Ukraine vs Russia: Who has the moral high ground?

[TokenLiberal]

Your. Way. Is. Not. The. Only. Way.

I thought you were all about non-conformity here. Evidently I was wrong.

I know less about you than I do about Magic the Gathering and I only knew enough about that to amuse myself with a card generator.

I'm afraid it's a bit of a disaster:
- Planeswalkers have an initial power level, and abilities. This would make more sense as an artifact you can tap.
- You mean "this spell can't be countered".
- There's no mana cost.

In my opinion it would be unethical to simply remove your posts in the future without making an effort to inform you of what to expect and why, because you aren't just an ad spammer. I honestly never thought that we would have somebody here that doesn't understand that adding a bunch of ad lib from the boogieman in their head, relating it to personal disagreements from others, and then injecting it into a third party's very simple statement isn't how you make an effort to get serious engagement. It's bait. I didn't even say you can't do it... I just said it's transparent and when people stop wanting to play then you're going to need to dial it way back or you'll end up with posts deleted. These are simple statements of fact. People want to be engaged with in an authentic manner.

None of my posts have been spam. I engage with everyone here fully authentically. The fact that I disagree with you doesn't mean I'm inauthentic, a spammer, or a troll. I keep having to repeat that point because you are all so very unused to and uncomfortable with dissenters, you immediately assume there must be something wrong with them. I'm like an alien stepping out of its spacecraft and getting shot on sight because I'm different and scary. Your way is not the only way.

What bothers me is that I have given you probably a dozen incredibly valuable tips in several posts in different threads and you've chosen to ignore every one of them.

Tips so I can be more like you! No thanks. I like being open minded and actually engaging with people, rather than preaching to them.

You've been eager to focus on irrelevant political banter

Examples? What you consider to be "irrelevant political banter" I might consider an important topic.

In this very thread I pointed out that this is not a good OP for a serious discussion

And you're wrong. Discussions can and often do start from simple questions or simple statements. There's absolutely no reason why an OP would have to contain a thorough analysis of the topic. Take a trial. One side makes an OP saying "This guy's guilty". Then a (very serious) back and forth starts. 50 pages and a million words later there's a verdict.

Your way of starting a discussion is not the only way. In my experience, shorter OPs actually have a better chance at starting a discussion because people are more likely to give their own thoughts, after which they have a stake in the thread.

You can either get past it all or you can't.

Get past what? You're the one making a fuss.


By the way, if you're trying to sell to me that this...

I determined a couple years ago that there's not a single meaningful thing a statist EU bootlicker on the Internet has to say about Ukraine and Russia that wasn't already said within the first week of the invasion. It's just a been a stream of blind hatred for anyone that disagrees with their imaginary invasion of western Europe bullshit or brings up the CIA coup and years of Zelenskyy bombing his own citizens.

... was not directed at me, I'm sorry, but I'm not that gullible.

If you're trying to tell me that it's not a personal attack, but just a "statement of fact" then here's another one: You're closed-minded, arrogant, and confidently wrong.

[Michigan Swampbuck]

How one determines spam is important, but I believe that a technique known as "sliding" is occurring here. Spam is obviously one way to slide a topic off into the black hole down on page 99, but off-topic comments may be even better, as they seem to relate just because it comes up in the thread.

Consider if I had just now gotten involved with this thread. Unless I made my post after just reading the thread's opening post, I would have given up after less than three pages. Maybe what is happening isn't technically spam; but it is sliding the topic into oblivion just like spam would if unchecked.

[TokenLiberal]

I'm not personally opposed to threads veering off topic because the discussion just happened to go there. Usually I'm in favor of following the discussion wherever it leads. If it goes off topic in a healthy way, that just means the people involved were interested in exploring a different point and that's fine, imo.

It's a little annoying though when people deliberately avoid the actual topic and make the thread about something else entirely out of the blue, and unilaterally. Ironically, that's what our moderator has done here.