Michael

If the truth is in between, it’s because we’re arguing different things.

Not necessarily! Sometimes the truth or a greater understanding can emerge even from two or more seemingly paradoxical or conflicting statements or ideas.

i.e. Dialectical reasoning

Thesis + antithesis = synthesis (which is likely still an inkling of the total truth, but nonetheless)

You make valid points, but I feel the truth lies somewhere in between your comment and the people in the chain that you are responding to.

Truly, thanks for engaging and sharing your nuanced perspective. You’ve changed my mind about this issue.

similar to our vote about enabling down-votes a while ago

Do you feel that there is any merit to revisiting this matter in the time surrounding the PieFed migration? I lean towards downvotes being disabled.

You:

I feel that “lesser evil isn’t a valid argument” rhetoric is part of how we got ourselves in the current screaming disaster, honestly.

Here is where you are specifically arguing the validity of lesser evil rhetoric. If I’m understanding correctly, you believe the pushback against such rhetoric is “how we got ourselves in the current screaming disaster”. I explained why lesser evil rhetoric is strategically invalid and why it is harmful (to discourse or otherwise).

Kamala was too busy to respond to anybody besides imaginary centrists and disenfranchised conservatives to realize that people really weren’t going to vote for her due to her refusal to properly address their serious concerns.

Hopefully, the next neoliberal that is shoved down our throats (in the primary or otherwise) learns to respond to the writing on the wall (large protest movements that demand a specific policy change) and clear widespread and public disapproval of our involvement in said atrocities.

You:

Is refusing to vote for that same neoliberal sufficient action to change our trajectory as a country? Seems like that is even more ineffectual, if that’s the metric.

You are indeed arguing for voting blocs and are seemingly criticizing people for independently refusing to vote for a neoliberal outside of those groups - by saying that voting blocs are more effectual. I’m agreeing with you, and I hope that people learn from the mistakes of the 2024 election and organize e.g. into more visible voting blocs. I don’t feel that it is totally necessary if candidates are truly representing us or are attempting to appeal to Americans, however.

And if I recall correctly, you loosely said that my principle of voting for politicians who “earn my vote” (or represent my interests) was disingenuous, but I’d like to clarify that it isn’t an impossibly high standard.

Regardless, if I’m still fucking up and misrepresenting you and your perspective - that’s on me and I apologize. I’ll amend one of my earlier, more visible comments and shed light to any developments that are buried down here.

I’m not blaming voters for having a red line on genocide in the 2024 election. Kamala Harris was free to respond to those concerns. I don’t think anybody besides MAGA was happy about what happened during and after the 2024 election.

In our current system, we need to hold candidates and our elected officials accountable for not pushing electoral reform - even on the state-level. How many more decades before it’s on the table? I believe we need a voting system that does not have spoilers.

The blame game that arises every time Democrats lose after not trying to win the election has gotten stale. Voters are simply not responsible for candidates not representing them and choosing to represent corporations over everyone else.

You guys seem to have a particular thing you like to say

I live in the US. I was born here. My opinions and views are my own and they evolve every single day.

I don’t feel like it’s fair for you to stereotype me as being part of a particular group of people.

just not voting is definitely also insufficient action to change our trajectory as a country.

If I was a candidate running for election and somebody says they won’t vote at all because they are completely disenfranchised - that would blow my mind. I’d rethink everything and get to the heart of understanding why they feel that way and ask myself if there are other people who feel similarly. 33% of Americans don’t vote in the presidential election, Democrats could be looking at non-voters or politically-active people who refuse to vote without representation and win every election that they face.

For example, Kamala Harris was free to respond to the concerns of the Uncommitted National Movement and Abandon Biden/Abandon Harris movements and represent them instead of gaslighting everybody about tirelessly working for a temporary ceasefire (which is a far cry to the permanent ceasefire that these groups advocated for).

The end result is your advocacy for the lesser evil, or more accurately, giving the lesser evil the knowledge that people will vote for them anyway. You see it as more effective than having Hitler as the president, and I’m not disagreeing with you completely - I’m disagreeing with your strategy.

I’m just pointing out that in recent history, Democrats generally refuse to negotiate and fight people to the left of them with greater strength than they fight people to the right of them.

but please find someone else to do it at in the future.

Initially, you responded to me.

You were the one who started using particular rhetoric of a variety that I consider incredibly disingenuous.

The US is a representative democracy. Elections are held for candidates to represent potential voters in an attempt to win the election.

I was the first to mention “lesser evil”, but it was in direct response to you using that rhetoric specifically in 2025 - unless my reading comprehension is lacking (which it may be).

I’m not being disingenuous. I’m supporting people’s choice to vote however they wish and encouraging politicians to flexibly respond (i.e. represent Americans). I feel that these two things are fundamental to a healthy democracy.

My country treats progressives and anybody to the left of the Democrats as terrorists - they refuse to negotiate.

Progressives and leftists are willing to negotiate, but discourse is killed, public opinion is actively shaped to smear opposing voices and to delegitimize them, literally any meaningful change is seen as unrealistic or radical, and so forth.

“HOW DARE YOU VOTE”

And I’m not saying that at all. Everybody is free to vote or not vote however they wish as far as I’m concerned.

It didn’t matter.

And I agreed with your suggestion for voting blocs and said I’d appreciate that sort of action. I disagreed with your advocacy for lesser evil rhetoric, unless I’m misunderstanding your position. I believe that it kills discourse and makes unpopular candidates run on status quo policy confidently.

You still gave me the whole script

There was no script. I appreciate you engaging. You are free to disagree with my perspective and see things however you wish.

