mozz

"He'll also do it in a rage. And this is where it gets really drug related: He'll start to freak out. You know, one time there was the word arbitrage on a cue card, and he started screaming, that the script department was setting him up. 'You're setting me up!' and he just freaked out, and then very loudly evacuated his bowels. And you could smell it, you know, and the guy was holding the boom mike, you know, was tearing up."

-Noel Casler

I love talking with people who disagree with me. Honestly I think I have something wrong with me, for how much I like arguing on the internet.

But also, I think that the presence of so many people who are deliberately coming in to distort the narrative being presented is a bad thing. It absolutely swings elections, for one thing -- the rise of social media influence campaigns as a factor in elections has been pretty well documented, and it's not a good thing.

It's obviously not real easy to detect someone who's saying X because they believe it, as distinct from someone who's saying X because this is one of 50 accounts they run that is designed to push X as a popular opinion on social media. Every social media platform except Twitter has dedicated teams for this stuff. I think Lemmy's admins are already overwhelmed running their instances, and it's not fair to ask them to also do this more or less impossible task, but just leaving it alone and letting the shills come in and do 10 posts a day about how Biden betrayed us and as a good American I'm not voting in the election, and leaving it to the users to argue it out with them every single time every single day, isn't really the way either.

I don't think you can do it by viewpoint, to create an echo chamber. That's obviously a bunch of crap. I did do some little experiments with a couple of ways to do it, having an LLM detect certain bad-faith techniques automatically or mechanically detecting shill accounts through their behavior, but it's obviously not a real simple or easy thing to do. I definitely haven't figured out something that I feel like is "yes this is the way, this works well."

I'm not angry at you or anything like that. I'm being super hostile partly just because I can be a dick in general, but also because it seems like you're being dishonest. If I've read it wrong then I apologize, but the type of thing you're saying just doesn't make sense to me.

It's just not that complex. I'll speak for myself: I didn't vote for Biden in the primary. I sort of expected him to be the exact type of establishment criminal that his background as a rich white guy who's worked in Washington all his life would suggest. Then he started doing good things for the working class and on climate change and I was surprised about it and for the first time decided he might be a good thing (instead of just not the end of the world like Trump would be). Then he started being okay with Israel slaughtering brown people and I stopped supporting him nearly as wholeheartedly -- like yes, he's returning to type as a war criminal like most US leaders; it's still better to vote for him instead of Trump, but also we should be working to build organizations that can replace him with something much much better. I don't think he started the war in Gaza, but he's certainly not doing the Palestinians any favors by enabling Netanyahu to do more or less whatever he wants.

I don't get where you arrived at this burning desire to decide that there are American Democrats who want to see Palestinians getting slaughtered in the streets by the thousands. I think population A hates it and opposes Biden on it, to this on-the-news-all-the-time-because-the-campus-or-the-person-is-on-fire extent, because he's enabling it. (While, maybe, still acknowledging that he's 10 times better than Trump by any standard.) I think another population B gets their news from establishment sources that don't really tell them that that's happening, that tell them that Israel is defending themselves from a terrorist attack and fighting a conventional war against armed opponents. I don't think that's what's happening, but I think they think that's what's happening, because the news is lying to them. And so they're okay with it. I don't think there's some population C that is both Democratic voters and understands what's going on and wants Israel to be doing what they're doing.

That's it. It's not complicated. It's not like some thing where you have to move the goalposts around in this convoluted manner to construct a person who voted for Biden in the primary because they want to murder Palestinians and they had a premonition that Hamas would attack Israel and Netanyahu would decide to start murdering the whole country and Biden loves all of that happening and so that's why they voted for Biden. The whole thing is cockamamie.

If I've misunderstood anything about what you're claiming happened then feel free to enlighten me. But you kept saying that people on Lemmy are okay with killing Palestinians, which I absolutely know isn't true, and the whole thing about the primary that you're saying now instead, makes so little sense that it's hard for me to take it seriously as a thing you actually believe. Sorry. If I'm a dick to you (which, maybe I shouldn't be), that is why.

Video game enthusiast

So Biden went around congress to ship weapons to Israel

Yes

against the wishes of the majority of people who voted for him in the 2020 primaries?

IDK "majority." I think there is a certain population that likes the Democrats and also likes Israel; I just think they get their news from TV or newspapers which give them a terribly slanted perspective. I so think that in addition to them, that somewhere in the 71% of people who oppose Biden's support for Israel that you'll probably find quite a few Democratic primary voters (and that almost everyone you'll find on Lemmy has learned enough about Israel at this point that they know what a crime it is to support them.)

Where are they? Why aren't they furious with him right now? Why aren't they joining the protestors?

180,000 people were on the streets immediately when the war started, people have burned themselves to death in protest, Democratic congressional staffers say the phones don't stop ringing at any point during the day, 100,000 people in Michigan alone voted "uncommitted" in the primary... and you're confused about the lack of outrage?

Just sort of assuming for no reason that there's zero overlap between anyone who voted for Biden and anyone in that grouping, and then angrily asking the question, WHY IS THERE NO OVERLAP WHY DON'T THEY CARE?

A: Yeah! How fucked up is that?

Kevin O'Leary: Oh, no, I was saying it's a good thing

A: ... What?

Kevin O'Leary: What?

Yoav Gallant: When can we expect the next tranche of aid to arrive? You've been totally unreliable ever since we threw chocolate ice cream in the face of your Secretary of State

US Ambassador: Oh, you'll know when it gets here, trust me

(I can dream...)

Seal: "You made a statement in public for all to hear. Are you unable to defend the statements you make? Or simply unwilling to have a reasoned discussion?"

Cat: I said I was sorry please can we let it alone

You weren't directing a question at the group of people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries (except by accidental overlap) -- you asked Lemmy readers specifically, regardless of who they voted for, a particular question based around the premise that they were Israel supporters, and then you swore that the way they answered implied that their support for Israel was being confirmed. Pretty much no one here supports Israel.

This is bringing me back to my idea of the politics sub that's auto-filtered in some way to weed out the weird accounts so that all the rest of us can just talk normal. I've spent like 30-40 minutes on this whole weird conversation at this point today (why, I don't know) which could have been spent on literally anything else.

You can go look and see whether this belief you profess would be an accurate belief to hold

If it is actually something that you think is happening, I think you want to take a step back and reexamine whatever it was that led you to think that in the first place.

the way someone describes how they perceive something

I don't think you actually think that lots of people on Lemmy support Israel. I think you know that the general opinion is wildly anti-Israel (as it should be), and you're deliberately linking "Biden" to "Israel" by pretending to misunderstand what you're seeing, in the hope that the anti-Israel sentiment will translate to anti-Biden sentiment by pure word association.

That's what I meant by "a narrative" -- maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "a dishonest propaganda narrative" instead, to distinguish it from the simple factual description of a narrative that you gave.

JFK made the peace corps, we can make the you-fucked-up-this-part-of-the-world-through-your-decisions-well-guess-what-comes-next corps. I like this idea.