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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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@cake, I have removed this post. (Though something technical is up with thread removal right now, so we'll see if it sticks.)

There is nothing glaringly wrong with this post, except for the way in which it substantially increases my priors that you are engaged in some kind of trolling, baiting, or otherwise dishonest engagement. This is a tough thing to moderate for, because it can be very tricky to know when someone is engaging honestly. But there are ways to weaponize another person's charity, and there are ways to work within the letter of the law to violate the spirit of it. This is why we have the "egregiously obnoxious" rule, and it is a rule that, for example, encompasses single-issue posting.

What you've done here is write a response to another user, that would fit just fine in the thread you already started. But you made it a top-level post, basically the forum equivalent of a "thread bump." Why did you do this? The only reason I can think of, is to get more engagement on the issue. But you already started by copy-pasting a pretty bad essay, then doing just the bare minimum I required of you so you could re-post that essay, and then--even though you generated tons of responses--you barely replied to any of them in any really substantial way. And here you are, instead of replying to other users directly, "bumping" your apparent hobbyhorse.

When someone seems to be doing something sneaky once, we notice! When you do it three times in 24 hours, the fact that you're not overtly breaking specific letter-of-the-law rules is not enough to protect you.

Knock it off.