Leaving the forum

Hi Seanc-kun.

Sorry about calling you ignorant back in February 2014 (which started our long running hostile relationship). I was being stupid.

Yeah I learnt japanese when I lived there but I havent used it here because the japanese expats want to speak english, much like Iranian expats, so I have forgotten it all unfortunately. OK, that'll do with ou lilhijack. Mofos dont like like it. Lets chat later. My doctor has jusst arrived. Bye for now.

Define "insult" for me then, please, since most of your response consists of saying that one thing is an insult and another is not, with no real explanation as to why.

Why is it "social sciences" when you generalize about one group, but a vicious personal attack when the generalization is about a group you belong to?

I'd like to know how you reconcile suggesting I "accept that some people might have a different perspective" with your tendency to dismiss differences in taste as being the result of bigotry.

In all seriousness, I've wondered this about you many times, but I thought it would be insensitive (and yes, insulting) to ask.

No, I understand that fine. Some of them are attacks. What you don't understand is that these attacks (such as they are) are not unreasonable or unprovoked: they're proportional responses to very condescending generalizations.

My argument is not that you are not attacked. My argument is that you have an incoherent, shifting standard of what constitutes an attack that allows you to think of yourself as a hapless victim, rather than a blatant instigator.

I challenged you, in that thread, to show me where I said this. You never did, because I didn't say it. I'm challenging you to produce a quote again now.

Exact same response as above. Never said it, and I defy you to produce a quote where I do.

False. I said there were identifiable aesthetic tendencies. Nothing more or less. You misrepresented this in that thread, too: you even somehow misremembered a post where I urged more nuance as suggesting I wanted less!

You don't appear capable of forming salient arguments against what people are actually saying. It's almost as if you take how they make you feel, translate that feeling back into words, and then pretend that's what they said.

False. Westerners can be prejudiced, and often are. What I've disputed are the cheap, reflexive attempts to use prejudice to explain differences in taste.

It's interesting that you're essentially parroting my usual contentions about you right back at me. I don't think you ever accused me of lacking empathy until I'd said it about you. Between this and the "everyone is insulting me and I'm not insulting them" stuff, this begins to feel very much like projection.

False. There are many issues with Western culture, and I have literally never suggested otherwise.

Try making an argument based on what I've actually said. Though I have to warn you, it will be much harder than the straw man genocide you've got going on right now.

Read these two quotes again, please. You say you don't insult people, and say you have nothing to apologize for, yet almost immediately afterwards compare people to dogs. Do you really not see the contradiction here?

That's a funny thing to hear from someone who just complained about being insulted four times in a single post (and countless times before that).

@Yoda Strawman Genocide sounds like a band name. Can I have it?

The Mod in this forum is pretty cool, to be perfectly honest.

__________________
You talkin' to me?

You're right, it doesn't. Didn't say anything of the sort.

If you care to read the exchange for yourself, here it is.

And note well that, in every one of these disputes, I'm always the one linking to posts, providing direct quotes, and asking for direct quotes, and he's always the one substituting all that for his own summaries and impressions of things. That's not by accident.

Nope. It's saying that's true if you do not understand the principle in question. But I believe you do understand it, or at least, are capable of understanding it.

The fact that you think of this as an insult makes my point. Follow the logic here: in the quote above, I don't literally saying "this is about Guap," right? I've only said something critical of a non-specific group of people, but you (reasonably) surmise that I'm saying you are part of that group, and so you take the statement as being about you, even though you are not named.

Now, apply that same thinking to your statements about Westerners: you didn't say, for example, "Joel is X and Y." But you do say "[GROUP THAT JOEL BELONGS TO] is X and Y." You hide behind the fact that this is a general statement, and not literally aimed at an individual, but this is a meaningless distinction because everyone knows you're referring to many of the people here. And I already know you understand and agree with this interpretation, because you just employed the same logic above.

Stop the madness.

@Guaporense just chillax. You're internationally loved.

Come here, you big goofball...

I'm with you MonnoM. I like Guap a lot, I think he's a really interesting person with unique perspective, so it bums me out when he and the forum are combative.

You talk about "the forum" as if it is like a hive-mind. However, the "forum" does not really exist. If I have a squabble is usually with one or two people (like this case).

Anyway, I have learned that talking about Western culture here can be regarded as very insulting. I guess that a lot of people are insulted very easily if one who is perceived as a foreigner talks about his perspective on their ethnic group.

I remember that a few months ago when I was talking in another forum, specialized in manga/animation that I explained my theory of why comics and animation only developed in Japan an did not develop in any Western country. Since my theory argued that it was because Western culture cannot accept stylization since it's obsessed with realism they cannot fully develop artistic mediums that are based on stylization. They felt insulted since they are Westerners as well (it was an English speaking forum like this one and if you know how to speak English you are usually a Westerner).

