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:
I'm sure there will be questions, let me see if I can address the most obvious ones:
- Can I still post negative stuff about Biden?
Absolutely! We have zero interest in running an echo chamber. However, if ALL you're posting is negative, you may want to re-think your priorities. You get out of the world what you put into it and all that.
- Why now?
Presumption of innocence. It may be my own fault, but I do try to think the best of people, and even though they were posting negative articles, they weren't necessarily WRONG. Biden's poll numbers, particularly in minority demographics ARE in the shitter. They are starting to get better, but he still has a hell of a hill to climb.
- Why a 30 day temp ban and not a permanent ban?
The articles return2ozma shared weren't bad, faked, or from some wing-nut bias site like "beforeitsnews.com", they were legitimate articles from established and respected news agencies, pointing out the valid problems Biden faces.
The problem was ONLY posting the negatives, over and over and then openly admitting that dishonest enagement is their purpose.
Had they all been bullshit articles? It would not have taken anywhere near this much time to lay the ban and it would have been permanent.
30 days seems enough time for them to re-think their strategery and come back to engage honestly.
I'm noticing you do this a lot:
"We should require proof of support of some leftist goals from people who want to criticize biden - i'm only kidding (kinda)" "This instance looks a lot like a troll farm - i'm not accusing just saying it's suspicious"
Sounds to me like you wouldn't be apposed to a political alignment test as a requirement to participating in political discussions (i'm clearly joking about this. mostly)
I talk from time to time about wanting to set up a forum where if you say something, you have to back it up, as a way to mitigate the impact of low-effort trolling "of COURSE we all agree Biden ruined the climate" from 5-10 different accounts as a technique to distort the discourse. I think it's toxic if it is politically slanted so that someone with mod power is deciding what is the "right" political viewpoint, obviously; on that much we will agree. But I do think that the discourse is being radically distorted by the existence of organized shilling efforts, and I think about what would be a good solution to it (which seems like a pretty difficult problem), in ways which I am sure would be wildly unpopular with a certain segment of the userbase.
You can characterize that as me thirsting to silence dissenting political views, if you want. I won't stop you.
I don't think you're trying to silence political views at all, but I do think you're trying to dismiss them as fringe, dishonest, or intentional subterfuge.
Castigating people you disagree with as 'shills' or 'bad faith actors' is, in my opinion, the lowest quality of political commentary. It excuses you from engaging with what that person saying, simply because you doubt their honesty, as if somehow that invalidates what they're saying. I think it's lazy and I wish mods would enforce their own rules against it.
I also find it frustrating that you continuously accuse people like myself and ozma of acting according to some agenda, but then appear in every political thread giving impassioned arguments about how we need to look past Biden's flaws no matter how real they are, as if that is not itself a political agenda. Do I think you're arguing that in bad faith? No, but then again i'm not in support of banning people who are simply too loud about their perspective.
Can you point to anyone who's said anything that I responded to without engaging on its own merits?
Everyone has a rosy view of themselves I am sure, but in my mind, I've spent an almost pathological amount of time here talking to ozma about the merits of what he's saying, on the face of them, and likewise for you, likewise for a lot of the other people. Then also in addition to that, if they display shill-like behavior I tend to call it out instead of just avoiding the potentially-unfair accusation. But I don't think I have ever really led out of the gate with anything along the lines of "you're a shill so that means I don't have to respond to what you just said".
Can you point to an example of someone who said something and I just dismissed what they were saying instead of breaking down why (in my view) it wasn't right, at least as a first step even if later I proceeded to what I thought of their motivations or changing the subject or etc?
If you need to qualify your immunity with 'but I haven't said it to their face', i think you've kind of proven the point. I don't think the face-to-face accusation is at all a requirement for it to be considered lowbrow prejudice.
That's just in this thread, but i've seen quite a lot of, 'i don't know for sure, but this person/these people really seem like bad-faith trolls to me' in your comment history. I run into it maybe once a week, and those are just the ones i happen to run into. I've seen you speculate that midwest.social is a troll farm, based on what I assume is just your interactions with me (i don't see you arguing with anyone else from here, anyway. maybe that's just my vanity talking).
Even if it's not in response to what that person is saying, you're still encouraging others to disengage with them based on some false notion of them being bad-actors.
I've told some people to their face (virtually speaking) that I think they are shills and why. Ozma is one, and in this thread I said it to somebody else after looking over their user a little bit. My point was that I generally engage with their arguments on the merits at first, and then proceed to accusing them of bad faith if it seems really clear to me that they're engaging in bad faith; I don't think I usually engage in it as a reason not to engage with their arguments.
