If you want to make changes without dealing with update hassles:
Hugo is nice if you want extensive customization and you’re okay fighting with Go code and templates, a little bit.
Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.
It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they’re pretty much always guilty. There’s a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.
Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it’s the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.
The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.
Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.
The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.
On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.
Agreed. I have such a distrust at this point of any media that fits a particular format and style, and that whole instance checked a bunch of the boxes.
Like, as far as I know, “Drop Site News” and “In These Times” have not done a thing wrong, and still every time I see them I instantly think “What the fuck! Are you guys Russian? What are you up to?”
The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.
I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.
I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.
I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.
Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report.
Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.
Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.
So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.
Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.
Yeah. I’ve started to get suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell you that they are bold leftist media, and they’re bringing a needed perspective that is super-vital and not just all propaganda and lies like everything else is. It sort of reminds me of those bank billboards that say, “To us, you’re more than just a number.”
Update: It looks to me at least pretty likely that !altmedia@altmedia.house is also Russian propaganda. Maybe they just wanted to post this thing, and are short of any of the critical thinking skills that would let them evaluate my argument that MPN is Russian when I told them it was. Mostly they seem to be posting pro-Palestinian stuff from reliable sources. But, the sidebar is super sus to me.
Until January 2nd, 2025 the 'WorldNews` subreddit, with 40 million users automatically subscribed, had an ‘Israel at War’ livethread constantly at the top.
This community was founded to dissent from this forced perspective, and present the Palestinian and anti-establishment position in general.
Fine. I actually completely agree with this, I took a quick look at some of the pinned /r/worldnews threads about Israel’s wars and “wars” and they’re completely full of pro-Israel bullshit. My initial assumption is that the inherent corruptibility of the Reddit / Lemmy moderation model has rendered /r/worldnews subject to propaganda from Israel, but who knows. But yes it’s some bullshit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1h3nk2e/rworldnews_live_thread_israel_at_war_thread_79/
It’s a little bit weird that they are pretending that anything on Lemmy needs to have this pro-Palestinian iconoclasty brought to bear, when everyone on Lemmy is pro-Palestinian anyway, but sure, whatever. Anyway, reading further:
This community is ‘AltMedia’ in the Mearsheimer and Walt sense. Not the Richard Spencer sense.
Not sure why those are the only two options…
And then below that is where it goes off the rails.
This community likes
John Mearsheimer
Good stuff if a little bit of an odd choice for the number 1.
Edward Said, Noam Chomsky
Great stuff
Chris Hedges
Well that’s an odd choice. All I really know about the guy is some email list that gets sent to me that has his name on it which occasionally says some very bizarre stuff. For example “The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil.” He apparently used to be an extremely bold anti-Iraq War voice back in those days, which is obviously fantastic, but since then…
Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016. Hedges, who has claimed not to have known much about the network at the time, was approached to make a show by RT America president Mikhail “Misha” Solodovnikov, who promised him complete editorial independence.[44][57]
On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works, with Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows. On Contact was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, RT America’s first significant award nomination, but the award was won by Steve.[44]
On March 3, 2022, RT America ceased operations following the widespread deplatforming of Russian-sponsored media caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[44] The run of On Contact ended.
Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.[44]
On May 27, 2020, Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections. After being informed the following day that running for office would conflict with FCC fairness doctrine rules because he was at that time hosting the nationally broadcast RT America television show On Contact, Hedges decided not to pursue office in order to keep hosting the show.[63][64]
Anyway. Back to the list:
Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson
I don’t recognize all that many of the names on their list. But, the people that they “like” that I do recognize that are in any way active in the modern day, there is a very distinct through-line (pretty much universal) about how those people feel about the invasion of Ukraine.
Anyway, YSK.
What the fuck
TIL. I’m so confused by this concept.
What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That’s… that’s how it works. If you’re not some kind of “YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever” idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that’s happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect “which side” is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person’s brain.
Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to “Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting” more often than not. I don’t really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.
There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.
Yeah. In retrospect, it’s easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he’d been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result…
Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.
I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk’s personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.
See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.
I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.
If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.
Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.
Hm.
Here are my thoughts:
I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.
I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.
I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.
Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.
Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.
Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.
No idea about tools although I hope you find something.
Two related suggestions that will change your life: