I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated claims being made in this thread, especially wrt what these supposed maga-bot/trolls all claim or do.
If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.
As it stands, however, making broad insinuations about the ill intentions of anyone who disagrees with you is not very Nice, and is certainly not Assuming Good Faith.
The mods here are very active, and very capable. We don't need people starting witch hunts here to "root out the fake Leftists", and based on OP and some others' reactions in this thread, that's clearly what's happening here.
I'm specifically talking about an exploitable vector that can be taken advantage by any number of people or organizations, so it's not really about particular users. There are examples, to be sure, but pointing them out or accusing them of working for anyone in particular would be counter-productive. Not only would it distract from the subject at hand, but they can literally make an infinite number of sock-puppets so it doesn't really matter unless you feel like playing an absolutely exhausting and fruitless game of whack-a-mole.
I'm seeking to illustrate the behavioral pattern, the weakness that it exploits, and the damage it can do, which I expect to have much more efficacious results.
This is not talking about an attack vector in the abstract. You and Philip directly asserted that users in this post are part of this group, and even went on a little self-congratulatory rabbit-hole trek deciding that they're probably AI as well.
You already did that, the second you asserted that some people here in this thread are part of this group. Hiding behind, "oh, I'll say they're here in this thread, which means their usernames are here to see and speculate upon, but I won't explicitly name them in my comment, so I can pretend that this is only abstract discussion" is just being evasive.
You're using terms like "behavioral pattern" to lend your post an air of scientific truth, but this is literally nothing more than rank aspersion. The list of behavior you laid out is rife with strawman positions and imprecise, improvable propositions.
How precisely do you define "Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left". "Most" is a vague, moving target. What qualifies as "dismantling... power possessed by the left"? That's an assertion of outcome, so are you asserting that you have some evidence tying posts here to a reduction in Leftist political power? Obviously not, but it's a useful claim to use for attacks since you're now working off a much worse impact than just political disagreement.
You haven't shown any damage, but you certainly seem happy to use the mere claim of damage and "abstract discussion", to call for direct exclusion or expulsion of people from Left spaces.
That's why this is a witch hunt, and not an appeal for moderation rule changes.
What this thread demonstrates to me, ~~not~~ more and more clearly, is:
https://www.theroot.com/in-his-own-words-martin-luther-king-jr-on-white-privi-1831933703
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
It applies to third party voters and our valid criticisms of the Democratic party, as well.
These are contradictory statements.
I won’t identify anyone who is claimed to be an example, specifically because of the valid concern raised in the second quote. I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of “talks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out ).
Is that proof positive that those people are working for the Russians? No, not really. Is it “beyond a reasonable doubt” that they are working for someone? Yes, to me. Certainly in conjunction with all the other circumstantial evidence about the way they behave. You use the standard straw man of “anyone who disagrees with you” being put in this category, but that is not at all what’s happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is what’s going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.
But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay. Your implicit threat to have the mods shut us all down is a waste of time. Talk to the mods (I am sure that some people have), tell them about the post, let them do what they’re doing to do. This is 100% an active and important problem on the Fediverse and talking about it is no kind of bad faith. I do actually, halfway, agree that singling out any particular user to accuse, could be a problem even if you’re extremely sure. But that’s not what this is.
This is you directly asserting that people in this post are part of OP's supposed group. This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.
I was not calling for OP to call people out, I was pointing out that their choosing not to do so meant that there was no way to repudiate the assertions. If someone who fits your supposed 'pattern' proves they're not in fact a bot/ troll/ AI/ etc, you can just claim they clearly weren't who you were talking about. It's a set up for a No True Scotsman argument.
Which is all well and good to claim, except that both OP and you clearly think some of those people are in this thread, based on your own comments, and many of the people disagreeing with OP here, I haven't seen around much on BH, and none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes. That doesn't look to me like "a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving", it looks like you're absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.
Sure it is. "There are people in these comments who are in the grouping I'm talking about" is quite similar to "there are people on Lemmy who are in the grouping I'm talking about." In both cases, we're talking about the problem without starting an unproductive and maybe-totally-wrong accusation against any single specific person.
Again, I don't really want to single out any specific person, since there's no way to be completely sure and there's so much overlap between someone who is doing propaganda and simply someone who is arguing in bad faith. And what's the point of starting the big argument that will surely ensue. I will say, though, that there is someone in these comments who I replied to who is exhibiting some of the behaviors OP described pretty much to a T.
Look through my history. How many times (for whatever timeframe you have time and inclination for) have I disagreed with someone, and how many of those times have I chosen to "attack" them in this way?
I actually agree with some of the people who I believe are these accounts, on some things. They tend to be stridently pro-Palestinian for example, which I think is a way to give themselves cover. Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can "attack" the viewpoint I agree with? That doesn't make any sense. That's an example of what I'm talking about with "ways of behaving" that are separate from the viewpoint, without needing to accuse any specific person to explain myself.
I can't make you agree with OP, and of course you are not required to. But you seem to be extremely persistent, here, in interpreting something OP is saying which has some widespread agreement as obviously that they are saying some other, different thing.
So now you've shifted from "you got them riled up", to "there's one specific person in these comments". Thank you for proving my point about moving targets.
And before you try to claim you were using 'them' in the singular, your next comment was "They all speak sort of similarly to each other, too.".
"There are people in this room who are bad" is quite similar to "there are people in this country..."
This is a red herring. OP is calling for people to exclude and block in order to box out political disagreements from being visible, not respond with attacking comments. I can't see your blocklist, so I can't see who you are 'attacking' in this way.
You've run this line with me before, and against others (including in this thread). What exactly that OP said did I misrepresent?
...
Surely you can see there is not a contradiction between "there are elephants in this room" and "let's talk about one specific elephant in this room"?
Dude, that's how I see it. Sorry if that upsets you. Not sure what else I can say about it.
I'm not OP. I actually don't think blocking them is a good idea. I think disagreeing with them in a particular way, and talking about the problem in general to spread awareness, is the right answer.
As I keep repeating, the politics or the substance of the disagreement has nothing to do with it. It's to do with a particular argumentation style.
I actually think you could make certain rules for communities that had nothing to do with calling out propaganda accounts, that would do quite a lot to address this problem, simply because the accounts I'm thinking of depend so heavily on certain types of bad-faith behaviors that are problems regardless of who's doing them or why.
Would it make you more comfortable if I made a separate post calling out particular types of behavior that I think are a real problem, and then we could talk about that without needing to accuse anyone of doing it because they are propaganda? I can do that. That actually might be a better way to go, because there are surely non-propaganda accounts which would be in that category which we should be addressing, and then there is no risk of someone being "caught up in the net" so to speak when they are genuinely not doing propaganda.
You said, more or less, that the issue is boxing out particular viewpoints. OP is clearly talking about behaviors and motivations (murky as that second one is to intuit), which is different. That's the core of the misrepresentation.
The problem is that all of these work together. You're in OP's post, agreeing with OP, making assertions that you see these 'behaviors', while never once previously disagreeing with OP's remedy. Severing out of a key aspect of their post, in one comment, at the bottom of a long comment chain, while only expressing agreement elsewhere? I think it's fair for me to say you are boosting OP's position.
Yes, that would have been a good route, rather than just agreeing with OP and talking evasively about fellow commenters being bad.
No, OP is most definitely attacking specific positions, not just behaviors. Here's a position-agnostic version of their list:
These are generic behaviors that would make the post not specifically about a particular group of people that OP has an issue with.
The dead giveaway is the one I bolded, because OP's version is specifying the Party itself, not simply the Left end of the political spectrum.
"Highlighting issues with Socialism as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Democratic party", for example, would run afoul of my "behavior-only", version, but not OP's position-specific version, so the only logical conclusion (which the rest of their comments definitely support) is that OP would in fact not have an issue with the behavior in that instance.
I think @Thevenin has the right of this issue in both of their comments: https://beehaw.org/comment/4660421
Side note: after our "discussion" a few weeks back, I went and read some of the interviews David Hogg has given since his Vice Chair win, and I'm pretty excited for how he's talking about changing the DNC!
I'm glad I went back through this post and found this, because this part:
Is exactly what happened to me with this user, right up until yesterday. He kept asserting something I disagreed with, to which I responded in detail, and then they'd explicitly say "i agree 100% why are you so upset?", while reiterating nearly the same point but with some pretty important distinctions. It went back and forth for far longer than I care to admit, and then when I finally put a fine-enough point on it they disengaged with 'aren't I allowed to disagree?' as if he hadn't been repeatedly expressing nothing but agreement.
It's been a while since I got baited like that, but if there were a agnostic behavior online I thought needed to be banned, it'd be this one exactly.
Unbelievably enraging, but also a bit insidious because to the outside observer it looks like they actually are in agreement, and then they go on to completely rewrite the perspective to match theirs as if it's the no-brainer position (see? look, we're agreeing). It is some absurd postmodern contemporary version of MLK's white moderate.
