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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Peer Review: Feedback on the new D&D.
 
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30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006

Best Friends posted:

The cycle of China thread discussions often is:

1) China is uniquely bad for doing this thing
2) that thing is not unique and in an international context not even unusual
3) mods, please ban all this whataboutism

To be fair, step 2 ends up being a long drawn out argument and then someone walks in and goes "why the gently caress is every post on this page about whether America suppressed Fred Hamptons free speech by murdering him?"

It's reasonable to not want that to happen in the China thread, but it also seems unavoidable as long as there's a crowd of people badly overextending themselves to declare China the Most Evil Country and doggedly refusing to admit it.

* # ¿ Jan 30, 2022 13:02
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# ¿ May 20, 2024 23:38
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30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006

Alchenar posted:

My observation on the Chinathread is that the situation in Xinjiang only actually comes up when someone decides to do a driveby 'nothing happened you can't prove anything happened' post, and that seems to happen suspiciously around the time when someone (usually Ronya) has just done a high-quality post on some new analysis or policy trend. The result is that the thread gets sucked back into a 3-4 page groundhog day recital of the same ground until a few sixer's get handed out, the interesting post gets lost and the interesting poster gets a bit less willing to post.

To take that observation to the wider forum isse: 'We don't moderate positions' might be a thing, but I think the best and longest running threads on the forums have been the ones which have been willing to constructively enforce a policy of 'we've had this discussion and unless you have something new to say, shut up and go away'. There's a big difference between enforcing groupthink and having threads stuck in an endless cycle of white noise.

If your feeling is that xinjiang is only used by bad-faith china-lovers to rile people up, then perhaps a no-discussing-xinjiang policy would be fruitful for the thread, given that the topic has certainly been done to death. I suspect that many people would be upset about that, and it would not be the people you seem to suspect.

* # ¿ Jan 31, 2022 02:13
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30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006
 I think if you want to cut down on the whataboutism in the US threads, you should probably cut down on the number of people who respond to posts going "the US oppresses people like THIS and China oppresses people like THAT" with dog-brained takes like "the united states never systematically killed civil rights leaders". Like, obviously that's going to result in a US-focused derail.

* # ¿ Jan 31, 2022 18:13
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Peer Review: Feedback on the new D&D.