with no redeeming qualities--I don't think that really changes the central point here: that some of the new progressives in Congress are stupidly lashing out at other Dems--like Pelosi--to the extent that it's going to hurt the Dems overall. Hardcore Dem party loyalists should probably be thanking Trump right now since he didn't have the good sense to leave well enough alone. But as to the real world, again I think this is all a consequence of the impact of social media on politics. AOC and her compatriots saw what they say on social media to get "likes" and "retweets." They're driven by the ratio, above all else, regardless if what they're saying is helpful and/or wise imo. And I think these politicians--I include Trump here--who are so driven by their social media needs (to land zingers and not get ratioed) are acting like they're on social media even when they're not. Look at these recent exchange between AOC and ICE chief Tom Homan from a congressional hearing: AOC is--in my view--talking like she's on twitter, and she's left looking like a deer in the headlights when things don't go the way she imagined. If she had tweeted some of the remarks she makes--and she probably has--such tweets would have been liked and retweeted over and over again. Any attempt at disagreement would have been washed away. But in a one-on-one situation, faced with someone who knows way more than her, she looks foolish and unprepared, imo. And this again is no different when it comes to the shit Trump tweets on various issues (Trump's tweets that attack individuals are a whole different level, to be sure). Why? Because one person is a first-term Congesswoman who occasionally doesn't have the full grasp of the facts before speaking and the other is the 45th president of the United States? Yeah, that is a whole different level. But one person is punching up while the other is punching down. What will hurt Dems overall is when old Dems insist on nothing but polite silence and blind loyalty from young Dems. What will hurt Dems overall is when old Dems don't recognize that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are not the future of the Party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley and Rashid Talib and Ilhan Omar are. If Pelosi is such a skillful politician, why doesn't she realize it is better to have young progressives in her corner instead of sitting quietly in the corner like well-mannered children who don't speak until spoken to? What will destroy the Dems is when people who look just like those four congresswomen stay home in 2020 and Trump and McConnell finish their takeover of the federal judiciary, including the installation of two more Supreme Court judges. Nancy Pelosi's self-serving speeches and photo ops of how diverse Dems are in comparison to the Repubs isn't what drives people like me or my kids to the polls. Joe Biden is a respected and accomplished public servant, but his viewpoints are 20 years behind the times. He's a VCR in a streaming world. Chuck Schumer doesn't energize me to open my wallet and contribute to the reelection of a Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill or Heidi Heitkamp and I look forward to the day when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez runs against and takes away Schumer's Senate seat. The cowardice of the Democratic Party is an infuriating embarrassment. The silence of the Republican Party is a national disgrace. If these children in Trump's prison camps were White kids from Norway instead of Latino kids from Mexico, they would have been shut down months ago. The Squad didn't come to Washington to make nice with old bulls and blue dog Democrats. The Squad came to Washington to snatch wigs and that includes Nancy Pelosi's if she is unable or unwilling to accept women of color are not there to be props for her Photo Shopped photo shoots. Trump doubled down on his "If you don't love it, leave it" rhetoric. That is hateful and detestable and anyone who is more upset over an internecine family feud than unbathed children caged in warehouses is bereft of even a shred of human decency. You try and go weeks without brushing your teeth or washing your ass. Then tell me I should be critical of Ocasio-Cortez for telling Pelosi that it's not a good idea to support any bill that gives Stephen Miller more money for his devil's work or because some right-wing website says she got owned by some no-name thug who carries out the evil orders to tear kids away from their mommies and daddies. Nobody but partisans give a damn if Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez don't like each other. If that's the issue which impacts on who and how someone votes, then they are as silly and stupid and superficial as Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are accused of being. Being an ex-bartender may not be the best prep school for American politics, but neither is being a womanizing bigot who ran several businesses into the ground, declared bankruptcy multiple times and stiffed hundreds of small businesses before reinventing himself as a pitchman