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:
Iām 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 youāre 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 werenāt necessarily WRONG. Bidenās 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 werenāt bad, faked, or from some wing-nut bias site like ābeforeitsnews.comā, 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.
If you need to qualify your acquittal with ābut I havenāt said it to their faceā, i think youāve kind of proven the point. I donāt think the face-to-face accusation is at all a requirement for it to be considered lowbrow prejudice.
Thatās just in this thread, but iāve seen quite a lot of, āi donāt know for sure, but this person/these people really seem like bad-faith trolls to meā in your comment history. I run into it maybe once a week, and those are just the ones i happen to run into. Iāve seen you speculate that midwest.social is a troll farm, based on what I assume is just your interactions with me (i donāt see you arguing with anyone else from here, anyway. maybe thatās just my vanity talking).
Even if itās not in response to what that person is saying, youāre still encouraging others to disengage with them based on some false notion of them being bad-actors.
Iāve 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 theyāre engaging in bad faith; I donāt think I usually engage in it as a reason not to engage with their arguments.
It wasnāt from you. If I ever fully realized that you were from midwest.social I then forgot it; my instance doesnāt show what someoneās āhomeā instance is in comments unless I mouse over to investigate. It was a different user that raised my suspicion (who I didnāt really engage with all that much, just observed the type of stuff they posted), and the overall nature and setup of the site. If thatās relevant.
Iām not completely sure if you are a shill user or not. I have suspected it in the past. If Iām 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 itās not really time-efficient for them to do that for any extended debate.
Honestly, except for really egregious examples like ozma, I donāt feel like I can tell with any confidence who is and isnāt 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 doesnāt really lend itself to productive conversation (and I realize thatās 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 isnāt a shill, shouldnāt be the main thrust of the discussion. Itās only relevant in this thread specifically with ozma because he does it like a full time frickin job.
Thatās the other side of that coin: if thereās a cohort of users that is so clearly engaging in bad faith that itās distorting the overall conversation, I do feel like thatās worth talking about. I donāt think itās real productive to just play the sucker and keep saying āNo actually Biden didnāt ruin the USās climate change policyā 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, Iāll 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 āshill, unless enough effort is shownā.
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 ānormalā 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 itās not hard for me to imagine your perspective as valid. Itās also not hard for me to imagine someone who supports trump, or doesnāt 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 peopleās 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, thatās 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 donāt agitate for those on here because I know iād 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 thatās uncomfortable and easily misinterpreted as voter suppression. āBiden at all costsā, while completely justified, stifles any discussion of progress outside of what has been provided, so the āblue no matter whoā rhetoric is a natural target for any agitation. There is nothing that enrages me more than a good discussion about āwe should do xā being derailed by āwell thatās not electorally realistic, not nationally popular, not gonna happenā, and those are the things that cause me to spend a week straight posting agitprop memes.
Iāll get off my soap box now. I think getting mad at the people agitating against complacency is counterproductive, even if itās completely understandable.
Hey so check it out: Thatās 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 everyoneās a shill unless exonerated by the third.
Surely you can see how conducting the conversation like that would make someone conclude youāre 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 thereās 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.
Thereās 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. Itās 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 Iāll acknowledge that iāve 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 Iām reframing something youāve said, Iām doing so in order to reveal a deeper issue. In this instance the issue (iāll 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 youāre thinking of when youāre looking at my culpability of this is this meme. Iām 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 hadnāt 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 ātrump will be the end of us allā has the rhetorical potential to de-fang legitimate grievence within the base and relieves pressure on Biden and the democrats.
Iāll also address a skepticism youāve 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. Thatās why James Carville got on his podcast and was cursing out pro-palestinian activists for raising the issue so loudly: he knows that itās a losing issue if itās elevated above other, less controversial issues, and thereās 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 wasnāt a āmisrepresentationā of any real position (i wasnāt arguing they were anyone was āfine with a little genocideā), 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 doesnāt apply to me specifically, itās not unreasonable to point out that itās 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. Iād 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 youāre a leftist.
I was admittedly being reckless by using the āshill-unless-proven-otherwiseā 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 āshillsā and leftist political agitators, and that effectively has a āchilling-effectā on the entire community. Thatās why every criticism of Biden here is always couched in ābut iām voting for him anywayā; without signaling āI am not seeking to cause chaosā every critique is potentially suspect of being bad-faith. Itās a cancer for actual activism and itās 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 donāt think that what I am saying is what you think I am saying.
I wasnāt 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 ā they were all things that applied to you, as I saw it, in some way. But like I say, I donāt really try to get involved in saying āI think this particular user is fakeā unless itās pretty egregious. Just expressing leftist agitation isnāt 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 thatāll imply to me that someone is fake is a glaring incongruity ā 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 āour newsā since all of us are leftists togetherā¦ presumably if you are this far-left lemmy.ml person, you will see how ridiculous that is. Does it mean on its own heās a shill? Not completely, no. But itās 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? Iām not trying to be dickish by asking that, Iām genuinely asking.
Yeah, 100%. This is one of the key reasons why I donāt 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 āhow do we make some progressā and towards āis 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 protestā, itās eliminating a lot of the potential for forward progress that something like Lemmy could otherwise provide.
Iām sorry that I seem to keep misunderstanding. I still think encouraging that speculation at all is problematic but I wonāt push the issue more, I think iāve 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 donāt 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 donāt think any of these things are happening. I think youāre mounting this grand challenge against an enemy that 99% doesnāt exist on Lemmy, and the people who actually are reading your messages are in a very different place than youāre describing here. When they say āyes 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 letās not elect him, also letās go to the Palestine protest this Saturdayā and you scream in their face āGENOCIDE JOE, GENOCIDE JOE, DONāT TRY TO SILENCE MY DISSENTā youāre 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 ādissentā 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 thatās what they were doing, just my assessment of their success level is pretty limited, since they almost all were killed.
Lmao, I meanā¦ Disagree? Look, itās right here even
Fuckinā¦ Look man, if you donāt see a problem in just that first sentence I donāt think youāre trying.
I think weāve run this line of argumentation through, weāve 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 donāt feel like pulling references from earlier in the conversation. And holy hell, weāve had this argument before, donāt you remember?
Iām sorry lol, Iām just not interested in having this conversation again. Youāll say āthe SPD split the vote because they were too stubborn to join the KPDā and then iāll say āsure but the SPD was reacting to the same conditions that cultivated the NSDAP in the first placeā and then youāll say 'i agree but stopping the nazis was more important ā and then iāll say ābut they didnāt stop them, they let them in, and also even if they had if they didnāt address the conditions that lead to the NSDAP then they wouldnāt ever really stop them so the KPD should have joined the SPDā and then youāll say āyea I agree with that but they had the majority so they didnātā and iāll say āand they didnāt stop the nazis, I thought we were trying to learn from this example not rationalize what ended up happeningā
LMAO though at you claiming iām 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.