I've been trying to put together a bunch of quotes with highlights this week, it's been a lot of work and I've had things come up in my personal life that have made it difficult to get it all together. I apologize for not providing supporting posts to this appeal sooner. I still don't have the highlights ready but I do have the source material and the arguments so I'm going to put those down now and hope to have the highlights finished before the weekend is over.
At first glance Sinful's arguments might seem a bit confusing and erratic, or as Sans put it "disgusting bait and then backtracing". This is rooted in a gimmick of playing devil's advocate. Sinful and Bonermaster committed to the gimmick in some long forgotten peanut, and if you go through posts you can find instances of it happening. It's a well-known habit for the rhetorically gifted to enjoy jumping into conversations to take the underdog side in an argument, but like all gifts it needs to be tempered because people get sick of it.
I've found this post by Sinful to be a very good window into his thinking and motivation for peanut posting.
sinfulbliss wrote: ↑Fri Jul 09, 2021 8:15 am
I post pretty much everything uhhh.
Also as long as you're being ironic you can't hurt public opinion of yourself that's the beauty of being ironic!!
Unless your irony is transparent and someone can see it reflects something really fucked up that you'd rather hide.
I dunno that's the cool thing about the internet, you can say really wild shit you would never be able to say IRL and as a result it can make for some pretty hilarious moments or very interesting conversations that you'd never be able to discuss IRL.
I have said some pretty fucked up stuff online but because it's online I don't care and it's usually just to be funny or cause some sort of drama (everyone loves good drama).
As long as your intention is pure and it isn't like, warped, you're fine...
(If you click the little arrow in the quote it will lead you to that post on the forums, where you can see a few posts further down he's openly larping the lawyer gimmick)
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Sinful likes to champion freedom of all-out no-filter expression as the ultimate form of entertaining discourse. He puts a lot of emphasis on authenticity as the reason it should be allowed, even though he acknowledges that even at best people going all out on each other only
might cause them to find common ground at the end. He's skilled in rhetoric: he knows how to frame attempts to shift the overton window as innocent questioning, he knows how to use irony as a shield, he knows how to use criticizing authority as a shield. Mind, this administrative team is the same team
that let him back in after he multikeyed over 200 rounds so he could powergame as HoS. In his ban reason he states the reason he stopped was because it was inefficient and caused computer issues, not because it's basically the worst form of cheating we have and ruins the experience for everyone (especially if you're using it to powergame sec, but I digress.)
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The worst part of it all is that Sinful was basically in a position not too far from Typhnox's a while back. By defending two rule 8 bans, one involving underaged content, people were starting to ask questions. The video could have just as easily been about Sinful. But when someone happens to fall in the same position that Sinful did (and without the same rhetorical skills that Sinful has), Sinful's response is to continually bring up the drama, post a direct link to the video, and undermine any possible resolution that Typhnox had accomplished. The undermining was so successful that it baited Typhnox into yet another one of his responses that makes him look bad. So yeah, when we're trying to avoid witch hunts, posting "A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." doesn't really help, and claiming that we're just trying to censor him for being too authentic and just asking questions is really dishonest.
Sinful asserts that the player's club should be a place of conflict, that it should be defined by it. He acts in accordance with that belief. Conflict is bound to happen within a community, but generally it should not be defined by it. There are communities built around debate and intense discussion of heavy topics, they are specialized for that purpose. This is a niche community that has a history of helpful hard-working people being driven out of the community by drama. The original hut had a bad habit of people using irony as a shield to say really horrible things, and no one was willing to deal with any of it because "it's the hut, it will go away in a second". The posts went away, but the community members didn't come back.
You might be able to handle intense, heavy discussion, Sinful, but a lot of people don't have the stomach for it. Not wanting to have this stuff in the community doesn't make somebody weak or a pussy. Even if you want to frame it as a weakness, the people who you'd imply are weak for that are strong in a lot of ways that you don't provide. I'd rather not see people leave because you won't put down unsavory arguments and behavior. Because then multiple people will be gone and you'll still be here, doing your thing, turning people away.
You say that by removing you from the Player's Club that it'll become a ghost town, both through your absence and the message your ban sends. I doubt that.
Here's what I have for pulled quotes that show what I'm talking about. I've highlighted some of them. Some of them might be redundant or not strong points, I'll be tightening all this up over the next few days.
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And nah man, this whole ban is way less dramatic than anything you've done up to this point. The host washed his hands of this appeal because the whole thing spun up into too much dumb drama, and you had no small part in that.
