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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I wish you'd include a link to the old Ukraine discussions, as it would be nice to go through and downgrade my opinion of certain forum posters' forecasting ability relative to the confidence they projected in Ukraine's impending doom.

This forum has a lot of pro-Russian (or anti-Western is probably a better term for them) posters who are smart enough not to go full "just 2 more weeks!!!" but who still fall for a lot of the pro-Russian propaganda overall. I vaguely recall a post involving a new Russian missile that would be a wunderwaffe.

As always, Ukraine could experience upsets at any time, but the likelihood of that at any given point is relatively low compared to just muddling along as usual.

You fell head over heels for the obvious fake Selzer poll despite being tell you otherwise. Have you downgraded your forecasting ability?

Excuse you, "obvious" fake? Not at all, it was just muddled in what it was picking up! I have that from the horse's mouth 😁

The Des Moines Register released a poll saying we were up, 47 to 44. Sheila, for one, didn’t believe it. “We’re not winning in Iowa,” she said. But since the polling firm, Selzer & Company, was one of the most reputable, she suspected it was picking up something positive for us: perhaps a shift in the votes of suburban women, or perhaps Republican women moving to our corner."

Harris, Kamala. 107 Days (p. 268). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.

I'm blocking Zeke since he mostly just posted ad hominems instead of actual arguments when responding to me. I can't see his comment. What does this have to do with Ukraine?

  • -14

Blocking is petty, and announcing you have blocked someone is extremely petty. If you want to know what someone you have blocked is saying about/to you, you need to unblock him or view the board without being logged in.

Blocking people certainly isn't petty if they consistently resort to ad hominems. Attacking the speaker rather than their arguments ought to result in a mod action unless there are exceptional circumstances IMO since it almost always degenerates to heat > light, but that's not really enforced here. I wish there was something like Twitter's mute functionality as that's what I'd prefer over full blocking, but if blocking is the only thing I have then that's what I'll use.

But you're right, I should probably have just ignored this. Fruit from a rotten tree.

but that's not really enforced here

Yes it is. We just don't always agree with you what constitutes an attack. Many people are maximally sensitive to anything said to them, and want maximum charity when interpreting anything said by them.

If you consider your behavior in posts like these to be fine, then I would not consider you to have a very good definition of what constitutes an ad hominem

Sometimes I think you just read posts, decide who's expressing the "conservative" (bad) position, and reflexively argue the opposite.

you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll

you are either being astoundingly clueless or just flat out disingenuous.

You have actually spouted a ton of bullshit

Transparent straw man. Stop this kind of disingenuous whining.

That selective edit is interesting. Here is the full context:

You know man, you get reported a lot and even the other mods have a hard time with you because a lot of people think you are and always have been a bad faith borderline troll who just says things to get under people's skin, without regard to truth or accuracy. And I have always leaned towards leniency, maybe because I'm a quokka and too willing to assume people actually believe the things they are saying and are sincere in their argumentation, even if they're really annoying. But I have frequently argued against banning you because it's too easy to find things you say that are moddable when most of the forum is trying to get you banned.

When you pull a stunt like that, literally chopping a piece out of a sentence to imply I said something quite different than what I did, it's hardly worth addressing the rest, but yes, I stand by everything I said in that post, and I have applied the same judgment to others. When you are arguing with someone, you are allowed to criticize, even harshly, the things they actually say.

Very bad form, and the way you slipped it in with the other quotes makes it clear that was calculated and intentional.