lvxferre

lvxferre , 5 months ago

Even here in South America, depending on the region, they’re invasive.

lvxferre , 5 months ago

He’s almost Karate Kid!

lvxferre , 10 months ago

I’m checking both users’ profiles. It seems to me that ErLiebtNurEINE is trolling but Go0semanMo0seKnuckle is genuine. I might be wrong however.

If one or more of them are trolling, it’s actually a good approach - you claim the sub, make it non-functional, people leave it and go create their communities elsewhere.

lvxferre , 10 months ago

One of my cat’s equivalent of that is to make a cat-sushi out of it: she lays on the mat that is supposed to be near the front door*, claws the corner, and rolls. Then she jumps, leaving a tunnel behind her, that she’ll then attack. The whole thing is hilariously cute.

*it’s usually in a random place of the house. Blame her.

lvxferre , 10 months ago

“for violating the Reddit rules”

Isn’t it “great” how subreddits often get as much info on why they’re being banned as Josef K. did in The Process?

And those suckers still put up with this sort of abuse.

lvxferre , 10 months ago

The problem with platforms advertising that they’re free speech platforms is that you’ll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.

And that backtracks all the way into

1. The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don’t). It’s quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
2. That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to “ackshyually”. In this case “free speech” makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn’t, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
3. The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)

Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.

lvxferre , 10 months ago

In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.

Often, but not always. It’s a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it’s just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.

What will decide if Squabbles’ admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let’s see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there’s some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on “With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence”).

lvxferre , 10 months ago

I disagree because any and all words and expressions can be used to bring the dogs to the garden. Coupled with your reasoning, this would mean that all words and expressions are always dogwhistles.

Instead I think that it’s better to see a word/expression as a dogwhistle if it’s within a certain context, and that context is mostly available to a hate group but not to outsiders. This has a bunch of consequences*, but in this specific case it means that we’d need to look for further actions and words from Squabbles’ admins to know if it’s a dogwhistle or not.

Or even a lack of actions/words. If transphobic and related content becomes commonplace in their site, and they do nothing against it, I think that their very silence would be already enough to label it as a dogwhistle.

*e.g. it explains why dogwhistles are often found alongside each other, or why they keep changing, or even how they actually work on a discursive level.

lvxferre , 10 months ago

I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.

And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.

Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.

lvxferre , 11 months ago

Cute. I was expecting that “I’m pissed because humans want me to do weird stuff!” face (my cats do this), but it seems that she handled well her first visit, no?

lvxferre , 11 months ago

Happy birthday, Charles! May you get the tastiest treats today. (And in other days, too!)