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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Top level mod comment directed at multiple people.

First, @foreverlurker. I think you're a troll and after conferring with @ZorbaTHut, you are banned for repeatedly posting things that pattern match to "Bad faith sockpuppet who ignores warnings and repeatedly does the same thing as soon as the last ban ends."

Besides being trollish, it had the desired effects of a trollpost, which is to induce multiple people (including @FistfullOfCrows, @grognard, and @FarNearEverywhere) to post shitty responses and subresponses. I'd mod you all, but if anything my mod note would be something like "Stop taking the bait and letting a troll get you to play Let's You And Him Fight." So consider yourselves to have gotten a pass on this one, but consider not letting a troll jerk your strings next time.

And to everyone who's going to say "But it started an interesting discussion!" Yeah, and someone could (and has) start an interesting discussion with an unhinged unambiguously culture warring rant, but "Anything that gets people to talk" is not the criterion for a good post.

"Anything that gets people to talk" is not the criterion for a good post.

Aren't we missing out on a lot of interesting conversations as a result though? Banning forever is fine (OP is an undeniable bait post), but in general I think a lower effort-level for toplevel posts would be good. I think we'd have interesting discussion, at the time, over this or this or a dozen other things I've seen over the past month, but obviously I haven't made such posts.

I personally quite like the standard of "if you're going to bring up a controversial topic it should be because you personally care about and have a well-thought-out stance on the topic, and you are willing to either defend your stance or change your mind".

I don't think it even needs to rise to that level - I would settle for, "I have not considered this thoroughly, but I think this article makes an interesting, provocative point, and I'd like to engage the community on it" if it's actually in good faith. The well-thought-out stance part is optional, but honesty is required.

If you think the point is interesting or provocative, there's probably a reason you think that, and I think comments where the poster explains their interest and take are better.