I will do my best to clarify, but I will say up front it is not as easy to establish this sort of thing with the kind of "smoking gun" evidence that was provided for their vote manipulation and subsequent lying about it. After all, how do you prove an argument is dishonest, and is there an objective measure of an argument being "unreasonable?"
To the point of misrepresenting evidence, I believe that much is more straightforward, but in the same manner as what occurred in this thread, every time the claim is made that they are deliberately misrepresenting evidence, they aggressively rebuke it and make counter-accusations of toxicity for implying dishonesty in the first place.
For unreasonability, I can speak to a few specific instances that I find compelling as examples of this behavior, and I emphasize the fact that the reason this has become an issue as Ant describes above is because these examples are a template for how this group responds to any and all information that is inconvenient to the conclusion they want to reach with their CRT, with Transcending and Xearsay making all of the CRTs that the four of them all focused on.
In a recent thread aimed at downgrading Lucifer Morningstar, a significant portion of the discussion revolved around the tier of a being called The Presence, who is also called the Source. For the purpose of this discussion, they are considered as equal to eachother. Some information was presented that, by my assessment, strongly support the Source scaling above a race of beings called "the Supercelestials" which would've rebutted that aspect of their argument. The information is as follows:
1) The Supercelestials do the bidding of the Source, and act based on it's judgment, to such an extent that at his command, they use energy from the Source to create multiverses in the "Overvoid", and then die, and let their energies return to the Source, who sits at the centre of the Overvoid.
2) We do not have direct knowledge of how the Supercelestials came into existence, but given the above,
it is most likely that the Source created them.
3) One Supercelestial said -- as an explanation for why she is creating a multiverse -- that she "
hopes to please the Source of her power" with Source in bold.
I felt strongly that the aggregate of this information paints an extremely clear picture that the Presence/Source scales above the Supercelestials, so I was surprised to receive the following counter-arguments to each claim:
1) The fact that they do his bidding doesn't mean he scales above them, because
humans can have bosses they work for who aren't stronger than them. When I objected that the social context of human society and employee is not really applicable to a super-deity who commands beings to die for the sake of creating multiverses, it was demanded that I provide a thorough explanation for why.
2) It was argued that the most
probable explanation for the Supercelestials existence was that they created themselves/came into existence from nothing and the fact that they do the bidding of the Presence/Source doesn't mean it created them. Specifically the example was given that Jason Momoa can hire bodyguards, but he didn't create his bodyguards. I once again said that this really does not translate at all to a god at the center of the void beyond creation, and the race of beings who he sends to create multiverses with his energy and then die and return to him.
3) Ignoring the context of the conversation, the claim was made that this person meant they wanted to
impress the Source with how powerful she was, which I explained
made absolutely no sense in the context of the conversation.
At this point in the conversation I was becoming increasingly frustrated with what I considered to be unreasonable bad faith arguing. By my assessment, these are not responses and claims that would come from someone trying to be reasonable and engage in good faith with the evidence and come to likely conclusions about it's meaning. Rather, it felt as though (and keep in mind that at this point several/all members of the group are dogpiling to this effect) they were deliberately exploiting any opportunity to call doubt upon even the most obvious of conclusions, and place undue burden on detractors to provide explanations and justifications for exceedingly obvious conclusions or basic concepts, only to object to the explanations themselves with the same far-fetched rejections and demands for justification.
So I decided I was going to stop entertaining some of these demands, such as the demand to explain why a human hiring bodyguards is not a meaningful counter-example to the statement that the god at the center of the overvoid probably created the race of multiverse-creating supercelestials who do his bidding and literally give their lives to create multiverses on its behalf, using power that is explicitly identified as coming from him.
In a vacuum, even these three examples may not be fully compelling to establish the pattern of behavior described, but what I want to underscore is that this is how
every single piece of information is engaged with. Far-fetched bad-faith detraction, accusations of toxicity against anyone who expresses frustration at how silly the arguments are, and even went as far as to claim that users who abandon the debate due to this have "admitted they have no evidence."
Keep in mind that these situations often involve participation from every member of their group, many of whom we have established were recruited onto the site for the specific purpose of supporting them in CRTs. This situation evolved into the current one when, after many of these threads were closed, one of them took to the All-purpose request thread to claim they shouldn't have been closed because of how many agreements they had. When Ant highlighted the fact that they have been posting these CRTs one after the other and might be collaborating with each other, they harshly rebuked him for voicing this suspicion, and when I presented some of the evidence to call attention to the fact, they all came here and participated in an attempt to have me banned.
I recognize that this wasn't exactly concise, but it's difficult to capture vague concepts like "bad faith arguing" or "unreasonable stonewalling" with only a single example. But I fully agree with Ant's assessment, they play the victim whenever any of their problematic behavior is called attention to, aggressively rebuke the person suspecting it with claims of toxicity or false accusations, and all concurrently dogpile threads with low-effort detraction towards what
should be very simple matter-of-fact conclusions from overt evidence.
I think this RvT situation is a compelling example, as well. Look at how they all responded to the evidence described by Mori as "
absolutely staggering" and "
the most cut-and-dry, textbook case of vote manipulation" and by Starter_Pack "
some of the most damning evidence I have ever seen of collusion." Absolute denial of every single claim, rejection of every single piece of evidence, counter-accusations and hostility against anyone who stated the obvious conclusion. Starting with their initial attempt to
have me banned for suggesting it. Imagine trying to engage in a CRT with 4 separate users who are arguing against scans in the same denialistic manner that this group argued against the "absolutely staggering" evidence against them, and having them create a new CRT for all of them to join in on to that same effect, immediately as soon as the last one was closed.