I love this.

This is the woman that inspired “Rebel Girl” by Joe Hill.

What Does “From the River to the Sea” Really Mean?

Please explain yourself.

When interacting with a remote instance, usually remote Admin accounts aren’t clearly marked the way they are locally - he only saw me as [OP]. I don’t think he realized he was attacking a site Admin in his reply, so he doesn’t get a pass for hostility to a “person in power.” His hostility was merely hostility.

As an aside, American cops aren’t protected against personal attacks. Insults to their profession and their person are both protected speech, from what I understand. Officers are expected to show restraint when insulted, although that’s not often the case. There’s a class of speech defined as “Fighting Words” - IANAL but when it comes to police, unless you’re saying “I’m going to punch you” or some similar specific violent threat, I believe your speech is protected by the First Amendment, and in case it is not, there’s a lawsuit you’re likely to win.

I think we both value diversity of opinion, and I appreciate you putting yourself out as a moderator and trying new things. We’ve both accepted roles that gives us small privileges, but mostly responsibility. I value your contribution to the instance, and I hope that’s communicated through this dialogue despite our disagreements.

At this point my goal is not to convince you to take a specific moderator action. I’m responding to the observation that !pleasantpolitics seems to be deviating from the goals you initially set, and I’d like to understand and clarify what is going on.

The video is worth a watch. It actually doesn’t argue that all vegans must be anti-capitalist.

Instead it’s a take-down of a video of a popular vegan influencer arguing you can’t be both vegan and anti-capitalist.

ACollier Astro on Space Elevators

James C. Scott traveled a sparsely trafficked road. As he goes to the other side, I imagine him crossing in defiance of the traffic light.

There’s a similar extremely visible movement in Barcelona. Tourism has always been a soft version of colonialism, but in Mallorca, Menorca, Formentera, Ibiza, Barcelona, and Valencia, it does double duty. These regions are economic powerhouses for Spain, but they’re former autonomous societies that were conquered and colonized by the Kingdom of Castille.

While traveling there you’re likely to meet people who speak Spanish, German, English, and French out of necessity to communicate with tourists, but even speaking Spanish in these areas is an insult to their autonomy. The native language of Mallorca is Balearic Catalan. If you go to the Basque country and don’t speak the Basque language, you’re going to get some pushback. There’s a similar independence movement centered in Barcelona but popular throughout Aragon, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands, and assuming the people you meet prefer to speak Spanish adds another layer of colonialism on top of the tourism.

Biji biji!

Classic Dropout.tv

ACT V SCENE III

Milwaukee. A room in the convention.

[Enter TRUMP, Veep, and Attendants]

TRUMP

Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:

Till Key Largoe wood remove to Maralagoe,

I cannot taint with fear.

KYLR

I don’t have a problem with “bad language” - I think it’s entirely appropriate to say fuck sometimes. My problem with the comment is its context and its subtext. But before I unpack that, I think we should talk about something else first.

I don’t love “fuck you.” I debated whether it was protected political speech expressing a viewpoint on the article, or a personal attack, and I couldn’t decide, so I left it up.

Saying “fuck you” to an American cop is protected political speech, and you should expect to be protected under the First Amendment. Saying “fuck you” to a cashier at a Wendy’s is not, and there is no constitutional prohibition that will prevent you from being escorted off the premises.

Could you speak a little more on what you mean by “protected political speech” as a criteria for moderation?

I do feel the community is trending towards an echo chamber. I think it is systemic, but I don’t think it’s intentional.

There’s a version of the prisoner’s dilemma that occurs in online debates. When both people argue in good faith and listen to each other, the discussion takes the most amount of time and mental effort, but there is also a feeling that the effort was not wasted. When one person is arguing in good faith while the other is engaging with low effort or trolling, the effort put into a good faith argument feels wasted. When both participants troll each other, nobody is seriously challenged, but neither of them waste very much time or mental effort in the process either.

This is meant to be an amoral framing of the situation. Time is limited, so time spent inventing novel arguments to convince an implacable enemy is time that could be spent doing something more effective, so trolling makes sense. Obviously when this approach is the dominant strategy in a forum, the space becomes toxic, anti-intellectual, and useless for evaluating the strength of ideas. I feel like you implicitly understand that, and are trying to create tools to make it easier to prevent that from happening.

Your tool is based on votes. People often vote for opinions they agree with, against those that they disagree with. Sometimes they vote for well-thought out arguments, and against low effort trolling. So your algorithm basically divides people into four groups. Group one are people who have both unpopular opinions and express them in toxic and low-effort ways. They are extremely likely to be banned algorithmically because they get both kinds of downvotes.

Group two are people who have unpopular opinions, but are good at expressing themselves in a way such that several people who don’t agree with them still value their contribution. Your algorithm is likely to allow them to participate even with the tax of downvotes they get due to the unpopularity of their views. These people also make the most valuable contribution to a forum that is based on good faith discussion and debate, because if these people leave, you are left with the last two groups - three high effort popular opinion people, and four low effort popular opinion people. A space that includes primarily groups three and four together and excludes the other two is an echo chamber.

Group four is the problem. If they are allowed to participate in discussion without repercussions, they will eventually drive group two out, by either making them feel their time is being wasted so they leave, or by changing their strategy and joining group one. There is no simple algorithmic solution to this problem. I think your experiment has attracted a number of group two people due to the novelty of your experiment and the over-representation of anarchists on the instance you’ve chosen to host it, but they are not guaranteed to continue to participate. Lemmy.World is a pretty low bar to use as a measuring stick, but given the incentive structure at play, I think there is a real danger of falling below that standard unless the bot’s algorithmic decisions are complemented by active human moderators who dis-incentivize and weed out people from group four.

‘Party of law and order’ mocked as Trump adviser speaks at RNC hours after prison release

‘Bless his heart!’ GOP delegates reportedly gleeful over Biden’s ailment

I looks like I posted a reply the same minute you did. Thanks for doing these updates and check-ins.

I’ll probably have more to say later when I have more time to write.

!PleasantPolitics aspires to be a place where people can have good faith discussions about politics without interference from trolls and assholes. ‘Unpleasant’ doesn’t mean merely having different opinions from conservative Democrats. Creating an echo chamber was not the intended goal.

Use this one weird trick to get free energy from your old smoke detectors!