Brood Parasitism in Leftist Politics
t3rmit3 @ t3rmit3 @beehaw.org Posts 38Comments 1,986Joined 2 yr. ago
t3rmit3 @ t3rmit3 @beehaw.org
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38
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1,986
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2 yr. ago
It's so frustrating to see so many comments doing exactly what the post is pointing out, either deriding games as a medium, or "gamers" as some monolithic group of disaffected young men.
Games are a medium, same as books, movies, or tv. They can convey any message, and yes, many games do have Progressive (or even Leftist, see Disco Elysium) themes. But unlike TV, books, and movies, where there is a constant stream of political interaction from both Left and Right wings' political apparatuses, there aren't really a lot of Leftist political entities attempting to reach young men via videogames.
Name one Left-wing gaming influencer apart from Hasanbi (who it should be pointed out, many Democrats tend to hate on). I can list off at least 3 different right-wing ones off the top of my head (JonTron, Asmongold, Dr Disrespect), and I don't inhabit those spaces, so I'm only going off the biggest names. And that's not even beginning to get into the gaming-adjacent Rightwing influencers who those gaming influencers direct their fans to.
It's a pipeline, and we don't have one on the Left.
I remember the first time AOC played Among Us, and it was a huge deal for us on the Left, because it was possibly the very first time we'd seen a Democratic politician actually engage with games publicly.
Gaming is literally the largest entertainment medium now by a large margin (yes, larger than movies and tv), but we don't see politicians putting out lists of games to play like they do books or movies. Instead, most times we see an article about a Democratic politician somewhere like Kotaku, it's often because they're trying to blame video games for something.
So instead we have largely ceded the gaming sphere (not the games themselves, but the areas of discussion around gaming) to the Right. They pull in disaffected young men, tell them women and 'wokies' are the reason for their problems, and then hand them off to overtly political folks who transform that general disaffection into right-wing political capital.
I think you're misunderstanding what "taking games seriously" means in this instance.
The Right takes the political power of games seriously. They understand that games can be tactically used as an access route to young men, to influence their politics. They know that it is just another medium like TV or movies or books, and don't eschew interacting with them for political purposes like Democrats traditionally have.
That's why it was such a big deal when AOC played Among Us (and later, her and Walz streaming various games). It was a politician on the Left actually 'deigning' to interact with young people in a platform that they inhabit, and not belittling it.
The closest equivalent person we have on the Left to people like JonTron or other YTers who mix Right-wing talking points with games to draw young men into their pipeline, is Hasan, and Democrats treat him like he's practically Ted Kaczynski in waiting.
But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay.
This is you directly asserting that people in this post are part of OP's supposed group. This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.
These are contradictory statements.
I was not calling for OP to call people out, I was pointing out that their choosing not to do so meant that there was no way to repudiate the assertions. If someone who fits your supposed 'pattern' proves they're not in fact a bot/ troll/ AI/ etc, you can just claim they clearly weren't who you were talking about. It's a set up for a No True Scotsman argument.
You use the standard straw man of “anyone who disagrees with you” being put in this category, but that is not at all what’s happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is what’s going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.
Which is all well and good to claim, except that both OP and you clearly think some of those people are in this thread, based on your own comments, and many of the people disagreeing with OP here, I haven't seen around much on BH, and none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes. That doesn't look to me like "a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving", it looks like you're absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.
This is not talking about an attack vector in the abstract. You and Philip directly asserted that users in this post are part of this group, and even went on a little self-congratulatory rabbit-hole trek deciding that they're probably AI as well.
There are examples, to be sure, but pointing them out or accusing them of working for anyone in particular would be counter-productive.
You already did that, the second you asserted that some people here in this thread are part of this group. Hiding behind, "oh, I'll say they're here in this thread, which means their usernames are here to see and speculate upon, but I won't explicitly name them in my comment, so I can pretend that this is only abstract discussion" is just being evasive.
I’m seeking to illustrate the behavioral pattern, the weakness that it exploits, and the damage it can do, which I expect to have much more efficacious results.
You're using terms like "behavioral pattern" to lend your post an air of scientific truth, but this is literally nothing more than rank aspersion. The list of behavior you laid out is rife with strawman positions and imprecise, improvable propositions.
