Retro Thursday, I'm bringing these back for emphasis and all the people who skimmed through them the first time:
---
Let me break this down.
So apparently I'm getting lynched or shot at.
I already said that my official position is that I won't take a position D1. But if you really want to know my train of thought here it is:
Subtext: I'm doing you a solid by replying to your unreasonable demand to make my position public. Because I'm tots a good guy.
First Az post is obviously "Let's not have silly RSV", which I like and gives you town points in my spreadsheet. But then I start saying to myself: "This is Azrael. Scum Azrael could easily do that on purpose to get the
aforementioned town points, while making us look into RN with the townie comment". WIFOM. So screw your edgy play, I'm just gonna see how others react to it. So I poke RN.
So, we have a conscious decision to see how other players react to my play before you take an action or stance of your own. That's in line with what I figured your mentality was - and it's the classic scum mentality. Scum often experience great difficulty being decisive when it comes to taking sides on a difficult or potentially controversial behavioral analysis question, because they find it difficult to know how they would perceive the evidence, if they were town.
The natural townie response in such a situation is to be inquisitive, to gather more evidence, ask questions, like Ham was doing, in order to get to the bottom of the situation.
The natural scum response, by contrast, is what GR did. To wait and see how the wind was blowing, and how other players begin to react, and to take his cues on how
best to camouflage himself and proceed based on the responses of other players.
Then kpaca starts post ping pong with you, and I'm like holy shit is one of them scum, both or none? I said as much and stuck to my plan of watching the others when Dechs scored enough scum points to get a vote.
I still have the gut feeling that you may be town aggressively scum hunting, so I was not about to vote for you, but at the same time, I had no strong reason to make a case for your towniness once you reached L-1 and were out of it before I could even finish reading all the walls of text.
One of the characteristics of the scum mentality I described above is very evident in this paragraph here, and also in the paragraph above. Scum are very often able to identify multiple competing factors that they ought to weigh (such as my aggressive scum-hunting), or the "possibility that I'm doing it for WIFOM".
What they find it difficult to do is figure
out which of those factors should be the one that persuades them.
In this case, I think it's even more difficult for GR to fake the correct mentality b/c there are a couple clues buried in this text that indicate he knows I'm town, and is finding it difficult to present alternatives. The best explanation he has for his confusion isn't that he's focused on the "mistake" I made that everyone else is focused on. Apparently, that's not of concern to him - probably because he knows it for an honest mistake due to his inside knowledge.
No, what he's actually struggling with if you read between the lines here is how to justify still voting for me despite what he's perceiving (a bit more easily than others thanks to the bias of his inside knowledge) as a strong scum-hunting record. Apparently, the idea that I'm capable of faking a strong scum-hunting record is enough to paralyze him in a bout of confusion and inertia? I don't buy that for a second. What he's worrying about is how to
justify his vote, when all hell breaks loose in the inevitable counter-analysis wagon that would take place the instant I flip town. That's what's staying his hand, that has him frozen on the sidelines, waiting for the rest of the town to take positions first.
My vote for Dechs is supposed to be weird but other than you pointing out that his counterclaim is not something that scum would do (which despite being a good point, only raises the question of whether you could be scum buddies) no one has said why those bells I heard are only in my head.
I didn't really know that he's a newbie, so I'm going to review his posts under that light and see whether I was overreacting.
You attempted to crucify him very aggressively for what were nothing more than innocent logic tells. Both the style and substance of the attack were far too bloodthirsty.
Confirm vote.
Also, you say you didn't know he was a newbie, GR?
Because I seem to recall you laughing at his posts in the Sons of Anarchy signup thread, where he stated he was a new player, but was trying to give me some tips on how to play.
Lynch this liar?
Ooo. "But If you really want to know my train of thought, here it is".
That's another good bit, there. It's like I'm torturing him by simply dragging an attempt to describe his own train of thought out of him.
Which vote am I trying to justify again? And you call a single vote a crucifixion?
You're confusing the fact that I have to go through walls of text while at work with scum mentality. My not wanting to take a stance about you comes from the fact that I both
know what your trajectory is and how long your posts are. I'd rather deal with you when we have a better picture and probably caught a less experienced scum.
Fine, I'm being lazy, but at least I'm trying to post stuff and get reactions out of not you players.
Translation: "It's not fair that I'm actually playing this game and making an effort as compared to the lurkers, and got caught because I took the high road of actually participating."
I agree, actually. It's not fair.
But your activity level has nothing to do with the scum-mindset that's clearly evident in your description of your train of thought.
This was your Dechs vote:
Unvote RedNihilist
Vote Dechs Kaison
I don't like your use of the word "trap", your vote-hopping, nor the fact that you're trying to direct a power role.
Your light-
claim is not helping your case either.
This is pretty strongly worded for a page one or two vote. Too strongly worded, and on too thin a basis. His light-claim isn't helping his case? Doesn't even make sense. And the rest of it just buzz-words as a substitute for a real case, strung together with smilies for hyperbole and emphasis, as if it should be self-evident that the three things you mention are unpardonable sins of some kind.
And then, you immediately back off that strongly worded read when I call it out. Those convictions weren't as strong as you'd have us believe, after all. Not when you take fire for them.
Scum plays, every step of the way.
PPE - You're dodging the point, GR. You were there for the conversation. You heard him say he was a new player. You can't write off your case b/c you didn't realize he was a newbie - you did know it.
I'm enjoying the fireworks
but I often like to look for "honestly" and "TBH" wording, as it often suggests a self-deception in progress.
You can look up something called performatives, which are phrases inserted before a lie, commonly used by politicians.
I haven't caught any scum with this observation yet, but looking forward to it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSHCdalj3Fo
In my mind, the slip is just icing on the cake of everything else going on with him. Read for yourself the posts where I take apart GR's mindset piece by piece. That's the true damning evidence - five or six different high quality behavioral scum tells occuring in rapid succession, from a very unconvincing
explanation of why he's in a dilemma over taking a position on me, to lack of townie inquisitiveness and engagement, consistently exhibiting verbal tics indicating lies, difficulty weighing competing behavioral evidence, nervousness in sharing his thought patterns, to his overaggression and lack of conviction when it came to his vote against you, and his bare OMGUS vote putting me to L-1.
It's like he fell out of the ugly tree, hit half the branches on the way down, and then climbed up into it so that he could jump out of it again and hit all the rest.
Nobody falls into making that many high-quality scum mindset tells in such rapid succession by mistake or accident - it's a pattern. In 95% of my cases, I have some reservations about whether the case is actually correct, there's almost always some lingering doubts whether or not I could be wrong, and frequently I'll change my mind as new evidence comes in. This is one of the 5% of scenarios where the clarity and quality of the evidence is
remarkable.
Read those posts carefully, read between the lines for his mindset. You will not find many more obvious examples than these of what a scum mentality looks like.
