Ukraine vs Russia: Who has the moral high ground?

[Michigan Swampbuck]

I made many on topic posts, in fact I wrote more about the topic in that thread than anyone else (including you) by far. Sure, around page 6 the discussion went off topic a bit but that's not just on me, and we ended up bringing it back at your request.

Either way, you're behaving like a 12 year old. Grow up.

Well, sounds like I'm getting to you, good. You should see my 2-year act. just a couple more pages and I'll be through.

Why not report me to the mods?

[Ksihkehe]

Catch 22 I believe, until I get moderated at least.

I don't moderate for content unless it's illegal or spam, so don't expect to hear from me on it. I hadn't even clicked on this thread until late last night.

This OP is several paragraphs away from the minimal expectations most people have for a serious discussion on complex geopolitical issues. If they get to 8 pages on it they should send you a fruit basket or thank-you card.

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.

[TokenLiberal]

I don't moderate for content unless it's illegal or spam, so don't expect to hear from me on it. I hadn't even clicked on this thread until late last night.

This OP is several paragraphs away from the minimal expectations most people have for a serious discussion on complex geopolitical issues. If they get to 8 pages on it they should send you a fruit basket or thank-you card.

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.

So you think it's reasonable to rely solely on Russian state media when learning about the war?

[Michigan Swampbuck]

I must have been mistaken and apologize for believing you are a troll Token Liberal. I'll lay off now. But admittedly, you seemed to fit the bill to a tee with how you responded, at least to me.

Entirely my bad. The only excuse I have is that after I left ATS and joined other discussion boards, I was getting some raw treatment from real trolls. The mods, even the owner of one board, were no help. The smaller boards don't want to lose membership, I guess. I was testing this board as much as I was messing with you.

Continue, please, I will stop with my immature antics and let it go now. Besides, from my recent research into paid troll farms, the trolls get paid by the number of responses they get. So, better I restrain my posts if I really believe someone is a paid troll.

[TokenLiberal]

Thanks. I've dealt with my share of trolls. The way to recognize them imo is by how little effort they put into their posts, and by how much they seem to like personal attacks.

[Michigan Swampbuck]

Thanks. I've dealt with my share of trolls. The way to recognize them imo is by how little effort they put into their posts, and by how much they seem to like personal attacks.

This was mentioned in my recent research on the subject, at least about troll farms in third-world countries. I will no longer go off topic about this and continue to derail your thread. No need now, thanks.

[NobodySpecial268]

On the subject of morals . . .

This footage was taken by journalists on a train in Kiev.




--------------------------------------------

ETA: The footage shows Macron, Starmer, and Merz acting rather suspiciously. The video alleges that Merz hides a cocaine spoon, and Macron hides a 'baggie of white powder'.

Merz, by the way, was appointed chairman of BlackRock Germany in 2016. BlackRock itself is heavily investing in the reconstruction of Ukraine.

These are the people who are leaders of "the coalition of the willing"pumping money into Ukraine to continue the conflict when everyone else wants to end it, including Trump.

My own position is: One does not need to examine the high moral ground when the moral low grounds speak for itself.

[Ksihkehe]

So you think it's reasonable to rely solely on Russian state media when learning about the war?

Speaking as a member:

Thank you for your effort to prove my point about having nothing new to say, much appreciated.

Your ridiculous insinuation, which is a very deceptive misrepresentation of what I said, reveals more about you than it does about me. It would appear that, in your mind, anything that doesn't come from an EU statist bootlicker is Russian state media? That would literally be an implicit part of any logical process that concludes my statement was anywhere close to your ridiculous suggestion.

You frequently use these deceptive rhetorical devices. It's indicative of low character. The alternative is that you're ignorant of what it is you're doing and how wildly illogical your conclusion was. If you do know exactly what it is you're doing... you should just stop. While it may feel good in the moment to engage in histrionics, it's off-putting to others and isn't a healthy way for you to get attention.