It wasn't from you. If I ever fully realized that you were from midwest.social I then forgot it; my instance doesn't show what someone's "home" instance is in comments unless I mouse over to investigate. It was a different user that raised my suspicion (who I didn't really engage with all that much, just observed the type of stuff they posted), and the overall nature and setup of the site. If that's relevant.
I'm not completely sure if you are a shill user or not. I have suspected it in the past. If I'm honest, you engage in some of the same types of behavior they do (using some particular talking points, and mischaracterizing what the other person is saying to a more convenient thing to argue against, being the most egregious), but that could just be what you feel like saying because you feel like saying it, and you also talk at length back and forth which is un-shill-like behavior, just because I think it's not really time-efficient for them to do that for any extended debate.
Honestly, except for really egregious examples like ozma, I don't feel like I can tell with any confidence who is and isn't fake, so I tend to talk to people on the merits and then talk about fake users as a systemic problem as a separate thing.
Yeah, maybe so. I think in general, accusing people of acting in bad faith is a bad way to go, just because it doesn't really lend itself to productive conversation (and I realize that's ironic since I do do exactly that sometimes). Definitely getting into the weeds of ad hominem, categorizing each person in the discussion as is or isn't a shill, shouldn't be the main thrust of the discussion. It's only relevant in this thread specifically with ozma because he does it like a full time frickin job.
That's the other side of that coin: if there's a cohort of users that is so clearly engaging in bad faith that it's distorting the overall conversation, I do feel like that's worth talking about. I don't think it's real productive to just play the sucker and keep saying "No actually Biden didn't ruin the US's climate change policy" over and over again indefinitely, without delving into why it is that so many people keep saying that he did and using the same very particular talking-point framing.
But yeah, the point about it being usually not really a friendly or productive thing to do to run around throwing accusations of shilling around, I'll somewhat agree with you on.
Well I guess i appreciate the benefit of the doubt, even though I still take issue with the default seemingly being 'shill, unless enough effort is shown'.
You and I, I think, have put in far more effort into arguing our cases than most people on here do. Most people who share my perspective have long since stopped trying to argue anything in good faith at all with centrists, because doing so almost always ends with an accusation. Therein lies the pitfall of the shill-unless-proven-otherwise attitude - it makes it easy to characterize most people as shills, enabling anyone to dismiss or accept a perspective at-will according to what they believe a 'normal' perspective to be.
I have no suspicion you are a troll - not because you put more effort into your comments than I think a bad actor would, but because it's not hard for me to imagine your perspective as valid. It's also not hard for me to imagine someone who supports trump, or doesn't believe in climate change, or believes gay marriage is a sin (my relationship with my father is almost defined by our vociferous disagreement on those subjects). Half the battle of political organizing is trying to genuinely understand other people's perspectives, and trying to persuade them on their terms, and writing those people off as bad-faith actors is a non-starter for organizing. I know people here value most of the same things I do, that's why I harp on the things I do - those are the things we agree on, and those are the things I would like to organize pressure for. I have a lot of other perspectives I know for a fact are outside the norm for .world, and I don't agitate for those on here because I know i'd sour any chances of progress on other fronts if I did.
Ozma likely sees things the same way I do: there are a lot of well-meaning and left-of-center people in this community, with a lot of overlap in overall goals. A part of any strategy for normalizing and organizing around more left-leaning policy is pointing to that discrepancy between what we all agree on and what our electoral system fails to produce, and that's uncomfortable and easily misinterpreted as voter suppression. "Biden at all costs", while completely justified, stifles any discussion of progress outside of what has been provided, so the 'blue no matter who' rhetoric is a natural target for any agitation. There is nothing that enrages me more than a good discussion about 'we should do x' being derailed by 'well that's not electorally realistic, not nationally popular, not gonna happen', and those are the things that cause me to spend a week straight posting agitprop memes.
I'll get off my soap box now. I think getting mad at the people agitating against complacency is counterproductive, even if it's completely understandable.
Hey so check it out: That's not at all what I said. My criteria I listed for suspecting you of something dishonest were:
Then I also mentioned that:
I have more to say, but I just wanna pause on this point for a second. Check this out:
I literally never said that, or anything close to it. I listed two criteria that would fit a shill, and one that would exonerate someone from being a shill, and it sounds like you just totally edited away the first two and started telling me that I think everyone's a shill unless exonerated by the third.
Surely you can see how conducting the conversation like that would make someone conclude you're not speaking in good faith?
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I agree, and I appreciate the way in which you did and that you allowed me to address it.
So, I still don't think that what I am saying is what you think I am saying.
