PhilipTheBucket

No matter how unjust it’s been, the only imaginable way out is to somehow let him “save face" what ever that means in this situation.

It is literally a cliche of geopolitics for the mighty empire to continue the senseless and horrific war against some small country that's effectively defending itself, year after year, because of this logic. But then in the end to reluctantly agree to the "unimaginable" way out (saving face with some kind of explanation that literally no one believes), because at the end of the day, the simple physics of the situation will allow nothing else.

I more or less agree with you about Putin's logic and mindset actually. My overall point is there is more than one country and leader in the world that can be stubborn. The defenders are often more stubborn, at the end of the day, it turns out (to the shock and confusion of the attackers who thought they had a monopoly.)

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

That too. That's the reason he's now moving to homeless people. The thinking is that not many people will stand up for them. And you know what? He's probably right.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

It's a lot more sinister than that.

He started with the immigrants, because there was a tenuous theory under which his personal police force was allowed to fuck them up and do whatever they want. Some little speedbumps aside, that worked out okay, no one stopped it. Now he's talking about federalizing the police force in one particular place, and moving on to the next target, who are citizens, American people, and where there's not even that vague theory that he's got a right to be throwing them in detention and letting them die of the natural conditions there.

If no one stops that, then it moves on to the next group.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

So what they've done in Ukraine is completely unjustified? In your opinion?

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

This is just bait lol

Get a room you two

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Sure, it would be nice if Russia simply left Ukraine, but put yourself in Putin’s position - it’s a complete non-solution. You don’t fold after going all in. It’s an incredibly naive thing to say

This is exactly the kind of logic someone would use to justify either of the examples I brought up. Exactly.

The fact that he really doesn't want to stop killing innocent people, and so he would have to pay the "cost" of doing something he doesn't want to do, isn't a justification. I would actually really like for him to be arrested on that ICC warrant and try to explain this exactly logic at the Hague. I think it would be great. I would support him using that defense, I think it would be wonderful to see. People could decide whether to accept the logic, and then whether to hang him or not depending on whether they bought into it as a good reason for continuing to kill innocent people on an industrial scale.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Someone who supports modern Russia or the modern CCP is not "left leaning" in any sense which makes sense to me.

Maybe it's not real productive to have an extensive debate about labels, but the exact reason I dislike these people is because they're doing so much legwork for horrific right-leaning regimes. If they also have some left-wing views, then great, but it doesn't really excuse their support for de facto fascism in my view.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Yeah, I get it. You're not wrong.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

No, it's on par with telling someone "Well, you shouldn't keep driving drunk then" or "You should 100% stop contacting her and move on if she keeps instantly blocking you on every new platform you try on." Certain actions really are under voluntary control. We're not telling Russia they really need to shape up that GDP if they want the world to take them seriously. We're asking them to stop deciding to kill innocent people. Seems legit. The obstacle is that they really want to, and they're reluctant to stop.

(The analogy is flawed because there's no real equivalency between driving drunk and maybe rolling the dice on killing one family, and yourself, versus doing it to members of a million families. But the simplicity of the solution is the same.)

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Holy shit

I'm not watching this entire thing, but it's bad. I watched some sections and holy shit.

The first random thing I happened upon was Hasan talking about trans issues, overtalking someone from the chat who disagreed with him and demanded evidence which was literally open on his screen at the time, called them transphobic (?), then banned a trans person who chimed in to say that yes they agreed and Hasan was doing a bad job arguing for trans issues, and then spent extensive time berating them on stream, wishing bad things on them in the future...

I honestly can't even do it justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdCFycPw3fI&t=575s

Holy crap man. I generally sort of discount people trying to find reasons to nitpick some leftist voice, because pretty much everyone has some kind of imperfection and whatever, it's fine, we don't need to constantly be shedding allies because fuck anyone who ever did something allegedly etc etc whatever. Anyone can have a bad day if they're on streams a ton of the time... but this is bad. And it makes me not surprised at all if he has the same type of super-confident wrong take on geopolitical issues.

Edit: Also, by far the saddest thing is the nonstop scroll of people cheering him on and celebrating this person getting banned, just whizzing by in the chat. Shit is fucked. Our society is in a bad state.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Not really. The two have nothing to do with each other.

"The Chinese government shouldn't have shot all those people in Tienanmen Square." "Yeah, but you have to remember Western imperialism."

"The Khmer Rouge shouldn't have killed a quarter of their country's population." "Yeah, but you have to remember the Vietnam War."

"Ireland shouldn't have covered up for sex-abusing priests." "Yeah, but you have to remember Protestant oppression of the Catholics..."

