It’s not up to a moderator to determine who is ‘wrong’ let alone ban someone for it.
that wasn’t the whole argument was it now? There’s turkey since the 50s, more since 2004, come on now
Turkey doesn’t border Russia.
Turkey bordered the USSR from 1951 to 1991 while in NATO
oh and I forgot Poland in 1999 again.
We have a lot of constructive back and forth on the forum, but we also have a repeating pattern where a single thread gets blown up when one poster comes in an drops some kind of “opposing view” and there is an explosion of people presenting all the counterarguments and then suddenly that thread is exclusively about that. It’s also a repeating pattern where these situations correspond to someone coming in an dropping some already thoroughly debunked, often conservative Fox News sourced, garbage talking points. We need a way to deal with that stuff because it impacts the quality of the forum. It think we’ve already gone round and round on this but I don’t think every idea is worthy of serious debate just because it popped into someone’s head or they saw it on Fox News. Are black people really inferior? Let’s debate it seriously!
The problem is not posters who post “opposing views”, even where those views are dumb, it’s the small group of posters who can’t let anything go, ever, and continue to yell at a single poster until they turn every thread into aids and we have to have endless containment threads or ban people with opposing views. And CaffeineNeeded and Wookie are two of the major offenders in this regard.
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BH was being an annoying poster mostly via his “style” not necessarily his content. He repeated the same points, posted the same video more than once, and did not really “engage” in discussion. While I imagine that there are alternatives to giving such a poster a short timeout, I think it was okay in this case.
BTW I don’t think catfacemeowmers is correct on his Sabo timeline, but that is secondary at this point.
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What should happen when somebody pops into the forum and drops a steaming Fox News or Russian propaganda turd into a thread? Do you have a solution other than yelling at them until the go away or containing them or banning them? This is a weird week to be advocating for appeasement policies!
I don’t disagree with your points about BH but I think banning someone is not the correct precedent.
I also think the specific criticisms you are levying on BH could almost perfectly be applied to your posts in the Crypto Thread.
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How should a poster with dumb views be addressed, if it is not to have several people disagree with him?
This is a falsehood. He substantively replied to several posters and did so in a calm and factual manner (despite sometimes being insulted). Yes, he linked the video a few times, but that’s not all he did, and he certainly didn’t ignore the arguments coming his way. I don’t necessarily agree with his arguments but they’re pretty standard realpolitik positions and they’re not remotely worthy of a ban
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Ban obv.
Ignore them, it’s really easy
You can say your piece without obsessively always needing to have the last word, which just perpetuates the endless back and forth between guys like churchill and guys like you and CN.
For example, just upthread, CN posted this:
But at least in what I was responding to, the argument was about Russia specifically, rather than the USSR:
But rather than continue to argue, I was like “you know what, nobody cares about this, I’ll drop it”. You and CN basically never do that, you go on and on and on as long as the other person continues to argue with you. If you’ve said your piece, you don’t need to continue to engage.
It’s bad enough when this is on subjects people actually know a lot about, but here we are banning BillHaywood for his opinion on Eastern European geopolitical strategy, a subject that none of us ITT right now, myself included, have better than a high school understanding of.
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This is the short version.
wait so if I respond to this ludicrous pedantry is that wrong?
It’s OK man you already got the last word here. You won!
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I stopped responding to Bill as soon as he posted that stupid video again, but it sure seems like a poor strategy to reprimand the people wanting to get the last word in against dumb posts rather than the person posting dumb shit who also has to get the last word in.
This, by the way, is the same thing he does seemingly every time he comes around in the political threads. I forget if the last time was here or on Exiled or on 2p2, but he comes around, posts some contrarian takes, gets a bunch of in depth good faith responses debating his claims, then more or less ignores them and posts the same contrarian takes and the same videos or whatever. Then he gets another round of substantive, but slightly more annoyed responses, then he does it again. Maybe now and then he substantively responds to stuff he has a comeback for, but he ignores the strongest arguments against his position that he cannot refute and doubles down on the original stuff. It’s extremely bad for the quality of discussion, and extremely annoying to those debating him. Four hours off for that seems like no big deal, maybe he posts better for it in the future.
I didn’t go back and look but I’m pretty sure he’s got a history of being a Putin/Russia apologist, too, regarding the election interference stuff.
Since this thread seems active - I have no idea what you guys are arguing about, nor do I really care.
I’d like to make a point though - the Ukraine thread is the first thread since I joined these forums in which I have not trolled. Perhaps that could clue you all in to the gravity of the situation.
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