I wasn't saying that those three bullet points were the things that would indicate a shill user. The only reason I brought them up was to speak to you directly about how I saw your user -- they were all things that applied to you, as I saw it, in some way. But like I say, I don't really try to get involved in saying "I think this particular user is fake" unless it's pretty egregious. 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.
One of a much smaller set of behaviors that'll imply to me that someone is fake is a glaring incongruity -- like beliefs or ways of speaking that very rarely go together. A good example is ozma talking about CNN as a trusted liberal news, sort of "our news" since all of us are leftists together... presumably if you are this far-left lemmy.ml person, you will see how ridiculous that is. Does it mean on its own he's a shill? Not completely, no. But it's super weird. That kind of thing is why I am suspicious of him, somewhat less suspicious of you even though you post stuff that to me seems wildly counterproductive to leftist progress in this country, and not at all suspicious of slrpnk. Does that way of looking at it make sense?
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.
Yeah, 100%. This is one of the key reasons why I don't like the shills. The country needs a whole lot of help definitely including replacing the Democrats with something substantially better, and by distorting the whole conversation away from "how do we make some progress" and towards "is it a good idea or not to let Trump get elected and start imprisoning anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell and shooting anyone who tries to hold a protest", it's eliminating a lot of the potential for forward progress that something like Lemmy could otherwise provide.
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.
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. I think you're mounting this grand challenge against an enemy that 99% doesn't exist on Lemmy, and the people who actually are reading your messages are in a very different place than you're describing here. 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 so let's not elect him, also let's go to the Palestine protest this Saturday" and you scream in their face "GENOCIDE JOE, GENOCIDE JOE, DON'T TRY TO SILENCE MY DISSENT" you're producing no benefit for leftism in this country.
If you wanted to go the DNC and start yelling at them about support for Israel and tepid marijuana reform, then sure. That sounds fine to me, that would sound productive (because I think there you would encounter some discouragement of any "dissent" like anti Israel sentiment).
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? Certainly that's what they were doing, just my assessment of their success level is pretty limited, since they almost all were killed.
Lmao, I mean... Disagree? Look, it's right here even
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?
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.
So to deal with the four bullet points one by one in more detail:
I get what you're saying in breaking down that paragraph of mine, and I can respond to what you're saying about it if you want me to, but I feel like I need to point out that in my eyes not a single one of those bullet points is in it, or anywhere near it.
You said earlier "Most people who share my perspective have long since stopped trying to argue anything in good faith at all with centrists." I'm gonna be honest, I have reached that same point with a lot of the lemmy.ml hivemind, and this is why. 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.
The conversation I would like to have with you is, we need better outcomes than Biden, how do we get there. It is frustrating and pointless to have to over and over again have that much more productive conversation be recast as, I am supporting Biden no matter what and squashing any dissent against him and actively hostile to anything better than him, and then for me to have to try to explain that that's not accurate and be lectured about the contents of my own mind and my own opinions, and have an extended debate about it where I'm apparently not allowed to the be the authority on what I think and what my opinions are.
Surely that makes sense? Or no?
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:
You:
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:
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.
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
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.
I'm going to be blunt. I was registered as third party (green party or libertarian) for many years of my life, I've done various activism things in and out of electoral politics. You are inventing a reason and supporting theoretical framework for why I support Biden in this election that is mostly imaginary, just invented out of general theories and thin air, and lecturing me at length about how my own internal politics work (which isn't how they work), and also about "the way" to do effective protest (which, sure, is fine, but is also in my opinion not the only way or guaranteed to be applicable and the perfect solution to every possible political / cultural situation.)
From time to time, you tell me something about my own thinking that is so wrong that I can point to some clear counterexample, but it hasn't changed in any respect the main thrust of you explaining to me what my thinking is. I can say, look, I posted an article from Nader about how to withhold votes from Biden to get needed political outcomes; look, I showed support for slrpnk even though the general consensus there is largely just anti-voting-in-general, because I feel like they're generally working for good and authentic about their beliefs, and so that is fine.
But no, none of that matters. You've already figured out what I believe, and you'll tell me about it at length, whatever I have to say about it.
If you want to have a back and forth where the things you say are open to critique, and where you're open to listening to me explaining my own views and the reasons for them instead of you breaking them down to me based on some general political theory that applies very little to my own thinking, then sure. But if you're committed to this conduct and to lecturing -- if the whole model is, you are right and I am wrong and you explain and I listen and say "yes sir" to your theories, which are above critique because they are already right -- then there's not a lot of point in us talking.
Yup, I've been there for a while bud.
total lack of self-awareness
My god welcome to the club. I gave up after he did it something like 4 times in a row to me. Strangest style of argumentation I've ever seen, incessantly whacking at strawmen that don't exist. Glad you can see it too, I thought I was starting to lose it.