What topic are you wanting to discuss?

Any and all common talking points.

Facts don’t actually convince the one you argue with outside of rare cases, but are usually useful for onlookers.

Yep. Especially online, where the people starting arguments are usually not open to other ideas. There are usually far more onlookers, many who can be engaged. But also, prepared answers are good for quick replies that don’t take time to write out and check, just for people to not end up reading it

outside of rare cases

Interestingly, I’ve seen at least three people confess to being former US-Libertarians who read the Manifesto of the Communist Party to better dunk on commies, only to realize Marx was making good points. Like you said, this kind of thing is rare, but if there are low-effort ways to find the curious ones, then might keep it as a tactic.

I think Lemmy in general is very against AI

I agree, although for a counter-case, db0 has involvement in community-driven image generation (Horde, some communities they host and banners they use).

My view isn’t as blanket as pro- or anti- “AI” (and I add quotes because I see that as a science-fiction term adapted into a marketing fantasy).

These technologies are powerful and there are legitimate, productive, pro-social uses of them (an obvious example is assisting in medical diagnosis). They are not inherently incompatible with social values, environmental progress, and the other problems associated with it - these technologies are tools powered by electricity and materials. But the way they are currently implemented, the economic concerns around marketing them, and the lack of broad education around them, are very very dangerous.

• The way regular people misunderstand and misuse the technology has already resulted in direct deaths, all kinds of mismanagement and mass sacking of workers. Mistrusting technology is no new issue, see ELIZA in the '60s for example, but this is so much more accessible, more misrepresented due to marketing campaigns and social media, and more powerful. Furthermore, a huge proportion of people don’t have the media literacy to instinctively doubt its output - and this was already a big enough issue with news media.

• Processing currently is largely done using non-renewable energy sources in large centralized data centers (consuming water, creating noise pollution, etc.) which has serious global and local environment issues.

• Most of our exposure to this technology as regular citizens is wasteful or actively harmful, such as propaganda/forgery, vapid industrialization of artistic aesthetics, unsolicited sexualization, scams and fraud attacks, automated bots, advertising and other ‘slop’, along with misguided attempts to eliminate workers from jobs which cannot be adequately delegated to these tools.

They fully support the Russian invasion

wut? Even lemmygrad.ml doesn’t - their support of the Russian Federation’s invasion has always been critical, not full. Just like their support for Hamas is critical - it’s extremely obvious that neither the capitalist-run RF nor the Islamist Hamas are groups they agree with at all.

(I am not a campist, I’m simply explaining the campist concept of “critical support”)

Just ban everything and everyone you don’t agree with.

They were specific about what they didn’t agree with: Authoritarianism.

And if they don’t want to tolerate guests from an instance that allows Zionism, then good. Any feddit.org members who think their admins’ permissiveness is tolerable are complicit in the promotion of Zionism, even if they aren’t intentionally complicit. Yes, hanging around with pro-genocide people should earn punishment, such as ostracization until they stop hanging around pro-genocide people. It’s a social media account on the Fediverse, switching isn’t difficult.

We did the same thing to Wolfballs, until their admin closed the instance because it was filled with literal neo-Nazis calling the admin a ‘race-traitor’. Tolerating every belief is utopian, pointless and self-destructive.

Thanks. Lots of the documentation was difficult to parse for a beginner so your explanation of those features is very helpful.

The site hasn’t been designed yet, so I can use whatever database is most appropriate. I’m only familiar with SQL and MongoDB so far, but this project shouldn’t be a complicated design so I’m open to alternatives.

I can definitely add a field for that, and I suppose I could use even a lightweight langauge model (or hypothetically even a static thesaurus dataset) to populate it automatically, allowing for manual overrides by a user in case it suggests something irrelevant.

Republicans come up with the most delightful fantasies… socialists running the country, queer people running the media, politicians calling to execute Trump. Just for a day, I’d love to live in their nightmare.

Somewhat relevant are the Subvertisers for London (as well as similar groups all over the world):

Another word for “marketing” or “advertisement” is Manipulation.

Don’t worry they’ve solved that, it’s called 🩷 𝐼𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 😎. That’s much less ominous! They just influence!

Cutest commission in the gallery

If you have a bit of time, please collect evidence of when that targeting and harassment happens. I’ve already seen a few accounts using low-quality /c/MoG posts to try and demonize .ml, lemmygrad and hexbear so it’s useful to have a post or posts to point to showing that it’s a harassment circlejerk, not the credible spectators they pretend to be.

Actual answer: be a professional penetration tester

Former jewel thief Larry Lawton robs Executive Cigar, Florida, skip the first 1:20 if you want

Remember to put it back after you’re done with it, so someone else can use it later.

That slop is trash on multiple levels, and looking at those votes I won’t be surprised if the whole sub is too, so I won’t even check.

That said, the existence of these confused groups is a reminder that hegemonic patriarchy alienates huge numbers of men as well, who are looking for answers and community. Sexism in our societies does stigmatize male and men victims of abuse, preys upon those who don’t meet masculine ideals (look at “mens help” grifters and products, akin to the women beauty industry). And if we fail to create and promote places for the disillusioned victims of patriarchy to learn and find community in, they might find a home in reactionary false-solutions, like the manosphere and trad cultures (even see “trad women” who glorify their own subservience to patriarchy) which are an easy pathway to recruitment by openly-fascist organizations.

You’re not an ultracapitalist, Harry.

@Civility@hexbear.net: Is singing like this civil? My friends need to know.

