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You could argue that an outlet which sometimes engages in things of seeming journalistic merit but also publishes outright propaganda is more dangerous, given that the former may have the effect of giving credence to the latter.
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Feb 1, 2021 00:37
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I don't at all see why that merits a probation. Poster said they were wrong about part of their post but follows with why they are still concerned, nobody needs to be "punished" for that.
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Feb 1, 2021 01:23
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If you're going to start ruling out sources based on whether or not they're pushing an agenda you could probably save time and skip straight to applying that rule to posters as well.
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Feb 1, 2021 17:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Having an agenda != Pushing propaganda I don't really think that is true. Propaganda is when people I don't like do it. If I want you to believe something I am going to construct an environment which will cause you to believe it, how I do that is irrelevant, the objective is to make you believe the thing I want you to believe. That will probably involve showing you information which I can convince you is true but that has only a tangential relationship to the actual veracity of the information, and the more important thing is again the whole environment, because the more comprehensive it is the less I have to worry about relying on any particular source. Thus is is entirely possible for me to cite accurate information and turn it into what is by any reasonable definition, propaganda, because it is merely a facet of a wider attempt at coercion. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 17:26
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Main Paineframe posted:If you missed the last feedback thread, we're trying to break subjects that draw large amounts of ongoing discussion out of USPol, so that the thread can move on to new news, while the subject that got broken out gets the full focus it deserves without being mixed in with a bunch of other random crap. Regardless of what your intent might be this is not functionally different from "talk about it in a corner where we don't have to look at it" There is a finite amount of posting attention available and it tend to concentrate in particular threads, thus breaking subjects of discussion out of threads has the general effect of taking attention away from them.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:02
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Perhaps it is not possible to have a dispassionate discussion about a subject that people are extremely invested in and where the positions they hold are likely to converge with other trends in their political views, so either you accept that arguments are going to be extremely angry and that nobody is likely to be interested in changing their mind, or you ban discussion of it, which is still, whether you like it or not, supporting one of the sides of the argument. That is a trend you can extend to a lot of political topics, in fact. Banning things because you don't like how they are argued often supports one side of the argument.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:19
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Politics is messy and bloody because power in society is zero sum, I don't really think we should ever expect it to be otherwise? You can't expect people to pretend like it isn't because it makes conversation nicer.
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Feb 4, 2021 23:33
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I agree, which is why limiting sources to your personally preferred window is a proxy for not having to substantiate them when they push your preferred argument and why I don't want to see it enforced by the moderation.
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Feb 6, 2021 20:19
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Seeking to capture the moderation in order to restrict discussion to sources you like is weaponizing bad faith information. Because I absolutely do not at all believe that the people looking to do that are somehow "apolitical" and that their idea of what is and isn't an acceptable source has nothing to do with their political leanings. Either just argue that the moderation should favour your politics or argue that it's a free for all, because there is no middle ground. All decisions are political, all control is political, you cannot rules lawyer your way into a true takes only zone, the entire point of discussion and, indeed, democracy in general, is to achieve that, if there was a rules based approach that worked you wouldn't need those things.
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Feb 6, 2021 21:00
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Jarmak posted:This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. This is how the well is poisoned in order to pave the way for disinformation: claim that everyone is acting in bad faith so who's really to know? See also "you can't trust any source", "fake news media", "everyone's lying, they're just the mainstream lies" The "bad faith" part is trying to pretend that decisions are not political, it is entirely possible to have good faith political takes that are wrong or right, but I do expect people to be aware that their takes are political, rather than pretending like they are not, that it is possible to have a somehow apolitical rule for what sources we can trust to eliminate the work of arguing about them. It is possible, even, to come to an agreement to eliminate the work of arguing about the sources, but you do that because everyone arguing agrees that they are not politically useful. It is still a political decision. If people want to sincerely advocate for lovely positions I am quite willing to entertain that, unless we can all agree to simply exclude some political positions from the forum, but I do not have any patience for failure to acknowledge that controlling sources via the power structures of the forum is itself a political act. As I said to begin with, I entirely agree that "mainstream" as a concept is an attempt to ignore the need to discuss the validity of the source, because "mainstream" is shorthand for "I do not need to discuss the validity of the source because it is implicitly accepted to be true, including its political bias" and this is why I have no desire to try to establish a "mainstream" set of sources that are permitted for use in argumentation. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Feb 6, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 21:17
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If you want to convince me that you want to control sources with zero political intent whatsoever then I think the burden of proof is on you to do that, because literally nobody in history has yet managed it. Or perhaps more importantly, disregard intent, you need to demonstrate to me that it will not have that effect because regardless of what you want, restricting access to information based on control of a moderating authority structurally does produce political effects, that is literally what the supposed "freedom of the press" exists for.
