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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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Let's take a closer to home example of self-organized play then: is the poster on theMotte who lashes out at the moderators and refuses to play by the rules more or less agentic than the poster who abides by the rules and advocates for their position?

TheMotte is actually a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, when I think about it. We respect those who demonstrate their worth, their skill and charisma, often if they are interested they end up as mods, they're in a position to change some of the rules if they want to enough. Those who lash out and can't handle the rules, they flame out, they don't have any impact.

The Motte equivalent of Artembares is someone who decides we suck and leaves (and then goes to whine about us on reddit). We can't actually keep people here who decide they don't want to play anymore.

Or if you want to compare Artembares to the guy who lashes out and gets banned - yes, he is being agentic and he's quite entitled to decide he doesn't want to follow the rules. And we're entitled to ban him.