Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB's username lol) and myself here in !politics....
To start, I would like to link this graphic to the community guidelines to illustrate where the cutoff is between heated debate and inappropriate bickering.
This one will be challenging, but we will consider it. Thanks for weighing in though. Even if this doesn't become a direct rule, it at least points to the kind of community we want to co-create.
I'll piggy back on your response here to add in that I would prefer that posters copy and paste the nut graf of the news story into the body of the post.
"Nut graf" is a journalism term for the paragraph that clearly delineates what the article is about. It's what makes the piece newsworthy. "The paragraph that explains the story in a nutshell." The nut graf usually appears in the first three grafs of any current events piece.
I think if this is included in the body text (willing to invite more than just this paragraph, but bare minimum this graf), then readers can determine if the larger piece is worth their time to read or important.
This is an excellent question and is really up to us as a community to establish. The thought had occurred to me that there's room in our magazine for:
politics news that is not US-based
threads that are discussion only about political events
responding to something clearly editorial (thinking here if a really cogent YouTuber has a video essay about political matters that isn't rage bait)
It's just a matter of community members saying what kind of content they want here and us establishing Badges (we can do that as mods, kind of like post flair).
Not trying to split hairs with you, but we are talking about the same paragraph with different terms.
Lede: A clash at city hall today resulted in a rushed vote called during a late night session today, drawing criticisms from civil rights advocates.
Nut graf: Proposition HB (number) had been backed by state legislators from almost exclusively one political party. The bill would impact certain people in this specific way. About 150 protestors packed the gallery and spilled out into the foyer as the leader of the bill's opposition in the state house, state rep So-and-so from the name of county district, lead a 15 hour filibuster that was interrupted prematurely by the lieutenant governor calling a vote on the bill just before the special session ended.
A bad hot take is different than trolling activity. What I've seen the most of is an ineffective version of the Motte and Bailey fallacy. What I've seen is summarized as:
Troll: Very strong rage bait content/comment
Community user: Reasonably pissed response that this position is horseshit
Troll: Calls for civility even though they originally were like, proposing to genocide trans people, which is inhumane
This isn't a situation to foster. Let this kind of scum in and then they bring friends. Like roaches.
I would want to qualify this a bit to expand, but in short - I would like to see only content that generates discussion or educates the audience. Memes and screen caps of article headlines (I never knew this was a thing on reddit) fail to educate, so I don't see that having a home here.
Content may be:
Direct url to reliable or reputable source of journalism (as determined by Media Bias Charts from watchdog organizations). Post title must match article title. Poster must include lead or nut graf in body of post text. Poster may communicate their interpretation or editorialization of the news item in the first comment.
Direct link to a YouTube video from responsible content creators - no podcasts but yes interviews with direct people of interest from trusted media sources and journalists, even if this content is editorial in nature. Editorial content (for both videos and articles) should be clearly marked EDITORIAL: [original title of linked content]
OC threads seeking community engagement and debate (ex: DISCUSSION: How have anti-trans laws impacted you or people you know directly?) - the community space for these may be an "enter at your own risk" because I don't want to get caught in the quagmire of who has a shitty opinion versus who is a shitty person. For threads like this, I think the most moderation we should be doing should be removing/banning spammers and bots. If users want to feed the trolls in these spaces, then I won't challenge how you like to spend your weekend.
As we collectively discuss this and come to a conclusion that most of us feel a sense of ownership over, I just want to state point blank that I do not want to see duplicate posts with the same link just because two users have opposite viewpoints on the ramifications of the news.
However, I'm fine with one poster giving CNN's article on a newsworthy event and another user posting the Associated Press's article of the same event. Those two news sources (among others) will have different perspectives, voices, and information. That lends itself to robust community engagement, to me.
I don't want this place to be a joyless hellscape of too much reality LOLOL
Humor, sarcasm, wit, satire should all be expected in the comment sections. Humor that punches down or is trolling in the guise of humor I guess will just be downvoted to hell. oh well.
Fully agreed about blacklists and whitelists. I would like to base those lists on something very public and transparent such as the Media Bias Chart so it doesn't seem like the mods are being arbitrary and targeting one user just because we are opposite sides of the aisle.
Yeah, I don't think the goal can ever be pure, emotionless neutrality from a mod team.