I guess their reaction was because they like to think that their culture does not constrain their individual judgment and capacity for artistic expression in any way and pointing out the fact that is actually does is taken as an insult. Well, cultural environments exist and they constrain and condition individuals. I have noticed most English speaking people deny it even though it is something that is quite obvious.

Instead they tried to explain around this fact by pointing out that maybe if the US government didn't threaten to regulate comics in the 50's the mediums of comics and animation would also have developed like they did in Japan. However this argument fails to take into account that in all of the Western countries which number at about 80, have failed to develop comics and animation into sophisticated artistic mediums. While in non-Western industrialized countries like Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China, these fields are flourishing (although the new industrialized countries their degree of development is still much lower than in Japan). Clearly some deeper cultural elements are at work here.

Anyway, I have the impression that scholars and other people in the "higher up" levels of society are harder to insult with anthropological facts. I guess that people who perceive that they have a lower position in their ethnic group tend to be more easily insulted when one criticizes their ethnic group because their group identity becomes more relevant for their individual identity.

Some people I have insulted through the most benign comments such as "I think that there are more UK people than US people in webforums in proportion to their population because it rains more in the UK so they spend more time at home".

@Yoda, you should learn when to stop replying to people's posts, for instance, you should have already perceived that nothing good would come from your first post in this thread. Hence there was no reason for you to post that. (although I was already expecting you to post exactly that before you did, your personality is rather deterministic).

Many times your addiction to "win an internet debate" becomes ludicrous. Most times you debate on the internet you just don't actually try to understand what the other people are saying and you just act as if it were a "fight" and try to "win" it. That's really ludicrous.

You have to just accept the fact that different people have a different opinion than you do and other people also have different sensibilities than you do.

Also, could I ask you to make it so that the forum could have the option to put you on the ignore list? Why I cannot put you on it but everybody else?

Sure there was: you've repeatedly lied about what I've said in other discussions. Which is why I challenged you to quote me saying those things. Which you have failed to do, again. Which is exactly what I was expecting.

I expected nothing less from you right now. Why do you feel this visceral need to reply/reply/reply/reply, argue/argue/argue/argue? I am not arguing with you because I know it is futile. You are unable to understand that and you are unable to perceive your own addition in internet "debating".

Well it was my mistake to feed your trolling here.

Again, you're basically just taking what many other people have observed about you and volleying it back. Dismissing someone's opinion based on their ethnicity is a prime example of not "actually [trying] to understand what the other people are saying." So this is fine advice. Why don't you take it?

Because moderators often have to issue warnings or inquire about things, and we need to know that those messages are being received.

Yes, I'm very impressed by your ability to predict that, when you repeatedly lie about and insult someone, they'll probably respond.

See above.

Sure you are. You're just not answering me.

Oh that makes sense. But then you should be more professional given your status in this board.

Your obsession with semantics is amusing.

Sorry to interject here, but I noticed your "you should be more professional" comment and had to jump in - although I'm still a rookie on this board, I'm a long time veteran of several other message boards, and I can already tell you this... Yoda seems like one of the most professional, fair-minded forum owners I've ever seen.

Many forum owners won't even entertain you in debate - they'll simply curse you out, pull rank, and ban you, because, well... they can.

And what should the "professional" response be to someone who's lying about you, insulting you, and has spent years making condescending generalizations about the majority of the forum's users?

Before you answer, you should know that I saw all those awful things you said a couple of posts ago, before quickly editing them out. So I'd also like to humbly submit that unleashing a string of insults and then immediately thinking better of it is a pretty good sign that it's you who's been responding compulsively here.

What I find amusing is the way you try to make ordinary responses sound extreme. For example, asking why I have a "visceral need" to reply to falsehoods and character attacks when any reasonable person would feel compelled to. Or, because I like a good turn of phrase, I have an "obsession with semantics."

You should not interact. You feel insulted by my opinions to the point of thinking I am insulting the majority of the forum's users? That's bad for you. But you are not going to improve anything by trying to suppress my views. And I insult the majority of the forum? Make me laugh, I actually notice people here are hypersensitive snowflakes so I feel like I am walking on a minefield: I say anything and I get trashed. I was very careful on composing my message to not insult anyone but I you still manage to feel insulted.

You should resist your visceral desires to argue ad infinitum with users because you have a responsibility being a moderator. That is since I cannot block you like I can block other people I cannot just ignore you.

Hence we should learn to ignore each other. So far I have been fairly consistent in ignoring you but you have been fairly incompetent in ignoring me.

Yes. So for the record: you are an extremely arrogant, bigoted, intolerant, autistic, ethnocentric and authoritarian person. Yes, that is the fact: you are garbage.

It's because you lack empathy since you are autistic so you do not understand the cause of other people's reactions to your own's.

You believe many posters here are hypersensitive, yet you consistently feel the need to block/ignore other posters?