Yes, they also of course ignored all my actual arguments in their response. Literally made a whole thing about how OP was not about positions just behaviors, I lay out how it very much was about positions, and the next response completely ignores that and pivots to something else entirely.
It's almost impressive how much near-sealioning they did.
What's your reaction to these parts?:
I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of “talks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out).
Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can “attack” the viewpoint I agree with?
My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I've had levied against me before.
As in, especially during the last election cycle, I had people on BH who have no clue who I am (or that I would and did vote for Harris), trying to chastise me or accuse me of being a troll for "talk[ing] CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason", when in fact I was talking about Democrats' failures in order to try to fix them.
The Democratic Party is at a huge crossroads right now, because it's lost 2 elections to Trump that shouldn't have even been close, and in both cases it was with candidates who either 1) had no primary to choose them, or 2) were in control of the Party during the primary. The fact that 2024 happened, and we're still seeing these takes attacking Leftists (just calling them "fake" doesn't make it so, no matter how much OP wishes it did), instead of saying, "hey, maybe the Centrist path of trying to work across the aisle doesn't actually work to counter the alt-Right/ Trump-Right/ whatever you want to name their current brand of bad-faith political gamesmanship", is breaking my brain.
We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can't win "doomers" or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.
You're speaking in generalities, and I have no way to judge what happened or was likely the situation, from this statement. You could be describing a random Cyrillic character that wouldn't be on a non-Russian keyboard, for instance, or you could be describing someone using a comma for denoting decimal places, which is something a British or Canadian would do, even if they're living in the US. I'm not going to denounce someone sight-unseen based on what you wrote.
I work in infosec, and attribution is difficult under the best of circumstances. If I had IP logs, request headers, UserAgent strings, etc, I might be able to spot a foreign national impersonating an American, but I don't, and neither do you.
I've seen at least 2 accounts on Beehaw, pre-election, who were rabidly pro-Israel. One of them disappeared completely after the election. The other I still see around, still often posting pro-Israel and Israel-apologist content and comments. So in my experience, your 'tell' is flawed by being based on a false premise. And that's just Beehaw. Across all of Lemmy, including the center-right instances? There are absolutely staunch Zionists and pro-Israel users.
Well, since you're asking me to surmise 'why' you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you've probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered 'good' among Dem voters).
After we lost, many pro-Israel sources (even in congress) have rushed to blame the pro-Palestinian movement for it, because it allows them to both set up the pro-Palestinian movement as an enemy to the party, and to deflect blame from Biden's pro-Israel stances for contributing to the loss, both of which serve their interests.
You've had people accuse you of having no idea what normal American salaries are or how Americans write their numbers, while claiming to be a genuine American who was super-concerned about the election, and saying that was suspicious? What strawman position similar to that have you had levied against you?
Most of the people OP was talking about are not trying to fix the Democrats, and they're often pretty explicit about saying that Democrats are as bad or worse than the Republicans and that they want to not vote or vote for third party candidates as a result. Obviously, advocating for a third party in itself isn't suspicious or anything, it's fine, but the particular type of guaranteed-to-be-counterproductive way that they're doing it is what OP is calling out, I think.
I sort of get what you're saying, that maybe someone has accused you of being a fake account because you criticize Democrats, and that's how you read OP's message. I don't think that is what OP's talking about, it's certainly not what I am talking about.
I... what?
This has nothing to do with my question. I was pointing out that some of these fake accounts put on pro-Palestinian affects, and that I still think they are suspicious even though I am also pro-Palestinian. It doesn't even need to be anything to do with the Democrats in this scenario. I feel like you read what I talked about but now you're talking about some totally different scenario.
I am aware that there's a whole establishment-Democrat theory that the pro-Palestinian movement itself was "fake" or not really valid. That's 100% different from what I am talking about, and I don't think that theory ever really got traction with anyone outside of DC or the establishment media. Actually I would specifically contrast something like the "uncommitted" movement as an excellent example of something that is clearly real, because it clearly shows concern for the Palestinian people and a desire to fight for a better solution, whereas the exact thing me and OP have been talking about and what makes it suspicious is people who seem like they're totally unconcerned with making things any better, and just want to explicitly tell people never to vote for Democrats, and that's the end of it and as far as it goes. Which, voting's not enough sure, but refusing to do it at all seems totally counterproductive to anything good happening with immigration or Palestine. Totally different from what you're talking about as your own behavior and advocacy.
