“And so then Lemmy said ‘Hey you know what would be a good idea is if we copied that model exactly’” :-(

I absolutely have observed mods on Lemmy engaging in the same shitty behaviors (I am sitting on a post about a little cabal of [email protected] people who seem to be trying to rig the discourse in a particular direction to meet their electoral goals). But the simple fact of it being less centralized and more transparent (and with more of a culture of effective pushback against the mods) makes it a lot harder. They can’t just say “lol get fucked” like the mod from this post did and have that be the end of the story.

Oops, you are 100% correct, I fixed the title.

Yeah. It sounds cliche, but “listen with your heart” is really accurate. She’s saying she misses the old days when America worked. That’s not wrong (I mean for white people it’s not, I would recommend not to go down that rabbit hole lol). A lot of it isn’t about what you say to her, it’s how you say it. If everything you say sounds cold and factual and correcting her, of course she’s not going to want to listen and it’s just going to be a hostile interaction.

It is tough. My experience with stuff like this is that they just live in a whole different reality, so it is hard to get a foothold. I had to work really hard at having conversations with people for whom the tone of voice and emotional intent is a huge part of how they process the information (which I think is most people). That’s not how I operate, so it was hard to keep it in mind without coming off as fake or condescending, but if you’re genuine about what you mean and focus on sort of the core of why you came to your beliefs (not the facts but the reasons why you care about the facts so much), a lot of times it comes across better. And then on top of that, you’re dealing with someone where their factual understanding of the world is off in la-la land, so it’s hard to not just lecture them or tell them what’s what.

Like that kind of thing about Reagan, my first reaction to the answer is “Yeah, and have you wondered why that hasn’t ever happened since then? Why everyone was doing okay until the late 80s and then it all went to hell and hasn’t come back? Honestly that’s what I want, is to get back to when working people had a fair shake and people could make a living. Don’t you want that? It sure as hell is not happening now under Trump…”

But again, it’s not the words, it’s the intent behind them. If you’re reasonable and you care, then it’s hard for her to take your statements hostile even if she doesn’t agree with them (honestly I can guarantee you that one conversation or even several about it will not change her mind.) But you can sort of plant seeds and then she’ll come around on her own, or if she does not then oh well.

If she is being overtly hateful on her own then it’s different. IDK what you can even do then. But mostly in my experience it is people who are so twisted up that they think the Democrats are so hateful that of course things X, Y, and Z make perfect sense and are the only humane thing to do. Mostly.

I can’t really offer specific advice on this situation. I don’t know. But I will say, in general separating from the person who’s victimized by propaganda just helps the propaganda spread. A lot of this stuff actually has deliberate features and habits that it tries to instill into people, to make it drive away people who might talk sense into them and make it harder for them to hear sense if someone does say it to them.

I think you should view your MIL as a victim of propaganda, similar to a drug addict or a person with significant trauma in their life. A lot of them are victims. Of course, if she’s telling you “I’m glad they’re snatching all those US citizens and deporting them to hellish nightmare prisons in other countries just because they’re Hispanic,” then maybe you want to shun her. But usually what’s happened is that they’ve gotten so twisted up in their perceptions that they think that what they’re saying and supporting is something really good, and everyone should support it. The stuff that she is victimized by is incredibly powerful, it’s not surprising to me that a lot of people get taken in by it.

Like I say it’s hard to give general advice about what you should do. But this may help you to be more gentle with her even if you are aware of the hatefulness at work in the stuff she was victimized by and have some understandably big feelings about it.

The whole model is just absolutely stupid. I mean, I get how it was what Aaron and Spez came up with back 20 years ago, but the fact that nobody bothered to make anything fundamentally better at any point since then is just fuckin’ weird.

Yeah. I do see the point, Reddit moderation at this point is hilariously bad so I guess I shouldn’t assume that this person did any little thing wrong.

The whole moderation model which depends on volunteers with unlimited power and allows any random idiot to create an unlimited number of alts, is broken. Reddit devs and moderators have made a good go I guess of trying to make it work, but all they have done is demonstrated that it is not the way.

Yeah, it’s fair. I know the moderation on Reddit has gone entirely off the fucking rails at this point.

