What does the top line of this message say, please? And how does it relate to this conversation?

https://ponder.cat/post/2823497/3110989

I’m not saying anything at all about .ml users in general. I’m not even sure where you got that. I’m saying that you seem to be failing to understand the simple explanation I’m giving you for why you don’t see names in the modlog, but other people do. I’m also saying some specific things about dessalines. Nothing about lemmy.ml in general is the reason for anything I am saying in this exchange.

Maybe it was unfair for me to accuse you of “pretending” not to see my message. I guess maybe it is genuinely an issue of reading comprehension / attention level, and not of anything “pretending.” I do think it’s fair to point out when I explain to you why you don’t see names in the modlog, and you simply move on with the conversation as if that exchange hadn’t happened, and you still don’t understand why you don’t see names in the modlog or how anyone else would be able to therefore. That’s weird. Why do you do that? I guess… thinking that correct answers only come from you? No point in reading other people’s messages to find correct answers in them, because you already know, and you can just skim the message quick and then get back to accusing people of weird things they didn’t say?

Go back and read the message instead of searching again in the Lemmy UI. I explained the issue to you. It’s literally the first sentence, all on a line on its own, it’s not like buried deep in some kind of abstract discussion where I am going into minutiae or anything. I’m not trying to get in an argument or asking you to. There’s nothing to argue about. What I explained is how Lemmy works. Read, understand. Or choose not to, up to you.

IDK what you’re on about that percentages are not a good representation. If you take the busy-ness level of a main active instance, and say that one person is doing almost half the moderation, that’s a significant moderation load (even if they were not being additionally extra in what level of comment they feel like needs moderation). In my opinion.

Anyway, in the last 3 days, I see on my instance 12 moderation actions by dessalines (more than half the ones I can even see on lemmy.ml as a whole). I am subscribed to barely anything on lemmy.ml, so I don’t know what factor you want to multiply that by to arrive at how much he is doing that doesn’t get federated to me or how big a part of his day it is. And of course he’s free to do whatever he wants with his time. But, regardless, just going by what I can see and what gets federated to me, it looks like he spends a not insignificant amount of time moderating lemmy.ml personally.

The west failed Ukraine

True

and no one is taking accountability

Mostly true

that does nothing

I mean they’ve been funding about a quarter of the war and giving technology and intelligence support that has been keeping Ukraine alive against an opponent literally 20 times their size. They have also been distracted to the point of negligent homicide in their consistency and magnitude of support, absolutely, but even within those drawbacks I think that is at least slightly more than nothing.

The lemmy.ml modlog is not obfuscated for admins on other servers.

You ignored my message where I talked about this, and checked and did the math to verify the assertion, and instead you wrote this comment, continuing to pretend that the facts were unknowable and saying “unless there is information I somehow missed.”

the thing i’ve always hated about most people outside ml is that they always make assumptions, not even wondering if what they’re saying might be false

if you’re gonna be prissy about something, at least get your facts straight.

Those are all quotes that can be used to hurt a trans person in the wrong context and have been used to hurt trans people

Well, maybe, but the frying pan in my kitchen can be used to hurt a person in the wrong context, as can the knives, as can the bottle of olive oil for that matter. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to use them. What is relevant is whether they are being used to hurt in the context they are actually being used in.

This is my beef with blahaj’s moderation. Everything that makes them in any way uncomfortable is a crime against humanity, and if you don’t see it 100% the same way as them, then you are a crime against humanity and an awful person, and they’ll start wild criticisms of you including trigger-word labels, applying things like “misgendering” to things that are not genders, “transphobia” to issues that have literally nothing to do with any trans person on any level, and so on.

I mean, they can do that if they want, but I think you summarized my reaction to it pretty well with:

When you start denying basic facts in pursuit of an agenda, people have a right to stop listening to you.

Dessalines does a ton of the moderation on .ml. He and davel are, as far as I can tell, the main moderators for the whole server and all its communities.

I’m not subscribed to most of their stuff, so it’s hard to check for hard numbers or verify that, but I see him all the time on the “let’s complain about Lemmy.ml moderation” subs. Doing a quick spot-check in the modlog for !fediverse@lemmy.ml, which I am subscribed to, I see:

• 46% of moderation actions were by davel
• 39% by dessalines
• 12% by Arthur Besse
• 2% by nutomic
• 0% by the moderators of the community

That’s extremely consistent with what I have observed from the rest of the communities on the server.

not even wondering if what they’re saying might be false

Why do I hear Alanis Morissette in the distance?

No water for you, you gotta be able to fit the grooves. As is known.

the admins allowing transphobic comments to remain

This is a pretty blahaj-centric view of what happened. Their definition of “transphobia” includes “I feel like women with super high testosterone levels competing in women’s sports does get into kind of a legitimate gray area,” “I don’t think dragon is a gender and this person is clearly a malicious troll,” and “dude.”

I don’t think anyone on Lemmy is down with unambiguous transphobia, but blahaj likes to take sort-of-maybe-arguably transphobic or questionable comments and pretend they are Hitler-level hatefulness and then ban anyone who refuses to see it in their 100% un nuanced way.

ghosting Ada when asked to clarify their policies around dealing with transphobia

When did this happen? I mean, they don’t really owe her an explanation, they can run their server the way they want just like she can hers.

