The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

It's bad because it's gaslighty and fucks with people's heads. That doesn't mean it never has the intended effect. It did, in the September 2017 case, have the exact intended effect of causing you to stop actively spamming the mod queue and harassing the mods. I'm willing to stop using a tactic because people have argued persuasively that it's abusive. I'm not going to falsely claim that it didn't work. It works great as long as you don't know it's there.

It is really common that anyone telling you "no" will result in you getting angry and abusive. Usually towards them, sometimes towards random third parties. For instance, when mods told you "no" on a post that you were particularly emotionally committed to, you started spamming them with it to try to force them to give in and post it, because if you made not-posting-it unpleasant enough, then it would get posted and you'd win.

Anything that you can perceive as a person telling you "no" is likely to produce this abusive behavior. But if something prevents you from taking an action, and you can't tell that it's a person refusing you that action, it's different. You don't care that much about the action; you care only about whether someone is denying you. If you can't tell a person did it, you just go do something else. Which means that an undocumented/unknown throttle is an effective way to get you to calm your titties and go do something else. But if you know it exists, it is no longer useful -- you go back to your usual behavior of maximizing harm because you don't approve of being denied, ever.

The only true injustice is that sometimes people oppose your whims. Since letting you do whatever the fuck you want, and never changing behavior in response to this in ways you don't approve of, is the only true injustice in this universe, and this is self-evident, it follows logically that no one can ever deny you a positive and friendly interaction unless they are doing so out of a deep and abiding malice and evil, which must be punished. Possibly once you have punished them enough, they'll stop being evil, and you can have positive and friendly interactions with them.

(To be clear: That last paragraph is not actually how anything works other than your emotions.)

 

You can't suicide-bait and send death threats and at the same time care about doing what's right

 

No one suggested that relaying a message was "inherently abusive".

What was abusive was, and you said yourself at the time that it was intentionally abusive, you were aware of this, and it was your goal, announcing intent to repeatedly spam the same fucking message over and over, explicitly stating that you were going to do that until the mods capitulated and gave you what you wanted.

That was abusive.

And you know what else is abusive? After being told, several times, with proof and timestamps and everything, that it was the spamming and harassment which got you Discouraged, trying to come back and spin it as though it was about the specific content of a specific post, rather than the fact that you were spamming that post repeatedly in an attempt to hurt people until they had to comply with your demands.

We're not talking about some isolated thing. We're talking about the only social strategy you use at all anymore. You really did, back in September of '17, conclude that "being an abusive asshole gets results" and commit to using that as your strategy. Since then, you have persistently used abusive tactics in every conflict you're in. You've harassed people anonymously so you could "protect" them non-anonymously. You've announced intent to get people hurt or killed to prove that systems exist which could hurt or kill them if abused maliciously. You've threatened to kill people, you've threatened to kill their friends or family or parents, you've told people to kill themselves, and you've done this specifically to win arguments. You're not mad and lashing out; you're using a consistent set of tactics.

The rate at which you were spamming the post dropped from "constantly" to "zero". That counts as "working".

I believe that it is what you feel, and that it is a significantly more accurate explanation of your behavior than any explanation available to your conscious mind. None of your wrathful behavior makes sense otherwise. Spamming people's posts with ratings specifically because they asked you not to? You are punishing them for trying to assert boundaries. You react with violence and abuse when told "no". Other injustices, you bitch about, but don't care enough about to do things. And there's no injustice you care about enough to do something relevant to achieving your stated goals. It's a fig leaf to cover for the fact that you like being mad and hurting people because hurting people you feel deserve it feels good, and the easiest way to do that is to feel people deserve it without any tedious searching for coherent justifications.

So I don't think it's what you believe, but I think it is what's actually happening in your brain. It is a model which predicts roughly 100% of your actions, while the model you claim is what's happening explains virtually nothing that you're doing.

