Thank you to the people engaging with the Mr. Rogers / Charles Manson hypothetical. I could for the life of me not figure out what it was supposed to illustrate.
So, what I am hearing from you is that, while it is the perception of Republicans that Democrats treat adults like children, it is actually the Republican adults who need to be coddled like one?
Yes, I like to tell people that I disagree with X, and give detailed lists of why others should disagree with X because of A, B, C, and D because…what, I’m self-destructive? I like to argue against myself?
Tell me more about myself, please, I’m curious?
Do I eat meat but, really, deep down I’m a vegetarian? I wear clothing but, secretly, I’m hiding from myself that irresistible urge to run into the public and bare it all?
@Sage_Rat, I’m having the hardest time following your logic and reasoning in this thread. Many of your responses seem to be for questions that weren’t asked or just baffling.
I’m just reading along, and feel free to ignore me, but that has been my impression.
Factually, yes.
But the question isn’t whether those things are wrong, it’s whether people should be called evil for being incorrect, whether you should just throw them away or try to reach them - in part by understanding how they got to where they are and working against it.
What’s your view of Thomas Jefferson? If you don’t want his name removed from every surface, are you bad and evil? Or should I accept that people don’t know everything, can be successfully deceived, and sometimes will wrongly try to protect themselves from being deceived?
Do we live in a perfect world or an imperfect one? Bad things can happen for reasons that are more sad than evil. Those are still bad things but there wasn’t mens rea. A man can hear what he thinks is an invader in his house, swing a bat in the dark, and accidentally kill his son. Something bad certainly happened but is that man unequivocally evil? Should he have done better vetting? Yes. Is he an evil person or just someone who didn’t follow a good process? He had a bad process.
It’s fair to blame him for the bad process but that’s very different from treating him like a self-conscience serial killer.
Well, we got off on a tangent because Naita wanted me to address his point that - as I understood it - Republicans are just bad people, full stop.
I would, personally, differentiate between someone being bad and someone doing bad things with good intentions. If someone is intending to do good then it’s unreasonable to slap them with an evil label.
How many gay and trans people need to die before we stop trying to “reach” the people encouraging violence against them, and just decide to “throw them away” by denying their violent rhetoric access to Twitter’s services?
Do we have to ask how much death is enough to justify banning these people from Twitter?
Hate for profit is a very corrosive drug being pushed by very skilled pushers.
The problem is that once someone is an addict they are very hard to reach. And they quickly turn into pushers themselves, in a gigantic pyramid scheme where the currency is simply repeating the evil they’ve been sold and have come to normalize.
Imagine what the real world drug problem would look like if each time an addict bought and consumed a dose, two more doses magically appeared in their hand to be consumed or resold?
Most civilized people of either party agree that it’s a regrettable situation when someone becomes an addict. But thewy also agree that it’s evil when someone becomes a pusher.
If we could have stopped the for-profit (and pro-foreign enemies) propaganda machine 10-15 years ago we would not now have 150 million home-grown and now self-perpetuating pushers.
But here we are, and they and their addiction are not going away until / unless both the seed propaganda and the self-perpetuating exponential spread are curtailed.
I don’t know why you do it, but you never said that people should disagree with someone who believes that Charles Manson is a model citizen that children should role model. You lay out the argument that is made by “some people” and just leave it there as though it has merit.
So, no, I have absolutely no idea why you think that this is an effective method of discourse. I am just pointing out that it isn’t.
Strawmanning like this is an even more useless form of argument, IMHO.
Once again, strawman on your part. No one said people should be called evil for being incorrect.
Now, people can do evil things, but it’s not because they are incorrect, it is because they treat others in an evil fashion. The argument that you seem to be making is that they should be accepted if the reason for their treatment of others is because they are incorrect.
OTOH, there are a number of Republicans who would happily call me evil because they say I want to kill babies and chop the penises off of young boys.