The whole premise is nonsense. I do know people from outside the US who took this attitude to Putin, I can think of specific ones of them that I talked with about Putin and they told me I was an ignorant American, more or less, and Ukraine's not innocent and the US intentions in Ukraine are not good either. They thought it was hilarious that I was all heated up about Putin and (in their minds) not heated up about the US government doing more or less the exact same thing in their region of the world for the last several decades.

And then the 2022 invasion happened.

And as soon as it was apartment blocks and hospitals blowing up, power plants, shelling Chernobyl, kidnapping kids and taking them back to Russia, they all of a sudden got real fuckin' quiet about Putin kind of being an admirable guy because, what the hell at least he's trying to stand up to the US instead of getting fucked around by them or else making corrupt deals like everyone else. They weren't stupid or naive about what a war like that meant, who was paying the horrifying price, or how much or how little it was doing to solve American imperialism anywhere else in the world. And so they were shocked and horrified, watching the scale of the suffering. They didn't want to try to do little backflips to connect it to some kind of noble cause somewhere else that it was supposedly in service of.

Any other reaction, honestly to me, means you are at best some kind of sheltered and elitist person, some kind of person who feels like making excuses for innocent people dying because you want to cling to some pet theory. As the person in Hasan's chat very succinctly alluded to, I would never make that kind of excuse on behalf of the US, or for Israel or any other horrifying state-power entity that's doing awful things and spreading around propaganda about it. So why is Hasan doing it? That's fuckin' weird, don't do that.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

I don't really have a problem with someone being a streamer or being successful. I was always kind of on the fence about Hasan (still am actually), I like him because he is a strong leftist voice and maybe I should not be nitpicking him here. This is the first really dumb thing I've heard him say.

I guess I see him, after seeing this, as similar to Joe Rogan for the left: He's actually generally sensible, he has a very loyal audience who mostly lines up with his political leaning, but he talks about complex issues without really understanding them (or apparently even trying to), which makes him vulnerable to saying or promoting total bullshit by accident. Case in point...

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

I mean it is kind of a dick move to spy on downvotes and then demand that someone respond to you. The dude is wrong as hell, but I do agree with the overall principle that not every vote needs to be subject to someone getting interrogated as to why they voted that way.

Their shock at finding out that it works that way is, of course, why the currently Lemmy UI is badly designed because it creates the illusion for people that their votes are private. They definitely should not do that.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

Admins have way too much information on Lemmy.

No, users have way too little information on Lemmy. This whole distinction between "the admins, who see secrets and control the flow of information" versus "the users, who are only allowed to know what we tell them, and have to follow our rules" is a holdover from corporate structures of web service. For the most part, it has no place in the future I would like to see.

The technology makes it impossible to hide the votes. So don't hide the votes. It's okay, as long as people know that's what is going on. But anything that creates that kind of lord-and-peasant dichotomy should be minimized as much as possible within the realities of how things are going to get hosted. Admins can read DMs. So end-to-end encrypt the DMs. Mods and admins can make deletion and bans. So put the users in control of who's allowed to "moderate" their individual feed (this is one thing that as I understand it Bluesky actually did very right), don't partition everything into spaces where at all times the "users" are powerless to overrule someone trying to control their feed for them. And so on. You get the idea.

That's my opinion, others might see it differently, but I really don't get why they copied all elements of the Reddit model when a lot of them have no place (or don't even make sense) in a federated network.

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

It's ridiculously stupid. In my opinion. Actually making the votes private would be fine. Making the votes public but making sure everyone knows that would be fine. Trying to pretend they're private, and hiding them in the UI but making it an open secret that they're not private and anyone who knows what they're doing can look at how other people are voting, is textbook harmful security-by-obscurity misleading your users.

It kind of goes with their authoritarian mindset I guess. "Don't question me, I don't have to be honest with you about what's going on, just shut up and go back to your UI which has only the features I allow you to have. Mine has a little dropdown that can look at the votes. Yours doesn't. Get back in your box. All the good users won't look outside what I tell them to."

PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au 4w ago

The Lemmy creators thought votes should be private, and didn't respond meaningfully to people who tried to tell them that Lemmy votes are not private.

If they're currently retconning it as "Lemmy votes are not private and never were," then that's a step in the right direction I guess, but the fatal flaw was ever following the Reddit model where votes are "supposed" to be private for real. Because as you note it is impossible to do in an ActivityPub system. A lot of people when this was first being discussed, pre-lemvotes, were objecting strongly to the idea of making votes public, because they liked pretending they were private and just not paying any attention to the fact that they weren't. I think mbin still refuses to display downvotes for this (stupid) reason.

(Actually, Piefed did what I thought was a brilliant solution, creating new actors to send out votes with that were different from the comment actors, so that individual users could vote from Piefed and admins could check into it but the votes would not be trivial to associate with the users. IDK why they abandoned it but it seemed like a pretty clever way.)