Do you support sending weapons to Israel?
mozz@mbin.grits.dev to 
Humor me for a second. Quick poll. You can just write "Yes" or "No" in the comments.
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev to mozz@mbin.grits.dev to mozz@mbin.grits.dev to Humor me for a second. Quick poll. You can just write "Yes" or "No" in the comments.
No. Why are you asking?
Because one of the troll accounts is trying to say Biden-supporters here mostly support giving weapons to Israel, and I'm naive enough to think it's worth investing time to demonstrate that that's a bunch of poo poo.
Why I take the internet this seriously instead of just shaking my head and moving on with my day, I honestly don't know.
🙄 I said people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries mostly support giving weapons to Israel. But go off I guess. Fucking asshole.
You weren't directing a question at the group of people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries (except by accidental overlap) -- you asked Lemmy readers specifically, regardless of who they voted for, a particular question based around the premise that they were Israel supporters, and then you swore that the way they answered implied that their support for Israel was being confirmed. Pretty much no one here supports Israel.
This is bringing me back to my idea of the politics sub that's auto-filtered in some way to weed out the weird accounts so that all the rest of us can just talk normal. I've spent like 30-40 minutes on this whole weird conversation at this point today (why, I don't know) which could have been spent on literally anything else.
You want an echo chamber?
I love talking with people who disagree with me. Honestly I think I have something wrong with me, for how much I like arguing on the internet.
But also, I think that the presence of so many people who are deliberately coming in to distort the narrative being presented is a bad thing. It absolutely swings elections, for one thing -- the rise of social media influence campaigns as a factor in elections has been pretty well documented, and it's not a good thing.
It's obviously not real easy to detect someone who's saying X because they believe it, as distinct from someone who's saying X because this is one of 50 accounts they run that is designed to push X as a popular opinion on social media. Every social media platform except Twitter has dedicated teams for this stuff. I think Lemmy's admins are already overwhelmed running their instances, and it's not fair to ask them to also do this more or less impossible task, but just leaving it alone and letting the shills come in and do 10 posts a day about how Biden betrayed us and as a good American I'm not voting in the election, and leaving it to the users to argue it out with them every single time every single day, isn't really the way either.
I don't think you can do it by viewpoint, to create an echo chamber. That's obviously a bunch of crap. I did do some little experiments with a couple of ways to do it, having an LLM detect certain bad-faith techniques automatically or mechanically detecting shill accounts through their behavior, but it's obviously not a real simple or easy thing to do. I definitely haven't figured out something that I feel like is "yes this is the way, this works well."
At this point I somewhat agree with you. The same way emails are filtered because there is SO much spam or worse things floating around. But I'm such a forum I think it should be done on a user basis, not message basis. So if someone constantly says something and does not actually react to replies, so no discussion, just dumping something, then this should be stopped. Regardless of what the actual message is, what the intentions are, if that is a real person or a bot. Randomly dumping messages hardly has value. But how to detect that is indeed the issue. Even with LLM since they can be used to counter themselves, but they would help against the low effort posts.
Yeah. That was more or less the conclusion I came to -- it's too hard for the LLM to follow the flow of conversation well enough to really determine if someone's "acting in good faith" or whatever, and it's way too easy for it to interpret someone making a joke as being serious, that kind of thing. (Or, maybe GPT-4 can do it if you want to pay for that for API access for every user that wants to post, but I don't want to do that).
But it seems even a cheap LLM is pretty capable of distilling down, what are the things that people are claiming (or implying as an assumption), and did someone challenge them on it, and then did they respond substantively / respond combatively / change the subject / never respond. That seems like it works and you can do it kinda cheaply. And, it means that someone who puts out 50 messages a day (which isn't hard to do) would then have to respond to 50 messages a day coming back asking questions, which is a lot more demanding, and creates a lot more room for an opinion that doesn't hold up if you examine it to get exposed as such. But, it wouldn't really weigh in on what's the "right answer" to come to, and it wouldn't censor from participating anyone who wanted to be there and participate in the discussion.
IDK. Because you asked I dusted off the code I had from before just now, and I was reminded of how not-happy-with-it-yet I was 🙂. I think there's a good idea somewhere in there though.
K.
I don’t know anyone on this side of the aisle that supports that, atleast no one i talk to.
However, i do absolutely see righties using it as a catch-22. In your mind, it plays like this:
So no, your opinion doesn’t matter to me because it can never be anything but negative.
So Biden went around congress to ship weapons to Israel against the wishes of the majority of people who voted for him in the 2020 primaries? Where are they? Why aren't they furious with him right now? Why aren't they joining the protestors?
Oh that’s an even better one.
Protest: those people need to go home/get back to class
Don’t protest: complicit in genocide.
This whole exchange is based on the assumption I'm a troll who speaks out both sides of my mouth which obviously I can't disprove so there's no point in continuing.
Yes
IDK "majority." I think there is a certain population that likes the Democrats and also likes Israel; I just think they get their news from TV or newspapers which give them a terribly slanted perspective. I so think that in addition to them, that somewhere in the 71% of people who oppose Biden's support for Israel that you'll probably find quite a few Democratic primary voters (and that almost everyone you'll find on Lemmy has learned enough about Israel at this point that they know what a crime it is to support them.)