At this point in time, I feel it’d be healthy for us to be expressing what policies we’d like to see a candidate supporting instead of giving a moderate (with effectively no vision for a more desirable future) our support by default.

In 2020, we elected the lesser evil, a self-proclaimed Zionist, who ended up aiding in the genocide of an occupied people.

If the lesser evil is aiding in modern atrocities that you and I absolutely cannot fathom living through, what the fuck are we doing as a society?

I just don’t think it’ll ever be anything close to 99% effective given that this is a website. I explained why previously.

Thanks for engaging though - I do understand and appreciate the necessity of bot prevention and I’ll be sure to keep an eye out as a user.

As another user suggested to me in the past, there could be government-run social media that requires ID at sign-up. Maybe a service like that would appeal to you if our government (apologies if you aren’t US-based) wasn’t labeling certain speech as terrorism.

I trust instance owners and software developers to sort this out in a privacy-respecting way. If a specific instance breaks my trust, I might find it necessary to block it.

I don’t support violations of privacy and I appreciate some level of pseudonymity and anonymity in social media.

Who is going to vet the vetters? What if they become compromised or were compromised from the beginning? What recourse is there for users if there are data breaches?

His group basically created the Freedom of Information Act, Clean Water Act, OSHA, Whistleblower Protection Act, among other things.

Which are all unfortunately not quite as effective in practice as they were intended to be, but you make a valid point regardless. These things are obviously desirable developments and are effectual - hence my edit to the part you quoted before I saw your response (ineffectual -> what Ralph Nader is advocating for isn’t enough in the present day).

But I feel like if we had a few hundred people doing that level of change, we would actually be able to do some of these things like getting money out of politics that are actually what’s needed.

I’d like to see that happen and I would appreciate the strategy and organization of such grassroots initiatives.

Is refusing to vote for that same neoliberal sufficient action to change our trajectory as a country? Seems like that is even more ineffectual, if that’s the metric.

I think it’s desirable that candidates be pressured to really dig deep to be the leader we need and run on that - especially years out from an election.

I feel that lesser evil rhetoric is undesirable, unnecessary, and is part of the reason why we have the gun to our heads. Vote for the status quo or something very close to it - or get Hitler. It doesn’t feel like democracy to me.

As the other commenter suggested, state-level electoral reform in blue states (such as California) could be enacted so voters are free to vote for whoever they want without spoiling. It’d be a massive step in the right direction and it’d likely get more people to turn out to the voting booths.

If there was an actor behind a handful of accounts that are mostly run by LLMs (which mimic human input and interaction) it’d be easily viable for state-level or professional actors to pull such an operation off at scale and successfully manipulate a small platform like the fediverse - especially with some level of manual input or confirmation. Even taking believable selfies of real people that fit the profile is possible and can be anticipated if the actor or the organization behind them are resourceful.

I’m not entirely against instance-level detection that attempts to understand user patterns and prevent or flag abuse to mods and admins, but I do believe that humanized input and interaction can already be effectively emulated and will only advance as time passes.

I believe that increased scrutiny of users in a centralized manner is a privacy violation. I picked my instance intentionally and I give some level of trust to the instance owners, but I wouldn’t consent to them (or the software they choose to use) handing over my PII or usage patterns to a third-party group that suspects me (even through purely automated mechanisms). I would discontinue using the service in such a scenario.

To support my point that bot detection is mostly futile on the fediverse, I’d like to draw your attention to a parallel to this situation in gaming with humanized aimbots - which are already incredibly viable and are implemented in a variety of ways.

There are usually actual human actors guiding input to some degree, but the aimbot/etc. is designed to mimic human input to achieve believable results. I believe this technology could still advance quite a bit and there are new methods popping up as every day passes.

The key difference between gaming and the fediverse, is that the fediverse is not software running on our computers at the kernel-level (as with most anti-cheat) - it’s a website running in a browser.

Ultimately, I feel it boils down to just blocking instances that you disagree with the operation of to curate your experience - which is already available on Lemmy.

I disagree with the notion that we need a centralized list or that such a list is desirable. Again - I trust instances to sort this out.

As LLMs and deepfaking technology advance, the likely result will be completely undetectable bots that effectively mimic human behavior, even with advanced and potentially automated defenses.

See: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to have to e.g. take a selfie in a specific way to be able to use the fediverse and have the ability to reach a broad audience - just because I am hypothetically suspected. Such a list will also likely chill participation, as an unintended effect.

From my perspective (and without reading the book), what Ralph Nader is advocating for isn’t enough in the present day.

Clearly, the change we need in America is systemic - getting an establishment neoliberal (who is likely to run as a moderate) to budge on specific policy changes is insufficient action to change our trajectory as a country.

I believe that it is in the spirit of democracy to encourage others to vote however they want to - that includes forming voting blocs and doing exactly what you are shedding light to.

I feel that in a democracy, it is desirable for candidates to actively be making attempts to appeal to potential voters and actively attempting to represent their interests; instead of running on effectively maintaining the broken status quo - with minor changes.

None of that data proves anything besides potentially identifying bots, as you suggest.

It’s just an exercise in group paranoia - and would likely be abused by actual state/professional actors attempting to silence users/create bubbles.

Personally, I trust that the mods and admins will sort the bots/vote manipulation out. As for the bad actors, we can counter their propaganda with our good faith participation and our efforts to lead others to the truth.

Gavin Newsom is free to earn my vote? I don’t see how your question is relevant - the election is years out.

You’re suggesting a public blacklist with thorough vetting, I just thought it’d be fair for you to step forward in such a hypothetical scenario. But you’re right, it’s not feasible - nobody can definitively prove that they are an independent actor.