But far, far more importantly than either of them were their defenders/ apologists in media, both social and traditional, who were the real barrier to moving these candidates to better more popular positions that could have gotten them elected.
Squid dropped off the face of the world after moving to the UK. I think they had been terminally online and may have just cut it out cold turkey because they suddenly found themselves in a new environment and had real shit to do like, getting an actual job instead of commenting several hundred times a day.
Yeah so I'm a huge fan of the Intelligence Squared series. I think they do debate, excellently.
I highly recommend reviewing this old gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEI8CtuSKs, which I think is highly relevant today, which addresses the premise "Has Obama overstepped his congressional mandate?"
The way that this debate program works, is that an audience is polled, prior to observing the debate, with regards to the impression or conclusion of the thesis. So some audience members say "I agree, Obama has overstepped." some say "I disagree, Obama has not overstepped.". These data are recorded on a per audience member basis.
Once these data are recorded, the debate proceeds. Now I'm not so hung up on the Oxford debate structure (two teams, prime and secondary, minute based timed sections, etc). I think the way debate happens here is perfectly fine. But I think the scoring is really important.
Once the debate is concluded, the audience is polled again. The "winners" of the debate are not the team which has the highest raw score at the end of the debate, but whichever team has changed more minds.
Now I'm not interested in the structure of the debate as being important here, so much as, the registering of a prior opinion, and then the registering of a posterior opinion, as a part of the debate structure.
I'm imagining this as either a secondary web page where a debate can be "registered" and then a bot proceeds to become involved in that thread. Users can maybe use the spoiler tag to register their initial opinions (or maybe they need to go off site; clumsy, but simpler). I dont quite know how it would all connect together, but the way I'm imagining it is that its a separate server with, where a question gets "registered", which spawns a bot (which manages and monitors that specific thread and maintains polls from within the thread).
“influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community
I completely agree. I think that some elements of Lemmy are extremely destructive and toxic because of this. I think communities should be self governing, and that these little fiefdoms are deeply problematic. However, if I was going to develop a fediverse bot app for managing and scoring debates, I would most definitely need mod access to the community.
My thinking here is to hopefully prevent the de-evolution of debate into whatever garbage has become of the current state of TV "debate", where two people talk across one another, can't be moved and don't move each other, and then each team declares victory at the end.
Scoring based on the number of minds changed is the hallmark of a good debater.
I mean, most of the communities that are heavy handed in their moderation like this, are building themselves to becomes extreme echo chambers. Examples include c/world, c/politicalmemes. One of the worst betrayers of this was @flyingsquid who would regularly get into flame wars with people, then proceed to use their mod authority to ban them. And as much as people complain about people like @jordunlund, they are far, far better as a mod in not abusing their mod authority in this manner (although they have, and its been documented).
However, lemmy is small. And the reality is that the "kinds" of conversations that might happen only in one community are actually happening all over the place. The "conversation" happens wherever the conversation might be.
So instead of worrying to much about it getting unbanned from fiefdoms, you might consider starting your own communities, or taking the conversations you would imagine happening in banned communities elsewhere. The fact is, that the attention and people will follow you if you have good things to say.
Wait, I know that voice. Oh, God. The image of Dave Coulier’s face twisted in ecstasy as he moaned like Popeye flashed through my head, and I nearly crashed my car. I flipped a U-turn and headed back to return the movie.
Thanks. I didn't know that I didn't need to have that image in my mind. Now I do.
I mean duh. But so is Harris.
But far, far more importantly than either of them were their defenders/ apologists in media, both social and traditional, who were the real barrier to moving these candidates to better more popular positions that could have gotten them elected.