• 271 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • In run-up to the 1964 election, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. were given an audience with incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, where he asked them to scale down their protest activity until after the election so he could be confident he could win. They understood correctly that by continuing to protest, they had political leverage.

    Imagine an alternative reality where LBJ had not signed the Civil Rights Act, and instead Barry Goldwater had won and increased the segregation and discrimination facing African-americans. Would you blame them for using the only electoral political leverage they had available, and laugh at their misfortune?

    The only check the worst excesses of the Trump presidency has is the potential for widespread civil unrest. The Democrats aren’t capable of that. Grassroots Palestinian-american organizations are. In building that base of resistance, we shouldn’t make the same mistakes that caused the Democrats to lose the election. In the words of Nate Silver:

    Democrats…often get angry with you when you only halfway agree with them. And I really think this difference in personality profiles tells you a little something about why Trump won: Trump was happy to take on all comers, whereas with Democrats, disagreement on any hot-button topic (say, COVID school closures or Biden’s age) will have you cast out as a heretic. That’s not a good way to build a majority, and now Democrats no longer have one.

    Abbas Alawieh is concerned for the lives of his family and friends under another Trump regime. We all are. He is one of us.




















  • I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

    I don’t think it’s a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.





  • I disagree, and that’s part of the reason I’m so strongly opposed to Lemmy.World’s use of Dave Van Zandt’s site in their bot. Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

    This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. You can read more about those principles here.

    MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.