Once again, lots of strawman as well as a considerable false dichotomy. Can you actually lay out your argument, rather than resorting to such fallacious techniques?
Well, I suppose you got off on a tangent because you very poorly understood @naita’s point. That’s not anywhere remotely close to what they said.
Now, is it your point that these Republicans are entirely without agency, without critical thought, without any reasoning capacity? That they will only believe the things that agree with what they already believe, and lash out at anyone who tries to correct them? If so, then we are in complete agreement.
Now, where we seem to disagree is whether these should be reached out to, or if that’s a complete waste of time and effort. I am of the opinion that it’s a complete waste of time and effort, and honestly, often makes things worse, because it angers the child Republican to be informed as to their errors. It’s better to just outvote them then to try to persuade them.
You seem to be of a different opinion, so please, lay out, specifically, how we should be reaching out to these people to show them the error of their ways? What do you do when someone talks about how great Charles Manson is, and how he had some really good ideas about race relations? What do you do to court someone who has declared you to be evil?
First, let’s point out that at no point did I discourage banning people, nor did I (for example) applaud Elon Musk for reinstating banned accounts, nor anything along those lines. The proposal was that people be made aware of why they were banned and feel like the ban happened under a real and reliable process - nothing more and nothing less, with no mention any way of an undo, reset, redo, pardon, or otherwise.
If someone recommends violence, after accepting a TOS that says, “You’re not allowed to recommend violance”, then they should be banned.
But, if someone comes into the thread saying that I need to address, specifically, their diatribe against an imagined, stereotyped Republicans, then it bears noting that they should probably calm down and try to take a moment to understand the difference between a person who advocates violence and a person who thinks, for example, that Democrats are lying when they say that some particular person advocated violence. That person is still an advocate for peace. They might be wrong about what the person said, but they’re not advocating violence.
You should only be banned for advocating violence. You shouldn’t be banned because you’ve mistakenly come to believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene is an all-accepting, peaceful, intelligent saint. Or, to the extent that you should be - if the TOS is updated to say that you have to only ever say things that conform with facts that would survive a court trial - that should still go through some non-black box form of moderation.
So far as this particular thread is concerned, by ensuring that they see a proper process of judgement be used against them, that’s open, verifiable, points to clear rules, and that can be presented to Congress so that when Jim Jordan says, “You’re unfairly targeting us!” Mr. Zuckerberg can say, “Well, here’s the TOS, here’s what the person did, here’s the transcript of the communication between the moderator and the person, here’s the transcript of their appeal, here’s how we hired the appeals moderators and ensured that they were neutral and non-partisan, and you’re free to review all of that and get back to us with a recommendation on how to make that process better.”
A person who did wrong should properly and unambiguously have it made clear to them what they did wrong, and that they’ve gone wrong somewhere in the decisions they’d made prior to that point.
If it’s just a big wall that falls out of the sky that says, “No! We hate you!” With no explanation, and no link to the action that lead to anything, then you can’t really expect them to figure out what they did and how they went wrong.
So what was their point? I’m happy enough to respond, if I can understand it.
That’s a pretty cynical assessment of the modern corporation, though I’m afraid it may well be true. But if so, that’s a pretty sad testament to our modern world.
I don’t know if you missed my point when I said that their response was “agreeing with me that [the new Coke Zero] was great stuff”, but the point was that this was the exact opposite of what I was telling them. ISTM that companies do actually want their customers to feel that they care about them (“your call is important to us”) but what ultimately matters is whether they put any effort into making that happen, or at least, making it even remotely credible that they have any regard at all for their customers. Poorly engineered robo-replies create the opposite impression: “you put effort into writing to us; we put exactly zero effort into reading it. We couldn’t care less if you dropped dead tomorrow. In fact, we wish you would, if that would make you stop you writing to us”.
This phenomenon is, sadly, fairly new, although only those of my ancient generation would recognize it as such. Big companies used to be much more responsive and human, responding to paper mail with paper-mail responses, even to obvious inquiries from little kids like I was at the time. Today that would be unimaginable.
