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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Gonna be honest - I am approving this post despite severe misgivings.

  1. You are obviously a sockpuppet (account created today).
  2. The thesis of this post is essentially "We should ban all political parties outside the centrist Overton window in order to protect democracy." Almost certainly bait.
  3. The writing smells like AI. The style doesn't have obvious AI tells so possibly it's only AI-enhanced, but it still has the feel of something output by an LLM after careful prompting.

So why am I allowing a post that I am more than half-convinced is trolling?

  1. We don't want to summarily ban every new account, even though most of them nowadays are people spinning up backup alts.
  2. The post is interesting enough that I guess it's worth engaging on its merits, if anyone cares to.
  3. I am wary of becoming too paranoid about AI, because there will inevitably be false positives.

I am saying this so I can preregister my suspicions and see whether they are borne out, and also to give some transparency into why we let some posts get through and not others. (Quite often, someone appearing with a fresh-rolled account and a manifesto does not get out of the filter.)

"I'm going against my own best instincts and making the wrong mod decision because... (Excuses)".

Many regulars are indistinguishable from trolls, if their median post was their first they'd be filtered. I say there's nothing wrong with letting in some fresh troll blood.

Ok, but only if they're right-wing trolls.

I feel like this week has had a greater than usual number of weird, semi-hostile takes, but more than one have started subthreads that rewarded reading anyway. The initial posts were kind of rough to get through, and I didn’t have anything of value to add, but the other comments made it worth it.

But this sort of effort to milk the lolquokkas, or whatever – and I suspect it’s not the only one this week – poisons the well and erodes my willingness to endure my fellow weirdos’ off-the-wall rants, and that saddens me.

Thank you for all the yeoman’s modding, and for making the effort to make the call regardless. It’s appreciated.

This is 100% bait, and if he'd been a bit more subtle it would have been phenomenal bait too.

This was too obvious:

The first of these is the Third Way position of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, in Social Democrat fashion, which we already know can be trusted to uphold sensible economic and societal policy.

Which is a shame because these were excellent, and would have gotten me to reply

as hate speech is not free speech

Thankfully the need to have a permit in order to protest is already a well-established norm within many western countries

What makes you smell AI? I did a second read looking for that and the grammar/punctuation is too clapped to be AI. Unless they edited LLM output to make it worse on purpose.

This is 100% bait, and if he'd been a bit more subtle it would have been phenomenal bait too.

I'm getting old and jaded, because I can't tell what is supposed to be the difference between the bits that lacked subtlety, and the bits that were excellent.

a sensationalist media which amplifies any individual instances of so-called immigrant violence

I stopped here. That's the opposite of reality afaict and to see it baldly asserted pissed me off.

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