for his name being stamped on shit and a reality TV show star with a catchphrase. There's an entirely different dynamic between the scorn of The Squad projected from Pelosi and Trump. Pelosi is afraid as their power grows it will make hers lessen. Trump comes from another place entirely. He likes slapping around women who don't know their place and don't defer to him. That's why White women supported him in 2016 while Black women saw him as the fuckboy he always has been and always will be. AOC isn't always right. No politician is. She has made her fair share of mistakes and will make more to feed the hate of the haters. But her heart is in the right place and at some point, should she continue in politics, her experience and understanding of how politics works, may catch up to her. I would prefer Biden, Pelosi, McCaskill and the other AARP members of the Democratic Party reach out and take these young, impatient women under their wing and teach them not how to play the game, but to play it better until they can grow their ranks. Pelosi's Democratic caucus is broad and diverse and has to incorporate the broad and diverse perspectives of all of them. Four first-time representatives don't carry much clout unless its a wave election the way Newt Gingrich's Contact With America band of Republicans were and Pelosi can't spend all her time addressing or explaining herself to four newbies. But continually mocking and minimizing the impact of The Squad doesn't make Pelosi look strong. It makes her look arrogant by being so openfully disdainful of women of color. Or to put it a way even Pelosi won't be confused what it means: Just keep going out of your way to talk trash about these women. A lot of people who look just like them will go out of their way to stay home in 2020. If Pelosi clapped back at Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Omar and Talib to put them in their place. That was a 5 on a 10 scale. Trump pushed it up to 9 because he's racist AF. The only dog whistle he didn't blow was to call The Squad a bunch of uppity Black, Brown and Muslim bitches. But the week is only getting started.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 15, 2019 11:26:15 GMT -5
I've stopped thinking the real world exists. That the president of this nation can be so openly racist and people still make excuses or just shrug, it's out of this world. He's a vile human being with virtually no redeeming qualities at all.
All bourbons are whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon. Despite what the closet case from South Carolina might think, while communism is a derivative of socialism, not all socialists are communists.
But we're really doing this? This is the best the Republican "response" gets for Trump's ugly remarks? Graham calling four democratically elected women "commies." What fucking year is this anyway?
On a good day the senior senator from South Carolina is barely tolerable. On a bad day, he's utterly loathsome. He has solidified his position as the Ernst Rohm of the Republican Party.
See Lindsey? Two can play that dirty game. Go fuck yourself if Donald is too busy.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 15, 2019 10:10:30 GMT -5
Don't forget he-man-woman hater misogynist. Sorry for the omission. Totally, my bad.
Is that what you like most about him?
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 15, 2019 9:15:38 GMT -5
That said, Nancy Pelosi can not allow Trump and the Republicans to run her caucus. Trump is playing Pelosi and she is stupidly falling for it.
So, I'm calling bullshit on Pelosi. And I'm calling bullshit on Trump. And I'm calling bullshit on anyone who is more happy that The Squad had their collective knuckles rapped by Pelosi than they are outraged that the Racist-In-Chief told them to "go back where they came from."
This is Trump being the racist he's always been and gaslighting the Dems by trying to turn a family feud into a civil war and here comes Trump to pour some economy unleaded on it. It's a nice distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein/Donald Trump relationship and what sort of fun they were having with those young, fresh girls.
Because that's what a gaslighter does. Distract. Cause drama. Create conflict. Fuck shit up. If you didn't know now you do.
Hell yeah he's playing Nancy, he's also playing the fab four, and the five of them are swallowing that shit hook-line-and sinker.
God damn Trump is good at this stuff. Lets see, what was that ICE thing people were talking about yesterday?
You mean the casual and purposeful racism? Hell, yeah he's good at this stuff. Like any good showman, Trump knows what his audience wants and he gives it to them. And cowardly, chickenshit Republicans dummy up and say nothing while speaking loudly with their silence when the Racist-In-Chief tells three natural and one naturalized citizens to "go back where they came from."
Had Barack Obama ever said anything like this about four members of the Freedom Coalition on Sunday morning, the GOP would have started impeachment proceedings by Monday afternoon.
