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[#] Wed Aug 28 2019 11:23:56 EDT from LoanShark

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I don't believe that's true, really. No, Twitter is not as unfettered as Gab. But it has a fairly consistent set of rules, reflecting things like incitement to violence.

You may not agree with those rules, and I'm sure the one about harrassment based on gender orientation would be unpopular among a certain type of paleoconservative troglodyte, but honestly, who gives a fuck? These rules are mostly about decorum, and if you can't figure out how to express a conservative viewpoint with decency and erudition, you probably aren't worth listening to.

As many users here are aware, I'm an outspoken centre-left member of this BBS filled with mostly libertarians. I've also been a mostly-lurker on Twitter for the past couple of years. I find that the rules largely cut both ways. If there's somebody who's a far-right asshole/twat, I just ignore them and move on. So some of y'all might be surprised to learn that the only person I've ever reported to the Twitter policy team was actually a left-wing, if not anarcho-left, rad-fem, who was making a lot of violent comments. I wasn't the only person who was reporting her, and her posts demonstrated a consistent pattern, and she kept coming back from temporary bans, so we got her first account perma-banned.

Predictably, she screamed about some alleged dual standard. "I got perma-banned and yet there's all these Nazis on twitter." That sort of thing. She was wrong in that she got banned because she crossed a line. She was not wrong in that it's not hard to be a Nazi on twitter. It's fairly easy to do that: all you have to do is tone it down slightly. If all else fails, there is a tool that we all have, that we can use. That tool is commonly referred to as a dog-whistle.

[#] Thu Aug 29 2019 15:14:34 EDT from nonservator

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Fuck libertarians. They're pathetic, useless induhviduals with no friends, and for damn good reason. The only thing more pathetic than libertarians is SJW's making libertarian noises with their pieholes because they think it will "own teh Notsees".



[#] Thu Aug 29 2019 15:44:50 EDT from LoanShark

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Tell us how you really feel! ;-)

[#] Thu Aug 29 2019 18:55:15 EDT from darknetuser

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@LoanShark, I cannot speak about Twitter because I have never paid it any attention. However, I think many not-so-small services are becoming so biased that you are not welcome unless you support the same politicians they do.

Keep in mind that I am not talking about the administrators kicking people *only*. There are many ways to make a service unwelcomming, such as having the users dogpile on unwanted people and not having the means to filter your messages to ignore twits. 


The worst case I can remember is the forum of an important game publisher. Somebody started a thread complaining because other people was complaining because the lattest product included open political propaganda in it. A flamewar ensued soon thereafter in which some people said that they didn't want political propaganda in a premium product that costed lots of $$$ and other people said that the political propaganda was necessary for the betterement of the world.
Moderation arrived and more or less declared that people who opposed the inclussion of political statements in the product was breaking the rules, because disagreeing that the political message was necessary implied hate speech. Which is like saying that people who does not want to have the Unicef logo in a Bentley they just bought is responsible of hate speech because he wants to kil poor children.
But out of this one, which is decidedly very, very, very bad


...well, many people is leaving social media accounts because of trolls that are on some lobby payroll, and administrators totally fail to prevent the trollvalanche from kicking legitimate users out of the platform.
And yeah, you can say to screw sites that are so poorly administrated or that allow such bad practices. And guess what, here I am :P

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 01:15:29 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Fuck libertarians. They're pathetic, useless induhviduals with no
friends, and for damn good reason. The only thing more pathetic than

You could be talking about one of three groups:
1. Actual libertarians
2. People who associate with the Libertarian Party
3. Ayn Rand fanbois

There is a Venn diagram of these three groups which consists of three circles a thousand miles apart from each other.
\

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 06:41:19 EDT from nonservator

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The majority of the overly political libertarians, rather than normal people with normal jobs and/or normal lives, are the dictionary definition of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. They'd reject a cure for cancer just because you don't also have a cure for the million other ills the flesh is heir to. And when they start screeching about the Bad Orange Man, they make SJW's look sane and reasonable. These types can come from any of the three groups you mention.



