That sounds promising. I think Lemmy is young enough that we don’t have simple functionality like modmail or karma-type troll throttling, but I’m optimistic that we’ll start having improved tools very soon. Thanks for the heads up!

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are professors of government at Harvard, and this is an opinion piece.

Some people just look for things to be offended about…

Best of luck, chief.

Damn, dude, take a deep breath. I didn’t lump you in with anything, infer you’re lumped in with anything, or disparage veterans in any way, shape, form, or fashion. I didn’t even know you existed until this very conversation. Talk about wildly disproportionate blowback.

Go tell the person who asked what’s actually going on, not me. I don’t agree with the people I overheard, I’m just the messenger and responded to that person’s question because they sounded curious.

Then offer your opinion about how a military operation looks to you. I was literally at a charity even for veterans and overheard a group of people talking who I don’t usually hear from. And they didn’t know I was listening, so they were transparently honest about how it looks to them. It startled me because it was a wildly different framing than I was familiar with. So when the person asked what exactly is going on beneath the surface, I offered an anecdote that was timely and relevant.

Don’t take everything so personally.

Polite conversation not your strong suit? I don’t have an axe to grind here, dude, just making small talk.

I honestly don’t know. That explanation certainly makes sense, though. I’ll have to do some digging to see if I can find some studies that looked into it.

It’s certainly an interesting exercise in contrasting responses to a huge market shock. Obama was criticized for not doing enough, so Biden went all-in. We now know the Covid-era supply chain shocks were somewhat temporary, and rather than falling off a cliff like it did in 07/08, demand simply shifted to different markets, so one could reasonably conclude that the amount of demand-side spending through the pandemic was a bit excessive. That somewhat unnecessary influx of money is what allowed prices to jump, but it’s also interesting that our rate of inflation was persistently lower than many other developed nations, so it may not have been totally unnecessary. Hopefully economists have learned valuable lessons about the appropriate response to structural failures (like the housing crash) versus structural disruptions (like the pandemic), and adjust their recommendations going forward. Whether or not the recovery fixed some of our more long-term and systemic economy-wide failures like income inequality and the GFC-induced housing shortage (i.e. it didn’t), it’s laudable that Biden and Powell managed a very rare soft landing when they could have just as easily triggered a full-blown recession.

I didn’t say the former, and my opinion doesn’t preclude the latter.

…which is why I said:

I’d guess a sizeable bipartisan coalition within the military industrial complex sees it exactly the same way

I overheard a brief conversation between Trump-supporting veterans last week. Youngish guys, so not your average Vietnam boomer. It was startling to hear them talk about what’s going on in Israel in two stark terms:

1. They talked about Israel being savagely “attacked” by Iran. Not Hamas, but literally Iran.

2. They hope the military turns Iran to glass.

No mention of Palestine or Gaza at all, nor of the history of Israeli aggression. All they see is that Arabic nations launched an attack on Israel, and Israel is “fighting back.” It’s a mini holy war to these guys, and I’d guess a sizeable bipartisan coalition within the military industrial complex sees it exactly the same way. Palestine, to them, is just collateral damage in a broader war that was started by “them.”

My dad has had two stolen. He just puts another one up each time.

The book Humankind by Rutger Bregman goes into the details and is a fascinating read. Psychologists Haslam and Reicher did a follow-up “BBC Prison Study” in 2002 to test some of Zimbardo’s findings, and they didn’t find any of the really problematic behaviors that Zimbardo found (many of which were more or less coached or coerced). So it’s not necessarily that the results were invalidated, per se, and more that Zimbardo’s conclusions are not as ironclad as he made them out to be in his original paper. They simply weren’t repeatable once basic ethical safeguards were put into place for the safety of the participants. It kinda speaks to the wild west era of psychological research in the mid 20th century where there were no rules and people were free to do all manner of fucked up things that researchers could never get away with today. In some ways that period is useful because they allowed us to test some of our more fundamental understandings without the limitations placed on us by modern liability and psychiatric/psychological protection, but it can’t really be overstated how much damage was done to some of the subjects of those studies. Our modern system has matured in such a way that findings can more systematically and rigorously be tested because standardized practices are the norm and study subjects have basic safeguards across various disciplines.

For what it’s worth, Haslam, Reicher, and Zimbardo put out a joint statement that addressed some of the controversy surrounding their more or less conflicting results which essentially boiled down to the conclusion that both experiments are valid, though each has significant differences and limitations.

You’re commenting on a thread about a user whose polite, bad faith sealioning was tolerated for months, and whose spamming behavior is the only thing that triggered meaningful enforcement. If that’s what you’re concerned about, you should be in favor of more heavy handed moderation of obviously disingenuous “politeness”.

I think sealioning is patently uncivil behavior, no matter the veneer of geniality. I just think that Lemmy hasn’t quite figured out how to strike a balance between moderators enforcing truth and moderators enforcing good behavior.

I challenge that the definition of “bigotry” is as broad as each individual wants to make it, and the kit gloves with which trollish behavior is consistently moderated differ significantly from the approach taken to a very broad definition of “bigoted” opinions, which regularly invite heavy reprimands. As long as the definition of “bigotry” is rigorously defined, I don’t necessarily disagree with you. As I see things, it isn’t.

And yes, much of this could have been avoided if the people attacking Monk had been held to a higher standard of acceptable behavior. That is exactly the argument I’m making. None of that crap should have been allowed to spiral out of control.

My point is they shouldn’t allow either. The only thing worse is using a double standard, because it prioritizes assholes you agree with over polite users you don’t.

So the user you’re responding to just accused me of being a troll. Yet you responded…

I honestly am getting much more trollish vibe from you than I have ever gotten from monk all the times I disagreed with them and pointed it out.

The definition you gave in your initial comment is the definition I use. I very clearly didn’t ignore what you said, have no idea what “a patronizing” has to do with anything, and asked you a very simple question, which you ignored.

The fact that after only two replies you went straight to personal attacks tells me I’m unlikely to get anything productive out of this exchange.

And decisions to take a more punitive approach to the expression of certain opinions and beliefs than to shitty, antagonistic behavior will ensure that never changes.

So, again, can you define “troll” for me? I think you and I are operating based on fundamentally different definitions, and I’d like to see yours spelled out so I can understand the difference.