Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year’s $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan...
You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:...
Ok, fair enough, I was a little hasty with my response. Let me elaborate on what I meant.
Regarding your 3 point list for determining reasonable suspicion"
Reusing shill talking points
I want to thoroughly address this one, because there’s a good reason why shill talking points are talking points to begin with.
Shills primary objective is to sow distrust/chaos in a group, and a prerequisite for doing that effectively is to not be suspected of being a malicious agent. To that end, the talking points they use will always bear a resemblance to legitimate stances of the target group. Frequently they highlight a deep division in ideology or an inconsistency in the logic of the coalition, and they pound on that in order to drive a wedge.
There’s a very good reason why legitimate leftist agitation looks an awful lot like that - for the most part, leftist agitators also seek to drive a wedge within the coalition, but not to sow chaos. They do so in order weaken the centrist consensus and breed discontent with the status quo. It’s similar to what the civil rights leaders did: elevate the issue to such a volume that the people who consistently refuse to negotiate are forced to address it, and the medium through which that discontent is sown is the complacent moderate, who agrees in principle but has no reason to risk their own security to push for the change without disruption.
I get why this is one of three on your list, but you have to understand why this is too broad on its own: legitimate leftist agitation works and sounds much the same way as malicious agitation. What makes the difference between agitation that sows chaos and agitation that sows change is how moderates respond to the agitation. If agitation is effective for change, it will create just enough discomfort to spur action, but not so much that it breeds apathy, nihilism, and more complacency.
Using tactics like rampant strawmanning, just blandly pretending that someone said something different than they said and arguing against that instead of what they said.
This is a very fair point, and I’ll acknowledge that i’ve been short and quippy in this exchange and the thread broadly. However, as I pointed out to someone else, a part of persuasion is reframing your partners assertions in order to illuminate an inconsistency - any time I’m reframing something you’ve said, I’m doing so in order to reveal a deeper issue. In this instance the issue (i’ll touch more on this at the end), is that your three rules are too broad, and effectively can be applied to most people who disagree with you. A good example of this that I know you’re thinking of when you’re looking at my culpability of this is this meme. I’m well aware of how provocative this meme was, and that was the point. I was pointing to the comfortable rhetoric some centrists were using (your choice is binary at the ballot box) and reflecting back at them the rhetoric they were using as shelter from that discomfort. The point of the meme was to point out that what they were doing right then was rationalizing a choice they hadn’t been asked to make yet, and avoiding the choice they were making in that moment to convince people upset about the Isreali conflict that their concern was less important than the broader goal of defeating Trump (which is true, but that choice of rhetoric was also sheltering them from having to engage with their party). It was and is essential to make that distinction well known, because ‘trump will be the end of us all’ has the rhetorical potential to de-fang legitimate grievence within the base and relieves pressure on Biden and the democrats.
I’ll also address a skepticism you’ve raised before about the pointlessness of agitating in this way on a small site like Lemme that will never be seen by Biden: by using that agitation to call out the comforting rhetoric being used, it makes the counter messaging of the democratic operation a lot less effective, and (ideally) prevents them from being able to hide behind convenience logic and actually address the issue. That’s why James Carville got on his podcast and was cursing out pro-palestinian activists for raising the issue so loudly: he knows that it’s a losing issue if it’s elevated above other, less controversial issues, and there’s not an easy way to message out of it if it keeps getting pushed.
The reason for the explanation: I know you thought this meme was an intentional strawman, and to some degree it was an intentional re-framing of the issue. But it wasn’t a ‘misrepresentation’ of any real position (i wasn’t arguing they were anyone was “fine with a little genocide”), I was simply pointing out those people who were the subject of the meme, caught between a genocide they cannot themselves support but are desperate to fend off a trump presidency, needed to convince those undecided anti-genocide voters to vote for biden, and they could either convince them to vote by arguing that issue was less important, or by pushing the party platform to welcome those people back into coalition.
This is an important distinction, because provocative agitation only works by de-constructing those arguments that get in the way of directed action. Sometimes that looks or feels like an intentional misrepresentation, but it is importantly not a representation of a false stance but a rejection of the framing that the stance depends on.
Since you seem like you’re open to talking at this huge length which isn’t usual for shills, that sort of makes me trust you again.
