mozz @ mozz @mbin.grits.dev

And the voices. "Billy..."

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2 yr. ago

It seems to depend a great deal on what you think the likely outcome of that protest is, and if your imagined calculus puts the protest on the wrong side of some imaginary line, suddenly those protestors are 'useful idiots' at best or 'bad-actors' at worst.

Yes. You have grasped it.

If someone's protesting with the most likely result being better outcomes for the Palestinian people (because of useful pressure on the Democratic party, or even better some longer-term reform to our broken system that leaves these as the only two options), then I'm in favor of it.

If someone's protesting in such a way that the most likely result is Trump winning the election and making things 10 times worse for the Palestinians, then I'm against it.

I have no idea why that would be weird or surprising, but yes. There's a little bit of overlap between those two goals, and it's impossible to know the future or the impact of any particular action definitively, but a lot of real-world situations are messy. Them's the breaks.

I describe as "useful idiots" people who are falling for deliberate propaganda which is being deployed to turn them unconditionally against the Democrats, alongside a lot of objectively false criticism, producing only a vague level of improvement to the Democrats' behavior but a strong result of making it more likely that Trump will win, yes. If you're not doing that them I'm fine with you. And I have no idea, as I said, how many (if any) of the DNC protestors will fall into that category in practice. I just know how I categorize people based on the outcomes they're promoting, and I know I see people in that "useful idiot" category on Lemmy. I don't think you're one of them, for the record; that's why I laid out some of the specific accounts I'd describe as more specifically promoting propaganda as opposed to good activism and tried to be specific about it.

Hope this all is helpful; glad we could clear it up.

Lake City Quiet Pills

It's highly likely to be Adam Back.

According to you, a great many people protest simply to get Trump elected, right?

But when you treat them as a monolith, it's easy to complain that nothing you do can appease that group of crazies so they must not be acting in good-faith!

Let me try a different tactic: I'll just ask it as a question. Am I supportive of people protesting at the DNC, trying to get the Democrats to improve their policy on Israel by vocally demanding change, and withholding support unless they do?

I've given you the answer as to what my feeling on this is, several times.

Back when the internet was fun, there was a flash game where you could play as the different presidential nominees, and Howard Dean's special move was the "Dean Scream" where he would scream flipping back and forth from left to right, and all the enemies on screen would fall down. Top tier.

This kind of stuff is actually pretty common in lawsuits. You just throw everything at the wall, because sometimes something sticks. It looks heinous in the light of normal human behavior (and you can say they’re awful for not just settling the lawsuit and making the guy go through this), but once they’ve decided to fight it, you can’t really blame the lawyers for doing their jobs finding what they can to fight it with.

Because our media is shit

Biden really was visibly too old. But they’re also pretty good at ginning up issues literally out of nothing when they want to.

If there’s one thing that’s connected with success in a management role, it is blind cockeyed optimism combined with ignorance of the issues involved and a preference for simple one-sentence solutions. Literally never seen it go wrong, in government or war or business or anything else.

Hey Jill Stein, why is completely pulling out of NATO part of your otherwise almost 100% sensible progressive platform

JILL STEIN COME BACK

ALSO WHY IS IT #2 ON CORNEL WEST’S WISHLIST, that’s super incongruous in relation to literally everything else about him, do you happen to know anything about that

COME BACK

ANSWER ME

Dude this is genius

I am interested to see how it plays out but the idea of the instance admin being able to pierce the veil and investigate things that seem suspect (and being responsible for their instance not housing a ton of spam accounts just as now) seems like a perfect balance at first reading

Edit: Hahaha now I know Rimu’s alter ego because he upvoted me. Gotcha!

Do you seriously think I am so retarded that I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?

FTFE

And the answer of course is yes

It is different when real imminent harm to real organisms in the actual real world is involved

If someone is posting that crystals will cure your cancer, or you can feed your baby honey to build its immune system, or vegan cat food is safe, it is a good admin’s job to curtail your free speech rights unless you can demonstrate pretty convincingly that you are not the wrong one (with more than “I KNOW bro, I’m vegan, so that means I’m right and stfu”).

And doubly, triply, so if you are actively censoring people who are trying to debunk your misinformation through exercise of their own free speech.

Honestly, 'actually leading to x' is effectively meaningless. Who the fuck knows if something "actually leads" to something?

This is totally weird to me. Why would you possibly advocate for any particular course of action, except in terms of what it’s likely to accomplish?

What else would lead you to what you’re deciding to do? Vibes? Allegiance to the group? I’m just lost. I mean of course it’s impossible to know for sure what the outcome will be, but you can at least make an educated guess.

Why else would you do a protest, unless you were aiming to impact the future? That is a serious question.

I don't think anyone here would defend sharing outright false information. But that isn't the only complaint you've had about Ozma; you've complained that they only post bad things about democrats, not just that some of them are incorrect

Hm. So, I just looked over a bunch of Ozma’s recent history and it honestly looks fine. Maybe it’s a little dishonest to characterize one of the main architects of the IRA and the Paris Agreement as “former alum of Blackrock” as if that’s the most relevant thing about him. But I mean basically it’s fine and that’s the only story I have much of any complaint about.

