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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I'm not a mod and I don't speak for them, I only speak for myself and my own opinions.

There obviously is an anti-woke consensus here, I don't see what point there is in denying that. That doesn't mean that wokes aren't welcome, it simply means they're not in the majority. The rules about neutrality and consensus building made more sense in the early days when this was all new and the ideological split was closer to even, but now we've gotten to the point where the regulars have been here for 10 years, and they all know each other's positions fairly well. Nitpicking someone about consensus building this late in the game seems a bit silly. As though every post in a 10+ year dialogue has to assume that we're starting from a totally clean blank slate.

I think it's good to still have the rule about consensus building on the books to deal with particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong..."), but I don't think it should be enforced that stringently.

particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong...")

I find OPs framing to be even more obnoxious than your quote because it buries the assumption of agreement until mid-post and never makes it explicit. So I was expecting to read a very different type of post, and was unhappy when I realized what was going on. At least when someone starts off "obviously we all know..." you know where they're coming from and can read/skip accordingly.

I would like to register profound disagreement here. We should absolutely not relax any rules because "everybody knows we all agree." Allowing consensus building will degrade the quality of commentary significantly.