Did that all not come through from what either of us said so far? You thought we were just saying that anyone who criticizes Democrats must be fake?
The tough part for me is that on the one hand, I want to believe that you are being earnest.
But the supposed prevalence of accounts who are both
does not comport with my experience on BH. Certainly not at a level to constitute a group large enough to be who this post is about.
And seeing as I have previously seen OP accuse people of being bad-faith actors, who were (imo) clearly just in disagreement about politics, I am not willing to extend a benefit of the doubt to them.
Also, you keep making latent accusations throughout your comments:
You haven't even proven there are any, and yet half your comment is premised on them not only being present, but you having positively identified them. How am I supposed to take that claim as good faith?
This is the root issue with this post. OP is encouraging individual users to block people to create a walled-garden within a walled-garden. You say you're not, but then what is the remedy you're putting forth?
This thread is a witch hunt by definition, because it contains neither the means to accurately identify the supposed ~~witches~~ trolls, nor an actual workable, mutual, proper-process remedy. It's literally calling for circumventing the mods with mob-action.
Okay. You basically ignored most of my message, including some specific questions which I asked for specific reasons to try to get to the bottom of this. You just repeated your side again. So never mind.
This on the other hand is a pretty good question. So, one remedy I'd like to try is creating a moderated community specifically for political discussion, with a bot that can "oversee" the community and can identify fallacies or bad-faith engagement. LLMs aren't really capable of following the thread of a conversation or picking the "winner", but a lot of the stuff that pisses me off on Lemmy is pretty simple stuff to detect that I think they could do: Claiming that someone said something when they actually said something else, blatantly ignoring a direct question and instead going off and just talking about some different thing, repeating yourself forever without substantively responding to anything the other person says. That kind of thing. I think if there were a bot that could moderate discussions according to that kind of guideline and call people out in an unbiased way when they were engaging poorly, it would be hugely helpful. Because everyone does it, to some extent. It's easy to get emotional or get heated up about the point you wanted to make, it's easy to misinterpret something accidentally, and obviously everyone comes from a standpoint that their stuff is right (obviously right) or else they wouldn't be saying it. I think a more neutral arbiter could help to point those things out without it being a big acrimonious mess whenever people disagree. Accusing another person in the conversation of bad faith rarely goes anywhere good. I think in general (if it somewhat worked) it could be a really cool thing.
And, getting back to your question, I actually think something like that would do a lot to address the type of engagement that I tend to talk about when I talk about fake accounts. It sidesteps the (basically impossible and highly polarizing / inflammatory) task of categorizing accounts into "fake" or not. If you have a political viewpoint that I or OP happen to think may be coming from a "fake" POV, but you're just sitting there talking about it and engaging with people who disagree, it's fine. That's healthy. The problem comes in (to me) when people come in big gangs to all yell the same stuff, don't really engage with people who disagree but just mischaracterize the opposition and repeat their points of view forever, basically just engage in bad faith. Whether those people are "fake" or not is still relevant, to me, but I don't think just excising them out from your Lemmy experience is necessarily the way, and I definitely don't think trying to publicly call them out once they're "identified" by whatever specific criteria is the way. Because it is impossible to tell specifically for any given person.
Probably there are going to be 0 people who think that is a good idea. That is fine. I feel like the general street cred that AI in general has right now will lead people to hate the idea. That is fine. If I get motivation, I think I will just set the idea up and turn it loose, and if anyone's open to play with it then see how it works out. That is my remedy.
Lmao, I cannot believe that i'm getting back into it with you, but I can't not address this
I have a strong feeling you think I fit into this bucket, and - for the record - I think the reason you get into these types of exchanges is because you use pretty lose language when describing your perspective, and people pick up on the possibility you may be alluding to a specific meaning they take issue with.
That's what happened with our conversation that got me engaged, and it turned out at the end that I had correctly identified our disagreement while you were explicitly trying to pass it off as agreement. You should consider yourself lucky that so many people seem to be addressing these politispeak comments with long and charitable explanations and not outright scorn. "I didn't say that" or "why are you yelling, i agree with you" sounds innocuous enough but quickly becomes gaslighting behavior when it turns out you were in disagreement.
I said:
And you think it is "loose language" and you kept accusing me of things like "Insisting that ‘it should have been enough that she wasn’t trump’ while also insisting that the base doesn’t have legitimate concerns that depressed their motivation." Yes. That is precisely the kind of behavior I was calling out in my message. You have that part correct, you are in that bucket.