I know someone who believes in every CT out there. During Covid she forwarded a ridiculous anti-Covid email to our club mailing list. You know, we’ll become chimeras and Bill Gates can track us.
We told her not to do that again. As for reaching her? I tried, but no way. She has not grasped that all the predictions made in that email have failed and so maybe it was wrong. She has not one logical bone in her body. Keeping her from spreading dangerous ideas is all one can do.
I don’t know if she is a Republican. She is a Trumpist, but I bet she thinks a lot of Republicans are godless Commies.
Only if they take the accusations seriously. They don’t get to label themselves “Advocate for Peace” if they dismiss the claims based on their anti-liberal biases. That description of oneself is EARNED by doing the work. And it isn’t a lot of work either, like connecting the dots between calling LGBTQ people “groomers” and violence against LGBTQ people. You don’t need to be the second coming of Einstein to figure that puzzle out.
How about you explain the logic that you used in order to come to the conclusion that @naita’s point is that “Republicans are just bad people, full stop”, and then I’ll determine whether I think you would be able to understand.
I think it would be like trying to explain to someone who insists that Charles Manson had a kid’s show that he’s actually a bad dude, but depending on how you came to the conclusion, there is a very very small chance that it can be explained to you, if I choose to be very patient with you.
First, I’m sure that there’s lots of side angles and side discussions that I haven’t brought into the topic or directly addressed. Why not just assume that the answer to any of those is pretty bland and uninteresting?
Second:
And yes, others should try to disabuse him of his misunderstanding. I don’t believe that I’ve said anything to imply otherwise.
Okay, so we are probably looking at closer to one moderator for every 15-20 people at this point. How much are people going to be paying for this platform?
Do you think that if someone is sanctioned on a social media, they will agree with it, no matter how open and verifiable the moderation is?
Let’s put it this way, do you agree with the way that moderation is handled here? would that be a good model to go forward?
Once again, that’s not what happens, that’s just pure strawmanning on your part.
Now, not saying that that’s not what they will say, but they will say that no matter how clear the rules are, and how unambiguously it is shown that they broke them.
Because you were going on and on about how we should understand this person, not how we should correct them.
You selectively quoted yourself to change context.
What you said that implies otherwise is that anyone who tries to correct him is the one who is really ignorant.
You squarely put the blame on the person who would disabuse him of those notions, rather than on the person operating under incorrect information.
And you don’t explain how to prevent someone from getting angry at being corrected, nor what to do when they do.
I did say that there’s a form of ignorance going on there, as well. I’ve also said, in the past, that there’s more range on the world than good and bad, and that there are more scenarios in any situation beyond side A being good and side B being bad.
You can categorize things like “Side A is being tiny bad. Side B is being middle bad. It would be better if both changed but side B is more pressing. Still, it doesn’t hurt to tell side A about what they did, if they’re going to be annoying about getting your opinion on the matter.”
This is fascinating to me. What I wrote was that the current campaign against “unfair moderation” is mostly based on an unwillingness to accept restrictions on COVID-misinformation, anti-trans messaging and calls for violence. This is by no means a claim that all Republicans are evil, it’s a simple description of fact.
Sage_Rat says it’s desirable to be told why one is banned, and as far as I know that is what happens today. MTG was banned for repeated violation of Covid-misinformation rules. The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson were suspended for misgendering a public official and a celebrity respectively, and told they needed to delete the tweets to be reinstated. They refused.
Yes, sometimes people get a notice they’ve been banned for some tweet or other, can’t figure it out what is wrong with what they wrote and have no good recourse, but those events are not what has been driving Elon Musk or the anti-moderation crowd. It’s this completely open and shut cases of breaching moderation rules.
I personally don’t believe the world can be divided into good or bad or that all Republicans are evil, and it seems to me a truckload of bias is required to read that into my posts in this forum.