also if anyone would like to debate the policy on banning "bad actors", this would also be a good place to discuss. I know typically this is discussed "closed door", but I'm trying something new...
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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if anyone would like to debate the policy on banning “bad actors”, this would also be a good place to discuss.
As someone who has been accused of being a bad actor, I have some thoughts.
People like me are the only reason the Democrats still have a chance in this election. People like me who said "Biden is a bad candidate and I will not vote for him" are the reason the Democrats switched to Harris, which has given them a shot in this election. Now, I was accused of being a bad actor for criticizing Biden. The "vote blue no matter who crowd" wanted to shut down criticism of Biden.
And now another thought: Harris is going to lose Michigan unless voters like me can push her into adopting a more pro-Palestinian position. (She might be experiencing a surge of popularity in Michigan now, but that will change over the coming months as Gaza continues to be an issue.) I don't know why Democrats need to be forced so much into adopting broadly popular positions, but they do.
When you shut down criticism of candidates, you are not helping the candidates, you are hurting the candidates. This Democrat urge to shut down criticism of their candidates is what hurt Hillary so much in 2016. It is not good. The way to respond to criticism of your candidate is to point out the good things about your candidate, not to viciously attack anyone who criticizes.
Hi. Why was my post linking to a story from The Morning Star removed?
Yay!
If you want to keep it global, then don't fall into the trap of banning or removing all content that goes against .
The world is big. There is strong propaganda. Silencing people doesn't help.
Hopefully this place grows well
Sure, but a callout-thread forum is the most toxic environment imaginable. A self-post politics forum is going to be struglling with toxicity from the get-go; it doesn't need any help with that.
People definitely shouldn't be silenced, but that's the joy of the fediverse: there's always other places to air your views.
Is the problem of biased mods censoring viewpoints they don't like always going to be a problem, especially wrt high-stakes topics like politics? You damn betcha. How best to deal with that? Honestly I don't know, but offtopic sniping from the sub next door doesn't seem productive. Should there be a bitch-about-the-mods forum per-server? Maybe. Are there better ideas? Doubtless. Come up with some, it's a real problem that really needs solving.
but offtopic sniping from the sub next door doesn't seem productive. Should there be a bitch-about-the-mods forum per-server?
If this is about the post I made (which OP calls “recent events”), I just want to say I wasn’t interested in discussing the mod, and indeed did not name the mod in question.
I was interested in discussing a wider problem that exists on Lemmy.world (including in this sublemmy) and in Western political discourse generally. That problem is a trend of conspiracy theories that Russia is behind everything, and accusing people being Russian agents for very little reason.
And I know that Russia does try to manipulate opinion and peddle disinformation, and I’m not denying that. But these claims are becoming ridiculous. Like that mod claiming that Russia single-handedly caused Brexit (and banning me for disagreeing).
And almost any US politician who isn’t a Democrat gets regularly accused of being a Russian asset.
A couple days ago, there was a comment in the World News sublemmy calling the Pope a Russian agent, and it was upvoted to +13. And it wasn’t a joke.
Yesterday I saw a guy called a troll and downvoted to -70 because people thought he had a negative opinion about Bernie (he did not). And I was downvoted to -10 for saying there was no reason to think he was a troll.
Obviously some awareness of the potential for foreign interference is good. But surely too much paranoia about foreign interference is detrimental to reasonable political discourse, isn’t it? And where can we draw the line?
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to discuss, and I’m disappointed that people have characterized my post as me complaining about a mod. I’m wondering if maybe people stopped reading after the first couple sentences.
It's true that the centre-right (the dems in the US, the labor party in Australia, etc) do use that tactic as a way of shutting down criticism.
Candidate: If elected, I will fully fund children's cancer research, and also promote puppy-stomping as a national sport.
Progressives: We're not voting for puppy-stomping, you sick bastard.
Centrists: Oh, so you want children to die of cancer, we see how it is; all this virtue-signalling about puppies is just a smokescreen so you can get your jollies over tiny child coffins.
But while that's absolutely something that needs to be addressed - I've been around forums since the freaking 90s, and callout threads have never, ever ended well, either for themselves or for the place they're posted in. They never have the effect you want, and borrowing far-right terms like 'derangement syndrome' doesn't help either.
If you come out swinging with a subject like 'c/politics is a lost cause' and a buch of hyperbolic-sounding statements - then whether or not they're true or justified, the whole thing ends up with big handwritten-sign energy, the province of karen neighbours and paranoid nutjobs.
And a community that rewards that kind of thing with attention rapidly turns into a toxic shithole of interpersonal drama and weird little cliques forming with their own little catch-phrases, and six months down the line it may as well be r/the_donald.
Perhaps it shouldn't happen, but I guarantee it always will.
If you want to talk about shitty wedge politics, your best hope is a top-down approach: start with broad principles, and let the discussion filter down to specifics naturally.
It's a difficult line to walk. On the one hand do you allow blatant propaganda for the sake of discussion? Or is it better to remove toxic content before it festers.
The former sounds best in theory, but in practice the later creates a better environment for discussion in my experience. /r/askhistorians was probably the best community on reddit because it was very clearly moderated for a purpose.
I don't think posts or discussions pushing narratives that are critical of the few democracies of the world, and lacking any criticism of actual dictatorships are made in good faith. Maybe the person truly believes the narrative, but there is no doubt that universally, dictatorships are much worse places to live for freedom of expression/speech.
See right there you are blind to your own propaganda and would like to censor things that are different.
So just another US centric pro-Us Democracy and Warmongering sub. Got it.
Yeah, I think I’ll just move to lemmygrad.
I don't think posts or discussions pushing narratives that are critical of the few democracies of the world, and lacking any criticism of actual dictatorships are made in good faith.
So I can’t criticize the actions of democratic Israel unless I also throw in a criticism of, say, North Korea. Otherwise, it would be clear that I am acting in bad faith.
Well, before I leave, I’ll just point out that North Korea is neither conducting nor funding a genocide, which is not something I can say about Israel or the United States of America.
You can criticize whoever you want. Israel and NK are both not friendly nations to human rights right now at the moment. But that being said you should balance criticism with something constructive as a suggestion.
It's easy to tear the world down, but hundred times harder to build it back up.
But that being said you should balance criticism with something constructive as a suggestion.
So if I say the United States is a racist genocidal state, I should balance it with a constructive suggestion like “The United States should stop being a racist genocidal state”.
Is that what you want?