Texas?

That Ken Paxton?

Did Allstate not pay their protection money, or something?

(It’s not completely a joke. Allowing rampant corruption, and then cracking down on real crimes using legitimate systems of justice but only on the crimes done by people who cross you personally, is one of the galaxy-brain strats of the sophisticated modern tyrant. It’s incredibly powerful and there’s not really a good way to resist or prevent it that I know of. It’s one of the big reasons Xi Jinping has become as powerful as he is.)

I was really trying not to get drawn into this. Maybe I am not strong enough.

You literally have comments in the mod-complaint post about how you think anarchism is fundamentally flawed.

I said I thought it had some fatal flaws. Then, two different people came out to tell me I was ignorant about anarchism. I allowed as how maybe I was, and asked them what I should read to learn more. Then I read it. Then I got back to them to say I liked it a lot, and on reflection made it clear that I was talking about a particular breed of faux anarchism, and not anything to do with the philosophy I was reading about in Kropotkin.

You know, like trolls do.

The exchange is here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14477565

It’s honestly kind of hard to remember, in internet spaces, that most people are reasonable. It’s easy to misinterpret things or classify someone you’re talking to as some kind of “enemy” of one breed or another, but most people can work past it. I talked about it in that comments section. At a certain point I made a realization that almost everybody there, even among people who were telling me I was wrong, were pretty civil about it. They said what they said, I said what I said, and we sort of moved on our separate ways having had the exchange. All good.

Then there were a very small minority of accounts where it had to be personal. It’s not enough just to disagree and talk about it. Someone has to be “bad”, and someone has to “win.” People will start reaching for what the other person really meant to do, or how they really feel about things. It’s like they can’t let it resolve into anything positive; they have to “prove their point” and assign a bad belief or action to the enemy so they can succeed in their case that the other person is “bad.”

I think that second type of argumentation is actually a small minority. I think they’re just super loud and tend to dominate comments sections sometimes, because they trigger other people and trigger each other, and they never stop once they get started. Part of the reason I feel like defending myself here is that I do feel like it’s relevant to look back at that comments section as a whole, and see how overall productive it is. (It also doesn’t say what you think it says, although there is a minority that does think what you said, yes. Sort by top, read the top five comments, and you tell me what the consensus is.) The more that it is “You are trolling! You must shut up!”, the less light and the more heat the overall exchange of words is going to generate.

The one thing I will allow, is that maybe I have a type of sarcasm and instant-disagreement that makes it easy for something to spiral into more of an argument than it needs to be, or cause way more friction than needs to be there. You can see some of that in the comments section too. I’m not doing it for the sake of trolling. I am very sincerely explaining what it is that I think, and why, and I’m generally listening for the counter-explanation. If someone makes a point that I think has a fatal flaw I will sometimes point it out in, I guess, a very mean and talking-down type of way. That part I can see, yeah, if that’s what you’re talking about, maybe you are right that I should not do that.

Sincerely expressing your actual viewpoint, which disagrees with the community’s consensus viewpoint, is classic trolling? And then explaining why and asking questions about what people mean in their disagreements with you? You gotta update the urban dictionary and all, they’ve got it all wrong.

I’m a little hesitant to restart the drama, but if you’re curious, here’s what happened:

https://slrpnk.net/post/14823401

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30753583/14479446

You can draw your conclusions about whether or not I’m a troll. I will take no questions and reply to no comments attempting to restart the debate. I do think it’s semi-on-topic to discuss one specific instance of when this type of “you’re not allowed to moderate that way” policy might have been a good thing, but an extensive argument about whether I should have been allowed to say those things in that specific instance is not.

I’m also fascinated to discover that the person who’s been swearing to me recently that Wikipedia is evil, NATO is evil, Russia doesn’t care about Greenland and Trump’s desire to invade them is no big deal… was way, way back at the time when this happened, out stumping for the Green Party in the anarchism community and being protected by the mods while doing so. That is fascinating.

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of remote psychology?

Yeah. It makes a big difference what communities and what type of “poking holes in the narrative” comments they are talking about. It could be a way to crack down on fake leftist communities that will ban you for saying Biden has been raising working people’s wages for the last four years, or it could also be a way to force you to accept misinformation because banning it would be against “free speech.” I wish they had listed some specific examples.

When I saw the original announcement from LW admins, I was extremely surprised find that I, with some reservations, agreed with it.

Lemmy definitely has a problem with single-viewpoint moderated communities. I am banned from some anarchism communities because I came in and did exactly what Serinus described, gave a point of view that poked a hole in the only officially allowed narrative, and I definitely have observed particularly on lemmy.world moderators who are very unapologetic about banning people who try to poke a hole in the only allowed viewpoint. I don’t think anyone on a social network should be in the business of policing the allowed points of view. You can kick out the agreed-to-be-obnoxious stuff, and there’s going to be a big grey area there, but once you’ve come out with it that you want to allow side 1 but not side 2, in my opinion you shouldn’t be a moderator anymore.

Of course, announcing the policy and implementing it are two very different things. Implementing it perfectly will be impossible. Also, there are people who use “poking a hole in the only allowed viewpoint” as their excuse for being an absolute knobhead, never shutting up, and being hostile and disingenuous. (Depending on who you ask, I might be one of them.) I’m a little bit suspicious of how well lemmy.world is going to implement this extremely-difficult-to-implement policy change. I was sort of expecting it to be some kind of red herring which was forbidding moderators from dealing with trolls or propagandists when they found them, though. It still might be that in practice, of course.

But overall, I was more than a little surprised when I read a LW moderation policy announcement and found it describing a genuine problem and a pretty credible attempt at a solution. I don’t even know if the communities I was thinking of while reading it are still around and still doing their thing, but if they are, it’s a problem.