There is no longer any distinction between Trump's racism and the enabling of it by Republicans. If you support Trump and say nothing about his racism, that pretty much means you're fine with it and while you may not as racist as Trump, you are kinda racist yourself.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 14, 2019 17:14:34 GMT -5
If you are born on American soil, you are an American. Period. Full stop. This is not conditional. There is no time limit. There are no restrictions that apply. If you are born in America, you're an American. If you aren't born here, but you come here legally and follow the rules, obey the laws and pledge allegiance to your new country, congratulations! You are an American too.
L-R (Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Talib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aka "The Squad")
So The Racist-In-Chief had to Tweet out his racist thoughts. The kind of racism where you don't call them by a racist term, but it's clear to anyone that Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Talib aren't "real" Americans. They have all the wrong colored skin. They have all the wrong "progressive/socialist" thoughts. They don't want to see illegal aliens caged and their children taken away from them. They see ICE as an American Gestapo and the immigration policy of this administration as cruel, maybe even evil.
So the Racist-In-Chief took his fat, pussy-grabbing fingers to the Twitter.
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly…and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how…it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
Three out of four of the freshwoman can't go back to their "shithole countries" (Not forgetting. Never forgiving) because the Disunited States of America is that shithole country.
I don't care who doesn't like The Squad. I like The Squad, so I'm not phased by the chattering class and the haters. I ride and die with women who aren't cool with going along and getting along and being useful props for photo shoots with old women who wants to show off Democratic "diversity," only then to be shooed out the room so the adults can make deals and cash their campaign contributions from corporate interests.
Nancy Pelosi is a better foil for Trump than the wormy little Chuck Schumer, but she's too goddamned cautious and afraid to go big. She wants to wait for Trump to fuck up so badly even the Republicans will back away from him holding their noses as if they walked into a hot, airless room full of soiled baby diapers.
Nancy Pelosi has a job to do. She's supposed to not only hold onto her majority, but to build on it and expand it. And if she has to throw four women of color under the bus, back it up, rev it up and run over them, throw it in reverse and do it again, that's fine with some limp "liberals" who like their diversity subservient to their primacy. That is why the same people mad at AOC and the other three women of color are the same people who were royally pissed off when another woman of color called 'bullshit' on Uncle Joe Biden's fond reminiscences over his good time with segregationist senators.
Nancy Pelosi has a job to do. She's trying to protect the moderate Democrats who came to Congress by winning a seat formerly held by a Republican. There's no appetite for the Green New Deal, free college tuition, Medicare For All, or the abolition of ICE in those areas. Omar, Talib, Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez couldn't win a race for country commissioner in these districts. The votes simply aren't there and never will be for that sort of Big Government/Big Spending thinking.
That said, Nancy Pelosi can not allow Trump and the Republicans to run her caucus. Trump is playing Pelosi and she is stupidly falling for it.
So, I'm calling bullshit on Pelosi. And I'm calling bullshit on Trump. And I'm calling bullshit on anyone who is more happy that The Squad had their collective knuckles rapped by Pelosi than they are outraged that the Racist-In-Chief told them to "go back where they came from."
This is Trump being the racist he's always been and gaslighting the Dems by trying to turn a family feud into a civil war and here comes Trump to pour some economy unleaded on it. It's a nice distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein/Donald Trump relationship and what sort of fun they were having with those young, fresh girls.
Because that's what a gaslighter does. Distract. Cause drama. Create conflict. Fuck shit up. If you didn't know now you do.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 13, 2019 22:03:18 GMT -5
Oh, so it's like that, huh?
Well, it was worth a shot.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 11, 2019 9:08:23 GMT -5
Adversarial
If people are genuinely interested in changing minds, arguments need to be less adversarial. “There is a whole body of literature in psychology about persuasion, influence and attitude change,” Suler says. “For example, how do you convince someone to believe something? Those principles apply as much to online behaviour as they do to offline behaviour. ‘Joining and leading’ is one strategy: you join the other person’s point of view on some particular point in the argument, then slowly lead them from that point to something new you want them to believe.”
Yet such subtlety is rare among online arguers. Mc Mahon suspects that a desire to convince isn’t what drives many people to argue in the first place. Many argue because it’s fun. He compares it to gladiatorial combat.