The line may be subjective, but I want it to be transparent. Some rules may be arbitrary, but applied consistently and are sourced from the community who wants to live with them.
Other discussions in this thread have highlighted reputable sources of content. This can include NYT opinions and news, but would never permit content from OANN.
I hope this addresses the concern about opinion/editorial content.
I think we may need to stipulate and employ the use of badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that users can use kbin QoL userscripts to filter out content they don't want.
Do you think community engagement should be a response to misinformation or moderation be the response? I've already seen some trolls be answered with a flurry of factual links debunking misinformation claims, and it was glorious.
This same article was posted on another magazine, so I'm reposting my comments from that thread here in response to comments left by @Retix@cassetti and @amberprince
Please know that the Venn diagram between me and DeSantis is razor thin, and the only thing (I think) we have in common is that we are carbon-based life forms. I also see some common sense items in what was described in the article, but I have my larger misgivings, which I'll explain much further below.
Why alimony is important and necessary
Here's why alimony is important for the rest of an ex-spouse's life. I want to be clear that I believe a spouse of any gender should have access to alimony, but the most traditional situation is a woman who forfeited having a career outside of the home to be a mother and homemaker, while a man furthered his career for - let's just say - a long enough time that once the divorce occurs, it's too late for the woman to reasonably start a career and expect to rise to the same level the man is at in his career at time of divorce. Let's use an arbitrary number like 20 years for my example. Let's assume these two people met and married no later than 25 years old for the sake of my example, as well. Alimony is not relevant for couples married for very short periods (less than 5 years), nor is it relevant if both spouses worked full-time jobs.
So in my example here, both people are about 40-45 years old. Retirement age is going to vary by industry, but roughly let's say 65 years old. By this point, the man has paid into either a 401k, pension, a Roth IRA, or some other retirement financial tool for 20+ years as well as a federal retirement program, usually Social Security. One of the stipulations of paying into these financial tools is that you have to have a job in which you're submitting W-2/I-9 documentation. A stipulation of receiving the money you paid into Social Security in specific, is that you have to make enough dollar-amount SS contributions that amount to a little more than 10 years of working a W-2/I-9 kind of job/career. And to boot, the amount of SS you get paid after retiring is based on your highest earning 35 years of your lifetime of work.
So when a woman has skipped college, not worked outside the home, hasn't gained job skills, etc. etc. for 20 years, she is now coming back to the job market with zero tools and equipment to get into a career (though obviously could enter the workforce through a paycheck-to-paycheck poverty wages kind of job), has no Social Security credits for a retirement that is just about as far away for her as it is for her ex-spouse, and has no savings or other financial resources because she was a homemaker and didn't earn money as her compensation for her labor. She is also now going into new situations at a time in life in which we have all lost neuroplasticity and may find it difficult to learn new things or go back to college. And we should also be realistic about the subtle/legal ways in which older people are discriminated against in the hiring process.
This is why alimony exists. It helps to make up for the opportunity-cost in an adult's older career years and for lack of retirement security. When the members of the First Wives Association and other ex-spouses seek lifetime alimony, it's because they either will never have access to their own Social Security benefits, or will have access to extremely scant benefits whenever they do retire.
Here are my concerns about this bill, regardless of some common sense aspects of it
After Roe v Wade was overturned, there were a series of news articles this past year about what the next play for conservatives would be to further erode women's right, now that a woman's autonomy over her own reproductive choices was no longer enshrined. A lot of writers started pointing to quieter movements in states like Texas and Florida to abolish "no fault" divorces.
Remember a few months ago when Steven Crowder was pissing and moaning about how his wife initiated their divorce and the thing that seemed to really miff him the most was how "apparently in the state of Texas, she can do that"? The issue as far as he is articulating it isn't necessarily the stress of a divorce but that he couldn't exert control over the situation or over her - she had the legal right to dissolve their marriage all of her own volition. That is unacceptable to men who will always want control over women. The fact that conservatives want to come after this legal autonomy after already "winning" the war on women's bodily autonomy shouldn't be glossed over.
No-fault divorce is an alternative to fault divorces. For states that permit no-fault divorce, people can still cite a fault. A no-fault divorce means that either party can initiate divorce proceedings without having to cite fault of the other spouse, usually physical abuse, infidelity, or inability to bear children.
However throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, if you were a woman being abused or raped by your spouse, it was exceptionally difficult to prove that abuse or to gain sympathy over that abuse in order to follow through with a fault divorce. And if your husband isn't cheating on you and you have children, you can't cite the other typical reasons for divorce. So a lot of women were trapped in domestic violence for hundreds of years in America because of these divorce laws.
Only in the late '60s, when California enacted a no-fault divorce law in 1969, did women's rights around this matter advance. This is why divorce "skyrocketed" in the 1970s. I want to be clear that I believe that no-fault divorce should power all genders of spouses, but relating to the Women's Empowerment movement of the 1970s, this was absolutely key to women starting to rebuild their lives away from being daddy's little girl who was transferred like property to becoming Mrs. John Smith. This is one of a few key moments in American history that allowed women the opportunities to eventually become CEOs, Supreme Court Justices, congresspeople, and homemakers.
Though people tend to focus heavily on divorce rates as a metric of failure of a relationship (or failure of "family values"), the reality is that women in today's era are technically better positioned to willingly enter into marriage knowing there are legal mechanisms in place should that marriage turn sour. If women understood that by entering into a marriage, there would be an almost impossible chance to escape it if something arose, then I think we will see many more educated women never accepting marriage at all for themselves. Educated women were already less likely to marry as young as uneducated women. The most vulnerable population affected are uneducated women who marry young to conservative spouses and are manipulated into (or socialized into valuing) being homemakers.
Hence even though there are common sense elements in this legislation coming out of Florida, there are very real harms that will come out of this 20 years from now that impact conservative women getting married in 2024. I also worry about the larger "give them an inch, and they invade Poland" posture of the Republican party as this alimony law could eventually lead to an erosion of no-fault divorce laws, as well.
More than 20 percent of Republicans surveyed said certain criminal charges against former President Trump have made them more likely to support him in the 2024 election, according to a new Ipsos poll released Thursday.
Sincere question: does this statistic represent the sentiment that they A. like that Trump is a security risk to national interests or B. see this indictment as further proof that he's actually the messiah who was close to unearthing JKF Jr and QAnon stuff, so clearly he was thisclose to draining the swamp?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: what is the role that Oppositional Defiance Disorder is playing into such a huge number of people??
I used to live in a house with a lot of drifters. There was a young woman (24 years old) that I roomed with who, when she would go out for the day and I would say, "Have a great day!" she would snarl back, "Don't tell me what to do!"
I see a lot of alignment in your threads and comments with the things I care about, so please hear this feedback as coming from someone siding with you.
You may want to start using phrases like "darker complexions" instead of "coloured skin," the latter phrase referencing an outdated term of "coloreds" or "colored people" for what we now would call "people of color."
I don't think asking for completely neutral moderators is the goal. But finding folks who at least will open the reports log and lay down the law to prevent the eventual slide into being overrun by trolls.
I'll post another comment later this evening, but I think the main objective is to just have a couple of people to keep an eye on things since Ernest is too busy being an awesome instance dev for us.
This community is too small to require round-the-clock vigilance, and it's not reasonable to expect mods to remove content immediately.
I think if we just get 3 or 4 people who are willing to check the report logs once or twice a day, each, then we can at least establish a really rewarding community here.
I have sent a DM to @ernest to ask we be added to the mod team here. I checked out all of your profiles and it's clear that you all make positive contributions to a variety of communities with both engaging comments and thread submissions based on reputation scores. It's also clear that none of us are political die-hards and we are multi-faceted users. If @ernest is open to it and we establish the mod team, we can coordinate between ourselves later. I'll DM each of you with that info when it's time to cross that bridge.
@Grumps If we move up as mods, can you be a very dedicated community member and report bad faith commenters and rage-bait threads whenever you see them? And help communicate in other threads in !politics that we will be responsive to new reports made to the moderators?
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, a sign of the president’s strength in uniting his party to have the backing of one of its most liberal members.
I agree with this but I just don't think it's realistic that Harris slinks away in 2028. I don't see her as power hungry per se, but I do see her really enjoying being "the first" especially as it pertains to race and gender. She will not accept anything short of the Dem Convention nomination after a second VP term.
