mozz @ mozz @mbin.grits.dev

And the voices. "Billy..."

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2 yr. ago

Yes, and instances have their own overriding sitewide rules. Some instances exist specifically for misinformation or the encouragement of reprehensible behavior, or at least advertise themselves as a safe space for it, and some don’t.

It’s also relevant that (edit: Rooki’s I was wrong) the community's first reaction was the kind of reasoned discussion that some people are now saying should be the answer (as opposed to this heavy handed censorship), and then only after (edit: Rooki’s) reasoned discussion was deleted and they were banned, did they shrug their shoulders and say well if just hitting the “fuck you” button is within bounds then I’ve got one of those buttons too.

I think it can be written down as a useful learning experience for the vegan club about how the world works, if they decide to learn from it.

You're fine with hurting democratic chances as long as, what, the alternative candidate is better than or equal-to the democrats when it comes to saving Palestinian lives? Doesn't this mean that you aren't fine with it in our current reality where our only options are Kamala and Trump? Or are you suggesting you'd be ok with it if there was a third-party candidate with a better policy?

I am fine with hurting Democratic chances as a side effect as part of a campaign which will produce better behavior from the Democrats. Sorry, I should have made that clear. I think there’s been a slight (pitifully slight) shift in the Democratic line on Gaza this year, and I think a lot of that is because of how much pro-Palestinian activism was creating real credible threats to them electorally. To me that is fine, that’s a good thing.

It would be great if our system supported a third option, but it doesn’t 😢. Not in this election. I think advocating for reform of the system in the future, and pushing for more humanity from the Democrats, is the best we can do for now.

Anything which actually goes as far as leading to Trump getting elected for real will be an unmitigated catastrophe for the Palestinians (even relative to their existing level of catastrophe which is already hell on earth). I think they might literally all be dead or pushed into Egypt by the end of a Trump term. (They might be at the end of a Harris term, too, but it’s at least less likely).

When a protest gets big enough to present a genuine threat to the Democratic electoral machine, suddenly it's the protestors fault for, what, successfully raising the issue and pressuring the democrats?

No. I don’t know how many times I need to keep explaining that this is not what I am saying, or why you keep not listening to me when I do. Do it one more time and I will report you for strawmanning and see if the mods feel that that represents approaching the conversation in bad faith, and either way just end my side of the conversation.

If a substantial portion of the electorate is turned off by their stance on an issue being protested, it's not fault of the protestors, it is the thing being protested that's doing the damage.

It is highly relevant whether the thing being protested is actually happening.

So e.g. when the uncommitted voters punish the Democrats for their support of Israel, I’m in favor of that. When ozma makes something up about the Democrats that isn’t accurate, which only hurts their chances but doesn’t do anything productive for anyone except Trump, I’m against that.

Why do I keep having to explain this? This is such a weird conversation.

The Palestinian genocide and the US's complicity in it is happening in real-life objective terms. Protestors are simply pointing out the US's continued roll in it and asking the democrats to put an end to it (quite peacefully i might add). Fuck, even simply making a definitive statement or commitment to it would be great, but they continue walking on egg-shells because they still value Israel as an ally more than they care about Israel committing war crimes.

100% agree

Your "calculus" is simply 'democrats have moved as much as they are willing, and any more protest will hurt their electoral odds, so let's top now'.

I feel like just typing again the same thing I have been typing will not be productive here

Let me try just pure pattern recognition

Is that what I am saying?

1. Yes
2. No

Pick one

don't compare those who disagree with you as 'abusers' (i keep giving you opportunity to amend your language here, but you don't seem like you want to)

No, I do not. I can take another stab at explaining it, but first let me ask something: Would you agree that Trump would be an even worse catastrophe for Palestinians (as well as many many other vulnerable people) than a second term of the existing Democratic status quo?

I think it’s funny that the vegan mods in question pivoted effortlessly from “this is our place, fuck you, you are banned, we’ll decide what is and isn’t allowed” to “halp halp they’re censoring me, what about my human rights, you can’t do this”

Yes

You’ve got to be joking

Hey, check it out! I was right in thinking that the studies indicating good outcomes for the pets were poorly structured.

We found that there has been limited scientific study on the impact of vegan diets on cat and dog health. In addition, the studies that have been conducted tended to employ small sample sizes, with study designs which are considered less reliable in evidence-based practice. Whilst there have been several survey studies with larger sample sizes, these types of studies can be subject to selection bias based on the disposition of the respondents towards alternative diets

There aren’t studies saying that it is dangerous for the pets, which is a little surprising to me. Long story short the jury’s still out. But IMO it is completely fine for the admins of an instance to come down firmly against potentially animal-abusive practices, just as they would against political misinformation or nonconsensual pornography or what have you, regardless of how much in favor of those things are the members of the community promoting it.

By getting Trump elected

... by hurting their reputation through protest.

Yes! You have grasped it.

I don’t give a shit inherently about the Democrats’ reputation. I’m fine with actions that may hurt them in the election, as long as they’re aligned with better prospects for the Palestinians. Actions that have a lot of risks on the “getting Trump elected” side and not a lot of benefits on the “getting better behavior from the Democrats” side, I’m not in favor of.

How can that possibly be confusing? I feel like I’ve restated it enough now. If you’re really determined not to pick it up, I will not keep repeating and trying to force you to, though.

