PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

Posts

595

Comments

1,799

Joined

1 yr. ago

Moderating

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Maybe you could stay out of Canada, if you have no awareness of the BS people like you submit us to.

I know when I talk with Canadians about stuff like "Trump is a dope why is he doing this", they always start ranting about China and Russia and traitors and theft and hate. It's a perfectly normal thing to do, and I'm the weird one here. Truly.

I want to start asking you about the slrpnk admins again. Why did you want to involve yourself in standard fare Lemmy drama and why, the only time you got coherent and started trying to make some sense, was it on behalf of one of their strange moderation decisions? Why was that what motivated you to step out of low-effort-chaos land? As far as I can tell, almost literally every other thing you say is this type of schizophrenic nonsense. You'll start talking about electric vehicles and within one sentence you're yelling about the US proxy war on Russia and Mexican state sponsored terrorism and Yemen. But the slrpnk moderation drama was a super weird outlier, as minor as it was, and I'm still curious about why that was.

I was interested because it made sense, then a little bit confused about somehow bringing China into it, then I read “Russia” “ Traitorous lying filth” and so on and went back and read the username and it all clicked into place.

Never change buddy. I have no idea how you’ve kept this account going for this long but I’m planning to report this comment.

I’m not sure this is actually necessary. I found that a single post of a moderately-interesting community to !newcommunities@lemmy.world wound up federating my stuff to all the main instances instantly.

I get the concept, and maybe depending on the details of the network it might be needed (it might be a good approach on Mastodon for example, which has a much harder chicken-and-egg problem in terms of getting your stuff federated). I’m not sure it’s doing any active harm or anything. But at the same time I do feel like importing this kind of “not enough people are seeing my stuff how can I make sure as many people as possible see my stuff” tools over from the SEO marketer’s toolkit might be a bad habit or pattern to get into.

1. Put up genuinely interesting stuff on the community, at least 1-2 times per day so it has a little flow of activity.
2. Once there are a screen's full of posts or so, post the new community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca. People will see the thing and subscribe to it from everywhere (if they are interested) and it will get federated to most of the main servers.
3. As the activity continues, people may decide to post stuff of their own there, and other people will run across it either from the "local all" feed of your instance or from the "global all" feed somewhere else. They may subscribe to it, they may happen to see a cross-post from someplace they are subscribed to, but however it works out there will grow a steady flow of subscribers, if people are interested in it.

The sort of filtering aspect where not every new community will automatically get its posts thrown into every single person's feed every day, is a feature not a bug. The steps above are enough to get it popular if people are into it, but also limiting enough that it won't get publicized above its organic popularity level and start spamming everyone's feed.

strategically America absolutely stands to benefit economically, militarily, and food security wise from annexing Canada

I can absolutely completely agree with you there. I'm just saying that Trump doesn't give even the slightest little bit of a shit about any of those things.

When U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to annex Canada, he is, in many ways, eyeing the Ring of Fire. The wealth of chromite, copper, nickel, platinum, vanadium and gold in Northern Ontario are globally significant, part of the critical mineral wealth that, according to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, has Trump wanting to make Canada “the 51st state.”

I absolutely don’t think this is true. Trump does not value minerals any more than he values factories or values the military being strong and protected.

Mostly, I think he fantasizes about Canada being a state because he is The Weak Strongman:

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman

Somewhere in Canada, he knows that there are people outside his orbit who can treat with him on a somewhat vaguely level playing field, and that’s intolerable to him because he is too feeble to accomplish anything on a level playing field, and so he needs to co-opt them somehow so he can start to tear them down. I think that’s what he cares about, not minerals.

on the 50 communities here on lemmy he mods to silence discussion that doesn’t align with his views.

Who is he on Lemmy? I didn't know he was here too. Do you have some examples of silencing discussion that doesn't align with his views?

I'm aware of reports of him doing messed-up moderation on Reddit, which is sus. If it sounded like I was in his corner I am not. I'm just saying like you were that more clarity would be better.

Edit: There's also this and this

Yeah. The instant I read "racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views in a position of power" I strongly suspected that this is some bullshit.

IDK man. I've heard bad things about carrotcypher before, I have not looked into them one way or another. It's sort of dicey both ways: I'm paranoid enough to be wary of a moderator who seems right-wing or pro-corporate who seems to be abusing their position, and also paranoid enough to be wary of a sudden hue and cry that a particular moderator needs to be removed because they are "problematic" in poorly-specified ways.

Just taking a cursory look at it: Mike's defense of carrotcypher seems pretty credible. He looked at all carrotcypher's past moderation actions and decided that it all looked fine and explained why with details. The criticism seemed a little unhinged. The one link that I saw at a quick glance was a link to a single one-line reddit comment, saying that it called CNN propaganda when it didn't, and saying he favored deporting Mahmoud Khalil when he didn't.

Then there was a bunch of stuff like:

this is a wildly disgusting person that you welcome into your space. i know that as a trans woman i cannot trust any fosstodon user while knowing what kind of person you happily let on your staff, whether theyre acting on those beliefs or not. it's not safe for our mostly queer userbase to talk to your fascist-harboring userbase.