If I went to Ada and started demanding she “clarify” her policies on dragon centered trolling she probably wouldn’t spend too much time giving me extensive clarifications on it. Nor should I be able to demand that she needs to.

mild criticism

You misspelled “totally innocent unrelated comment which stepped on some kind of weird and arbitrary rule which they will swear is hateful and proof you are a bad person on purpose, BAN!”

No, he had to bunch his fingers up because the number of grooves wasn’t right, and only then did it perfectly match. Weren’t you paying attention?

You didn’t answer, but @Skua@kbin.earth just figured out what the image was from. It’s a photo of a page from a textbook showing an undated and heavily edited composite view of the earth, of unknown accuracy from unknown sources. Sterling.

I have 0 idea that this will change your mind, since you already know you’re right, and any contrary information is some kind of offense against you instead of just someone trying to talk sense and logic. All conversations are zero-sum. Loyalty is more important than truth. And so on. Clearly.

Have a good one

I absolutely did, sorry about that.

Yeah.

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: They think we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

-David Ben-Gurion

Personally, I don’t care that they are communists. A lot of it is just that they’re dicks. I would feel almost the exact same way if they were MAGA people, or pro-Nancy Pelosi people, or for that matter Bernie Sanders people or just non-political people, that harassed and banned and mocked anyone who disagreed with them in the same way that .ml does.

I halfway agree with you, the first part at least: I don’t mind if people have opinions I think are wrong or stupid. It is fine. Unpopular opinion, I also think letting nutomic have some kind of transphobia and talk about it is fine. The alternative is that every opinion that someone thinks is “incorrect” gets driven underground where no one talks about it, and so anyone who does hold that view can’t really have a conversation about it or learn where and how exactly they are wrong. It just festers, and eventually they find more people who also think that way, and none of them talk about it in public because they’ve learned not to. It’s just a stupid cultural feature.

This stance does make it kind of silly that Ada defederated from some other server because of one random user on there, saying that if the admins won’t ban that user then how can she protect her users against ever seeing someone with a wrong opinion, and so bang, defederation. For some reason, the exact same logic does not apply to lemmy.ml even though the one random user in this case is also an admin. Who knows. But anyway, for my opinion she is making the right call in this case, and made the wrong call in the previous one-random-user case.

To me, the great sin of .ml isn’t their bad opinions, although they are very bad. It is that they are unapologetically heavy-handed about manipulating the conversation to require their users to hold those opinions also. That to me is terrible. It’s dishonest. It’s like sending fake votes out into the network, it’s like editing people’s comments after they write them. It’s just wrong. I think someone who takes that attitude towards other people’s communications has no place on a shared network where we cooperate to get communication done, and the fact that those other people have accounts on their server and so “belong to them” or whatever doesn’t in any way excuse it.

I don’t know what’s in their heads that they think “these users are ours, so we can do what we like with their content” is reasonable. Also, to be honest, I don’t know why people put up with it. I think the propaganda that recasts it as “defending the space” from bigotry or Western propaganda has a lot to do with it, sort of putting up a distorted reality where what they are doing is actually some other, unrelated, thing, and so people look at it in that light instead. I don’t know.

Anyway, I sorta agree with you on the main thing. nutomic holding opinions I think are wrong isn’t a crisis. People can think what they want as long as they’re honest about it and let other people be honest about it too. That’s my feeling.

Yeah. China as I understand it is actually really sincerely investing in economic development for the rural areas in a way that’s really genuine and admirable. I’m not saying they are always and uniformly bad, almost no one is that.

Basically, both the USSR and China experimented with some variety of actual communism, realized that it didn’t work on a big scale, and abandoned it in favor of command-economy capitalism. The USSR didn’t do it in time, but China did, and now China works while the USSR exploded and fell down. Why people try to argue that they were better even economically during the time that they were communist is just totally bizarre to me.

The equation “Substack = Nazis” is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of “I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it’s actually evil and I’m super clever and informed so I can see that and you can’t and I’m the first one.”

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it’s just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it’s pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it’s hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don’t have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Yeah, I sure was defending Hamas. Boy howdy. That sure is exactly what I said.

I suspect you are intentionally just trying to stir shit by not reading the messages you’re getting and pretending they say something else. If that is not the case, I would really encourage you to go back, carefully read what I wrote, and then after tell me back what you learned about what my attitude is towards Hamas, because you have severely misunderstood.

Hey, look, I found some.

Promoting terrorism by saying Israel “has every right to defend themselves,” is 100% protected. Both by the current application of the law, and by its proper intent. I’m actually not very concerned with the current application of the law to pro-Palestinian advocacy (“Palestine has every right to defend themselves”) because the current application is a bunch of tyrannical bullshit, and I hope we are able to restore it to something sort of adjacent to good sense and the intent of the framers soon.

You’re advocating for it being legal to advocate for terrorism, or in fact to commit it, but illegal to make terrorists uncomfortable by making edgelord statements, if the terrorists or their friends happen to be in power. That is a profoundly fucked up point of view. Pretty much every terroristic regime has usually labelled any resistance to them as “terrorism” as one of the key steps in making it illegal to resist their terrorism.

If you’re having trouble grasping what I am saying, I am saying that Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians including torture, starvation, bombing of hospitals, deliberately shooting children, basically any type of war crime you could think of, is terrorism. So far they have committed roughly 50 September 11ths in Gaza, at least, and they have plans to do many many more.

Hamas does commit terrorism also, yes, although far less than Israel. But the main thing I am saying is that supporting terrorism is unequivocally legal, and very popular, in the United States, as long as the terrorism is being done by our friends.