No one made you tell my kid that you're planning to kill his parents, again, which you do any time you're mad at me or him. You did that yourself. And you can go on blaming me for denying you access to your friends, but it's bullshit.

Seriously, like. Fuck right off. I dunno whether you're trying to hurt the kid to get at me, or just because you like hurting people, but it is in no way the result of caring about "what's right". Not on any level whatsoever. It's malice.

You can fix this, but to do it, you have to actually reject malice as being innately wrong. And you won't, because you'll insist that some people deserve malice, but that's how it gets you -- once you think some people deserve malice, you will find that everyone who inconveniences you is technically one of those people, or counts as one of those people, or is supporting those people, or reminds you of those people. You can only fix it by rejecting malice itself.

 

Do you believe you've relayed all of the context of the situation here?
I can think about one or two glaring things you've omitted.

 

It is just fucking wild to me that you can type this up like you're expecting a rational, calm discussion while at the exact same time threatening and abusing Seebs's family with: "I'LL KILL YOUR PARENTS."

 

Oh, and also recruiting someone to go communicate with someone else who's repeatedly told you to LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE, because obviously your desire to be able to say you apologized is more important than their desire to be left alone and not interact with you.

It really does come down to that: No matter what you do, everyone has an abiding moral obligation to always be willing to hear from you, and to accept communications, and no one has a right to be left alone.

You wanna prove that you feel otherwise? Stop doing that.

If you wanted him off your server, you coulda said "I'd rather you left". You didn't. Why? Because the point was to hurt someone, not to achieve some other goal.

You weren't abusive to achieve an end. You invented an end to justify abuse.

Not pictured, but clearly impending: You'll complain about how important it is to you to be able to talk to him, and how I'm clearly cutting you off from your friends and hurting you by not letting you onto my discord so you can hang out with him.

But that's really the thing. You're not even remotely making sense. None of your abusive behaviors are actually oriented towards achieving your goals, and none of your goals require abusive behaviors. You just settled on this as your tactic that you're gonna use, and then whine about how it's everyone else's fault that you don't like the results.

 

What the fuck

Why do you think that those things make it okay that you threatened his parents? Because you supposedly didn't meant it??

There is no reason that will make that action okay and not fucked up and terrible

But you care about doing what's right

 

So:

'No, you see, I did totally threaten to kill his parents, but I was just doing it to prove a point, which somehow makes it less bad'

And the companion piece:

'What is the point? The point is apparently to prove that I can be so toxic and abusive that I could get him to leave. I sure showed him.'

 

You won't even begin to consider ceasing to abuse literally everyone you supposedly like, care about, or want to defend until never. You could literally have the heads of every person who has ever done you wrong on actual literal staff-mounted weapons, and it would never be enough.

So you make a difference. The difference is that you hurt the poor, and the disabled, and the queers, and all the other outcasts and victims, because you love hurting people and refuse to stop. And that is the only difference you will ever make until you actually commit to doing things that help people instead.

When you hurt people, you will be wrong. Not because violence is always bad uwu, but because you are a fucking idiot when you are mad, and the only way for you to not make everything worse, for you and everyone else, is to stop acting on your anger, because your anger is fucking stupid. This isn't some kind of grand sweeping moral claim about violence; this is a practical observation. When you are mad, you are incapable of competent decisions. You don't even try. You just do the meanest, most hurtful, thing you can find, and make excuses for how the target totally deserved it or it somehow achieved an end.

And that's why, ultimately, I don't believe you when you say you want to make a positive difference: Because you know all of this, and you have the ability to do good things. You've developed plenty of control; your elaborate deceptions and schemes prove that plenty. You just don't want to do the hard things. You want the instant rush of rage and hurting people. So you do that, and you blame it on everything else.

This isn't a question of what you can cognitively handle. It's a question of values. You value the thrill of hurting people more than you value your ethics or ideals.

 

It already did, she's specifically claimed that I'm "abusive" for not letting her come on my discord and do this shit to more people.