I agree with one part of what you said (that the Democrats are mostly shitty), but disagree with another part (that 100% of the "blame" attaches to them because they are shitty, and there is no other factor at all above 0% in the previous election that influenced the election, and in particular I have some specific things that I think influenced the election). I have no idea why you are so persistent in sending messages while also being so persistent about not understanding that. I tried, man, I really did. Do you want a diagram? I can send a diagram maybe and go back to each of my previous messages and show with color-coding how the different elements of the argument line up within certain messages and how it works to say "A and not B" and how that's allowed, to send that to someone who thinks "A and B." Should I do that?
I wasn't sure if that was what you were saying, I wanted to allow you the option to clarify, but every time you did you just made it less-clear what you were saying.
I said:
You responded with:
and then you said:
I said:
I can go down the whole conversation if you want, but pretty much every comment has some degree of intentional(?) obfuscation. Edit: just so we're clear, that first quote from me is in my very-first comment. That was basically my entire point, but you kept pointing to other things I was using to support that argument and saying 'yea, i agree' but never addressing the thing I was trying to communicate
This is the loose language i'm talking about. Yes, you kept saying "i agree" to a vague sentiment within my comment, and then you'd turn around and disagree with the main thing. I don't even really know if you're doing this on purpose, but when I see you in another conversation that people keep having this kind of exchange with you I have to assume that this is why.
I'm sorry if this truly is unintentional, because this must be incredibly frustrating, but this is why I think you keep running into this. To those who don't know what your intention actually is, it feels a hell of a lot like gaslighting. Just state the thing you're disagreeing with explicitly, don't bury it behind a whole bunch of statements of agreement.
I don't insist this. I don't think this is what happened, although I do think that effect was one very small piece.
This is, again, you telling me what I believe (indirectly through the mechanism of "what liberals believe"), instead of listening to me when I tell you what I believe.
I'm actually pretty sure that somewhere in the history, I specifically addressed the two root causes of the Democrats losing, at least twice, of which one of those main root causes was:
This part, I agree with. Two things can be true.
It boggles my mind that you're apparently having so much difficulty with this concept. It is not either-or, such that me saying that propaganda and misinformation factored into the election means I am denying that the Democrats laid the groundwork by more or less abandoning the American people for decades. I agree with one part of your view, but not the other part.
I literally cannot believe that I am explaining this so many times, just literally the exact same concept over and over again, and you're not grasping it.
Let me pause there. Has what I said so far make sense? Just removing everything else from the equation. Can you understand the thing I'm saying right now, and do you believe me when I say that this is what I believe? Does this message here, taken in isolation without reference to an expansive network of how you misinterpreted some past statements or anything like that, make sense so far?
I feel like this may be why you're having so much trouble with this: You are interpreting everything just through the lens of whether or not it agrees with you, what you think the main point is, and so on. Forget your point of view. Go back and read my message, try to absorb what it is that I am saying starting from a blank slate. See if you can answer this:
I think that, if you wanted to boil it down to main root causes, there are two causes for the Democrats losing because people didn't vote for them. One was ____ and the other was _____.
Not what you think the singular root cause is, and whether or not I've got it right and am focusing on the right things if we assume your answer is the objective truth against which mine is being measured. See if you can answer that question in terms of what I on my side believe the two main root causes to be.
Lmao. K fine, i'll play this game:
Here's my take:
I have repeatedly, ad nauseum stated my disagreement. You do not agree with me, and that's fine. I don't think there's any world, in the absence of propaganda, that democrats could have overcome the broad, nationwide discontent being caused by the failure of democracy without acknowledging that discontent. That's always been my whole point. That was the whole reason I responded to you to begin with. I don't care if you agree that there is some attribution to that specific problem, I'm attributing the their entire loss to it, full stop. That's why i was screaming why it's such a huge problem. It isn't because of propaganda or the dems being in need of reform, it's because there's a growing faction of people that think the choices on offer do meet even the threshold of consideration.
Do not tell me again that you agree with me, even in-part. I wouldn't believe you at this point even if you did.
I feel like you have grasped the nature of my argument, and parts of yours that I do and do not agree with. We got there, I guess.
You seem very hung up on whether to call me agreeing with you in part, and not with another part, as full disagreement or full agreement, and you seem to have very confused for quite a while now that I am not falling in either of those categories. You've arrived at "full disagreement" now, as if daring me to challenge you on it. I am fine with that definition if you want to call it that.