[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 09:20:21 EDT from LoanShark

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2019-08-29 18:55 from darknetuser
@LoanShark, I cannot speak about Twitter because I have never paid it

any attention. However, I think many not-so-small services are becoming

so biased that you are not welcome unless you support the same
politicians they do.

I'm asking you to think this through very carefully.

Think about sites like 4chan, 8chan, and Gab, which are known for their free-wheeling, anything-goes, nastiness. Ask who feels welcome on those sites: right-wing trolls and right-wing trolls only, pretty much.

Contrast that with twitter, which has rules and has a decorum police. You may not agree with the rules, but it's obviously a far more neutral platform to the extent that the rules are enforced fairly and mechanically.


So I would argue that unfettered free speech is not the determiner of who feels welcome. Quite the opposite.

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 09:28:25 EDT from LoanShark

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Moderation arrived and more or less declared that people who opposed

the inclussion of political statements in the product was breaking the

rules, because disagreeing that the political message was necessary

You've got some good points in here.

I don't think that would happen on Twitter, FWIW. Their rules simply don't apply to cases like that. Posts have to more directly break the rules.

I'm also pretty disturbed by mob psychology and cancel culture but that's another discussion.

This kinda reminds me of the debate surrounding Orson Scott Card. The dude wrote some very inspiring books that taught compassion to teenagers while remaining apolitical. That was his ethic - political viewpoints not appropriate in fiction. Although he may have abandoned it more recently.

He's also completely tone-deaf at best, and a raging bigot at worst, on sexuality issues.

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 09:31:01 EDT from LoanShark

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2019-08-30 06:41 from nonservator
The majority of the overly political libertarians, rather than normal
people with normal jobs and/or normal lives, are the dictionary
definition of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Bingo.

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 14:25:24 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Well there you go. I voted LP for the first two decades of my adult life, because I had no appetite for the BushClinton crowd. I suspect I was in very good company, because the Nolan chart generally shows (or did at the time) that most people are libertarians but either didn't know it or wouldn't admit to it.

(That may not be the case now that Bernie bros and other assorted millenials are on the scene. YMMV.)

I stopped voting LP when I came to the realization that the LP has nothing to do with libertarian ideals. Poke the phrase "Gary Johnson is a complete idiot" into your favorite search engine.

Today, the Libertarian Party people are basically just Democrats who also want legalized drugs.


Understand, however, that no single policy exists in a vacuum. On one hand, you want to achieve small wins when you can. On the other hand, "perfect is the enemy of the good", while usually true, brings up a few thoughts that I've had about (pure) libertarianism in the past. For example, a pure libertarian would want legalized drugs, fully open borders, and minimal taxation, right? But what if you only implement the first two but don't fix the third? Now we're paying (as our old buddy Gil used to say, "while having a gun pointed at us by the government") for the care of drug addicts and non-taxpaying aliens.

(Trying to keep this discussion academic ... for those of you who are new here, know that we try to keep the unlimited mudslinging to the Politics room.)

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 20:19:58 EDT from LoanShark

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In my late teens/early 20s I flirted with libertarianism. Abandoned it fairly quickly because, well, this is who I am: center-left liberal guy. You don't change who you are overnight.

After that, I was kinda judgy about certain lib issues (drug law in particular) for a while (as Peter Pulse could tell you), but that's a different story.

Lately though I've been reading reason.com more than a little bit. Doesn't mean I agree with everything they say; far from it. It does mean I find that they're the only people who are intellectually honest in certain niche areas; the only people who get certain things right, journalistically speaking. I like what @enbrown is doing.

tl;dr: Kamala Harris is the antichrist. Any Dem candidate is preferable.

[#] Fri Aug 30 2019 20:28:42 EDT from LoanShark

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To be slightly more clearer, sometimes your life goes through some changes (and/or, you just get older and start feeling more secure about certain things), and your politics change.