I think most of my complaint about ozma is historical at this point. Back in the day he would do stuff like say Biden betrayed his voters on marijuana policy because he said he would do X Y and Z and then he didn’t. When I pointed out he had done X and Y and tried to do Z but failed, ozma would ignore it and post more memes about how Biden betrayed his voters on marijuana. That to me seems like it implies you don’t give a shit about X Y or Z, or pushing Biden to better marijuana policy, but you do want to try to get Trump elected. That’s weird and counterproductive. To me.

If there are massive palestinian protests in the DNC this week that constantly interrupt the proceedings, is that an example of a good or bad protest?

No idea. I’m not even plugged in enough to that culture to know. Probably it’ll be a good thing; anything that’s directly putting pressure on the Democrats and bringing public awareness to the issue will probably be a good thing, because those are two excellent things.

Like I said, I don’t know if there are any people who are doing protests at the DNC who think the answer is to unconditionally blow up support for the Democrats, imply that they caused inflation and they love what Netanyahu’s doing and are cheering him on, and so vote instead for Cornel West. I know they exist on Lemmy, and if they’re in Chicago too, then I would classify those people as useful idiots.

Does that help answer the question?

I'll answer your question with another question:

Dude, I am not asking that as any kind of “gotcha” question or anything. I want to know where you are coming from.

would you agree that supporting any amount of genocide is beyond indefensible? Hint: the answer should be fairly obvious and the question should feel incredibly condescending.

If it’s a choice between blowing up the earth and destroying India or something, and those are the only two possible options, then I would choose destroying India. That’s sort of the type of choice you have to make in modern American politics. If there was a way to lean on the lever to make the blow-up-India explosion smaller, I would definitely support doing that.

If someone was saying, blowing up India is SO BAD that it is indefensible, and so I want to aim a whole bunch of criticism at the blowing up India option (and in a way that seems only in the vaguest of senses to connect with leaning on the lever to make the explosion smaller and in practice seems more likely just to make more likely the blowing-up-earth option), that would alarm the fuck out of me and I would disagree with that person.

I mean doesn’t that make sense? If the alternative is no genocide, then supporting genocide is indefensible. If the alternative is a bigger genocide, then supporting genocide can be an “acceptable” (if you want to call it that) lesser evil. Putting pressure on to reduce the magnitude of the lesser genocide, while also advocating for it to be the lesser and not the greater genocide, sounds perfectly defensible. It sounds right to me.

Does mozz's behavior lead to better or worse policy from democrats? Does making excuses for their lack or response improve their policy on Gaza? No? Well fuck, looks like he's just another useful idiot, then.

I doubt anyone from the DNC is on Lemmy. I think the impact of anything I am saying, if any, will be on the voters.

That’s what makes it not make sense to me why shitting on Democrats on Lemmy is supposed to help any Palestinians. It seems more likely to get Trump elected, which will hurt them.

Yeah what the fuck

I actually came here (without reading the article! It is NYT it's not my fault) to say hey it would have been nice for you to have noticed this in like 1995 but I'll take it, it is still an unusual POV in Washington and that is absolutely fueling a certain level of rebellion against the entire system as a whole

But if NYT is just trying to hijack populism to drive some new kind of bad faith conservative bullshit and say that Sanders and Warren need to get with this guy then as always fuck 'em

Quite right.

• Someone posted that a vegan diet is ok for cats
• Someone else posted that no the fuck it isn't
• !vegan mod removed the previous post
• Admin (presumably Rooki) restored the deleted comment and deleted comments that a vegan diet is ok for cats
• Mod flipped the polarity of the deletions back again, and banned Rooki
• Rooki unbanned themselves, flipped the polarity back again (so now it's only the anti-vegan-cat comments)

So I was wrong, I think. The !vegan mods did delete some of the debunking first, but it wasn't from Rooki. I think.

Also, it's still going on; the mods are as of a few hours ago still undeleting vegan-cat advocacy comments and banning people who disagree with them.

an instance admin (not a community moderator) stepped into a community (!vegan), removed a bunch of "disinformation" comments

Is this true? I thought Rooki just posted a counterpoint, not removed anything. Maybe I am wrong.

Edit: I am wrong. !vegan mods did initiate the comment-removal-war, but it wasn't comments of Rooki's that they were deleting.

100%

That's the funniest part to me. Rooki was extremely evenhanded about it.

They posted misinformation, Rooki left it up posted a counterpoint. They banned Rooki, Rooki didn't ban them in return, just restored the counterpoint and removed their ability to ban. At no point were any of their free speech rights interfered with in any (edit: any unreasonable) way, and now they're all butthurt that they are no longer able to censor the admins on their own instance, in service of promoting animal abuse.

Good luck guys. Like I say I would look at it as a learning experience about how the world works.

(Edit: I had my chronology wrong. Rooki wasn't the author of the initial vegan-cat-debunking comments that the !vegan mods deleted that sparked the whole thing off)

I didn’t think it needed to be spelled out, but I am not seriously suggesting doing this; I am making a particular satirical point.

If you think forcibly taking control of an organism and feeding it a diet which isn’t what it would prefer with its free will to be eating, and may not even be healthy for it, is so messed up that I shouldn’t even be joking about it, because contemplating it happening to you is horrifying, then yeah you kind of have a point and we can agree on that.

Yep

More common, I think, than someone saying “well I opened the door to it by trying to ban them first, it’s only fair that I have to find a new instance now, that was a valuable lesson and now I understand better how it probably felt on the receiving end of the bans I was happily handing out before”