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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Ah, the old pivot from one persons "They are inveterate liars and it's smart and great, which I can attest to due to my decades of working in politics" to "You can't call them liars, that's against the rules!" I don't know what else to call them after this political cycle. Is there one single truthful thing they actually said?

Who is "they"?

You can call Nate Silver a liar. You can call (specific) Democratic politicians liars. You can call any particular organization or individual a liar (if you can back it up). You can argue that specific statements are lies or that people who claimed to believe something were lying. You cannot just say "Democrats are liars." Unless you think you can actually make a case that every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. If you really believe that, write your effortpost about how Every. Single. Democrat. Is a liar. Otherwise, yes, culture warring with "Democrats are all liars" will get modded.

Of course if someone came in and said "Republicans are all Nazis," you'd expect that to be modded (and you know it would be). But then you'd continue to be pretend to be confused and indignant when "Democrats are all liars" gets modded.

Who is "they"?

More seriously? The entire apparatus around Joe Biden that hid his dementia. Here is an article from 6 months ago, after the debate. It described how years before that his dementia was obvious to everyone who worked around him. There was an anecdote about how when they were trying to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, he met with congressional democrats for the last time to try to whip votes. He was so obviously demented, Nancy Pelosi had to excuse him and try to make his comments make some sort of sense.

They all lied All of them. Every single one of them, to a person, lied about Joe Biden's mental state for years. The entire party, the media handlers, every single person who had met with him and saw how demented he was. They are all liars.

There, done. It wasn't even that hard.

LOL. "Liar" is on the same level as "Nazi". I mean I know Nazi has been thrown around so much it's been severely devalued, but I don't know it had fallen all the way to "Liar". Good to know, good to know.

Again, stop pretending to miss the point.

"Nazi" is not the same as "liar," and you know I do not think "Nazi" is the same as "liar," and you are not LOLing.

I took two very common generalizations we actually see, by way of illustrating the point. If I thought you honestly needed something with exact moral equivalence, I'd come up with more closely-matched pairs, like "Nazi/groomer" or "liar/misogynist" or whatever. But (1) this would be pointless, you'd just pedantically argue the equivalence; (2) it's not necessary, you didn't really miss the point.

You got the point.

Don't tell me I'm not LOLing. I just woke up my sick wife with my LOLing, and the dog too. I LOLed in a deep, throaty way, from deep in my gut. It was the LOL of a man deeply satisfied, and you can't take that away from me.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

Edit; I mean, seriously. If you are about to mod in so silly and unserious a fashion, so much so you can already anticipate how I'll object (because it's true), but you plow on ahead anyways, and then you get all butthurt for your deserved mockery, just hang up your hat dude. You're cooked.

I wasn't about to mod you, and as much as you wish it were so, I don't get "butthurt" by your tantrums. That said, unless you are trying to get modded so you can feel more persecuted, editing in personal attacks makes it a lot harder to treat you as having (another) bad day.

Blowing up being called "silly" and getting laughed at into a "personal attack" is textbook butthurt. I don't make the rules.

Do you know what projection means?

It's when you very obviously and visibly engage in embarrassing behavior, and you try to salve your ego by accusing your interlocutor of doing what you are doing.

You are blowing up. You are being silly. You are butthurt.

I am pointing this out, not because I take pleasure in "No you"s, but because I am responding to you as a courtesy. Such courtesies, trying to explain to someone why they are going off the rails, are almost always a mistake, and will certainly be a mistake in this case. But I do it because when you are not blowing up and throwing tantrums, I actually enjoy your posts.

So I still now and then waste my time trying to explain to you why certain posts get modded. Note that I had no intention of modding you in this thread and didn't threaten it, and then you had to start whining and trying to play schoolyard "I totally got you! I got you! I did I did admit it!" games, and still I am not modding you because no, I really don't look for chances to do so, I look for chances to not mod you, and the times you get modded are a fraction of the number of times people report you and ask us to mod you.

I know this is very quokka-like of me, I am engaging in good faith with someone who is engaging in bad faith, and my charity is wasted. Hope springs eternal, however, that you will learn, stop pretending not to understand the rules, and stop being modded so you can post more of the things I like and less of the things that make me sigh and ask the other mods, "How long this time?"

Well, that last part is a bit of a lie. Hope doesn't spring eternal. It's about gone.

You took a simple exchange that could have been instructive (or you could at least have either asked reasonable questions, or civilly disagreed), and instead here you are once again thumbing your nose and taunting like a little boy on the playground, almost as if you want to be modded. It reminds me of those videos of Karens freaking out and turning a misheard word into a fistfight.

You really don't have to be like this.

To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.

If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.