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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Given that you seem to think highly of your own writing ability, I am really tempted to give you some writing advice, but that's not my role here and I doubt you'd appreciate it. That said:

@OliveTapenade seemed quite willing to wade into this petty back and forth with you, but you still have been warned before about being unnecessarily belligerent and engaging in namecalling, and you picked up a few reports, and this post in particular, while trying to hide some of the insults in a wall of text, is definitely full of them.

So let me be perfectly directly: stop doing this or you're going to get banned. If you think this warning is unfair, don't complain to me, I don't care. Ping any of the other mods (or send a modmail) and explain to them why you think my modding is capricious and unreasonable, and if they agree, they will remove the warning and "Ban next time" note I have attached to your log.

And in anticipation to your first objection, no, I am not going to mod @OliveTapenade. I do not judge his comments to be in violation of any rules. If you disagree, ping any of the other mods (or send a modmail) and explain to them why you think my modding is capricious and unreasonable, and if they agree, they will issue a warning to @OliveTapenade.

If you choose to take this opportunity to lash out at me, as you have in the past, be aware that while we usually cut slack to people angry at being modded, you are very low on slack right now.

Given that you seem to think highly of your own writing ability

I do, but I've never said that here, as nobody pays me enough (that is, anything) to write all that well here (nor have I received a single response from anyone at least very recently containing enough new and novel information to stimulate my thoughts enough to think I should communicate even better myself to hopefully receive more new and novel information back). (Though I do write well enough, and better than many/most here granting that they're also not getting paid, including many moderators.)

So let me be perfectly directly:

Thank you, writing-sensei. Can I have some more tips on writing?

while trying to hide some of the insults in a wall of text

Man, this is crazy. It's like living in bizarro world, where everything I say is interpreted in the exact opposite way as what I clearly communicated. I suppose you didn't read the "wall of text" enough to know that the "wall of text" is obviously the point, and whatever "insults" are present (and perhaps there are some, but you would probably say there are more than I would) are purely tangential.

Again, the mods here supposedly exist to moderate lacking charity, and yet you just accused me of writing a bunch of (in my opinion well considered (and in your opinion you would think that was my opinion if you were actually being charitable)) arguments just to try to... hide saying another user is kind of acting like a schoolmarm? I mean, I'm not hiding it. In my opinion which I grant can inherently only be proven to be my own subjective experience and not automatically reflective of anyone else's (hence the controversy), he pretty much is. (If "schoolmarm" is too spicy of an "insult" here then I guess I'll have to eat that ban.) As are you, but I know that's your gimmick around here and obviously what Zorba wants, so I give you somewhat of a pass. I don't see why anybody bothers backing you up without at least the status (kind of?) that goes along with it. I'm not even going to consider schoolmarming myself unless I get a red background name for my trouble.

So you just dismissed my whole post as "wall of text" with no value. That's charity? You're the paragon of charity here? Looking below, I see the character limit per post to be 500K. I used less than 10K characters of that according to my text editor's count. But it's a "wall of text"? Maybe Twitter would be more your speed?

The lack of enthusiasm for literacy from a moderator here is rather shocking. Isn't it... kind of your job here to read and interpret "walls of text"? I know you have a lot more posts than mine to look over, but it's not really such a "wall of text" for me.

Granted I'm already familiar with the content, but I just timed myself and it took me less than 90 seconds to reread all of it. Is it really that bad? Don't we all read actual books here too?

In any case, as I will momentarily post in a supremely civil reply to Mr. Olive, it seems I've just reached another classic barrier where the allegedly "open-minded" return to being the closed-minded again. We all have them, probably even me at some point. But I suppose mine are just further out than what this forum can accommodate. Oh well. I merely tried to provoke some thoughts and expand some perspectives about a niggling little dogma, but obviously this was not appreciated by the dogmatists. I will have to try another approach or another venue some other time. Thanks for writing in anyway. :)