Pleasant Politics

Here's how to do it:

You can make a strong argument that the United States has been a major sponsor of international terrorism throughout the 20th century and up until the present.

• Noam Chomsky giving examples
• Smedley Butler tying it back to earlier US history
• Wikipedia giving an extensive list

Is that still going on? Is support for Israel terrorism? Has it gotten better in the 21st century? Is it relevant what other countries have done, or what good things the US also does?

@lulztard@feddit.org I don't know whether this post will be any more useful than the other one, but the other one was pure hostility. You can't pick a fight with a whole community and start ordering them around and expect the conversation to go anywhere good. It's not your subject matter, it's your delivery.

I think it has a better chance of turning into a real conversation. If this one turns into a waste of time, too, I'll delete it, too, but I want to give a chance to this conversation, because the subject matter is fine.

I'm leaving the pro-Zionist comment up. Long story short, it's abundantly clear to both me and the bot that it's a real user stating their real opinion. I don't want to create a "free speech safe space" for all the comments that aren't welcome anywhere else because they are horrible, but I also don't want to create a place where there are elaborate boundaries about what you can and can't say. The rules are: No bigotry, no spam, no personal attacks. Not that you can say fuck one person, but not this other person.

I severely don't like the "nanny state" moderation that prevails on a lot of Lemmy. We're all adults here. Hopefully. Even with the tiny amount of content that's been posted so far, I've been batting down reports that are based on the idea that the user base can't make up its own mind about what's trustworthy, what's true, or what's worth reading. This is the first comment I really wanted to delete. To be blunt, my personal opinion is that it's garbage. On the other hand, lemmy.world has political threads that are overflowing with garbage comments, so if we only have one so far, we're beating the curve.

The post about US terrorism should have been removed, only because it came from a throwaway. That part of the bot isn't working yet. I have to change the parameters. I'll get to it soon. However, if it had come from a normal user's account, I wouldn't have a problem with it. The comments look fine. Again, we're adults, or else hopefully can act like it. The problem with posts like that comes when they start dumpster fires of comment sections, or drown out the good content, but that hasn't happened yet! I think that's a really good thing. It means getting rid of all the people who love to start big pointless fights has been working so far. Running across content every once in a while that you think is dead wrong isn't a problem. It's good for you. It builds character.

None of this is set in stone. I'm not trying to make a safe space for horrible content, and if it becomes that way I'll set stricter boundaries. But I think a couple of controversial posts that didn't lead to big bitter shouting matches shows good things about this moderation model, not bad things.

Bullshitters, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his 1986 essay “On Bullshit,” don’t care whether what they are saying is factually correct or not. Instead, bullshit is characterized by a “lack of connection to a concern with truth [and] indifference to how things really are.” Frankfurt explains that a bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”