In the future I would recommend that you pursue this course immediately instead of after a day of yelling: Objectively summarizing the point of view of the person you're talking with, and comparing it to your own and seeing where they differ and why, instead of just spending the whole time yelling your own side and then telling the other person what it is that "liberals" believe and getting confused. It will be outside your comfort zone but it is communication. I would actually recommend that you go forward from that point of comparison, and into analyzing the differences and reasons for their differing point of view and considering it even though (by definition) you will think it is wrong, and critiquing your own points of view based on the differences and the reasons for them and any counterarguments they may make. You will find your internet interactions more productive, I think.
In any case have a good one, I'm glad we got there in the end.
If i spent a single character trying to "summarize your perspective" unsolicited you'd accuse me of misrepresenting you.
I told you straight up what I disagreed with, and you ignored it or didnt understand it. I could not have been clearer if i tried. Next time I'll just assume you're doing it it bad faith and call it a day.
Here's a template you can use:
"It sounds like you're saying (argument). Do I have that right?"
Pretty hard to characterize that in bad faith. Establishing a shared mental model is pretty essential. It also puts you in a position where it will be extremely hard for your brain to trick you into thinking that the other person said "yes" when they said "no" or vice versa, whereas misunderstanding what someone is saying is surprisingly easy to do, even when you're not giving mental weight to "what liberals believe" in your model, or anything else that explicitly discounts the need to read or understand anything that's being written to you.
You can also try this template:
"It might seem like i’m lecturing you because I don’t think you’re grasping what I’m saying."
"sticking your fingers in your ears"
"paternalistic bullshit."
That's always super helpful and productive, you could try that too.
Lmao each of those were after you had completely missed my point, that had not changed and which you had not acknowledged. You will not find a simgle moment in your responses where you correctly understood what I was saying.
Respectfully, fuck off with your patronization
I know! I was super unreasonable. I was required to agree with you completely, and everything different than your point was a weird distraction. It's horrible. You're right to call it out and get all upset.
I don't give a shit if you agree with my point, don't be dense. I cared that you weren't comprehending it.
Democrats are so cooked.
I know! I was super unreasonable. It's the worst. You're definitely right to get all upset and constantly write things that are the opposite of what I think and get mad. It's obviously the way. Obviously.
I am done now, I was just having fun. I hope that my condescending assistance has been helpful.
Grateful for the opportunity to learn from such a practiced propagandist.
You clearly aren't intending this to be about this (OP's) post, and yet...
I actually like your idea, and I think that it could work if there was some kind of set structure to the posts, maybe using a template to make it easy for an LLM to parse, and to prevent comments from asking more follow-up questions than allowed. My partner is involved with competitive debate, and I think a highly-structured variant could work in an asynchronous format like forums posts, especially if there's a bot to auto-remove posts that aren't formatted correctly (that part could just be a script with regex or something).
I realized, in the course of talking with you, that while me and OP have come to the same conclusion about what's going on in Lemmy, the specific sets of behavior we are calling out are very different. But we're describing the same underlying problem, we just have different perspectives on what we observed that led us to that conclusion.
I basically agree with OP's characterization of a type of argument these accounts like to make that to me doesn't make sense, but I just sort of suspect that there's a big contingent of genuine users that also like to muster that exact same argument pattern also, or at least a lot of the elements of it. But again it's probably pretty fruitless to start wildly speculating about which specific users are or are not "genuine," unless they do some kind of really obvious tell that they are not what they are claiming to be. It is absolutely impossible to know.
Hm... this is an interesting idea. I was going to have it intuit the "main pillars" so to speak of each side's argument, and then make sense of how well the other side was coping with each of the pillars. Not in the sense of assessing right versus wrong or reading sources or anything, that's clearly hopeless. But just the basics: Are you addressing the argument directly, or are you just kind of stepping past it when you respond or pretending that it didn't exist, or are you mischaracterizing it as something totally different and then beating up the strawman? That might seem like kind of a simplistic bar to clear but I think there is so much on Lemmy that would fail that type of test that it would be really productive to have an objective referee. For everyone. It's surprisingly easy to fall into "my stuff is right, fuck all this other stuff, that is nonsense" type of thinking, it doesn't even have to be anything wrong with you if the bot is dinging you for not addressing something.
Formalizing the thing and the format you need to provide could work too, it's just an extra bar for people to clear and I feel like the LLM could probably do a half-decent job without it. I might try to knock up a quick version of it based on my idea but I'd be happy for any critique or other ways it could work.