“Steven Pinker has argued that violence is in decline in the developed world,” he says. “It’s not an everyday experience for most people, but it’s still within our genetic history as a species. Acting out aggressive urges is no longer socially acceptable within our civilisation, except perhaps voyeuristically – witness the popularity of mixed martial arts, for example. The rest of us make do with the virtual version of combat, acting out those ancient urges online.”
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 11, 2019 9:04:58 GMT -5
Undeletable“The other person feels a bit anonymous, mysterious, unknown, so ‘transference reactions’ tend to occur, which means that the other person is unconsciously perceived as some other significant person in one’s life.”
He sums this up pretty starkly: “Persistent, emotional arguers in online debates are often really arguing with their mother, father, wife, husband or themselves.”
Discourse is confused even further by the fact that much online discussion is essentially private composition in a public space.
“If you put something on Twitter it can be seen by upwards of 250 million people,” says Mc Mahon, “but you probably wrote it in silence and in physical privacy. So there is quite a gulf between instantly public global communication and these very, very private thoughts. So a private thought – That guy is an idiot – can easily become an undeletable public announcement: You are an idiot. People have been calling each other idiots for a very long time but never before in such epic terms.”
Online you can argue at whatever speed you want: “If you say something nasty now, to my face, I might not have a quick comeback,” says McMahon. “On the internet I’ve time to word my response to you properly, edit it, research it and rewrite, perhaps even find an image of you and deface it. Online, the potential to choose and sharpen conversational weapons means arguments ramp up and become emotionally charged faster than face to face.”
And people also comment before they’ve had time to think. “In days gone by if someone got really angry about something they had read and wanted to speak on that anger publicly, they’d have to sit down, write a letter and post it to The Irish Times,” says Mc Mahon. “By that point the anger might have dissipated. But today those steps have been shortened drastically.”
Indeed, there’s evidence from research at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay that ranting online intensifies our anger rather than reducing it. And no matter how pure the original motivation for arguing, says Mc Mahon, at a certain point different priorities assert themselves. “We’re not wired for rational thought. We’re wired for competing against each other. We’re not wired to find the truth. We’re wired to win.”
So, given all this, is there any real, practical reason to argue with strangers online? That depends on why you’re doing it in the first place. If you’re trying to assert your identity and feel a sense of belonging among like-minded well-wishers, then it may make sense. “But I’d be very surprised if any argument online is ever going to convince anyone of anything,” says Mc Mahon. “At best you’ll get public acceptance – you’ll beat someone into submission – but with private disagreement.
“To change anyone’s opinion takes longer. You can convince people with a straight, logical, clear argument, but that usually only happens in a minority of cases, when the other person has no opinion whatsoever, and when they are open to be persuaded. Presenting a person who already has an opinion with a list of facts about how they’re wrong is seldom effective.”
In Oxford, Bright, who has studied how information proliferates, agrees. “If people hear a view that’s not too far away from their own, that’s more likely to be influential than the diametric opposite.”
And, he says, arguing doesn’t necessarily alter the arguer’s perspective. “In fact it can reinforce their opinion . . . There are people who actively reinforce their own views by reading the opposite side of the argument.”
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 11, 2019 9:01:54 GMT -5
Online identities Conspicuous opining may be the new conspicuous consumption. Dr Ciarán Mc Mahon of the cyberpsychology research centre at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Institute of Leadership says that as people construct their online identities – and narcissism, he says, is rising alongside social media – they self-consciously align themselves to certain points of view.
People often argue to “mark their ideological territory”, he says. “But the internet is a shared and communal space. While it’s almost entirely privately owned, we treat it like a public sphere, like a commons or wilderness. We each try to mark out our own personal corners, as in our social-media profiles – though, unlike marking out our physical spaces, like a garden or allotment, we can’t easily fence them off. When you realise that anyone can read what you put online, link to it and pass comment on it, you can only conclude that the internet is fundamentally a contested space.”
How we argue online is as complicated as why. Social media’s blend of public and private means that, on top of actual ideological disagreements, cyberspace abounds with misunderstandings and perceived slights.
