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1·1 day agoThe natural tendency of any government is towards tyranny. They’re not indomitable, though, and so sometimes the people fight their way a little more towards justice.
Inevitably, when the pendulum swings back, it develops that talking about the old justice-type of government that somebody won with their struggle, is punishable severely at the hands of the new government, which is simultaneously completely happy to be claiming for itself the mandate of the old government. When the old government wasn’t even all that “good,” just a little better than the norm in some respects.
We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before, during and after the revolution. We just wrote a bunch more stuff down (since for some reason even really important stuff in English law is still this kind of “everyone knows it’s that way” weird type of oral history system.) We also modified certain aspects in a more democratic spirit. But a lot of the bedrock, things like precedent, judges, juries, appeals, habeas corpus, and so on, comes from that system, so Bushel’s Case is still relevant in terms of talking about the nature of the judge/jury relationship.
The judge cannot. They can prejudice the jury severely through unequal treatment of evidence, witnesses, and through clearly showing their bias at trial, which in practice can affect the verdict dramatically. On the other hand, doing that makes it a lot easier to overturn the verdict on appeal.
The case which unequivocally established the right of juries to countermand the judge was fucking wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel’s_Case
The judge was putting William Penn and William Mead on trial for leading an unlawful religious assembly. The jury found the defendants, basically, guilty of “speaking,” but not of the crime they had been accused of. The judge blew his stack and ordered the defendants to be tied up (?) and the jury imprisoned without food, water, or heat. After two days with no food, the jury returned, and amended their verdict to “not guilty.” The judge got pissed again, ordered the jury to be fined (?) instead, and one of the jurors said he definitely wasn’t paying that, and appealed the whole judgement. The trial involved some physical violence in the courtroom when the judge would order something to happen and the person involved would tell the judge to fuck off and then resist the people who came in to try to enforce the ruling.
The appeals court sided with the jury. People remember Bushel (the juror) and his name is remembered as linked with the principle of law, and all people remember about the judge was that he was an asshole.
Yeah. Just turn it into a positive.
In all corners of the world, in all the years of history, there has been human life and energy. Modern Western culture has somehow reached itself to a point where you have erase it all, because it’s not “professional,” and present a strange view of history and the current world where all the greed, humor, meanness, and fun has been removed. Teenagers hate that, because they are not broken yet, and they innately connect back to and get excited by any little spark that accidentally shows through the dust-covers by mistake. Just let 'em do it. The instinct will go away anyway when they get jobs, you don’t have to make any specific effort to stamp it out.
You cannot out-clever teenagers. Just accept your defeat, and be proud of them for their verve in tackling the mission.
0·2 days agoIt’s not just the resources to mirror posts, it’s also the resources to keep up with communicating with the community, answer questions, maintain a positive presence. It’s not trivial.
I do sort of agree that it’s insane for any privacy company to be emphasizing Reddit over Mastodon. If anything, the limited resources should motivate them shutting down Reddit and keeping Mastodon. But it’s not as totally stupid an explanation as it might seem.
It’s also notable that Reddit’s features make it a lot easier to communicate with tons of people in a genuine way, with minimal effort (since it’s good at surfacing high-voted comments and letting you engage with those people). As well as making it easy to silence anyone who is saying anything you don’t want them to say, of course.
Star Wars would have been a really crappy movie with you in charge of it.
Or World War 2
“We shall fight them on the beaches, and then lose, because there aren’t enough of us. We’re boned. Churchill out.”
0·3 days agoThey don’t look angry. They look cold and calculated about it.
0·4 days agoI don’t know Roman history. But for the legionnaires they switched from spears to swords, and I thought to myself, “What the fuck, why would you ever switch away from spears as the primary weapon for ancient world infantry.”
AND THEN THE SPEARS CAME BACK 😃
0·5 days agoMaybe, but if that’s true, I think it happens on both sides of the political spectrum. Just as many Democrats engage in that as Republicans.
I do not think that American Democrats or Republicans are capable of running an operation that is anywhere near this successful. They are, for the most part, corrupt idiots. I’m talking about foreign influence campaigns which are designed to destroy the US by getting Republicans elected, not Republican influence campaigns which are designed to win by getting Republicans elected.
Also, Lemmy is overwhelmingly left-leaning. So in that case, isn’t Lemmy part of that surge trying to influence the campaign? They were heavily promoting all things Democrat, and heavilly downvoting anything that was third party or republican.