It would have been much easier to just link to some of the messed-up things, instead of asserting them and getting all upset and using the "I'm queer so don't you DARE argue with me or you will be a 'problematic' person too" card.

IDK, I'm not decided on carrotcypher specifically and he might be a big POS and I just haven't seen it yet. I have seen arguments that he removed particular reddit posts that there was no legitimate reason to remove. I just wish there was more light and less heat about why exactly he is a problem. Basing it on "this is stuff he removed that he shouldn't have, look, links" is way better, in my opinion, than just being loudly upset about it.

the idea that voting blue will bring the change you want

Yeah, this is the stupid I wanted to argue against. This isn't an either-or proposition. Voting blue is necessary to make sure we don't all get thrown into ICE-camps before the next election cycle. Reforming the party is necessary so that we don't all die of climate change, wage slavery, and corporate takeover. "The Dems" are not going to reform the party. We need to reform that party. There are important people like Bernie and AOC trying to do that, but they're outnumbered by the ghouls about 20-to-1. This type of "principled" stand to refuse to vote for anything blue until they get better on their own will do negative 0 percent to help accomplish that mission.

You could phrase it as "corrupted opposition," suggesting that they are complacent and addicted to campaign contributions, which would both be more accurate and also point the way to an actual solution, hellishly difficult as it might be.

These phrases like "captured opposition" and "ratchet theory" I think have more to do with encouraging people to do nothing at all (because they construct a model where everyone is deliberately lying and all change is hopeless), than they do with communicating any actual reality.

What the fuck are you on about?

The USSR imploded because it was a corrupt and violent kakistocracy

I don't know that the US had anything to do with the coup, but it didn't work anyway, and they were much more friendly with the anti-coup people than with the coup. I could be wrong but I thought it was by hard-liners who were opposed to Gorbachev's reforms and wanted to keep the USSR together back according to its old principles instead of liberal reforms.

Nobody sponsored ultranationalism in Russia except by accident. The IMF and BIll Clinton sponsored gangster capitalism, which took off like gangbusters and defined the gruesome arc of the next several decades of Russian government. It's one of the great sadnesses of the late 20th century, the promise of what could have been for the Soviet people in the wake of mostly peaceful anti-communist revolution simply getting replaced by more misery.

Fuck the nato. Fuck putin.

Lol

"I wish that she would stand stronger and throw rocks at the Republicans when she sees them in the hallways, and try to put ICE agents on trial for the many felonies they're committing. That would be helpful..."

What? Why? That's exactly how it works.

One thing I would add to all the good answers here: It stems from a lack of contact with real-world, messy, difficult environments.

Usually people who come into contact with harsh reality a lot in their daily life are pretty humble. They don't get stuck on one way of looking at things, they don't refuse to admit obvious good sense arguments. Even if they get to the point that they're super-qualified, they just kind of have common sense and are approachable. Mostly, not always. I think this is why people kind of fall in love with certain types of environments with a lot of challenge or "win or lose" aspect to them: Business, sports, law, war, esports, mountain climbing, whatever. It's like you get to prove yourself and all your bullshit against the harsh light of day, and a lot of times what you learn is that some genius theory wasn't really all that solid once it got exposed to the real world.

But then, a whole lot of first-world modern life isn't like that. You can just go around your entire life talking about economics or politics and just be wrong as hell and you never get to find out. So it's easy to be super-confident, and it's obviously a lot more comfortable to be always right about everything than it is to admit when someone's maybe successfully poking a hole in your genius.

Dude, Techdirt is gold. They're extremely sharp on issues of politics and law, they just do nerd stuff also.

Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of cops aren't happy about Trump pardoning everyone for assaulting the Capitol police, and violating everything they've been trained on how they need to do things in terms of "arresting" immigrants using ICE. She's in Wisconsin, so maybe you're right, but I still feel like her directly upholding the law using the position she has to tell bailiffs what to do would have been a better play. If they want to ignore direct orders from a judge, at least let's get that out there, and then we can figure out what to do at that point.

The truth is I'm just doing armchair analysis when I have no idea of the situation. That's how I see it though.

Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest.

Lady: You've got bailiffs. You've got the entire damn police force and courthouse staff at your disposal. Send the defendant into your quarters and tell him to lock the door, wait for ICE to come in the courtroom, raise your voice tell them to leave your courtroom, find them in contempt when they don't, and send them for three days. Tell the court staff to grab them. If they fight back, fuck it, game on, sounds good.

I'm glad she's trying to protect the rights of her defendant, and the agents who "arrested" her should clearly be in prison. She did good, no mistake. But I think she has a lot more leverage than she was acting with if she wants to decide to protect defendants. Trying to be sneaky about it is just going to feed into their narrative. There's a reason they cover their faces and try to snatch people quick and get out of the area. They know they're vulnerable. Feed into that.

Oh. Yeah, I wouldn't call those moderates anymore. Those are just nazis at this point. And yes there are way more of them then there should be.

Is that really so far off though?

Yes you fucking cretin

Notice that the one US president who actually has been building concentration camps and operating the Gestapo, shares with you a strong dislike of NATO.

I’m not sure I am hearing any of that anymore. Which moderates are you talking about?