Five @ Five @slrpnk.net

Admin at Slrpnk.net

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LOL

I really like this quote, but it is not anywhere else online outside of this video:

After chiding activists who warned years ago of the Republican Party's descent into outright fascism, mainstream Democrats have now fully embraced the accusation. It's become difficult to find a single Democrat campaign appeal that doesn't lean hard on the warning that the Trump wing of the GOP -- which is now the only viable wing of the GOP -- represents an existential threat to democracy, the United States itself. Fight it, then propose something to meet the nature of the movement.

It can't be the case that both the Supreme Court is an unaccountable neoconservative body intent on rendering the whole country unrecognizable and that there's simply no way to do anything about it. It can't be that climate change is the single most important issue facing the world, with our entire species at risk, and drilling licenses need to continue.

It can't be that innocent Palestinians have faced unbearable suffering and we care very deeply about their plight and absolutely nothing will stop the arming of the nation responsible. It can't be both rhetorical urgency and policymaking impotence.

What the mainstream Democrat seems incapabale of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point. Suddenly, another very persuasive argument takes on a different meaning: 'Vote the liberals though he harms you because the conservative will harm you more' starts to sound a lot like 'Vote for the liberal though he harms you because the conservative might harm me, too.'

In reality, not a single Western politician or party, not a single government anywhere in the world, can be expected to change when constantly rewarded this way. The argument in favor of voting for the lesser evil is frequently made in good faith, by people who have plenty to lose should the greater evil win. But it also establishes the lowest of benchmarks: Want my vote? Be less monstrous than the monster.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

This is a long video that's worth watching all the way through. But the section you're referencing hopefully can stand on its own without the context of the rest of the video.

I think that would be a good idea too. Would you like to play a role in developing SLRPNK's style guidelines?

Boosted: https://slrpnk.net/post/30070139

I'm glad you said something. I don't mind so much when pieces that are critical of solarpunk or a corruption of the aesthetic are occasionally posted here because it gives the community an opportunity to define itself against those representations. I tend to skip over them myself though. I think introspection and criticism are core to the Solarpunk ideal, and I'm glad this essay was a fresh carafe of that tea.

Thank you for your efforts to make reading news more accessible to the Fediverse, including frequently sharing gift articles from paywalled publications.

!enshitification@slrpnk.net !fuck_AI@lemmy.world

• Arrests without warrants, brutality
• Teargassing and pepper-spraying journalists, citizens, etc.
• Violating direct court orders
• So much more!!!

Dick Cheney lied about walking so that JD Vance could lie about running.

I don't think you're wrong to want to be able to independently verify our reasoning. I think that's part of the reason it took us so long to ban HC, as they used a absurdity, jokes, and 'randomness' to foster a fascist base. I feel it's not difficult to see if you know what to look for, but the strategy works because it's not completely obvious. Those who call them out are more easily cast as humorless shrills, and people are more likely to view things from the stereotypical frame of power-tripping gatekeepers over-reacting to a joke, which is what it looks like on the surface to the uninitiated.

The conceit of HC is that it's a 'free speech' zone, and that anyone can say anything, including things that happen to be fascist or support fascism. That's not the case. Alice is the admin, this is her censoring criticism of Charlie Kirk's deification documented in PTB. She enables her moderators to be just as censorious when it comes to pushing a right-agenda.

It's worth reading up on the strategy of absurdity, particularly in regard to the banned Reddit community Frenworld. This is a community whose bread and butter was thinly veiled anti-semitic jokes and holocaust denial wrapped in cutesy images of frogs and clowns speaking in childish slang.

When contacted by this reporter recently and asked to comment on the content, shortly before the banning of their community, founders and moderators of /r/frenworld denied that the subreddit was linked to the right wing at all, let alone the far right, and said its content was harmless.

The impulse to give the benefit of doubt is a good one, to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but ultimately if nazis are at home on your platform, the end result is the same regardless of intention.

This is not the totality of the evidence, but I feel like it's enough to demonstrate why we came to this conclusion.

I came to SLRPNK.net from Beehaw.org, and while I think they do a lot of things right, I don't think disabling downvotes is one of them.

While Beehaw members can't downvote comments and posts on other platforms, visitors to Beehaw are able to downvote posts and comments on Beehaw and made by Beehaw members. While people on Beehaw can't see these downvotes, they are visible to people off-Beehaw all the same.

I think downvotes are a useful way of getting a temperature reading on a comment. With it gone, it puts more stress on other methods of responding to bad comments, those being reporting comments to the moderators, and replying to the comment with a statement of disagreement or rebuttal. Both methods of reply are moderator-intensive; moderators need to reply to reports in a timely fashion, and contradictory replies often devolve into slap-fights, which also require moderator attention. A social media experience is judged by its signal to noise ratio, so removing or dampening uninformative or irrelevant dross helps the gems to stand out. Moderation is key, and moderators are the weak point in any social media design. Good ones are difficult to find, moderator skills are difficult to teach, and it is an easy task to burn out on.

Beehaw does a good job of seeking out moderators and limiting their community list to keep the moderation task more manageable. Even with those in place, the moderation task is too great to keep up with the demands of federating with a site like Lemmy.world, which lead to them defederating from the largest instance early in their existence. I haven't kept up with their internal discussion in a while, but I get the sense that it is still a constant struggle.

Allowing members to downvote takes some of the work off of moderators. Judging quality in posts is a difficult task, and downvotes can provide useful information. Downvoting permits a more nuanced access to the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes the best response to a comment is to downvote and move on. Even in cases where an obvious rule-breaking content is eventually removed, like in the case of a racist comment, downvotes provide not only censure to the commentor, but solidarity with the people and groups targeted by their attack during the interim before moderator action.

Downvotes can be abused, and can communicate confusing information, like when a locally-upvoted post is torpedoed by downvotes primarily from a single foreign instance. I think giving moderators access to granular voting information in their communities was the right choice for Lemmy, and I think giving public access to statistical breakdowns of vote origin in comments and posts that reach a threshold of votes could be useful as well. I think even without technical improvements to mitigate these drawbacks, removing downvotes causes more problems than it solves.

Beehaw's world news is a great source of general world politics. There are also regional instances with their own political communities that can give you a local perspective on world events, like

• !uk_politics@feddit.uk
• !europepolitics@feddit.org
• !australianpolitics@aussie.zone
• !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca

Thanks, fixed!

Thank you for your quick action. I've updated the comment.

Thanks for starting this discussion. I've linked this post in !meta@slrpnk.net.

We've compiled an informal and incomplete list of servers we federate with who also federate with maga.place. Federation by default is considered best practice, so none of these admins have intentionally endorsed a fascist instance. I hope this post and the linked threads are informative in making your own decisions.

• Discuss.tchncs.de -- @Milan@discuss.tchncs.de @erAck@discuss.tchncs.de
• Lemmy.vg -- @nume@lemmy.vg @admin@lemmy.vg
• Lemy.lol -- @iso@lemy.lol @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol

Respect to @sunshine@lemmy.ca and @kersploosh@sh.itjust.works for taking initiative and leading discussions and votes on defederation.

The Public Universal Friend is fascinating.