180,000 people were on the streets immediately when the war started, people have burned themselves to death in protest, Democratic congressional staffers say the phones don't stop ringing at any point during the day, 100,000 people in Michigan alone voted "uncommitted" in the primary... and you're confused about the lack of outrage?
Just sort of assuming for no reason that there's zero overlap between anyone who voted for Biden and anyone in that grouping, and then angrily asking the question, WHY IS THERE NO OVERLAP WHY DON'T THEY CARE?
I don't know what I'm expecting I guess. I'm so angry with Biden but at the end of the day I already knew he's not really trying to support me. Sure he'll throw my demographic a bone here and there to get some easy votes but that's about it. My anger is purely that a politician I never wanted is doing something awful that I don't support. That's a regular experience.
I'm trying to imagine what it's like to be very much against shipping weapons to Israel and have voted for the guy in the primaries who went around congress to ship weapons to Israel. I'd be asking myself questions like "Did I vote for someone who supports genocide when there were better options?" and "Is our democracy even functional?" Of course I can't know with absolute certainty what someone is or isn't asking themselves in their heads. But I would suspect those kinds of questions would elicit strong words or actions.
And also granted, there have been a lot of both. But I gotta be honest, the people I'm seeing on television do not look like the demographics who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries. Do they to you?
As a complete aside:
Then what the fuck are you so mad at me for? That sounds pretty close to the speculation I shared with you and set you off.
I don't understand why you decided to be such a dick in this conversation.
I'm not angry at you or anything like that. I'm being super hostile partly just because I can be a dick in general, but also because it seems like you're being dishonest. If I've read it wrong then I apologize, but the type of thing you're saying just doesn't make sense to me.
It's just not that complex. I'll speak for myself: I didn't vote for Biden in the primary. I sort of expected him to be the exact type of establishment criminal that his background as a rich white guy who's worked in Washington all his life would suggest. Then he started doing good things for the working class and on climate change and I was surprised about it and for the first time decided he might be a good thing (instead of just not the end of the world like Trump would be). Then he started being okay with Israel slaughtering brown people and I stopped supporting him nearly as wholeheartedly -- like yes, he's returning to type as a war criminal like most US leaders; it's still better to vote for him instead of Trump, but also we should be working to build organizations that can replace him with something much much better. I don't think he started the war in Gaza, but he's certainly not doing the Palestinians any favors by enabling Netanyahu to do more or less whatever he wants.
I don't get where you arrived at this burning desire to decide that there are American Democrats who want to see Palestinians getting slaughtered in the streets by the thousands. I think population A hates it and opposes Biden on it, to this on-the-news-all-the-time-because-the-campus-or-the-person-is-on-fire extent, because he's enabling it. (While, maybe, still acknowledging that he's 10 times better than Trump by any standard.) I think another population B gets their news from establishment sources that don't really tell them that that's happening, that tell them that Israel is defending themselves from a terrorist attack and fighting a conventional war against armed opponents. I don't think that's what's happening, but I think they think that's what's happening, because the news is lying to them. And so they're okay with it. I don't think there's some population C that is both Democratic voters and understands what's going on and wants Israel to be doing what they're doing.
That's it. It's not complicated. It's not like some thing where you have to move the goalposts around in this convoluted manner to construct a person who voted for Biden in the primary because they want to murder Palestinians and they had a premonition that Hamas would attack Israel and Netanyahu would decide to start murdering the whole country and Biden loves all of that happening and so that's why they voted for Biden. The whole thing is cockamamie.
If I've misunderstood anything about what you're claiming happened then feel free to enlighten me. But you kept saying that people on Lemmy are okay with killing Palestinians, which I absolutely know isn't true, and the whole thing about the primary that you're saying now instead, makes so little sense that it's hard for me to take it seriously as a thing you actually believe. Sorry. If I'm a dick to you (which, maybe I shouldn't be), that is why.
Okay let me be absolutely clear here, I know full well that Lemmy and even Reddit leans farther left. I'm not gonna argue with you that I gave you that impression. I'm just going to say here and now, I don't think the majority of Lemmy are in support of sending weapons to Israel. Hell I can hardly find anyone who admits to voting for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries on here.
There are some and I set about finding those examples and even shared a few with you. If they exist here of all places then I speculate (I'm not trying to make some scientific claim here) there are a good number of them.
Dude why are you so hell bent on the 2020 primaries?
Yeah probably so, I can agree with that. Looks to me like about 38% of Democrats support Israel more than Palestine. To me it's absolutely crazy that it's that high, but I think (for no particular reason) that that's a product of how bad the news coverage is, and how much it goes out of its way to present the situation with this criminally pro-Israel spin.
I think if they fully understood the situation they'd be on Team Palestine and the big changes lately have been mostly due to them understanding it more and more, as the "war" continues and what's happening gets more and more obvious and harder to justify, so there's this new narrative being presented that wasn't in the mainstream news before. But I have no real reason for thinking that, it's just my guesswork about what's going on. It'd be interesting to find a poll that was analyzing how people understand the situation and what they think is going on, not just asking about the final bottom-line answer they're coming up with.
Why aren't you? Would you like to be able to vote for a better candidate than Biden in the presidential general election? I would. That requires examining what happened in the primaries to figure out what can be changed.
What a fascinatingly straightforward, natural, and organic train of logic.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.