First things first, I do not defend nutomic’s ignorant transphobia. It’s unfortunate to see how legitimate complaints about capitalist exploitation of trans issues (rainbow capitalism) can be wrongfully misdirected into reactionary anti-trans victim-blaming. Their personal writings on trans issues are harmful.

And I don’t think Lemmy really is defined by the politics of those instances anymore. Their politics are largely optional, especially now that many other instances have grown. These days, I see more red-scare posters than tankies, who regularly inflame off-topic instance drama whenever they see a username from one of the instances.

The cm0002 compilation linked is a list of trolling strawman claims, many are either completely made up or shamelessly misframed. I’ll pick a few representative ones to talk about, obviously there’s too many to give proper attention to in one reply:

• The first one: [Dessalines:] “Slava Ukraini” is considered a “Fascist slogan”: Yes, this is a true claim from cm0002 and a fair position from Desallines to hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Ukraini#Second_World_War . Openly-fascist groups like Azov Battalion maintain a strong presence in Ukrainian nationalism, so the preservation of this slogan isn’t a historical oddity.

• ^^ We also see cm0002 list another post of a user being banned for saying “Slava Ukraini”, which cm0002 knows is considered by lemmy.ml staff as being a fascist slogan, but instead knowingly misframes the ban as “Showing support for Ukraine on .ml is worthy of a site ban”, which simply isn’t the case. fwiw, I do believe the two devs, in the busyness, do a terrible job of explaining their perspectives in ban messages, using quick messages like “orientalism” or “Rule 1” which will just puzzle someone who doesn’t understand how what they said was offensive.

• [Dessalines:] “The BBC is not a credible news source”: I don’t unconditionally agree with that as a general statement, but in the context of some political topics, this is a fair position. They’re a state-sponsored channel, and like all countries, the British state has biases too. Here is one case of MI5 state intervention into the BBC ongoing for over 50 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“Christmas_tree”_files .

• “[Davel:] Response to a valid report of “NK is actually good” as propaganda/misinfo”: The report is right there to read, it’s not claiming “misinfo”. Spreading political beliefs is not against the rules of that community or the instance, why should it be? The point of thinking about politics is to improve the world. cm0002 just assumes saying some basic positive things about countries they don’t like should be banned. That is a chauvinistic belief, and them posting about it this way is propaganda in itself. Yet we can assume someone reporting their post for propaganda would get a similarly dismissive reaction.

• [Cowbee:] "Propaganda is good actually”: - and then you click on the link and now it’s changed to the lesser strawman - “Propaganda can be good!”… cm0002 is, again, making false statements to fabricate an extreme position out of some pretty boring factual claims, and then points to them and says “Look at all this extremism!”. Just look at the comments on that post, even they’re saying Cowbee is right, and that’s a politically-motivated circlejerk in a circlejerk community. cm0002 is inventing and exaggerating to create drama, and in my experience, drama spreaders are much more effective at driving people away than unpopular communities.

As a side note, and I want to point out that that I’m commenting about media propaganda practices and not taking a side (I support the working class in both Ukraine and Russia, I would pop champagne if Putin and their friends were shot tonight, and the same goes for Russian mercenaries, the Azov fascists and the US vultures prolonging their proxy war at the expense of Ukrainian people), but it’s always puzzled me that the phrase “illegal invasion” caught on. What the hell does a “legal invasion” look like? Laws are written by the victor, there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking law. 🏴‍☠️💿

Same applies to all social networks and MS Windows, right?

The only social networks I willingly use are Fediverse instances, none I’m registered on are hosted in the US.

No device in my house runs Windows. Linux is an upgrade, I recommend it.

Things that rich people own manufacturing of?

As a socialist, I believe the working class must seize the means of production, and am doing my part in building that future for us all.

What about cars? They’re pretty much govt spyware now too.

Yes, I despise the ‘smart’ features shoved into cars, televisions, etc… I am also active in /c/fuckcars, I am critical of their overuse and rarely use one.

Now, none of this is necessary for us to recognize that giving the US control of important infrastructure is dangerous. But you did ask. And many governments are also moving away from US infrastructure, although more slowly.

As for Starlink, its common use is the result of laziness and neglect. Satellite internet is clearly not the cheapest, fastest or most efficient for most of its customers to get modern internet infrastructure. Governments should be reducing their citizens’ need for Starlink as a serious priority, by building internet infrastructure.

I’ll add to this that a common rationale for centrism is that significantly changing course is dangerous. However, this is obviously relative, with an implication that the status quo is not as dangerous. Lots of unnecessary everyday death and suffering is normalized, often ignored by a centrist, but any death and suffering caused in the process of fixing these problems is counted!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

I don’t believe the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are useful to describe people. We can, and should, aim to be more specific.

As Cowbee pointed out already, ‘centrism’ is a vague concept, especially since this site isn’t just people from the USA. Does it mean people who are apathetic about left-right politics? People who intentionally position themselves in the middle? People resistant to changing this terrible tragedy?

Even in my country, and my country is progressive compared to the USA, both the center-right and center-left parties (I’m using Wikipedia’s evaluation here because I object to the left-right political scale) are funneling wealth up to the rich, destroying our environment, compounding housing issues, supporting an ongoing genocide and scapegoating immigrants. Seeing either of these parties as acceptable is a serious issue, and is complicity in the crises these issues create.

That doesn’t mean I absolutely judge these people as ‘bad’, perhaps ignorant or misled but not bad, there are many sincere and caring ways through life that lead people to these harmful positions, but it’s a seriously harmful political position which we, as a society, are obligated to shift. And yes, apathy is a political position too, there is no ‘apolitical’: the status quo is just the ideology of the ruling class.