“When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” -Tim Snyder

For as much as I respect Snyder I don’t think that’s actually true. People fighting for our own freedom against the US government has been a very frequent feature of US history. But, something has definitely come when we reach that point, yes.

Honestly, I read it as kind of similar to Putin’s “outlandish lying on purpose to show dominance” strategy.

They are to someone’s face telling them that they’re so dumb that they think living wages aren’t as important as being able to buy a new game system and play their stupid games while they shovel burgers into their fat working-class faces. It’s negging as a way of emphasizing that they’ll never be capable or organized enough to play at the big people’s table, so go play your games, loser.

That’s how I read it. Maybe they think the people seeing this poster are dumb enough that they’ll think “You know, he’s right, I do want a new game system.” But I feel like it’s a deliberate insult to remind the underlings of their place. That’s how I read it.

“In the amount of time it takes to vote, you could play three games of pool. Three! Now dat’s fresh.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0OwIMsQ4_4

This was clearly where it’s going. I guess, if it’s on, it’s on. Probably better if it happens sooner before ICE staffs up, figures out what the fuck it’s doing when they’re snatching people other than asthmatic students, and starts getting accustomed to real resistance.

So, we’re far shy of “good” when it comes to her voting record, and there’s plenty of issues to be legitimately upset over.

Can you name two or three, without changing the subject and getting all aggressive and pivoting to some other argument instead?

(Not this vote, this is horseshit as I’ve explained elsewhere in the comments.)

We’re so cooked it’s not even funny.

We’ve been through worse than this. You’re not wrong, but also, this is not the end of the story, never has been.

You fucking morons

This is never going to die, is it

For the uninitiated: MTG’s amendment left intact the funding for offensive weapons, but cut the funding for defensive weapons for Israel. So there is literally no way AOC could win. Leaving aside the fact that it was a kooky MTG amendment that was never going to pass in the first place… If she voted for the amendment, then everyone who is currently screaming that she’s a fake leftist who supports genocide could say “See? SHE VOTED FOR KEEPING ISRAEL’S FUNDING INTACT, SHE SUPPORTS GENOCIDE!” Since she voted against it, they are currently screaming “See? SHE VOTED AGAINST DEFUNDING ISRAEL, SHE SUPPORTS GENOCIDE!”

It’s just more can’t-win, let’s-eat-the-leftest-person-because-we’re-super-leftist-I-promise horseshit.

Edit: Here’s AOC voting against funding for Israel, in bills that were actually non-Hobson’s-choice opportunities to vote against aid for Israel:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/biden-meets-with-aoc-in-wake-of-her-vote-against-military-aid-for-israel/

And her voting against the actual funding bill providing aid to Israel (both offensive and defensive): https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2025212

*Sweet Home

It also got people thinking in a different direction than “I agree with this” and “I disagree with this” as the main meaning of the vote.

At this point, I think most mainstream social media is corrupted enough by the dopamine loop that it’s fairly predictable that most of the comments would be taken over by it as well. Reddit comments used to be more informative than the article a lot of the time.

Think of all the stuff they are breathing…

I would have thought that that applied to the Uber wrongful death suit also, but at least one court decided that type of click-through terms were binding even though it was clearly a bunch of shit.

Although, it was overturned later because it’s a bunch of shit. But it was at least a debate.

https://evan.law/2021/05/18/murdered-uber-passengers-mom-can-keep-her-case-in-court-and-out-of-arbitration/

Does this actually work on people? Like do you genuinely think telling someone that they’re too dumb/ignorant to participate, that that is effective rhetoric that communicates with others?

Lol I mean being straight with you and responding factually to what you were saying, responding substantively and clarifying, definitely didn’t work. Oh well. Also, “cynical” at least in the original meaning doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Instead of demanding I do the mental labor of deciphering your (seemingly mutable) politics, and just lay out what you actually believe?

I spent a few messages doing that, even though you were pretty hostile with me out of the gate.

Sounds like you’re not into the idea of doing the homework in order to learn what you would need to in order to be able to continue the conversation and have it be productive. Like I said, I’m not real into continuing the conversation then. Best of luck to ye.

At least for the tool I was talking about, it wasn’t planning on banning anyone. I’ve been a moderator for a decently large collection of forums on Lemmy and I can’t even remember the last time I banned someone, although it did happen a handful of times months and months ago. The tool was planned as purely something to give input to the participants about elements of the other person’s point that they were getting carried away with their own stuff and not addressing.

No, I just know scripting

Supplies cannot meet the rising demands.

I love how everyone in your replies is all of a sudden an expert on hitmen and their parameters.

Yes, a few minutes alone in a room with someone is long enough to kill them and make it look like something else. I’m as qualified as anyone else here (I’ve even seen a YouTube interview with an ex-professional hit man, so probably more so), so I can just say that and it becomes so.

Yeah, generally having it read the conversation (I think as JSON, maybe in markdown for the first pass, I can’t remember, it’s a little tricky to get the comments into a format where it’ll reliably grasp the structure and who said what, but it’s doable) and then do its output as JSON, and then have those JSON pieces given as input to further stages, seems like it works pretty well. It falls apart if you try to do too much at once. If I remember right, the passes I wound up doing were:

• What are the core parts of each person’s argument?
• How directly is the other person responding to each core part in turn?
• Assign scores to each core part, based on how directly each user responded to it. If you responded to it, then you’re good, if you ignored it or just said your own thing, not-so-good, if you pretended it said something totally different so you could make a little tirade, then very bad.

And I think that was pretty much it. It can’t do all of that at once reliably, but it can do each piece pretty well and then pass the answers on to the next stage. Just what I’ve observed of political arguments on Lemmy, I think that would eliminate well over 50% of the bullshit though. There’s way too many people who are more excited about debunking some kind of strawman-concept they’ve got in their head, than they are with even understanding what the other person’s even saying. I feel like something like that would do a lot to counteract it.

The fly in the ointment is that people would have to consent to having their conversation judged by it, and I feel like there is probably quite a lot of overlap between the people who need it in order to have a productive interaction, and those who would never in a million years agree to have something like that involved in their interactions…

Well, not really any of the above. I’ve tried with some mild success to build a “troll detection” system, but it needs far more work. Also, in the months since my initial work on this matter, I’ve found some far better approaches and would want to implement them. So my old work isn’t reflective of the new direction I’m planning to take.

I’ve actually done a version of this and a couple of other various ideas about it. The current WIP idea works totally differently to what you are talking about, I actually got as far as making a community for it, but then abandoned the effort because I couldn’t figure out a way to deploy it that would be in any way productive.

I’m going to say it knowing ahead of time that roughly 100% of the people reading are going to think it’s a terrible idea: It is an LLM-based moderator that watches the conversation and can pick out bad faith types on conduct in the conversation. I actually 100% agree with you about political conversation online being almost exclusively a big waste of time (including because of the way moderation happens and people trying to deliberately distort the narrative). This was just my idea to try to help it.

The thing that led me to never do anything with it was that I didn’t feel like anyone would ever buy into it enough to even take part in a conversation where it was deployed (even assuming it worked passably well which is not proven). If you care about these issues also, though, would you like to try the experiment of having the whole conversation we’re having with it observing the conversation and weighing in? I would actually like to, I’d be fine with continuing with the questions you were asking and continuing this whole debate about moderation and its impact on Lemmy, in that context. Let me know.

I’m not stopping you from laying out your thing, you can still say it. I feel like it’ll probably just be a reiteration of what you already said, which is why I don’t really want to go back and forth about it, I got your point already and I felt like I said my thing in turn. But sure, go ahead.