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Notes -
Your Quarterly Ukraine War check-in
Three and a half months ago, we checked in on the war in Ukraine. That post was itself a check in to follow up on dire predictions from the pro-Russia posters in fall of 2025 that the loss of Pokrovsk was heralding the collapse of Ukrainian front lines and encirclement of Ukrainian troops. Amusingly, @No_one went back and deleted all of their posts after the last check in, so I can only leave you with this:
I expected the Iran war to be a major tailwind for Russia (oil prices, sanctions relief, US distraction) but on the contrary, the western information space seems to argue that things will remain stalemated for the foreseeable future. Ukraine seems to be pumping out drones (is this all that matters now?), and has started hitting Russian oil refineries. People have been hyping up what seems to be a mostly symbolic bombing of Moscow. The map hasn't moved, supposedly Russian recruitment is down. The Russian spring offensive has been underway for several weeks and made no progress:
On the flip side, people write articles about how bad the Russian economy is, and then drop this line near the end:
I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has insight into the rhetoric on the Russian side or the pro-Russian perspective at the moment.
So - any new/modified predictions? We had @ABigGuy4U saying collapse in July-August (still a few months to go), @Lizzardspawn saying to look at the frequency of blackouts in Kiev (still unchanged at 6-8 hours a day afaict).
Well that is indeed amusing! I was looking forward to Mr. "Majestic Capeshit Arc" having to come up with excuses when his theories almost certainly failed to pan out. Unfortunately it seems his disappearance has more to do with getting modded by Amadan and deleting his posts out of spite or not wanting anyone to follow him to wherever he goes next or whatever. Amadan does a lot of uncontroversially decent modding, but also blatantly violates at least the spirit of the rules often himself, especially that "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary" bit. I've been more than a little skeptical of at least some of his modding decisions, so it's unfortunate to see No_one who should be here eating humble pie instead get taken out by something unrelated. Alas...
Ukraine is seeing a bit of a PR boom going their way right now, and as someone who's pro-Western I've been enjoying that a bit. But as anyone who's followed this war for long knows, that type of thing tends to happen in cycles. We're in a good cycle for Ukraine right now, but I wouldn't herald it as anything more than a temporary upswing. As always, Perun has probably the best take in that there's indeed some reasons for genuine optimism, but it's simultaneously not worth getting ahead of ourselves.
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:
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:
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.
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