purpleworm [none/use name]

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2025

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  • So between your initial, completely spurious accusation, this:

    a preaching continued push

    Which might otherwise be called a “campaign” or just “something this person believes in and argues for”

    recycled arguments

    Which, without proper refutation (and you have no proper refutation, see how you replied to me ~four times but could never give me a defense of the site), might just be “a reasonable argument that people repeat because it’s reasonable and has yet to be refuted” and similarly, in one of your other replies:

    It really interesting seeing this group so favourable to banning or setting up an auto-reply

    Which, again, could simply be that many of us have years of experience or Redditors/Ledditors posting that stupid website as an argument and you’d probably say the same thing if it was a website that supported flat earth theory, which is literally no less ridiculous than the claim that its individual ratings are based on, that being centrist is inherently less biased (which it literally does, see davel’s comment).

    All this taken together is hard to read as anything other than you posing yourself as some intellectually rigorous figure that looks down upon the cult/herd that you see here, but in reality you have been clambering for literally any excuse you can find to discount arguments out of hand, to say that what I and others say simply “doesn’t count,” to avoid actually taking the arguments on their own merits. Despite your meaningless and sometimes wildly inaccurate complaints about emotionality, you certainly aren’t shy about your own affectation, as in where you said something like:

    Signed, a disgusting centrist

    So, self-victimizing aside, this absurd standard about emotionality is clearly not something that you actually believe in, it’s just a crass rhetorical cudgel that you use to defend your biases about this sort of media from being fact-checked. If only we had a website that dealt with that subject . . .


  • I think the issue is that to a general audience it’s something that you can’t just say in passing with a noun phrase without establishing that you’re talking about this bias first, but if I had to produce a phrase then it would probably be “the less-politically-educated” or something, since obviously there are lots of people with political education who are contributing to problems in The Discourse, but the people who just hold up MBFC like it’s a cross to repel the vampire of radicalism are, in my opinion, mostly the kind of people who have very little political education and just consume a lot of corporate news or NYT (or some equivalent). The ones with an education will more consistently present (hackneyed) arguments or actual articles.

    I could be wrong though, it’s just the impression I get.





  • your reading critically thing

    I don’t think the obvious insinuation is fair to you, but I want to point out that this is an extremely funny turn of phrase.

    I’m getting more suspicious of you after this emotional plea. What sorts sources are you upset have these comments

    Speaking of unfair, I don’t think this comment is either. Calling that comment an “emotional plea” worth raising your suspicions is absurd. There’s not even that much of an emotional affectation and certainly there is no appeal to emotion in place of a valid argument. What is “emotional”? That you can infer he has a feeling on the subject? Come on. Furthermore, RedWizard is an upstanding guy from everything I’ve seen of him, and I think it’s just that some of us are really sick of MBFC tacitly question-begging the center being unbiased and people in some spaces always using it to attack anything source left of CNN, a behavior we’ve watched or been subjected to for several years now.

    Trying to explain it in terms of how you frame things: You are right when you said elsewhere that people only have so much time to read through various sources, so polluting the space with something that has been long established to be bullshit is detrimental to having more people come to more reasonable conclusions, and this is something that I’m sure you would agree to if it was a source that you really accepted at least that level of criticism for (e.g. it would be a negative for the site to get a deluge of links to flat Earth websites). That is why “adding more information is worse.” If it’s about putting something in an archive, then by all means put whatever you like in the archive so we have it for reference, but for these sorts of fleeting discussions, it is obviously harmful.

    To be clear though, I don’t support banning it on the basis that the liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.

    Edit: RW does make more emotional comments elsewhere, but again not appealing to emotion, so I don’t think the criticism rises above the most absurd of tone-policing.