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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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They don't. They are simply lying. Yes, it is my belief that to say Garcia was "denied due process" is a lie.

Okay, coming in to this late because I was hoping someone else would address it.

This is really skirting the line. You may sincerely believe that literally no one actually believes Garcia was denied due process. If so, you are engaging in a complete failure to extend even a little bit of charity or theory of the mind to people who think differently from you, including (obviously) people here in this forum. Even if you didn't directly address them, you're clearly addressing this at them. Coming as close as you think you can get away with to "Anyone who disagrees with me on this is a liar."

Besides obviously being intended as a slap delivered to anyone arguing the opposite, it's simply very poor argumentation. You don't have to steelman every argument you disagree with, but you should at least keep in mind that very often people really do believe the things they say they believe, and saying "No, you can't actually believe that, you're just lying" is a cheap dodge to avoid defending your own position or addressing theirs. It never produces good discussion, and here it just inevitably leads to clusterfuck threads where people are trying to get their digs in to express how much contempt they feel for the other side.

Note that I am not trying to rule on the object level claim here- I have read the same breakdowns of the Garcia case as everyone else and the situation is, at best, fuzzy. I am sure there are people arguing in bad faith. I'm sure there are people who really believe what they say, regardless of how well-founded their beliefs are.

Despite all the upvotes, you also got reported six times and the "volunteer janny" banner seems to agree with me that this post was borderline, since it keeps alternating between "bad" and "not bad."

In my opinion, this is a bad post because while the rest of it was fine, the very first sentence was its purpose, and that purpose was just to tell off your enemies because you're angry.

ETA: and to @UrgentSloth and @Thoroughlygruntled, who were so thoroughly disgruntled that I modded the "Fuck you" in response to this post but did not mod this post. My initial opinion on this post was that it was borderline. I don't like people calling other people liars, but you are allowed to believe that other people are lying. You are allowed to have negative opinions about your opponents. You have to be civil about it, no matter how uncivil you are actually feeling, but this was borderline.

I did not mod @HighResolutionSleep right away because I kind of wanted another mod who hadn't already intervened in this thread to make the call. But three days later it's still sitting in the queue with six reports and a controversial vote count so someone had to say something, or just dismiss it, and well, I wanted to say something because I agree that "Everyone who disagrees with me is a liar" is not good discourse. So don't do that. Also, don't tell someone off with a "Fuck you" because they are not engaging in good discourse. ESH.