Suler says that this is a result of “online disinhibition”. “When you cannot see or hear the other person, the lack of visual and auditory cues tends to make people more bold in what they say,” he says. “You can’t see a frown on someone’s face or hear anger in that person’s voice, which would otherwise cause you to tone down your argument. The arguer even forgets that another real, alive person exists at the other end of his or her words.”
Even more problematically, people have a tendency to fill the gap with their own projections. “The diminished sense of the ‘presence’ of the other person as a result of these in-person missing cues also causes people to project their own expectations and anxieties on to the person being debated,” says Suler.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 11, 2019 8:58:57 GMT -5
Cyberspace is an argumentative place. On social media you can see university professors arguing with climate deniers, politicians arguing with anti-austerity protesters, famous atheists arguing with anonymous Christians, Taylor Swift fans arguing with Nikki Minaj fans and the well-intentioned arguing with the malevolent.
People argue passionately. They argue creatively. They argue compulsively. There are misunderstandings and lapses of humour. Minor differences of opinion spiral into incivility – and, to be fair, pleasant arguments often stay pleasant. Nowadays, even the most debate-averse people find themselves engaging with online arguments vicariously, sucking up dubiously sourced opinions and counteropinions as if by osmosis.
When I ask internet arguers if they argue more now than they did in the past, they don’t hesitate: “Definitely.”
So is there a point to arguing with strangers? That’s a muddier issue.
“There was a lot of false hope in the 1990s that [the internet] would open up a new style of democracy,” says Dr Jonathan Bright, a research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute. He became interested in online discussion when he worked with a political website in the mid noughties. “We got this very aggressive and vitriolic debate going. It was definitely a corrective to the very optimistic view that the only thing preventing people engaging in politics was the lack of mass communications technology.”
Internet utopians had a “rational communicator” in mind, much like the rational consumer beloved of classical economists. This person was immersed in a world of ideas and argued logically. But this, it turns out, isn’t how or why people argue, and it’s certainly not how or why they argue online. Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University, in New Jersey, and the father of cyberpsychology, maintains that “argumentativeness has been around since the very beginning of cyberspace”.
“In the ‘old’ days most of what people did online was to join some kind of discussion group, so ongoing discussions, sometimes leading to arguments, were inevitable and part of the online lifestyle,” he tells me via email.
“There are just so many more people online now that it just seems like there is more argumentativeness. With many people striving for their 15 minutes of fame by pronouncing their viewpoints, we all have gotten used to online proclamations about something or other, proclamations easily disagreed with by someone.”
There are a number of points to note about arguing on the internet. People don’t argue for straightforward reasons. They aren’t necessarily trying to convince the person they’re arguing with to change their mind (although some are).
Sometimes they’re trying to correct a narrative or right a perceived wrong for a silent audience. (This audience is potentially vast but often, in actuality, tiny.) And sometimes they’re not interested in changing anyone’s mind at all but are engaged in a “performance” for the like-minded.
“Cyberspace more easily allows birds of a feather to flock together,” Suler says.
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 11, 2019 8:57:30 GMT -5
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Post by nighttimer on Jul 8, 2019 7:41:06 GMT -5
And once NT chose to come back to Rob's board after that bullshit, and lie, and then call me a liar...what, I'm duty-bound to meekly allow NT to call me a liar when he's the one lying? No. Fuck that noise. You don't get to single-handedly decide to abuse people in front of your own chosen audience and then claim it's "private." As Haggis notes, Nighttimer sends PM stinkers full of bullshit abuse all the fucking time to dodge the consequences of sending said stinkers. It's been his modus operandi for quite a while. It's high time he got fucking called on it. And that's your job, huh?
I could have swore you quit as a Moderator because you couldn't hack it.
Oh, I have your explicit permission to share it? Hell no. You didn't need my explicit permission to share it the first time, so if you were that sleazy once, I'm sure you can vomit up another bizarre rationalization to do it again. You're gonna do what the hell you wanna do because you feel zero accountability to anyone, so do whatever you want.
I'd expect nothing less from someone like you. Once you've convinced yourself you are pursing justice it becomes easy to deceive yourself that you're not merely looking for revenge. You've always envisioned yourself as the hero of your own narrative.
Just remember---everything you said about me applies equally to you.
Have an ordinary day.
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