This being the only qualifier that doesn’t apply to me specifically, it’s not unreasonable to point out that it’s the only one that really distinguishes a good-actor and a bad-actor in your eyes, even though there are absolutely leftist political agitators that fit those first two on your list and do not give long and drawn-out responses like me. I’d venture to say that those people are not really doing the educate or organize parts of educate-agitate-organize, but sometimes you just have to live with a bit of disagreement when you’re a leftist.
I was admittedly being reckless by using the “shill-unless-proven-otherwise” shorthand, but the above is what I was essentially driving at: your method of determining good-will or bad-will seems to have no way of distinguishing between ‘shills’ and leftist political agitators, and that effectively has a ‘chilling-effect’ on the entire community. That’s why every criticism of Biden here is always couched in “but i’m voting for him anyway”; without signaling ‘I am not seeking to cause chaos’ every critique is potentially suspect of being bad-faith. It’s a cancer for actual activism and it’s another one of the convenient logics that can dismiss uncomfortable confrontation as unworthy of engagement.
Like I say, I have more to say, but this is such a critical point that I want to pause and focus on it for a second.
I agree, and I appreciate the way in which you did and that you allowed me to address it.
If what they were spreading was bullshit, the posts themselves would have been removed for breaking misinformation rules.
If what they were spreading was biden’s own shit so that you had to smell it instead of ignoring it, I think he was doing you a service and you should be thanking him.
Just expressing leftist agitation isn’t it. Like I was recommending slrpnk to somebody recently, sort of like yeah they hate voting sometimes, IDK, but whatever, they are good people.
I’m sorry that I seem to keep misunderstanding. I still think encouraging that speculation at all is problematic but I won’t push the issue more, I think i’ve made my opinion clear.
So your intent in posting memes against voting for Biden is to spur the reader to get involved in leftist action? What would they start doing, to improve the state of the country? I’m not trying to be dickish by asking that, I’m genuinely asking.
I do not post memes ‘against voting for biden’, though I can understand interpreting it that way since I am mocking the essentialist and attitude that suggests it is the only thing that matters (I don’t mean anyone has actually said this, but the extreme sentiment conveyed certainly makes that implication clear). That attitude isn’t just short-sided, it is actively hostile toward critiques and agitation against democrats, who on their own routinely use it to rally support without offering real progress (anyone who pays attention to politics year-round might notice that these oppositional crises never really subside)
I think driving a wedge between those who seek to enforce support for a candidate and discourage dissent (including discouraging the propagation of news coverage that is unflattering to that candidate to a point that is threatening to consensus opinion, or launching crusades against those who are insufficiently emphatic about the need to vote) is the first and likely most important step in agitating change, especially when that candidate is actively engaged in wildly unpopular (at least in present company) oppressive genocidal activity. Protest simply cannot be effective if it is expected not to mount a serious challenge to consensus opinion among moderates, and that absolutely includes here.
I realize that this would appear to be counterproductive to a less black-pilled progressive, but I simply do not believe even democrats have any intent to address crucial issues in a way that challenges or threatens the overall capital and imperial structure on which the US has been built (this encompasses my critique of incrementalism, because incrementalist proposals always fall short of challenging those ingrained macro structures i believe are fundamental to truly addressing our active crises). I suspect our support of Israel is one of those issues, I also think climate change and campaign finance and election reform are as well (I already know you disagree with me about incremental climate change progress under Biden, we don’t need to get into it here). And I believe without a hint of doubt that none of them will ever be addressed without anything less than even the mildest of discomfort among comfortable liberal democrats.
To drive progress we must sow discontent against the status quo, that much has always been clear.
I just don’t think any of these things are happening
Lmao, I mean… Disagree? Look, it’s right here even
When they say “yes Gaza sucks please can we get a better president in the future (lol don’t bother me right now i’m busy) but in the meantime also Trump is 10 times worse(electoral essentialism) for Gaza among many other things so let’s not elect him, also let’s go to the Palestine protest this Saturday(what about right here and now? why does that seem to be intentionally left out here)” and you scream in their face “GENOCIDE JOE, GENOCIDE JOE, DON’T TRY TO SILENCE MY DISSENT”(lmao what do you think a protest is?) you’re producing no benefit for leftism in this country.