It says a lot to me that when DeSantis was directly asked about a response to the criticism that the ad is homophobic, his reaction is to defend the use of the clips showing Trump making public comments supporting the LGBTQ community. It blows my mind that DeSantis seems to have this complete blind spot and inability to see his own inhumanity.
I'm reminded of when he was credibly accused by a detainee at Guantanamo Bay of practicing torture on the detainees there. A reporter asked DeSantis to comment on this accusation and DeSantis got immediately hostile and defensive and replied that there's no way the detainee could remember something from 10+ years ago. But DeSantis never said: I don't have that in me to do to another person, surely this accusation isn't true. He said: you can't prove it was me. That is not exactly a denial of cruelty.
We should hasten to limit this man's influence and access to power.
Wow. This kind of mickey mouse attempt to prove affirmative action is "reverse racism" was invented by literal teenagers in conservative/Republican student groups across university campuses in the 1990's. Not only is it a total misunderstanding of how affirmative action works, it's full blown trite at this point.
Upsetting that this passes for TV journalism and I'm upset for those people interviewed who had to undergo experiencing this microaggression for the sake of this inept clown to try to make a point.
Oh THANK GOD you arrived at just this point of my life to shine light on the fact I'm stupid as shit. WHEW!! Now I can no longer be burdened with any decision making for the rest of my life. What would I have done without your scathing insight and rapier wit??? I shudder to imagine all the pitfalls I would have befallen without the kind and gracious light you've now shone on my life.
Hey everyone! Let's make @Unhappily_Coerced dictator for life! He's solved racism! Surely he has all the answers to the rest of society's ills!
For anyone viewing this comment thread, be aware that the tactic being used here is a common tactic among disingenuous and bad faith actors.
The tactic is to first make a volley that is divisive and controversial, usually lacking in respectful tone or tact with how brazenly illogical it is. Then once engaged with at the appropriate level (calling bullshit what it is), retreats into appeals for civility and decorum as it pertains to rational debate.
The subject being promoted here is not rational, the consequences are not beneficial to society at large, and this person only wants to cling to civility when it benefits him to do so, in order to appear to be a sympathetic victim in comparison to the other person in the dialogue.
Don't fall for this transparent ruse. Learn to identify this pattern. @Unhappily_Coerced has no intention of advancing a real debate.
Normally I would interpret this to mean she's being vetted for a VP pick, so she needs to distance herself from the fringe, but nope: they're just mad she's keeping it too real with Boebert.
Speak up now: What should our community guidelines be? ( kbin.social )
Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB's username lol) and myself here in !politics....
‘This is a death sentence for me’: Florida Republican women say they will switch parties after DeSantis approves alimony law ( www.orlandoweekly.com )
'My fears are that they can take you back to court, and I don’t have the money for an attorney.'
Nearly a quarter of Republicans say classified docs charges make them more likely to support Trump: poll ( thehill.com )
More than 20 percent of Republicans surveyed said certain criminal charges against former President Trump have made them more likely to support him in the 2024 election, according to a new Ipsos poll released Thursday.
Republican attorneys general issue warning letter to Target about Pride merchandise ( www.cbsnews.com )
The letter did not include any specific demands nor did it outline how the attorneys general believe the campaign could violate child protection laws.
Trump says he'd bring back "travel ban" that's "even bigger than before" ( www.cbsnews.com )
"We don't want people blowing up our cities and we don't want people stealing our farms," the former president said.
Has anyone stepped up to take over moderation of this magazine? ( kbin.social )
I cannot personally dedicate the time to moderation, but I do want to be active in this magazine....
Conservative women are embracing extremism under the guise of motherhood ( thehill.com )
The rise of this new, female group fits into a pattern of post-Jan. 6 domestic extremism.
Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity ( apnews.com )
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, a sign of the president’s strength in uniting his party to have the backing of one of its most liberal members.
DeSantis doubles down on ‘homophobic’ anti-Trump ad: ‘Totally fair game’ ( www.independent.co.uk )
Florida governor says former president was ‘pioneer in injecting gender ideology into the mainstream … he’s now campaigning saying the opposite’
At what point does blatant racism become acceptable and encouraged? ( youtu.be )
Journalist John Stossel perfectly illustrates why affirmative action is actually racist.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Booted From Right-Wing House Freedom Caucus ( www.thedailybeast.com )
But the Georgia congresswoman got backup from an unlikely ally: Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).