1. I am suspicious of your perfectly innocent story sir or ma’am
2. Modern web sites are very good at this sort of thing. From hearing from moderators on the small scale, it’s fairly easy to tell when someone who has been banned comes back, simply because they almost always start doing the exact same stuff that got them banned. At that point you don’t really need to do exact fingerprinting, you just look at the relevant dates / behavior / rough device fingerprinting and you have about 99% confidence that this is the same person. But, also, there is a whole technology of figuring out who people are on the web at this point, and it’s pretty comprehensive. Even if you change devices and IPs, your browser’s tracking cookies probably link your Reddit session with your other big-web-site accounts pretty much instantly and there is definitely some kind of API that shares that information back with Reddit. I’m honestly not sure even what I could recommend as a working way to do ban evasion on Reddit.
3. Bro why Reddit? I still read it periodically because there’s neat stuff there sometimes but there are far better federated social networks than modern Reddit out there, I think.

The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes

Yes, we’ve gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.

There is a vital question coming up. When the machines do all the work, does that mean everyone eats? Or no one?

Right now it is “no one” roughly speaking. That must change. There is no future for anyone there, just nightmares unfolding and unfolding.

Oh, true that, I see now. Yeah, you’re right I think.

Did they? It does say “by Reddit.” Where did you learn this?

Oh… I get it. I looked more. So the issue and the complaint wasn’t just that an anime image of a totally naked cyborg woman was treated as NSFW and put behind a click-to-show thing or something. That would have been fine, I do feel like that’s normal. The issue is that they have some kind of image-alteration gimmick set up which interprets the red cables as blood or gore or something, and modifies the original photo to block out that section permanently. That’s weird, yes. I don’t think the issue is “even vaguely nude,” though.

I mean, in fairness, that’s pretty obviously a nipple.

1. “Rubber” bullets are a massive metal ball wrapped in a thin sheet of rubber. They carry about half the kinetic energy of a bullet, they can still crack your skull or destroy a part of your body that they hit. There is a reason people started pushing for the terminology “less lethal” instead of “nonlethal.”
2. That said you actually raise kind of a good question I think. I suspect that a lot of the reason is nothing more than that the guns that shoot “rubber” bullets effectively are big and cumbersome. You can’t run fast while holding one, carry one around on your belt and then pull it out in a fraction of a second, et cetera. They actually do try to do what you’re talking about with Tasers, there’s a whole process, except that Tasers are unreliable so they have to have a second cop with a gun drawn most of the time.
3. Replacing guns with “rubber” bullets… a lot of the time when they are shooting they are thinking in terms of a gunfight with an armed suspect, so they don’t want to be in a situation where the “rubber” bullets aren’t penetrating a car but the bullets coming back at them are penetrating their car, something like that. If it is deadly force involved they don’t want to be at a disadvantage.
4. Replacing Tasers with rubber bullets… IDK, I think “rubber” bullets are probably more lethal than Tasers and you’re definitely going to fuck somebody up any time you hit them with one. The vast majority of the time, the Taser just sucks and then you take the probes out and you’re done, you don’t have any cracked ribs or destroyed eyeballs or anything. Most of the scenarios where they would be using a “rubber” bullet, US cops at least will use a 40mm “beanbag round” which won’t cause nearly the same type of injuries.

I won’t say your suggestion is automatically a bad idea but I think those are some of the reasons you so rarely see them except in “crowd control” type of scenarios where some of the existing nonlethal options aren’t viable, and also where they have some additional desire to cause injuries in the people they’re "control"ing. Basically you can choose a Taser which is unreliable, pepper spray which is short range and will fuck you up too sometimes, or a 40mm or rubber bullet which needs a big cumbersome launcher (and the “rubber” bullet may cause significant injuries anyway).

It was removed. Not accepting future merges isn’t how they do things (they actually have to have fights pretty regularly with hardware vendors who do want to do one-and-done hardware drivers without thinking through the plan for how to update them in the future which isn’t how it works).

They did do what you’re describing in 6.17, but it was in preparation for removing it (they didn’t want to chop it out immediately so as not to break stuff). In 6.18 it was taken out completely.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bcachefs-ousted-mainline-kernel-move-dkms-and-what-it-means

As of this writing, though, bcachefs is included in the current Linux kernel, and support could continue if the antagonists resolve their differences.

Tell me you’re not familiar with Linus without telling me lol

“Linux Magazine” is about 10 minor versions out of date. bcachefs was merged, and then recently it was evicted from mainline again because of interpersonal conflicts.

“The party cannot fail, it can only be failed.”

Anyway, like I said I don’t plan to have an extensive debate. I’ll leave you with this:

https://jacobin.com/2021/08/hitler-stalin-pact-nazis-communist-deportation-soviet

Edit: Fun fact, I’ve actually visited Trotsky’s house in exile in Mexico City.