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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Hello. I am not Impassionata, though I tried writing like/as (and it's not clear to me that there's a distinction) Impassionata when Impassionata retired.

Now that Impassionata is back on rdrama (and in fine form, their documentation of the AI Incursion really has me thinking) I figure I might as well continue the experiment somewhere else. I intend to write in a civil and constructive manner on matters of politics relating to the present fascistic movement which exists under former president Trump.

If you don't like that and are ready to rules lawyer the mods upon me, then you and I are involved in a War of Words. Hit me with your best shot.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

60% of Americans don't want Trump. Journalisms have documented a Truth. The Cathedral is your Culture and you Desecrate it at your Peril.

If you do not believe that the movement under Trump has enough fascistic signals to call the movement fascist, it is your claim which is partisan and inflammatory.

That said, don't think I cannot provide evidence, though it will largely consist of pointing you to where you are.

Christian Fundamentalist Evangelicals believe a Reality TV Star Is God's Chosen One

Just because the left occasionally overstates its case around matters of race doesn't mean you should forget that religious people believe authoritarian lies. There's overt white supremacy and there's latent white supremacy. Many religious cultures, especially in the south, have a great deal of latent white supremacy within them that in times when overt white supremacy comes to the foreground becomes more and more blatant.

The harsh recognition of the xenophobic impulse is not assuaged by a photo op unless you are.

Shut down.

It's not right.

Distinction without a difference, difference without a distinction, difference and distinction.

Violence against journalists. Criticism of journalists. Politicians who call for violence against the media should be shot in Minecraft only. I am a pacifist this way. But they should be shot in Minecraft as a statement of their failure.

We should suspend the norms and have the world's biggest virtual execution. Let anyone be put forth to be virtually killed, and let the procession sweep along and virtual bullets emptied into a corpse.

If you are going to engage in your 20 minutes of hate and call it discourse, you should really mean it. In Minecraft.

This is a place that is clearly on the verge of losing its hold in Minecraft. "Cowabunga." Your appetite for violence is sickening and crass and it is only here that you dare utter it for you are a coward. I make that argument from fIrST prINciPlEs thus

  • If you meant it, you'd have thought it through for long enough to know not to say anything like that.

QED.

  • -10

What's happening in this thread? I see two messages that are filtered [with an instruction to kick mod asses to fix it @naraburns (I don't know if this is your bag but yours was the first mod's name I found and I can't remember how zorba capitalises his name)] but this post that I'm replying to seems to be a pretty searing indictment of the motte and... yourself? It says ImpassionaTwo is replying to ImpassionaTwo. But I have no idea what you (or whoever you were actually talking to) said because it's filtered.

Hah, fun.

Alright, lemme start at the beginning! This explanation will be surprisingly meaty.

We had this issue a while back where removed or deleted comments would remove all children as well. This unfortunately meant that a poster could headshot a conversation if they deleted their initial post; it also meant that if a poster was awful, and got banned, and edited their post to flame the mods, and we removed it, we'd be headshotting the conversation ourselves. We had a few completely reasonable complaints about this and so we finally fixed it a few days ago (which was a surprising amount of work!)

One of the things the code does is that it suppresses the entire tree, but only if everything in that tree is hidden. So if there's just a new comment, it gets filtered, nobody ever knows about it until we hit the "approve" button, everything is good. And if there's a small reply tree that gets deleted, well, it all gets deleted, it's gone, everything is, again, good.

But if the whole tree isn't hidden, even though a root comment is - if we have the "the user deleted a root comment" issue - we need to put something in the comment slot just so it's understandable what happened. We've got a few ways posts can be "hidden". Two of those are the expected user-deleted-it and mods-removed-it options, and those have reasonably understandable text messages. But the last one is our new-user filter! We couldn't come up with any sensible way that we'd end up approving a comment as a reply to the new-user filter without approving the comment itself, so that's why the message says to go pester the mods, because it's probably a mistake.

In this case, we've got a three-post chain by Impassionatwo. The first two comments are . . . bad, but they're bad in a "ugh this technically doesn't violate any rules but this is not going anywhere good" sense. The third comment - the one that's visible - is also bad, but it's at least bad in a way where it's merely a bad post. So we ended up approving the third and just leaving the other two filtered for now . . . and honestly, I didn't even realize it was a reply chain until now.

So anyway, that's the basic answer; a major behavioral change and a situation we didn't expect to ever arise, which, of course, immediately happened.

I've got some tinkering to do, because if this happened once it's probably going to happen again.

So anyway, that's the basic answer; a major behavioral change and a situation we didn't expect to ever arise, which, of course, immediately happened.

Lol, of course. It looks like it stopped the trolling though, so one for the win column.

Since you'd have to actually click through and read the thread to see, I think it's worth asking: @ZorbaTHut are you aware that permabanned users still get to participate in janny duty? Should probably be fixed if you want this system to work the way I assume you intended.

Hah. Honestly it's not much of a big deal; the entire point of the system is that it has its own code for figuring out who's reliable, and contributions have absolutely no impact if it's decided you aren't reliable.

I guess that explains why a bunch of people showed up in the absolute bottom of the reliability table. It's honestly impressive how far down they got.

Oh, and @Tyre_Inflator @magic9mushroom pings so you can see the above answer easily.

I saw this because the quokka asked for help, and am happy you're as confused as me.