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Feb 6, 2021 21:27
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Jarmak posted:Reality is a matter of political opinion, so who's really to say what's true? Yes, literally, it is. Even if we assume, as I like to, that there is a concrete reality which we can discern through application of reason, the process by which we do that is inherently political, our ideas, our experiences, our pre-understood assumptions and beliefs about how the world work create a political lens through which we interpret the things we see and go on to influence the theories and ideas we form of our own, and the ones we expound to others. There is no politically neutral arbiter of what is and isn't true, it is absurd to me to believe that there is one or could be one? And even if there was one, the question then becomes why has nobody plugged it in yet and solved politics forever with the undeniably true and correct take on everything? Politics is the process of projecting different conceptions of truth onto the world and the ways in which those conceptions conflict with each other, and it intersects, as all things do, with issues of power and money and belief and all the other poo poo floating around in our society. You can't just go "this is true, everything else is wrong, politics solved now", or you can but that's the position of a lunatic. And while there are plenty of lunatics out there I don't think I particularly want any of them to be setting the rules of the forum I post in. Slow News Day posted:If the effect of restricting access to certain sources ends up being that we no longer get regularly subjected to anti-US propaganda from monstrous totalitarian regimes, I would be okay with that. I do not care about whether anyone wants to be anti-us or anti-uk or whatever. I also don't care who wants to be that or why, if they can make a decent point that's good, if they can't they can't and I'm not going to listen to them, but the process of establishing whether they can make a good point or not is called "discussion" and it is allegedly what I am here to do. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 6, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 21:35
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If the effect you want is "don't post sources I don't like" with the intended consequence of "posters I don't like stop posting one way or another" then offloading the risk onto the poster I don't think is a very helpful compromise.
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Feb 6, 2021 22:18
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If you don't like the predominant posting style of a thread perhaps you're just not a good fit for it? I find all of mine to be quite agreeable places.
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Feb 6, 2021 23:34
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I have quite strong opinions about moderators feeling the need to stick their oar into places because the assumption that just because they have the ability to do things means they have to find things to do. I have repeatedly suggested that I think less moderation is better and that I also have almost never seen it actually improve anything. They get appointed, they have some big idea to change things because the appointment is seemingly a mandate to treat the forum like their own personal experiment, they make a bunch of changes, it achieves nothing, they burn out or end up getting kicked out because it turns out they were doing some minor atrocity or other on the side, we get another one, the cycle repeats. If you think that moderating is too demanding the option always exists to simply not do it. Not just on a personal level but also as a general philosophy for the entire group. Just because you have the buttons does not mean you need to find ways to apply them. If people require moderation there is a report button and they can post about it, otherwise I find that every thread I post in functions entirely fine without moderator involvement beyond very rare instances and those instances elicit a summons from the people posting, they do not require proactive intervention. USPol I am sure can do whatever it wants, though I would and already have lamented the loss of posters I have found to be nothing but agreeable when I have encountered them elsewhere, as a result of moderation in USPol. But the thread appears to be talking about rules for the entire forum even if we ignore the effect USPol moderation has on the forum more widely. I care because this affects the places I post and the people I like posting with, and therefore ultimately my enjoyment of the forum. I don't know exactly what the changes and the moderation are for, or who they are supposed to benefit although I'm sure I could make some extremely cynical guesses. But the fact of the matter remains that I see this whole thing as being entirely deleterious to my experience of the forum. Whoever it is for, it is not for my benefit. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Feb 6, 2021 23:48
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Main Paineframe posted:I think we're all in agreement here that some political positions should be excluded from the forum. For example, vile and immoral positions like white supremacism or pedophilia, as well as positions that have overwhelming evidence against them like flat-eartherism or young-earth creationism. And I would agree, I am entirely willing to exclude political positions like that from the forum because I disagree with them politically. Censorship I have no issue with as long as it is open, enthusiastic, and by common consent.
