That’s actually, in all seriousness, a really good point. I think it’s “Active” that works that way, not “Hot,” but I get your point. It still doesn’t explain why they’re all top-level comments, or why there was a sudden rush of new ones all with similar totally bizarre lazy takes, like “Trump loves expanding the US empire and doing the bidding of the US foreign-policy establishment.”
Yeah. I think Mastodon’s model where there are no “communities,” just networks of trust with users choosing to follow or interact with each other and where there is no way to automatically get your stuff shown to everyone until trusted people have affirmatively given you approval for what you have to say, is just a better model. The reddit-like model is just too open to anonymous accounts in groups manipulating the conversation.
Yeah. I’m not aware of a good solution. I don’t want to let every comments section have random “and THAT’s why NATO is terrible and China/Russia are by far the lesser evil in geopolitics as everyone knows” comments interjected into it unchallenged. I don’t want every comments section to get taken over by extensive arguments about who is and isn’t a Russian propagandist. And I don’t want every comments section to be picked through by some kind of arbiter of who are the “allowed” comments, so that anyone who’s provisionally identified as propaganda gets removed never to be seen again. Even if there were someone who had time to do that, which there isn’t, that’s not going to wind up being implemented perfectly if that were the system.
My MO is to call out the very severe propaganda when I see it, talk about how I see it as a problem and why, without getting drawn into the endless bickering into which the propaganda accounts inevitably like to draw anyone who responds to them. It doesn’t seem like an ideal solution, but it’s the best reaction I can see.
I do think it’s fair to ban the ones that are just laughably obvious, I guess, for the sake of all of our sanity, since they’re clearly bringing nothing anyone wants to the table. At the same time, all that is going to do is set a higher bar, which I’m sure they will be able to clear. And also, it sets a precedent for moderators aggressively policing comments sections and kicking out the “wrong” people, which the propaganda accounts are also able to manipulate to their advantage when that becomes the norm. That’s a whole other conversation. That’s why I mostly don’t go on lemmy.world, this community being one of a few rare and sensible exceptions.
Oops, you’re right, I need to make some smokescreen posts. I posted a B movie to a media community just now. Maybe too much effort, though. It took a few minutes, I could have spent that on like 5 random memes I found on the internet thrown around in a meme community.
You think you’re playing chess, while you keep playing checkers.
You win today’s Thomas Friedman award for nonsensical metaphors.
It’s not competitive on the same level as “When you’re in a hole, stop digging. When you’re in three holes, bring a lot of shovels.” But then, what is?’
Edit: I got the quote wrong.
Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying-and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute.
Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense?
It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.
Courtesy of the formerly-glorious Matt Taibbi.
Putin is evil because Stalin was evil
Yeltsin was a glorious “freedom and democracy”
everything Trump does is because Putin has a pee tape
Boy howdy, that sure is exactly what I said. I’m amazed at your ability to cut through the apparent meaning of my messages and discern that at the core, I’m talking about Putin mostly in terms of Stalin, and also how I sure do love Boris Yeltsin. You can reach back to literally the only thing I ever remember saying recently about the Yeltsin era, that post I did of an article from a State Department person who was active in the 90s, and reference back to what stupendously great things for freedom and democracy I think the US and the Russian government were doing during that time.
I’ve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks “wrong,” some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks “right” again and the conversation they’re trying to downplay, in this case surph_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
Timestamps of the top-level comments on this post:
I feel bad that this comments section has now completely been taken over by conversations about propaganda. It’s meaner and less fun to talk about than the original political subject matter. On the other hand, for as long as people are posting propaganda, I guess it’s important for us to be talking about how people are posting propaganda. I will give kudos to the parent comment for being a lot higher caliber of propaganda comment than surph_ninja’s attempt.
Yeah. It’s sort of sad that the nature of the network is such that it’s sometimes necessary to invest some effort in figuring out what the history is, of the person you’re talking to, whether they’re coming from a place of conversation or a place of broadcasting a bad-faith argument to distort the conversation, but them’s the breaks. I think it’s necessary sometimes to be a pain in the ass about these types of minor annoyances, or else they’ll take over and the whole place will be populated with only annoyance instead of real conversation between humans.
And now there are three more top-level comments.
Timestamps of all the top-level comments on this post:
Why just now did it become active again, and all with top-level replies, not people responding to anything in the conversation below?
This is actually the first time I’ve seen some real confirmation for my theory about specific activity to bury conversations that people don’t want to have at the top of the comments. Before this, it was just a feeling, but this seems pretty hard to explain any other way.
For anyone who’s still reading this trainwreck of a conversation. Check this out:
https://lemmy.world/comment/14157938
There’s some further wider context here: https://lemmy.world/comment/14154055
I’m trying not to prolong this exchange, because it’s no longer adding anything. I feel like at this point pretty much everything that needs to be said has been. You can draw your conclusions. The only thing I’ll add is that, at the point of the above links, I don’t think I had pegged surph_ninja as conclusively a propaganda account, let alone a ‘Russian bot’ which I’ve never said. I just thought he was talking nonsense. I read his sources and then was talking with him about his argument at face value. After a while of doing that, and encountering a particular breed of total non-logic and a particular style of argumentation in service of a particular viewpoint, I formed a pretty strong conclusion that he is doing pro-Russian propaganda. But I think some of the conversation from above is from back before that happened.