How precisely do you define "Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left". "Most" is a vague, moving target. What qualifies as "dismantling... power possessed by the left"? That's an assertion of outcome, so are you asserting that you have some evidence tying posts here to a reduction in Leftist political power? Obviously not, but it's a useful claim to use for attacks since you're now working off a much worse impact than just political disagreement.
You haven't shown any damage, but you certainly seem happy to use the mere claim of damage and "abstract discussion", to call for direct exclusion or expulsion of people from Left spaces.
That's why this is a witch hunt, and not an appeal for moderation rule changes.
The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.
In any kind of public, widespread platform/ venue, I agree with you 100%. Discussing whether the US is a moral entity at its root is not something you do on CNN or even Facebook, because it is going to be weaponized by the Right to paint you as anti-US to the politically-disengaged Center, and also to justify their unconstitutional actions as being less harmful via whataboutism.
I don't think Beehaw- a small, intentionally Leftist space- is equivalent. No one here is going to say, "hmm, maybe Trump ignoring the constitution is the same as people discussing whether a document that first enshrined slavery and then sustained it in a carceral system, is capable of reformation. Makes sense." Nor is anyone outside this space reading or broadcasting it. And there does have to be space for free political discussion somewhere, or you've just abdicated free speech out of fear of politicization.
You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back … it’s not really to the left, it’s more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.
This presupposes that the form of democracy it will move "back" towards will be the same as where it was before all this. There is no reason to think that will be the case, and certainly major political events of the past in the US (Civil War, Civil Rights movement, WW2, 9/11, etc) have often included large constitutional shifts either through amendment or interpretation. This is certainly a major political event.
We could go on a tangent about whether political capital is real, and whether (if it is) we are capable of returning to where we were before even if we wanted, but suffice it to say that many people would likely disagree with the premise that we can ever perfectly revert to pre-2024 Election America. A lot of people (even in the Center) believed that our checks and balances under the Constitution would prevent a dictator. Now that we're seeing otherwise, I highly doubt most Democrat voters will ever again fully trust the Constitution to protect them, without serious amendment.
So discussing what those amendments might be, how that reform could work, or whether those protections are even possible to regain via the Constitution without e.g. giving congress or the judiciary enforcement abilities (or via some other means entirely), seems like a pretty important discussion for people to be having.
the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates
The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies (or did, I quit not too long ago) up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.
A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will "do analyses", and people will "make decisions", but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?
An AI saying, "I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?" isn't a real decision if the person answering can't verify or repudiate the analysis.
There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated claims being made in this thread, especially wrt what these supposed maga-bot/trolls all claim or do.
If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.
As it stands, however, making broad insinuations about the ill intentions of anyone who disagrees with you is not very Nice, and is certainly not Assuming Good Faith.
The mods here are very active, and very capable. We don't need people starting witch hunts here to "root out the fake Leftists", and based on OP and some others' reactions in this thread, that's clearly what's happening here.
Pretty damn big.
Not being able to name every expert in every field doesn't make you unintelligent.
"[in]capable of choosing" could either mean "at this time, without full facts", or it could mean "intrinsically". The former is fine, but any rhetoric that only our "betters" should be voting, whether that be measured by wealth, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, or anything else, is at best elitist, and at worst bigoted and authoritarian.
I don’t think that most people are capable of choosing who is well suited for a given task.
Just to clarify, do you mean that you just don't think most people are informed enough as to every person who is an expert in something, or are you meaning that people are not intelligent enough?
From the title, I thought the article was about Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series, aka Barsoom (1911 onwards). Calling those "kids' stuff" or implying that's how they were viewed feels pretty elitist all on its own; they were pulpy, sure, but still considered reading for adults. It feels kind of like the author wanted to concoct a reason to discount the much earlier sci-fi work(s) from having been "serious", so any consideration it was given (which at the time, was pretty significant) could be ignored in favor of handing Bradbury the credit.
But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.
Books are not required to address one's personal list of important themes to qualify as "serious".
he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.
