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I'm reading the instructions at the top of the page: "We ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War: ... Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."
I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
Ah, the old pivot from one persons "They are inveterate liars and it's smart and great, which I can attest to due to my decades of working in politics" to "You can't call them liars, that's against the rules!" I don't know what else to call them after this political cycle. Is there one single truthful thing they actually said?
Who is "they"?
You can call Nate Silver a liar. You can call (specific) Democratic politicians liars. You can call any particular organization or individual a liar (if you can back it up). You can argue that specific statements are lies or that people who claimed to believe something were lying. You cannot just say "Democrats are liars." Unless you think you can actually make a case that every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. If you really believe that, write your effortpost about how Every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. Otherwise, yes, culture warring with "Democrats are all liars" will get modded.
Of course if someone came in and said "Republicans are all Nazis," you'd expect that to be modded (and you know it would be). But then you'd continue to be pretend to be confused and indignant when "Democrats are all liars" gets modded.
LOL. "Liar" is on the same level as "Nazi". I mean I know Nazi has been thrown around so much it's been severely devalued, but I don't know it had fallen all the way to "Liar". Good to know, good to know.
Again, stop pretending to miss the point.
"Nazi" is not the same as "liar," and you know I do not think "Nazi" is the same as "liar," and you are not LOLing.
I took two very common generalizations we actually see, by way of illustrating the point. If I thought you honestly needed something with exact moral equivalence, I'd come up with more closely-matched pairs, like "Nazi/groomer" or "liar/misogynist" or whatever. But (1) this would be pointless, you'd just pedantically argue the equivalence; (2) it's not necessary, you didn't really miss the point.
You got the point.
Don't tell me I'm not LOLing. I just woke up my sick wife with my LOLing, and the dog too. I LOLed in a deep, throaty way, from deep in my gut. It was the LOL of a man deeply satisfied, and you can't take that away from me.
Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.
I wasn't about to mod you, and as much as you wish it were so, I don't get "butthurt" by your tantrums. That said, unless you are trying to get modded so you can feel more persecuted, editing in personal attacks makes it a lot harder to treat you as having (another) bad day.
Blowing up being called "silly" and getting laughed at into a "personal attack" is textbook butthurt. I don't make the rules.
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