Edit: Changed from double quotes to single, around ‘Russian bot’. Happy now?
Ooh, this is interesting.
I’ve talked before about how I have a working theory about how when the top comments section looks “wrong,” some of the propaganda accounts will make new top-level comments and top-level replies, in a sudden flurry of activity to a previously pretty dormant comments section, until it looks “right” again and the conversation they’re trying to downplay, in this case suprh_ninja getting ridiculed for being transparent propaganda, is shifted to way down the page.
That might sound like some tinfoil hat stuff except for how low-effort and bizarre this comment is. Trump was proven after extensive investigation to be an agent of Russia. He’s pretty open about it. He is actively hostile to the US empire, both the good and bad parts, although he is also aligned with a lot of domestic fascist elements. Are you saying Trump is happy about spending $60 billion dollars on aid for Ukraine, because it’s part of “all the giveaways to arms manufacturers”?
I’ll open up a Patreon. Freelance NATO propagandist. At the silver tier, you can sync a tier list of Lemmy’s greatest propaganda accounts to your client, so a link appears on every one of their comments showing their propaganda tier and a link to them getting ridiculed in some previous comments section.
See, this is what I meant about the chess game. You can say I accuse everything critical of US foreign policy et cetera. I can send you a big wall of text of about 10 different times in the last 24 hours that I was critical about US foreign and domestic policy. And it will make absolutely no impact on what you say. You’ve just got your thing you want to say, and you’re going to keep broadcasting it at everyone, and what they say makes no difference.
Do you want me to? I did that a while back when someone made the same accusation. If you want, I’ll dig up the comment and send it to you, to illustrate that this is one more thing you’re saying that has no connection to reality.
Like I say, I think engaging in this conversation is a mistake for you. It’s highlighting something that you really should be wanting to downplay. I’m happy to talk about it if you’ve decided you want to, though.
Sounds good to me. The comment itself isn’t all that bad. I think, as you said, it’s extrapolating from something objectively true to leap to an endpoint that’s totally nuts.
A lot of my reaction was from the combination of this particular conclusion being totally out there, and it being in service of a particular type of pro-Russian-viewpoint talking point, and the pattern of that type of thing being a very clear and consistent pattern from this user in the past. But I do agree with you. Usually, it’s better to just let people talk. It’s educational.
Here’s what I think you should do:
I think you’re doing really well though! In particular, I think you did a pretty good job with the deflection to taking some factual claim you made in service of that larger Frankenstein’s monster of bad reasoning, and insisting that the original claim is factual, you backed it up and showed sources, everyone’s just trying to cover it up because they hate the truth. That part was good. It redirected (or tried to, if I had taken the bait) away from the larger issue and into weird minutiae where you can defend that one detail point. So you have the argumentation down pretty well. You just need to introduce more cover to make it a more realistic account, and do a better job of what issues to focus on how much, and I think you can do really well.
I would not advise trying to engage in a back-and-forth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
The whole series is an interesting and somehow still relevant look at how dishonest debate on the internet tends to work. It’s a little bit dated because it comes from the era of freelancers, not today’s polished professionals, but a lot of the techniques of argument are the same. There is simply no good result, by engaging with them in a factual discussion, any more than you can win a chess game against someone who insists on moving pieces wherever they feel like moving them and keeps insisting that you’re breaking the rules and they’re winning.
I label anyone who uses “blue MAGA,” says Biden and Trump have equal levels of corruption, uses the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and says that Ukraine is Nazis, misinformation, yes.
I’m not even slightly interesting in a conversation about how “annexing territory in the arctic” equals invading Greenland or how we’re expending all our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. I wish we were expending our military assets sending aid to Ukraine. If we were actually emptying the warehouses completely sending them whatever they need, and not putting silly bureaucratic restrictions on how they can use it while fighting for their lives, then they might be winning the war. Instead, they get just enough to continue a long, bloody, pointless stalemate which has been a catastrophe for both Russia and Ukraine.
Reported for misinformation. Usually I think the propagandists can just be dealt with by disagreeing in the comments and letting people figure out who is and isn’t full of shit, but this has crossed into the territory of being pure annoying noise.
It is mind-boggling that he was taken seriously for decades as an economic and foreign policy thinker. He’s a pre-LLM argument for the idea that being able to put any number of sentences together so they scan is not an indication that there’s any intelligence behind the text. He’s a walking wrong answer. He was unerringly backwards about so many things, on such a basic level that even a very casual critical reading could identify the flaws, and no one noticed at what was supposed to be the highest levels of American journalism, save for a handful of heretics who had to shout from the margins and were basically ignored for basically his entire career.
https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/matt-taibbi-flathead-the-peculiar-genius-of-thomas-l-friedman.html
Enjoy. I started rereading it just now, and it’s just as great as it was back when everyone was reading Judy Miller and Paul Krugman.