mozz

You seized on literally the only thing in my long-enough-to-be-tedious list that was an attempt instead of an outcome, and are trying to spin it into me giving him credit only for failures. I'm almost impressed.

The first two items in my list represented the successful outcome of his second attempt at something, after the first attempt was blocked, but those $144 billion and 40% reduction numbers are the outcome (after the initial much bigger attempt). Then comes the attempt at marijuana legalization. Every other item is simply the outcome.

I think you should get some sort of award for how vaguely plausible you make this argument sound, given the yawning gulf between it and what actually happened, and the fact that the evidence for it not happening the way you said is literally just right up there in the comments up above (not buried away somewhere in some government document that there could be legitimate debate about how to interpret.)

P.S. how do you make an instance agnostic comment link?

You don't 🥲

Yeah, probably so. I'm just slightly concerned that maybe someone will read someone else joking about just using all stuff with CON saves instead, and think that it is for real and that is the way.

I don't see this interview as too much of a "gotcha"... it still lets the whole thing get framed in a very weird and deliberately-conservative-friendly way.

The core issue is, big tech companies have identified deliberate misinformation as a major problem on their platforms, and they're trying to fight it. Conservatives don't like that, because a lot of the deliberate misinformation is being spread by them and by professionals that they're employing. So they're trying to reframe the reality to justify their desire to make it illegal or at least difficult for tech companies to fight misinformation.

• There's a myth that government is telling social media companies to censor certain viewpoints, which simply isn't happening, and any communication at all (e.g. if the FBI learns that some misinformation campaign is on behalf of a state adversary and communicates some details about it to a social media company) gets seized on and misrepresented to make it look like that.
• There's a myth that this "censorship" is happening based on viewpoint, or whether something is true (like if I go on Facebook and say the sky is orange someone will take it down), rather than based on it being specifically dangerous misinformation or not.
• There's very little discussion of the fact that a lot of what's being "censored" is professional misinformation, and only tangentially (through someone reposting or repeating something that a professional outfit originated) does someone's actual organic post go into the crosshairs.

JUST LET YOUR PLAYERS BE AWESOME SOMETIMES

I know it's frustrating if your player is a golden god at dealing with some types of situations which defeat your effort to make a challenge for them, but this is one of the cheapest and easiest ways you can enable them to have fun in your game. There will be other situations which present genuine challenge, but it doesn't all have to be super hard. It is okay to let them flex.

What's the point of the mechanics including badass abilities if you're gonna get all frustrated if your players start to become badass sometimes

I am not a mod here; I think you have me confused with someone else. Have I given you the impression that I'm unable to argue for myself without resorting to asserting some sort of authority? I actually think this kind of disagreement is good for the discourse; I just think it would also be good to have a separate place that wasn't subject to shouty bad faith people clogging up the comments in quite so high a number.

It’s like slapping a tourniquet on an arterial laceration

Your whole student loan analysis I'll more or less agree with overall, and to some extent with its application to other domains. I do think if someone's artery is cut that you should usually put a tourniquet on. It seems like Biden's been putting tourniquets on, and the other group has been trying to fistfight him for doing even that much, and trying to go through the accident victim's pockets and threatening bystanders. And they have weapons. And, somehow, he managed to get some important tourniquets on even so.

You're making a completely valid presentation of why the patient isn't yet "fine" after the tourniquet. But going further from there to "I don't see why I should support the tourniquet guy over the give-me-his-wallet-and-empty-your-own-pockets-while-we're-at-it people" doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. It's actually pretty instructive to look at his example to see how far the party has moved left since Clinton. He used to be squarely in the mainstream of Democratic politics, then he was shocked and outraged by Obama (and showed for whatever reason an unerring instinct to gravitate to the worst candidates available, Pelosi and Hilary being two good examples), and now Biden's doing a bunch of things that would have been unthinkable even for Obama, so a one-time Democratic king maker is now on the far outskirts raging against the whole dominant culture of the Democratic party as it currently exists.

I'm gonna cut to the chase of a longer comment I typed out. The only part that really needs to be said:

"So, since there's no way to argue with it factually, the combatant seizes on a deliberate misunderstanding of what I was saying and tries to reframe the whole conversation around that misunderstanding, in order to create a thing to disagree about which isn't the factually-indefensible original thing to disagree about."

The rest and the context are pretty self-explanatory.

I joked elsewhere that I would like to mess around with a little AI moderation bot that tries to go beyond "is this racism" and into whether something is actually a productive part of the conversation.

I actually started messing around with such a thing tonight, no real idea whether it'll come to anything. But I thought you should know that it particularly liked this comment. "A clarification of their previous point in a concise and clear manner. It refrains from personal attacks, engages with the substance of the discussion, and ... maintains a respectful tone and effectively contributes to the discourse."

I've been so far resisting the incredibly childish urge to tell people I've been disagreeing with that the bot thinks they are wrong. What's the point. I will however tell you that it roasted FuglyDuck for his accusation of ad hominem being, itself, ad hominem (spending half his message saying he's not the guy who is X Y Z, instead of just talking about the subject matter).

What the fuck

Before he said something weird on a podcast a few weeks ago, I hadn't thought about James Carville since 32 years ago when he was active in politics in a nontrivial capacity. But now that I take a look at him again I am impressed by the strangeness of him. Among other things, he came out swinging against Barack Obama as a presidential candidate and attacked people who supported him, he wanted to "jettison" the Democratic primaries and caucuses and let Nancy Pelosi pick all the candidates, and his international résumé is interesting reading. He's just an all-around very weird guy it sounds like.

Quite a few instances block lemmy.world because it's so overrun by shouty accounts with bad opinions as to be a significant problem.