According to your logic, and your numbers, Lemmy is part of that influencing agent. And it seems to be trying to continue to influence things.
And since Lemmy is part of a political influence scenario, then that means you are too. As am I.
I don’t think Lemmy had any particular influence on the election, no, because of the small number of people here. I actually don’t think UniversalMonk is part of any influence campaign, personally, although there is no way to know. I just said I thought they were trying to influence the election, not that there was any detectable impact from it. Certainly as soon as the election happened, they switched from promoting Rachele Fruit relentlessly, to promoting conservative ideology just as relentlessly, which would seem to indicate that the Rachele Fruit stuff was purely a tactical front because of the election.
In a broader sense, separate from this individual user, it is absolutely well-documented that there are foreign influence campaigns distorting social media to promote electoral outcomes operating on a massive scale. I think that is why Trump got elected, and I think it’s why the far right is experiencing this massive surge right now all over the world, and liberal democrats like Biden, Trudeau, Scholz, and Macron are dealing with these insurgencies against their power which they’re not coping with well at all. I think the problem is actually vastly understated in the media. I think it’s one of the most powerful forces shaping world events right now, and it barely gets more than a footnote while the effects are talked about all the time in how politics is changing and new policies that are coming about because of it.
I am very surprised, as it sounds like you are, that it is on Lemmy. But also, it is very clear to me that there are influence campaigns on Lemmy, even if UM is not part of them. For whatever weird reason they decided that a few tens of thousands of MAU was enough to get someone involved in it. I think most people have a sort of anecdotal sense that it’s happening, based on the various tides of propaganda that come across from time to time, and I’ve seen users fuck up in ways that unambiguously indicated it (a random example being someone who claims to be American and preaching nonstop about Democrats, then using non-American numbering and then not understanding it when it’s pointed out to them that Americans don’t punctuate their numbers like they just did.)
My main point about the election is that Lemmy, I guess like literally every other social media outlet except maybe Signal or something, had influence campaigns operating on it. Any given group of a few tens of thousands of people was laughably too small to influence the election. But, by casting a wide net, I think they produced quite a significant impact on the election, and I do think Lemmy was a part of it.
(Most important) Monk posted to /c/politics at most about three times per day.
This is way off. During the October run-up when Monk was trying hard to influence the election, he was posting 10-15 times a day, which is about as much as anyone ever posts.
2024-10-21 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 4 2024-10-20 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 5 2024-10-19 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-18 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 8 2024-10-17 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-16 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 11 2024-10-15 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 5 2024-10-14 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 8 2024-10-13 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 14 2024-10-12 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-11 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 11 2024-10-10 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 10 2024-10-09 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 10 2024-10-08 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 17That’s how many times only to the politics community, no other place, on each of those days.
TL;DR: Monk’s problem on /c/politics had nothing to do with and could not have been stopped by such a rule proposed in the OP.
This part, I 100% agree with. Discretion is always a part of moderation, and the fact that they didn’t exercise discretion and common sense with Monk (and in fact actively protected him by banning people who he egged into conflicts with him) doesn’t mean that we should set some kind of new discretion-free policy that will impact the heavy posters who do bring something good.
Watching Linus take a big public dump on someone who deserves it is one of life’s finest guilty pleasures. It’s like a Maya Angelou poem. You can tell he really cared, and meant it, and took some time to get it right.
Not true, it was Tonya Harding’s boyfriend they had to worry about. All Tonya herself did was give them dirty looks during competitions.
Honestly, this one’s not even completely his own fault. Standard bureaucratic ossification has been fucking up ATC staffing for years now. The pay is low, the qualifications are steep, and the responsibility and stress is insane. Why would someone do that? And so, people don’t. And, on top of them, management from both the business and political sides simply doesn’t give a fuck about safety or morale.
The levels of traffic were just recently increased in that DC airspace where the plane hit the helicopter, and at the time, a bunch of qualified people were trying to raise the alarm that some bad shit was going to happen if they stuffed more aircraft into an already overcrowded area. No one in a position to make any of the decisions cared, and they did it anyway. That all happened before Trump and Elmo came into the picture.
Of course, it is true that their own actions have produced some additional consequences now. They’ve fired a bunch more people and demotivated all the existing or prospective ones pretty much as much as it is possible to do. And, as much as the existing systems are aging and in need of some modernization, it’s absolutely guaranteed that whatever Musk does to “improve” them will make them even worse. All I’m saying is that he didn’t entirely create the bad situation he is now about to amplify tenfold.