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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI,

There's a really morbid joke here, because on one hand, yes, we have very specific test cases on this very specific hypothetical, and back in 2013 I had some sympathy for the state's concern even if some of the actual actions were clearly overkill response to hyperbole. From Zorba's position, that's clearly the correct calculus...

For conservatives.

When an actual assassin got within inches of doing a Gallager to the then-Presidential Candidate and now-President, and someone started talking about aiming better next time, the fascist brownshirts didn't break down her door at midnight and the FBI or Secret Service weren't knocking on every message board she'd been to; she got fired from Home Depot and every progressive in the country started taking cancel culture seriously for three seconds before promptly finding an asshole they wanted to fire again. When a major political activist got shot in the throat, with audience members dancing in glee while he bled out on livestream, I gave you, specifically, a long list of people who weren't going to suffer after it, and not only did I manage to guess right in almost every case, it was only going to surprise you if they all turned out to be true. It's actually kinda impressive how direct and explicit the threats have to be before this FBI -- this administration's FBI -- is going after anyone.

And, of course, there's no FBI investigation after WhiningCoil's very specific example of Jay Jones saying worse than Corcoran said, when Jones sent his texts directly to one of his political enemies. Like, duh, obviously, that's not something that's even worse considering as possible.

That's not the joke. The real fun is that convention isn't limited to calls to assassinate political rivals. Indeed, there's a lot of other reads to WhiningCoil's position that aren't assassinating political rivals.

But we know that this rule applies to a wide variety of other matters -- whether it be advocacy of lethal force for the specific case of defending yourself from a man trying to beat your head in, or saying mean things about teacher's unions or school boards. There's a very specific post about a number of recents -- and about countless other prominent events -- that I will pointedly not make, here, because as you're very clearly saying, it's not allowed. Doesn't matter that isn't specific, hell, doesn't matter that it's advocacy of something that's legal.

What's the penalty for being late?

We know the state and its partisans are hypocrites. We try not to be hypocritical here.

It's still not clear to me what you and Whining want. To be allowed to openly talk about people who should be killed? To talk about when it's time to take up arms against the state?

This is a non-hypothetical question: how do you think our moderation policies are wrong, and how do you think we should correct them? Because from my POV (and as I mentioned above, our "moderation policies" are literally plural, as the mods try to be consistent but obviously we have a lot of latitude to use our judgment case by case), we are just trying to enforce rules like "Don't make death threats" and "Don't talk about doing obviously illegal shit." But we didn't tell anyone they can't talk about resisting the state or non-compliance.

Whining is the one who came in indignant because @self_made_human moderated @remzem for a shitty post. smh's reasoning was not even that remzem was advocating violence! He got modded for boo outgrouping. (The fact that @remzem has a long history of shitty edgelord posts worked against him.) So it looks kind of like Whining got triggered by a post that expressed sentiments he agreed with and thinks he might get modded for, and what do you want us to do about it?