No, he had continued in the footsteps of Burroughs and even moreso Wells. If you don't measure your own interests by the level of recognition that "intelligentsia" (i.e. critics who deride anything but the stuffiest non-scifi, non-fantasy fiction as "kids' stuff") give it, you'll have a much better reading experience.
but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,”
Yawn. This genre gatekeeping is neither useful nor enlightening. There are still plenty of stuffy, self-important critics today who dismiss sci-fi and fantasy as "kids' stuff", so it's not like Bradbury put those bad opinions to rest for sci-fi, just as Tolkien did not for fantasy. Chasing the approval of people who otherwise despise a genre should not be the goal for works of that genre.
Its not an empty panic if you actually have real reasons why its harmful.
Every panic has 'reasons' why something is harmful. Whether they are valid reasons, proportional reasons, or reasons that matter, is up for interpretation.
First you’d need laws in place that determine how the social media algorithms should work, then we can talk.
Yes, then we can talk about banning systems that remain harmful despite corporate influence being removed. You're still just arguing (by analogy) to ban kids from places where smoking adverts are until we fix the adverts.
companies ARE making it harmful, so it IS harmful
No, companies didn't make social media harmful, they made specific aspects of social media harmful. You need to actually approach this with nuance and precision if you want to fix the root cause.
That, and there are various other reasons why its harmful
Every reason that's been cited in studies for social media being harmful to kids (algorithmic steering towards harmful content, influencer impact on self-image in kids, etc) is a result of companies seeking profits by targeting kids. There are other harms as well, such as astroturfing campaigns, but those are non-unique to social media, and can't be protected against by banning it.
Let me ask you upfront, do you believe that children ideally should not have access to the internet apart from school purposes (even if you would not mandate a ban)?
This is the newest 'think of the children' panic.
Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It's not social media that's the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not "safety", it's damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids have.
We didn't solve smoking adverts for kids by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.
Let people who can’t afford housing run the country
They will never let that happen. There are more than enough rich kid millennials to fill congress a hundred times over.
We have to do this through shows of popular support, because apart from the few genuinely good people that manage to overcome the system to get elected, congresspersons are never going to as a whole be reflective of the average American.
This got me curious, so I started digging into their documentation. It looks like you can currently stand up the appview backend as a local dev environment, but making it actually run as an alternative instance doesn't appear to be possible (which is why no one is doing it).
There is only one instance, which is the company's, because the company has not released the server software. It's completely centralized.
That's not what the current PR lays out, and I'm not going to give them preemptive credit for future maybes. Right now they're just X v2.
Once they actually release the server software for self-hosting, i.e. once the app is actually at all even a little decentralized, and not just selling themselves on a feature that doesn't exist, we can see how much decentralization the trusted reviewers have.
Too unemployed, too uninterested.
Movie studios need to find some method to gauge interest in an idea before they spend tens of millions of dollars on it, not blame the people who never said they wanted it for not wanting it.
This neither centralizes nor decentralizes. It's exactly just as centralized as before (which, as they are one company, is total).
Whether Bluesky issues a checkmark, or whether Bluesky tells someone else that they are trusted (by Bluesky), and thus can also issue them, Bluesky is the one who is in control of checkmarks.
Unless Bsky sets up some kind of decentralized council that they don't control to manage this list, it's just a form of deputization , and deputies are all subordinate to the 'sheriff'.
Grants of revocable authority are not decentralization.
set of trusted authorities
Sounds like centralization to me. Who decides whether to vest authority in this group? Who selects the members of this group?
Unless there is some method for each host/ user to nominate members and it changes dynamically based on total votes at any given time, you've just permanently entrenched centralized authority in your (supposedly moving to) 'decentralized' app.
So now you've shifted from "you got them riled up", to "there's one specific person in these comments". Thank you for proving my point about moving targets.
And before you try to claim you were using 'them' in the singular, your next comment was "They all speak sort of similarly to each other, too.".
"There are people in this room who are bad" is quite similar to "there are people in this country..."
This is a red herring. OP is calling for people to exclude and block in order to box out political disagreements from being visible, not respond with attacking comments. I can't see your blocklist, so I can't see who you are 'attacking' in this way.
You've run this line with me before, and against others (including in this thread). What exactly that OP said did I misrepresent?