re: #8 Killgore Trout

Also, it used to be a rule around here that carrying out squabbles from thread to thread, day after day, sometimes even years was discouraged. Many people don’t care about past petty squabbles and they can take over the whole blog if they go unchecked.

This part is actually especially funny. Basically, Killgore has said and done a lot of really stupid, egregious shit, like creepily celebrating women getting assaulted while making up bizarre bullshit about them, declared himself a “Classical liberal” based on a quick skim of Wikipedia and then gotten the most basic tenant of how classical liberalism views the assignation of rights wrong, and other self-clownings like being not just wrong, but the opposite of right about the Hitchens video I cited above.

Think about it: Who is it who prefers that past arguments get dropped—those for whom the arguments show them in a good light, or those for whom the arguments show them negatively?

There’s certainly no point in constantly bringing up something that’s actually trivial or petty, but things that are substantially wrong—like being the kind of weirdo that declares on zero basis that two women getting pepper-sprayed by cops deserve it for being violent Marxist trustfunders—that’s the kind of thing that should be brought up.

You can’t really be an honest debater without acknowledging past mistakes. You don’t have to make a complete obeisance about it, but when you pull the exact same stunt, you’re going to have to expect them to be brought up again.