Posts like this don't trigger any sort of emotion for me and I won't be baited into engaging with this irrelevant tangent of your OP topic. I will point out deceptive behavior when I see it though and I can elaborate more on the kinds of people that are routine users of those tactics.

Speaking purely as a moderator:

If you make a habit of posting meaningless, deceptive, and/or low effort drivel like this to bait people or be disruptive, I will eventually consider it spam and treat it accordingly. This just isn't a meaningful post, is very deceptive, and relies entirely on an emotional response to your accusation. If you don't understand why deception is wrong then you need lots of further nannying that I'm not going to give you. It's rather ironic that I need to say any of this in a thread where you're trying to establish the moral superiority of your political beliefs, is it not?

I must have been mistaken and apologize for believing you are a troll Token Liberal. I'll lay off now. But admittedly, you seemed to fit the bill to a tee with how you responded, at least to me.

Entirely my bad. The only excuse I have is that after I left ATS and joined other discussion boards, I was getting some raw treatment from real trolls. The mods, even the owner of one board, were no help. The smaller boards don't want to lose membership, I guess. I was testing this board as much as I was messing with you.

Continue, please, I will stop with my immature antics and let it go now. Besides, from my recent research into paid troll farms, the trolls get paid by the number of responses they get. So, better I restrain my posts if I really believe someone is a paid troll.

I don't think anyone expects or even wants this site to get super big, so keeping numbers up at the cost of allowing problem posters is definitely not on the agenda.

The premise is that adults can engage in rigorous discussion without being censored or nannied. Adults can choose where they post and who they reply to. If somebody is trolling then it is best practice not to give them attention, but there are plenty of people that delight in engaging with trolls. If there's back and forth, then I assume both parties are willingly engaging in the exchange. Nobody is forcing anyone to reply. In chit chat threads nobody really cares that much usually and they often range widely, but in the other forums the OP should be mindful of engaging with nonsense.

I perhaps didn't elaborate on my previous mention of spam enough. As I said at the bottom on the above reply, the kind of deceptive emotional bait they tried to use on me is just spam. If people respond to it and engage with it on its merits, then it's not really spam anymore... then they're having a conversation with a troll. The OP can decrease their chances of being mistaken for a troll by not using tactics that trolls use, but they have thus far refused to do so. That's on them.

If somebody is spamming your thread, or any thread, they will have their posts removed. If they keep doing it their account will be removed. I'm not a meter maid out looking for violations to cite people on though. There's a report button and I'm not going to be very tolerant of spam. Harassment, deception, baiting... those are not legitimate posts, they're spam, assuming nobody is feeding them replies. Off-topic can usually be handled politely by the OP and things can get moving in the right direction, but if it's persistent then it's spam.

If you were concerned that your serious discussion threads are open season for people to trash here, that will not be the case. If you feel it's happening, report it.

[TokenLiberal]

Speaking as a member:

Thank you for your effort to prove my point about having nothing new to say, much appreciated.

No one here is going to have anything new to say about this war. Are you going to pretend to have an actual original thought? I'd love to hear it then.

It has long been clear that the majority here doesn't care about what I have to say, so I'm not going to waste my time unless someone asks me an actual question. I posted the gist of my position before. As I said to MSB before, if you want me to explain something, just ask.

Your ridiculous insinuation, which is a very deceptive misrepresentation of what I said, reveals more about you than it does about me. It would appear that, in your mind, anything that doesn't come from an EU statist bootlicker is Russian state media? That would literally be an implicit part of any logical process that concludes my statement was anywhere close to your ridiculous suggestion.

You frequently use these deceptive rhetorical devices. It's indicative of low character. The alternative is that you're ignorant of what it is you're doing and how wildly illogical your conclusion was. If you do know exactly what it is you're doing... you should just stop. While it may feel good in the moment to engage in histrionics, it's off-putting to others and isn't a healthy way for you to get attention.

