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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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This most recent iran thread is a complete shitshow and I lost braincells reading it. Can the mods make a containment thread or something, I think it may have reached the point where it's necessary.

Edit: Just fuck off and give me a 6 month - 1 year ban or even permanently instead of this weaksauce bullshit. The below iran thread is seriously reddit and twitter tier on both sides and if this is what the mods think of as good high effort discussion then just do me a favor and show me the door. Otherwise I can't resist responding in kind.

The discussion has been fine so far. What you are noticing is that the war is contentious compared to most discussion here because while the sub has been broadly right-leaning and probably honestly strongly right wing since (at least) 2017, there is a lot of disagreement about this war. That’s not a bad thing, although it does create more work for the moderators.

I think there is an argument to be made that somewhat independently of the ideological drift, the discussion culture of the forum has degenerated (because moderators have all but stopped moderating on tone, and the community stopped caring). The ideological drift somewhat masked this, because there was simply not all that much disagreement (the few token left-wingers usually are either on the verge of meltdown or necessarily have pathologically low agreeableness so it's easy to dismiss bad interactions involving them as being their fault). Now we have a topic that splits the dominant camp, and thus throws the degraded discussion culture into relief.

I don’t think moderation has become much more lax. Regulars were always held to lower standards (justified in many ways) and now the board is pretty much all regulars, so the spectacular flameouts of the Reddit days are few and far between (the last was what, Hlynka?).

I still don't understand the flameout ban, although I totally get that he was going to have to be banned eventually. I miss having a different classical conservative on the board and maintain that implementing a smoke the whole pack rule would have been a better short term solution, sort of like how secure signals got the single issue posting rule.