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Feb 7, 2021 01:05
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Of course they're political positions, what on earth else would they be? People who advocate them do so politically, because they want to achieve the political goals that those things describe. And of course it is because we disagree with them politically, because again they are political positions to which we find ourselves wholly opposed, visceral emotional responses are not somehow separate from politics? And the forum literally shed a giant pile of users last year because the administration did not reflect the values of the userbase. People post on the forum voluntarily and pay to do so, it necessarily must operate on common consent because if it doesn't people stop posting. Otherwise lowtax would have just banned everyone. This concept of sources somehow intrinsically affecting the content of the source is daft, yes the specifics of a source are likely to influence what they are going to say, but ultimately it is what they say that is important. Now if you were to post articles from stormfront or something, then I would wager that 100% of them would be nothing but a large string of racial slurs expounding some idiot conspiracy theory, so I can reasonably say that I have no interest in reading them and don't need the check further than the source. But again that is not because the source makes anything they post into racism but instead because the source posts nothing but racism. I don't give a poo poo where you post information from if the information is usable. If the information is available elswhere then... ok? I don't care either way. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Feb 7, 2021 02:16
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If we're going with "a source told me" then there are a large number of alleged journalists working for "proper" publications who spend most of their time citing their mysterious government sources on twitter and in articles and as far as I'm concerned it's all just gossip, you can talk about it if you want or don't, but it is all exactly as substantiable as any other "my uncle at nintendo said" shite. And it doesn't become more real if the guardian or the BBC is the one doing it.
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Feb 7, 2021 03:11
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There literally are people ITT arguing that anything published by RT is wrong because it is foreign russian propaganda.
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Feb 9, 2021 17:49
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On literally this page?Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Information coming from a foreign propaganda outlet (no need to use scare quotes, we know for a fact that RT and Epoch Times are propaganda outlets) absolutely and definitely cannot be trusted. The entire point of propaganda is that it mixes truth with fiction to the point where the line becomes very blurry, and the truthy bits (that often can be verified via other sources) make it much more likely that the fictional bits will also be accepted and internalized. This is especially true when the message has been carefully crafted and fine-tuned for a specific audience who may have a propensity to not question it because it fits their existing worldview and biases. Therefore, you shouldn't use propaganda outlets as sources even if the stuff they are reporting has been confirmed by other sources (this is extremely rare by the way — these outlets are almost never the ones breaking important news or doing original investigative reporting that can be verified). It is directly arguing against the very concept of indivudal analysis of anything coming from RT because only people with a big enough brain can do that which you, as a poster, do not have. Or just above: Slow News Day posted:Things like white supremacy and genocide denial are not political positions. The reason we don't allow them is not because we "politically disagree with" them. It is because we find them vile and immoral. Furthermore, the decision to not allow such content on Something Awful was not made based on common consent. The reason for that should be obvious: if common consent had been sought, there would undoubtedly have been posters who would have objected, even if purely on "all censorship is bad" grounds, and by your reasoning, that would have been sufficient to not censor that content. Meaning, at some point you as a moderator/admin/owner need to ignore dissenting voices and do what you think is best and right. You might end up being wrong, but such is life. It won't be the end of the world. Which is seemingly arguing that anything that comes from it is inherently tainted by evil. There does not appear to be a distinction based on what is published in either of these positions, merely everything coming from "the outlet" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 9, 2021 18:00
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Furthermore if your position is that propaganda is simply things published by a foreign organization with the intent to discredit the US government, publishing Reade entirely unedited is propaganda. Because she has actual, good reasons to be critical of the US government. And publishing her absolutely serves that purpose, but it is not in any way exclusive with the idea that what she writes is truthful and important. Which is a perfect microcosm of the stupidity of this concept of "no propaganda allowed"
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Feb 9, 2021 18:09
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Please illustrate the difference to me between saying that Reade cannot be trusted and that Reade is wrong or lying. Other than phraseological cowardice.
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Feb 9, 2021 18:12
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