Posts like this don't trigger any sort of emotion for me and I won't be baited into engaging with this irrelevant tangent of your OP topic. I will point out deceptive behavior when I see it though and I can elaborate more on the kinds of people that are routine users of those tactics.

Speaking purely as a moderator:

If you make a habit of posting meaningless, deceptive, and/or low effort drivel like this to bait people or be disruptive, I will eventually consider it spam and treat it accordingly. This just isn't a meaningful post, is very deceptive, and relies entirely on an emotional response to your accusation. If you don't understand why deception is wrong then you need lots of further nannying that I'm not going to give you. It's rather ironic that I need to say any of this in a thread where you're trying to establish the moral superiority of your political beliefs, is it not?

It was a genuine question. Let me explain. You wrote

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.

The person who disagreed with me in this thread is the one who brought up Russian state media as their source, and then went on to justify his reliance on Russian state media as the source for learning about the war. By suggesting that my rejection of their sources is just "blind hatred" and therefore not reasonable, you were implicitly (rather, I inferred it) rejecting my position that relying solely on Russian state media is bad. See how I got there?

I know it's all suggestion and inference, that's why I asked you a question to clarify. Apparently, you don't think it's reasonable to rely solely on Russian state media. Great, we agree. I guess you weren't talking about me, then, when you made your point about "statist EU bootlickers" and their "stream of blind hatred for anyone that disagrees with [...]".

If you were talking about me, and your judgment of my character isn't based on the disagreement between me and NobodySpecial, then what is it based on? Where is this "blind hatred for anyone that disagrees", not relating to NobodySpecial? Where have I expressed it?

Not only have your posts been nothing but personal attacks, you even played your moderator card. Another pathetic display. If anyone is showing "blind hatred" here, it's you.

[Ksihkehe]

It was a genuine question. Let me explain.

There is no need to explain and you already got a genuine answer. I interpreted the question within the full context when I responded the first time.

The explanation is that you encumbered my statement with a bunch of political baggage in your head and then injected personal disagreements you had with others into a very simple statement I made.

Comments about sucking Putin's dick and all this baggage you're trying to heap on me are exactly why I'm not interested in what team WWIII have to say. I don't need all that political baggage and animus heaped on me, that's not mine to carry. I'm not a practice dummy to pin your enemy's face on and that's exactly how I feel you've engaged with everyone here. I'm happy to return that favor and I think you know exactly how it feels now, do you not? Didn't you feel every one of those barbs I threw at a bunch of groups? You sure seemed to. You felt that way because you thought that I was just heaping all these complaints on you. I don't actually know you though... and you don't know me... so how can any of that really be personal?

My position is very simple. I don't approve of any state dropping bombs on any civilians, ever. If you would you care to manipulate that into "so you think only Ukraine has bombed civilians" or "so you think Russia doesn't bomb civilians" then by all means, apply whatever proprietary mix of political baggage you must in your interpretation. I'm just not interesting in carrying that baggage, so there's no need to share it with me.

Not only have your posts been nothing but personal attacks, you even played your moderator card. Another pathetic display. If anyone is showing "blind hatred" here, it's you.

   

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 only know that you do things like get upset over meaningless banter and call people a dick sucker when you don't like their opinion. You lose focus on important things for unimportant reasons.

As for playing the moderator card, there is no real path to me winning there. If I warn you that this kind of thing will be removed as spam if people are not willing to engage with it and you persist in doing it, then I'm playing the moderator card and you're the victim. If I just delete it when it gets to the point of being spam, you're still going to be the victim. It's okay, I know that you'll be the victim and I'll be the villain in every story. I'm fine with that, but it doesn't really change the end of the story nor the disposition of its characters. This is your thread, spam away. I engaged with it, so obviously it doesn't even fit the criteria I laid out. I'm not interested in talking about whose bombs landing on children are more morally justified, but this tiresome moderation stuff is what I'm here for so I'm responding.

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.

