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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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People say Amadan breaks the rules, but I haven't seen it? He seems to be pretty measured to me. Do you have examples?

I'm always sad to lose colorful posters here though. Sucks how few of the prolific folks seem to be able to regulate the heat in their posting.

This is the comment I keep coming back to as pretty clearly violating at least the spirit of "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". He includes several personal attacks including the following:

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

If stuff like this isn't against the rules, it should be.

Or when he's warned me of posting short comments. In this case he's justified since it's hard to tell if something is sarcasm on the internet. In my case it wasn't but it could be read as such, so I was fine with the warning. But then he does his own "ok bud" sneer comments which pretty clearly are sarcastic, and it's hard to read the situation as anything other than "rules for thee but not for me".

You can just read through some of his comments and it's not hard to find him being very aggressive like in this conversation:

You will not like getting into an IQ dick-measuring contest with me.

Are you aware that that there are numbers between 0 and 1? And other numbers besides?

Your hypothetical … is ridiculous and, of course, dishonest.

The problem with your farcical debate tactics is...

Do you actually know anything about Palestinians and Muslim culture besides what you have gleaned from the Internet about dogs and ‘honor culture’? No, you do not.

This was just one I found after scrolling on the front page of his profile. He's constantly getting into these hostile back-and-forths, so when I see No_one's profile has this banner: "Amadan is a power-tripping delusional idiot." It makes me think there might be an issue with how he was modded, although all his posts were deleted so I can't check.

I respond with great restraint to people with grudges taking swings at me. You are allowed to have a subjective opinion that is different from my subjective opinion, and I am allowed to assign the value I think is appropriate to your opinion. You are also allowed to message other mods if you want to discuss me or any other mod matters with them. I say this a lot, and I'm serious about it, but no one does this. Maybe because they think it won't do any good, and if the outcome they are hoping for is to see me removed as mod, they are probably correct that they aren't going to get what they want, but we mods really do have internal discussions about members, about reactions to moderation, and about our reactions to members. We do tell each other "Hey, I think you were out of line there" or "I need to back off where this person is concerned" or "If you are getting too worked up about this, maybe you should take a break."

As for No_one, he had one of the longest mod logs on the site. A string of abusive, sneering antagonistic comments with warning after warning and ban after ban, until we told him he was looking at a permaban. I was indeed the one who dropped the final permaban on him, but he was warned or banned by multiple mods at one time or another.

Yes, it is a shame that "interesting" posters flame out and get banned. When we tell them that if they keep doing something they will be banned, they should consider not doing that.

My issue with you isn't your actions as a moderator, it's your response style when you're acting as a normal user. I looked through a few pages of your comments here and all of your moderator actions were taken against posts that either clearly deserved, or were at least reasonably defensible. I'm pretty sure I've never gotten what felt like an unreasonable mod action from you either, even as I've gotten a few from other mods that were a bit iffy. I don't doubt that No_one probably got what he deserved.

But then I get warned for this while you're doing something very similar here and it feels like the traffic cops are speeding.

That's a small example and we could chalk it up to a one-off. My main issue is how often you devolve into making personal attacks when you're having a regular discussion with other people. I've seen you ban other people when they start swearing at each other -- which you should! But then you consistently get right up to that line with some of your posts doing so in practically every other paragraph (accusations of dishonesty, insults, mockery, sarcasm, etc). I'm sure you get a lot of unnecessary flak as a moderator and that can make you want to lash out, but as a moderator you should be held to a somewhat higher standard and not use that as an excuse.

Yes. I understand that you think what you think and you feel what you feel. Does it surprise you that I disagree on every particular? So be it.