Fuckin… Look man, if you don’t see a problem in just that first sentence I don’t think you’re trying.
I think we’ve run this line of argumentation through, we’ve circled back to some of the stuff we started with and frankly your effort here is clearly declining. As fun as this was I really don’t feel like pulling references from earlier in the conversation. And holy hell, we’ve had this argument before, don’t you remember?
Do you think that the Communists in 1932 who were fighting the SPD, instead of Hitler, accomplished progress by sowing discontent against the status quo?
I’m sorry lol, I’m just not interested in having this conversation again. You’ll say ‘the SPD split the vote because they were too stubborn to join the KPD’ and then i’ll say ‘sure but the SPD was reacting to the same conditions that cultivated the NSDAP in the first place’ and then you’ll say 'i agree but stopping the nazis was more important ’ and then i’ll say ‘but they didn’t stop them, they let them in, and also even if they had if they didn’t address the conditions that lead to the NSDAP then they wouldn’t ever really stop them so the KPD should have joined the SPD’ and then you’ll say ‘yea I agree with that but they had the majority so they didn’t’ and i’ll say ‘and they didn’t stop the nazis, I thought we were trying to learn from this example not rationalize what ended up happening’
LMAO though at you claiming i’m being overdramatic and then immediately turn around and compare my light agitation to helping the nazis rise to power. Holy shit did that conversation devolve quickly.
Look, I’ve written and shelved a few responses to this already, but I wasn’t being coy when I said I think we’ve run this conversation bare. I’m having a hard time contending with what seems like willful rejection of my critique of your framing - which is fine, it’s your political world-view and I can’t possibly expect to change it in a day. It just seems there’s an insurmountable disagreement that we can’t get past, and the longer we talk the more exaggerated we’re getting about the other’s perspective and we’re not getting any closer to an understanding than we already have.
Here’s a problematic exchange:
Me:
I do not post memes ‘against voting for biden’, though I can understand interpreting it that way since I am mocking the essentialist and attitude that suggests it is the only thing that matters (I don’t mean anyone has actually said this, but the extreme sentiment conveyed certainly makes that implication clear). That attitude isn’t just short-sided, it is actively hostile toward critiques and agitation against democrats, who on their own routinely use it to rally support without offering real progress (anyone who pays attention to politics year-round might notice that these oppositional crises never really subside)
You:
I am very confident that I never suggested that voting was the only thing that mattered. Someone saying that voting does matter is in no way saying that it’s the only thing that matters. I think you will be hard pressed to find even a single comment on Lemmy saying that voting is the only thing that matters.
The misconnect:
“I never suggested that voting was the only thing that mattered”. I know, that’s why I said “I don’t mean anyone has actually said this”. My point is that all political activity within this frame of view is interpreted through that electoral lense, and I’m pointing to that framing as not just problematic but the actual target of pretty much all effective agitation. That the spectrum of political action must fit through this narrow opening of election day is necessarily a rejection of the use of dissent outside of it. Your objection to and suspicion of bad-actors is a reflection of this, too: even honest critique from reputable sources is suspect of over-the-line provocation simply because the intent may be to distort public opinion away from voting for Biden in november, even if the substance of that provocation is acknowleged as fair. It is that idea that is the subject of my critique, but instead of addressing that problem you fall back to shit like this:
“When they say “yes Gaza sucks please can we get a better president in the future but in the meantime also Trump is 10 times worse for Gaza among many other things”
You say you can’t see how this statement revolves/hinges around electoral essentialism, but I don’t think that’s true. I think (notice that I am stating an opinion and not a statement of fact) you do see it, but you believe it is the essential predicate to all agitative action that follows, which is a fair feeling (as i’ve acknowledged). Having acknowleged that perspective, I’m offering a challenge to that framing: that electoralist lenses collapse political negotiation into a partisan binary (you are either working for this electoral outcome or that one), and it functionally rejects activity that falls on the wrong side (e.g. critiquing Biden is fine (good even), so long as the intent is still to help him defeat trump, or at least that the intent is not to hurt his chances).