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. You've been eager to focus on irrelevant political banter and get distracted by mean words. In this very thread I pointed out that this is not a good OP for a serious discussion and that has nothing to do with what side you want to promote propaganda for. Surveys and vague questions aren't going to get you what you want. You dropped a soapbox on the corner with this OP and you were waiting for a crowd to gather before you started preaching from it. It doesn't matter if you didn't understand what you were doing, I did... others will too. If you want to be perceived as a bad actor, these kinds of things will do a fine job of keeping up appearances.

I have no idea what you consider a personal attack here. True statements you don't like are not personal attacks. Did you look up what false axioms are and why you shouldn't use them? Did you look up what constitutes deceptive rhetorical techniques or what constitutes deception in rhetoric? Did you look up how to craft a premise that isn't so loose as to be easily falsified? Did you take a single thing I've provided you and run with it or was it all written off as personal attacks and disrespect? This is a serious question, not just theater. You didn't ask about any of them, but you also haven't stopped using them.

If you hadn't considered it, some of these things you're doing that you claim to not understand are actually quite disrespectful in the culture in which you've found yourself. I have provided you with plenty of things I fully expected you to find disrespectful and I did so willfully. Who has the higher moral ground? One that cares to understand the culture of another enough to know when's he's breaking with it, or one that doesn't care at all? I care enough to understand, but in spite of these specific things I've offered you to make learning easier for you... you don't seem to care. They're things that would benefit you beyond posting here for a couple hundred eyes, so it's up to you to act on it. It's out of my hands beyond offering you a path.

Nobody is forcing you to remain if you find it not to your liking. There are plenty of forums out there that have sufficient moderation that you will rarely be distracted by seeing things you find objectionable. You'll never really experience much authenticity under those conditions or be forced to face uncomfortable truths, but that's the price. It will be safe though and you'll never be meaningfully challenged on anything you find important because it's all one big slop pile. Your false axioms will be accepted, your weak rhetoric will never be argued against or derided, and you'll not grow or learn anything, but it won't be hard at all. It's all just a click away if that's what you want.

It's entirely up to you. If you sincerely think that you're unable to handle not letting your need to bait engagement from disinterested parties turn into spam, I guess this is a problem. I can't imagine that if you chose to that you couldn't simply learn about the kind of tactics in question and make an effort to avoid them, but I'm not you. I just know that the people here, at least the ones that are active, see through these kinds of things and will probably make your life difficult for using them if they bother responding to you at all. Many of them may not have a name for it, but they can smell bullshit when people start smearing it on the walls of a thread. It probably would have helped if you didn't choose a screen name that intentional puts a political target on your forehead, but I didn't choose it. You set the tone there.

If you're willing to make an effort to stop being disrespectful on our terms, then I think you'll find others more than happy to resume trying not being disrespectful on your terms. That doesn't mean you'll always like what people say and that doesn't mean that they'll always like your style of rhetoric, but it's a much easier gap to bridge when everyone makes an effort. Many people here have made an effort by simply not replying to you when you do these things, but several have given you flak in return. That's going to get out of hand very quickly, so it's best if you lean into the culture in which you're finding yourself or get off at the next exit.

You can either get past it all or you can't. I think the time you've spent being offended by things or feeling disrespected would have been much better spent by building the toolkit that I gave you the shopping list for and using it to throw it all back in my face. If you catch me sleeping and make me look a fool, good on you. Why not do it?

All of this time is the most respect I'm able to give anyone. Time, effort, and honesty, are all there is. My time and effort aren't limitless, but they're free while supplies last. I would quite literally help you make a thread better, actively and before you even post it, but you would need to accept that I know more about the audience than you do and you'd need to find a reason to believe that criticism of work product doesn't constitute a personal attack.

That's about all the bleeding heart honesty I've got in me for now and it's about as authentic as you're going to find from any moderator, on any open forum, anywhere in 2025. If you just want to play grab-ass with that kind of transparent rhetoric full of all your assumptions that's your choice, but there are much better ways to do things and they'll provide much better results. Don't expect many more walls of text trying to turn you against the dark side of rhetoric.