Basically, at the moment, I'm politically homeless - the policies that really matter to some of the people that I care about are political suicide for both parties. And the libertarians (even though they're a stopped clock that gives the right time twice a day) are finding the right answers.

[#] Sat Aug 31 2019 07:31:58 EDT from darknetuser

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Gab is prety much a Nazi den by design. They won't admit it, but they built the site so right-wing trolls could have their own echo chamber. It is not surprising to see it is full of such.

TBH there are already studies about which ideas get blocked in big social media sites. I agree the really, really big providers don't administratively enforce idea blocking openly. However, dogpiling is quite real and people leaves those platforms because of that very often, and administrators don't look like they are doing a great job with that. Still not as bad as medium-sized services, such as the one I talked about earlier.

I am active at darknet places which are really everything goes affairs... people is really way more open about themselves and you don't see much bad behaviour despite the fact banning is quite not a thing. Btw most people there feels more welcome at Jisko-like services or irc2p than they do to Twitter. It is funny that people is more willing to confess they have a self-steem problem because their Willy is too short or whatever when they cannot be tracked back.

[#] Sat Aug 31 2019 07:37:49 EDT from darknetuser

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2019-08-30 09:31 from LoanShark
2019-08-30 06:41 from nonservator
The majority of the overly political libertarians, rather than normal


people with normal jobs and/or normal lives, are the dictionary
definition of allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

Bingo.



Well, I have had my share of dealings with both libertarians, members of different Libertarian parties and the like, and they are all prety much normal people with normal lives and normal jobs.

Also, the ones in big parties usually have quite moderate programs. It is usually the small parties that have uncompromissing programs, mostly because when you are a small party you can only recruit new people by being ideologically pure. It happens with parties from other ideologies, such as communists and other authoritarians. Once those grow a bit they start watering down in order to get votes, because they don t need to stay ideologically pure to get new recurits.

[#] Tue Sep 03 2019 16:07:27 EDT from nonservator

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Lol. Gab is far, far less "Nazi" than Voat. And anyone who thinks the chans are for "right wing trolls only" is stuck in the echo chamber of [CURRENT YEAR], where "right wing" means "to the right of Mao".



[#] Tue Sep 03 2019 16:22:17 EDT from LoanShark

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Please report for re-education, comrade;)

[#] Wed Sep 04 2019 10:57:48 EDT from darknetuser

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Today I learned that Voat exists.

[#] Wed Sep 04 2019 21:51:20 EDT from ParanoidDelusions

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Twitter is completely biased with a left wing bubble. COnservatives have to speak with "decorum" and "be decent," but liberals can get away with all kinds of misbehavior before they get a ban. Facebook is even worse. Twitter is a constant stream of negativity though - there aren't any friends posting pictures of their labor day camping trip - it is just abusive liberals upset at everything looking for communities of conservatives to troll, in the hopes of getting those conservatives banned.

[#] Thu Sep 05 2019 21:41:33 EDT from ldo

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Wed Sep 04 2019 21:51:20 EDT from ParanoidDelusions
Twitter is completely biased with a left wing bubble.

Because reality itself has a liberal bias, don’t you know.



[#] Fri Sep 06 2019 12:38:55 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Twitter is completely biased with a left wing bubble. COnservatives
have to speak with "decorum" and "be decent," but liberals can get away

with all kinds of misbehavior before they get a ban. Facebook is even


This is my observation as well. Admittedly it is not an observation from a neutral point of view, but I have a feeling it's a fairly objective truth.

Is it "built in" to the platform?

One explanation could be that, simply, this is an effect of an obtusely large percentage of left-wingers operating the platform.

The other explanation could be that the left is far more likely to have mobs of people filing Butthurt Reports on posts they don't like, so it's far more likely that a provocative conservative post will be taken down than a provocative liberal post. As LoanShark correctly pointed out, left cancel culture focuses on takedown, while right cancel culture focuses on retaliation.

From my perspective, the only solution is a fight-to-the-death between Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, with the winner getting the death penalty.

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