I see the subtle accusation in this statement

It’s not all that subtle. It sounds to me like you’re part of a political monoculture as I described. Most people even in political discussions are not this obstinate about pretending that something they don’t personally agree with must therefore be some crazy thing that doesn’t make any sense, and spending most of your time talking with people who see it exactly like you do is one explanation for maybe how you got to be that way.

By getting Trump elected

I already explained it all… I mean it’s fine if you disagree with my calculus and think that what ozma is doing is the best way for good outcomes for Palestinians. I can disagree with that, and it is fine; it’s just talking. But it seems like because what I’m saying isn’t what you want to hear, you keep pretending that I am saying something different (saying that any criticism of Democrats is not allowed or etc), or like it’s too vague to make any sense, or etc etc.

People can have different points of view and still be both aiming for good things. It is possible. They can even talk to each other and understand the points of view without ever really coming to 100% agreement on details. It is actually more common than not; usually the only places where everyone sees it exactly the same way and anyone who disagrees is some wild enemy who’s trying to defeat all the progress, is in weird MAGA-like political monocultures.

your material concern over some forms of protest/activism is that it's going to "damage the reputation of people in the best position to do something positive".

Incorrect. My prime material concern is that these forms of protest/activism are much more likely to hurt Palestinians than to help them. I can’t believe that I need to explain this this many times.

If you persist in telling me that my own argument is something different than what it is, I am going to report you for strawmanning. Either start dealing with my argument as it actually is, or stop talking to me.

If anything, your standard would seem to suggest that the only form of protest is that which doesn't risk anything, at which point it becomes purely aesthetic.

So back when I was saying "I'm not real concerned about their actions 'hurting' the Democrats...". What do you think I meant with that whole explanation / that whole paragraph?

Don't worry, nations of the world and everyone involved even low level military people are always perfectly sensible

What's the worst that could happen

China is one hell of a lot more competent than Russia

I think the main saving grace is that whatever posturing individual people want to do, China has a good thing going on with trade with the West which no one involved on either side wants to fuck up.

The two big things I’m aware of are (a) firing Peter Robb on Biden’s very first day in office, and replacing him with a staff at the NLRB that was actual labor people (b) raising about 2 trillion dollars via increased corporate taxes and then spending about half of that on programs designed to create domestic manufacturing jobs

(Oh also the answer to what happened to working class wages since 2020 is they went up by 12%, inflation adjusted)

With the current way that ActivityPub works, this isn’t really possible. Every vote needs to be signed by some real user; if that changed such that anonymous votes were accepted then there’s nothing to stop any random person from adding 5 or 5,000 anonymous votes.

It’s not over until it’s over. It could still go terrifyingly wrong.

vote.org

Might I recommend the word "hamfistedly"? It's honestly a wonderful word to use about a lot of things that come out of the Trump operation.

Oh, yeah, at that point it'll be a scalability clusterfuck. No idea what the solution is. Maybe something with persistent caches run by third parties or something? That actually would be fine, since all the actions are signed with the private key of the actor, I think.

ActivityPub is not to me a real great designed protocol but it's whatever. Usually the key part for social networks is the "social" part of it; the protocol or the web site can be pure shite and if people like interacting with the other people there then it's fine. But yes, you are correct that beyond a certain point of scalability there are some dragons lurking that don't have obvious weak spots.

This is more what I was talking about

(You can find more like this at 538.)

I mean, I don't fully disagree with you that any number of polls like this aren't real representative of much. But, the point is that any time the voters were asked, they tended to prefer Harris as much as anyone else.

I actually fully agreed with everything you're saying until I saw how it worked out with Harris as the nominee and people's reaction to her. I'm sure the honeymoon won't last forever but it seems unlikely to me to see how that played out and then say "naw we should have done something different."

Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there

Yes. That's what I said. I'm actually not 100% sure about it; for all I know there's some way to get it, but AFAIK all the existing softwares don't publish votes "after the fact", only at the time to current subscribers. But then, of course, it's kind of a moot point because you can just grab it from any mbin instance's DB through the UI without needing to do anything special or any particular knowledge.

In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.

Not really. You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you're subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you're not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.

There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.

Tru dat. 100% agreed. It seems like there are all these people in this thread arguing that their votes need to be private. Their votes are not private, and will never be private, for as long as ActivityPub is what they're using. I can see some value, maybe, to making it slightly difficult to extract the information instead of just giving it for free to everyone, but holding onto the idea of your votes being private is a gateway to unhappiness and only unhappiness.

My objective standard is, what is going to help the Palestinians? And what is masquerading as that but (in large part) not going to help them but just going to risk a catastrophe for them that is continuation and widening of what's already their hell on earth?

That's not my personal feelings. I'm sure we disagree on what the outcome of different courses of action are, and that's fine, but that's why I am saying this and what my goals are in saying this. If what you're doing is the first thing then all good and I have no complaints about it.

I'm not getting into another effort posting disagreement with you.

Fair enough. You started talking to me, man. I was just talking about the convention. I'm gonna be giving criticism to people I think are making a mistake, just like you would give criticism to the Democrats or to me, if you think there's a mistake happening. All good from my side.

in support of a Gaza ceasefire

I mean, they're already "supporting" a ceasefire. They've been doing that. That's the issue, is Netanyahu is laughing their faces and telling them fuck your ceasefire, and they're not then escalating with him. But I don't think the issue blocking progress is just that they need to want a ceasefire very badly, and then that will solve the issue.