I’m not convinced. I think Eugine wants to win, where winning means making those nasty commie SJWs go away, or at least look bad, so that the glorious Rightness of comments like his own can shine forth. So: not a purely expressive act.
I don’t think it’s a conditioning exercise intended to make disagreeing with Eugine immediately painful, because his actual practice has frequently been to delay the large-scale downvoting and spread it out.
Rather, I think he wants (1) to make participation here painful for his victims and/or (2) to make it look as if his victims are generally disliked and disagreed with. He wants to remove them or reduce their credibility.
Imputing motives to people doing things on the ’net is a very traditional and popular activity, of course :-)
In any case, is there a testable assertion here? Do you think that if you wipe all his votes, Eugene, in the immortal words of Gollum, will “go away and never come back”?
(Let it be noted that I was doing so neither more nor less than you were.)
is there a testable assertion here?
Depends what you mean by testable. I don’t know what Eugine will do in any given circumstances; he’s a free agent and my mindreading powers are sadly limited. I think he is more likely to go away, and (conditional on not going away) likely to do less mass-downvoting, if he has reason to think that such activity will be noticed and reversed on a timescale of at most (let’s say) weeks.
But of course I could be wrong. Perhaps his actual reaction would be to go completely apeshit and try to do something very destructive. It’s not clear to me that he could actually do serious damage, but he could probably cause inconvenience for the moderators if he didn’t care about ever again being thought a constructive member of the community by anyone.
I’m not convinced. I think Eugine wants to win, where winning means making those nasty commie SJWs go away, or at least look bad, so that the glorious Rightness of comments like his own can shine forth. So: not a purely expressive act.
I don’t think it’s a conditioning exercise intended to make disagreeing with Eugine immediately painful, because his actual practice has frequently been to delay the large-scale downvoting and spread it out.
Rather, I think he wants (1) to make participation here painful for his victims and/or (2) to make it look as if his victims are generally disliked and disagreed with. He wants to remove them or reduce their credibility.
Imputing motives to people doing things on the ’net is a very traditional and popular activity, of course :-)
In any case, is there a testable assertion here? Do you think that if you wipe all his votes, Eugene, in the immortal words of Gollum, will “go away and never come back”?
(Let it be noted that I was doing so neither more nor less than you were.)
Depends what you mean by testable. I don’t know what Eugine will do in any given circumstances; he’s a free agent and my mindreading powers are sadly limited. I think he is more likely to go away, and (conditional on not going away) likely to do less mass-downvoting, if he has reason to think that such activity will be noticed and reversed on a timescale of at most (let’s say) weeks.
But of course I could be wrong. Perhaps his actual reaction would be to go completely apeshit and try to do something very destructive. It’s not clear to me that he could actually do serious damage, but he could probably cause inconvenience for the moderators if he didn’t care about ever again being thought a constructive member of the community by anyone.