I have repeatedly stated my opinion that effective protest is only that which implicitly threatens that electoral coalition. It seeks to sow discontent with the policies on-offer to put pressure on representation, and it isn’t just yelling at the representative, it is an act of cleaving some portion of that base off so that the candidate must choose between their own goal of winning or relenting on the position being protested for.
Protest is necessarily hostile toward the electoral political calculations, and by gatekeeping valid protest to activity that fits within that frame neuters its ability to push for change. Fostering tension is the goal. It seeks to be present in every political discussion about that candidate, lingering as an ominous and threatening presence that makes not just that candidate squirm and feel unwelcome, but all of the moderates who work to support them, too.
You are wildly mischaracterizing what I actually think, to the point where you’re saying things I strongly disagree with (e.g. voting is the only thing that matters, any dissent against Biden is forbidden) and then attributing them to me.
No, I fucking haven’t. I am not attributing words as coming straight from your mouth, I am presenting you with what I think your underlying assumptions are. You have not literally said “voting is the only thing that matters, any dissent against Biden is forbidden”. What you have done is rhetorically narrow the acceptable forms of dissent to that which fits into this electoral binary. Your method of identifying ‘bad-faith’ argumentation revolves around how or if that dissent is intended to effect electoral outcomes. I have become a broken record, repeating the same words endlessly:
effective protest seeks to disrupt status quo coalitions, effective protest seeks to disrupt status quo coalitions, effective protest seeks to disrupt status quo coalitions
The conversation I would like to have with you is, we need better outcomes than Biden, how do we get there.
I’ve said this repeatedly, but sure, I will say it again. Political agitation involves being a relentless-fucking prick. It means dominating every political conversation with the shit you want changed, raise the issue until it cannot be ignored, and absolutely do not allow it to be dismissed as irrelevant noise or covert opposition. It involves being so relentless that their only reprieve is to forcibly remove you from the space you are occupying. That is what I am doing and what I think you should be doing too, and this is why MLK castigated white liberals as the single greatest hurtle toward black liberation. Their obstruction is defined by that line they simply will not cross, and it is the goal of agitation to drag those people up to the line and push their complacent asses over it.
When you say things like ‘why are you bothering people here with this, we agree with you’… Emphatically, no you fucking don’t.
Look, I have zero illusions to how popular of a decision this is in this comm, and this isn’t my instance so who the fuck cares what I think.
but
I have a very hard time seeing this as anything other than a disagreement over personal political tastes, rather than anything to do with a violation of some unwritten rule. Your comm already has rules regarding article quality, misinformation, and off-topic posts and comments that could be used as a justification here if it applied. If there was a problem with the volume of posts for which he was responsible (i think this is the legitimate concern here), then you could either call it spamming or there could easily be a rule added limiting the number of posts per day that applies globally and isn’t reliant on subjective judgement.
I’ve been very vocal about my own political opinions, and have myself been accused of bad-faith trolling and of being a covert agent of some type or other. Speaking for myself, I think there’s a pretty obvious bias (maybe preference is a more fair term) when it comes to the coverage and rhetoric about the upcoming election in the US specifically. There’s legitimacy to the observation that inconvenient bad press about Biden is ignored/rationalized/dismissed on a ‘lesser evil’ and ‘at all costs’ political rationale that I (and I think ozma) tend to react negatively to. Breaking through the iron curtain of electoral politics to people who genuinely share political values (not all of them, mind you) sometimes involves repeated reminders and presentation of counter-partisan coverage. I personally appreciate ozma’s contributions because often these posts and articles encourage real discussions about the limitations of this particular politician, and people like @mozz frequently jump in and provide nuanced dissection and context to what would otherwise be an easily dismissed issue.
This is not my instance so It’s not up to my judgment what the right or wrong thing to do is here, but .world being an instance that has already de-federated with most others with louder left-leaning politics, the overton window has already been considerably narrowed. By removing the loudest dissenters (who are ‘not wrong, just assholes’), you run the risk of warping reality for those who don’t care enough to confront coverage they might find uncomfortable and might prefer a more quiet space to affirm their politics instead of being challenged. You’re cultivating an echo chamber simply by cutting out the noise you find disagreeable. The goal of agitation is to get exactly those people to engage more so that we can move the overton window further left and accomplish more at the electoral level in the future. It isn’t ‘bad faith’ to be motivated by that goal, it just might be unfair to people who are comfortable with where that window currently is and would rather not be challenged by it moving further left.
Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful....
I guess I just really don’t want some bullshitters to be able to influence roughly 50k web users without at least a little bit of push back.
I don’t mean to instigate an argument, but I think this comment illustrates pretty well why .ml might actually be justified in judicious use of the ban hammer. If people are coming in specifically motivated by an ideological disagreement, then maybe they’re well within their right (ethically I mean, they’re within their right just on the basis of owning the instance as it is)
And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.
It doesn’t even take receipts to know this is usually the case, often the users complaining will say they were posting a completely reasonable take about Tiennemen square and then OUT OF NOWHERE they were banned and their comments were removed. It’s not like they spend any amount of time discussing that topic on their instance on their own, people go there specifically to kick the nest
Yes I’m sure OP was having a very rational conversation about widely accepted and not at all contested facts that are not at all important to any ideological perspective.
I’m not making a statement about the truthfulness of the specific claims being raised, i’m just pointing out that the topic is very famously contentious, and going to that space specifically to raise it knowing full well it is not a welcome one is itself bad-faith trolling and deserving of removal and possibly a ban, depending on how hostile you’re being.
It isn’t your space where you can decide what topics are fair game, and frankly whining about it here isn’t going to change anything about their moderation policies.
I’m not skirting around anything, I’m just pointing to the problem. If someone walked into a LGBTQ forum and started harassing users about male and famale biology phenotypes, they’d be within their right to ban that person. It doesn’t matter if what they were saying was factually correct or not if the reason they’re there is to harass them along an ideological fault-line, especially if they’re instigating that topic themselves to begin with.
It’s their space, they’re allowed to keep certain charged topics out of it, even if you disagree with them or if you feel like they’re trying to censor what you consider to be factually accurate. You can talk about that topic anywhere else you want, they can’t censor you in your own space.
Honestly I think they’re not being strict enough, if it were me i’d be taking notes on everyone here affirming their intention to push this topic in my space and just preemptively ban them.
i’ve admitted I don’t think ‘truthfulness’ exempts attempts at harassment in another forum, even if you think that your crusade of truth is justified
I live in no such ‘censored fantasy instance’, because i’ve not defederated from any of the instances i happen to disagree with. Lemmy.world, however, has censored themselves from further-left perspectives, so I don’t find it at all surprising that you’re having difficulty with the concept. People like you feel entitled to inserting your world-view into other people’s discussions, but that doesn’t mean others feel the same entitlement.
You’re free to block me if you find my criticisms objectionable.
Look, I get that we all are very skeptical and cynical about the usefulness and ethics of AI, but can we stop with the reactive headlines?
Saying we know how AI works because it’s ‘just predicting the next word’ is like saying I know how nuclear energy works because it’s ‘just a hot stick of metal in a boiler’
Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don’t yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do. That’s not marketing hype, that’s just an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.
I hate that we can’t just be mildly curious about ai, rather than either extremely excited or extremely cynical.
Spotify is raising the cost of Premium subscriptions, again (www.engadget.com)
Spotify is officially raising its Premium subscription rates in the US come July, following reports of the move in April. The platform is increasing its Individual plan from $11 to $12 monthly and its Duo plan from $15 to $17 monthly — the same jump as last year’s $1 and $2 price hikes, respectively. However, its Family plan...
The First Borderlands Movie Clip Looks Like An SNL Skit (kotaku.com)
Today, during IGN Live, we got our first real look at the Borderlands movie, and folks, I’m not sure this is going to be very good....
Someone stop the ride, I want to get off (midwest.social)
A quick note on the return2ozma ban:
You may have noticed a distinct lack of return2ozma. This is due to their admitting, in a public comment, that their engagement here is in bad faith:...
[Discussion] Let's talk about lemmy.ml
Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful....
The Biden Campaign is Courting an Unexpected Group of Voters: Republicans (www.npr.org)
US grade school textbooks
STOP CENSORORING ME TANKIES (hexbear.net)
Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works (futurism.com)
Trump says it's "very possible" that Biden and other political rivals will have to be jailed (www.salon.com)