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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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He's jerking our chain for sure. But also, this is a good post in terms of thoughtfulness and laying out an argument.

Intentionally provocative and well reasoned in equal measure. This is his best work in my opinion. If only the median troll put this much thought into his posts.

It is not so reasonable to declare lower class immigrants elects (the chutzpah!) to the dirty, lazy, good for nothing natives. I imagine this was for effect, which means it is effortful if intentionally provocative.

I did ask for a steelman for what I see as* the UK establishment position. This is far more culture warry than steelman-y. The most steelmanistic part is describing a need for migration, the rest of it is one half elitist scrutiny, one half deferential multiculturalism that I'm not sure anyone really holds as a true blue belief. Which could be read as satire if we did not believe the writer is attempting to rustle "our" jimmies. That's good writing even if unintentional.

This post is borderline too uncharitable/provocative. It is not exceptionally thoughtful, although I did report it as a based post. Which in my mind exists beyond an AAQC in another dimension. It's a different kind of post. Is it a shitpost? Yeah, kinda, but a tolerable and interesting one. One you get away with maybe a couple times a year if you're a prolific poster? I always appreciated lefty affirmative action in this space. I vote minor janny spanking, but I also do not deal with you weirdos all the time.

I vote minor janny spanking

I vote "make him smoke the whole pack". If he makes one of those "at least he started an interesting conversation" threads, he has to answer to every comment addressed to him, or get banned.

"to every commenter addressing him", maybe? Not being able to out-type the sum of 10 people trying to rebut you shouldn't be banworthy. But one reply to each of those 10 people is probably a fair requirement, and as a bonus it would create an incentive for the 10 to initially only post one comment with their best arguments, which would slightly reduce motte-and-baileying, troll feeding, and dogpiling.

Oh, that's potentially good discipline. Is the expectation that you have to give up the act and engage more candidly in replies? Otherwise you invite dedicated trolls and jannies try to prevent that.

Yeah, that's the idea, and that's the danger. Though the latter has a self-correcting mechanism in that non-rules-conforming responses lead to a ban anyway. Though yeah, it does lead to more work for the mods.

Dodging hard questions was my biggest issue with Hlynka so I'd like to see some sort of expectation in that regard.

I totally vote for a ‘smoke the whole pack’ rule for people like Hlynka, burdensome, etc.

I like this.

Not well reasoned, just somewhat well written. It relies heavily on the assumption that UK immigration policy is actually selective, and on average imports people of higher calibre than the natives, and furthermore that those who do not realize this are idiots.

So, the meat of the argument is just wrong, and the rest is just sneering. In terms of thoughtfulness and laying out an argument, it's not a good post.