purpleworm [none/use name]

deleted by creator

So between your initial, completely spurious accusation, this:

a preaching continued push

Which might otherwise be called a “campaign” or just “something this person believes in and argues for”

recycled arguments

Which, without proper refutation (and you have no proper refutation, see how you replied to me ~four times but could never give me a defense of the site), might just be “a reasonable argument that people repeat because it’s reasonable and has yet to be refuted” and similarly, in one of your other replies:

It really interesting seeing this group so favourable to banning or setting up an auto-reply

Which, again, could simply be that many of us have years of experience or Redditors/Ledditors posting that stupid website as an argument and you’d probably say the same thing if it was a website that supported flat earth theory, which is literally no less ridiculous than the claim that its individual ratings are based on, that being centrist is inherently less biased (which it literally does, see davel’s comment).

All this taken together is hard to read as anything other than you posing yourself as some intellectually rigorous figure that looks down upon the cult/herd that you see here, but in reality you have been clambering for literally any excuse you can find to discount arguments out of hand, to say that what I and others say simply “doesn’t count,” to avoid actually taking the arguments on their own merits. Despite your meaningless and sometimes wildly inaccurate complaints about emotionality, you certainly aren’t shy about your own affectation, as in where you said something like:

Signed, a disgusting centrist

So, self-victimizing aside, this absurd standard about emotionality is clearly not something that you actually believe in, it’s just a crass rhetorical cudgel that you use to defend your biases about this sort of media from being fact-checked. If only we had a website that dealt with that subject . . .

I think the issue is that to a general audience it’s something that you can’t just say in passing with a noun phrase without establishing that you’re talking about this bias first, but if I had to produce a phrase then it would probably be “the less-politically-educated” or something, since obviously there are lots of people with political education who are contributing to problems in The Discourse, but the people who just hold up MBFC like it’s a cross to repel the vampire of radicalism are, in my opinion, mostly the kind of people who have very little political education and just consume a lot of corporate news or NYT (or some equivalent). The ones with an education will more consistently present (hackneyed) arguments or actual articles.

I could be wrong though, it’s just the impression I get.

You can make much sharper criticism than that, because MBFC at sometimes suggests and other times says outright that the center is the least biased (see davel’s comment).

The liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.

the uncritical masses

There is a sense in which this is a correct statement, but I think simply saying this when talking to a liberal is unhelpful because it does not make apparent that this behavior of being “uncritical” isn’t the masses being “sheeple” (scare quotes, not quoting you), but them choosing to accept what affirms their ideology.

your reading critically thing

I don’t think the obvious insinuation is fair to you, but I want to point out that this is an extremely funny turn of phrase.

I’m getting more suspicious of you after this emotional plea. What sorts sources are you upset have these comments

Speaking of unfair, I don’t think this comment is either. Calling that comment an “emotional plea” worth raising your suspicions is absurd. There’s not even that much of an emotional affectation and certainly there is no appeal to emotion in place of a valid argument. What is “emotional”? That you can infer he has a feeling on the subject? Come on. Furthermore, RedWizard is an upstanding guy from everything I’ve seen of him, and I think it’s just that some of us are really sick of MBFC tacitly question-begging the center being unbiased and people in some spaces always using it to attack anything source left of CNN, a behavior we’ve watched or been subjected to for several years now.

Trying to explain it in terms of how you frame things: You are right when you said elsewhere that people only have so much time to read through various sources, so polluting the space with something that has been long established to be bullshit is detrimental to having more people come to more reasonable conclusions, and this is something that I’m sure you would agree to if it was a source that you really accepted at least that level of criticism for (e.g. it would be a negative for the site to get a deluge of links to flat Earth websites). That is why “adding more information is worse.” If it’s about putting something in an archive, then by all means put whatever you like in the archive so we have it for reference, but for these sorts of fleeting discussions, it is obviously harmful.

To be clear though, I don’t support banning it on the basis that the liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.

Edit: RW does make more emotional comments elsewhere, but again not appealing to emotion, so I don’t think the criticism rises above the most absurd of tone-policing.

If you find it especially helpful to know what centrist liberals think of a source, then sure, but the fact is that people talk about it like it’s “basically data and not a personal point of view” (not necessarily saying you do) which is catastrophically false.

China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq.

The historical example they were giving is of China invading and annexing Tibet, wherein the vast majority of the population was brutally enslaved and a small class of theocrats lived on top of a huge and ever-expanding mountain of corpses, upon which they sexually abused and murdered countless serfs besides the ones being tortured and killed by the basic mechanisms of the system under which they lived.

So the “opposing party” in this context is the other side of the war, the western-backed theocrats who wanted to perpetuate their slave state.

For the sake of not completely spamming your inbox, I’ll just reply to a few more things within this comment if that’s alright:

Huh, I actually didn’t know that, point taken. I didn’t know China had elections in general

It’s only maybe half-true to say China internally has opposing parties. There are other parties and many of them are dedicated entirely to pulling the government onto a different path from the current one, but those parties also are constitutionally barred from controlling high offices.

However, China does have elections and those elections are meaningful, because you don’t need separate parties to have meaningful elections. You believe that primaries are meaningful, right? In many places (e.g. NYC), they are much more meaningful than the general. Intra-party elections are meaningful in the same way and for the same reason that primaries are, because there are still differences within a party, even more so in a country where there is only one full party and party membership is massive and pretty accessible.

I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize various aspects about Chinese democracy, but neoliberals characterize it in a hopelessly slanted way.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?

You are wrong, deportations picked up immediately and were high for his entire Presidency, especially his first term. Dems lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Obama is significantly liable for those loses too, because he immediately revealed that he was a complete fucking liar and didn’t want to actually pursue a progressive agenda. Even if this scapegoating were true, I’d still blame Obama because he had every opportunity to keep control of Congress but didn’t, and then it’s not like he actually opposed mass deportations.

I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm

I would never vote for Trump and would strongly discourage others from doing so, but there’s a meaningful sense in which his winning is less bad. Bear with me for a second: If Trump loses, he’s not actually the anti-christ who is thwarted, banished to hell, and then the Unique Threat to Our Democracy is gone. There will be more reactionary leaders who are as bad and worse who will immediately take his place. Holding him off from reclaiming office for one more term on a platform of adopting his old policies is not the victory some people depict it as.

What we need if we are taking Trump-like threats seriously is not to bail water, but to smash the Republican Party to atoms and scatter it to the wind. The Democrats can never do this, and over and over again insist that the thing to do is to adopt further and further right positions, to the point that you had Kamala commending the idea of the border wall construction project, merely saying it was mismanaged but she believed we should do something like it. That’s not hard-nosed pragmatism, that’s throwing red meat to reactionaries and supporting the cult of xenophobia to try to be Republican-lite, or more accurately to compete with 2024 Trump by becoming 2016 Trump (in terms of actual policy).

Kamala winning would have been catastrophic, not because she would have implemented worse policies than Trump, but because it would be a complete defeat of even berniecrat left-opposition in favor of a race to the bottom with Republicans of who can be more bigoted, as they get worse and then Democrats move to take up their old positions. The canonical answer in American politics would be even more cemented as “We need to get Republicans to vote for us by being racist,” and freaks like Ezra Klein who say we need anti-abortion Democrats.

If this is what the Democratic Party is, then they need to be destroyed just as much as the Republicans, because all they do is redirect “resistance” to becoming Republican on a slightly slower timetable. We need an actual left opposition to destroy reaction and the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than be that opposition, so we should be allowing them to take us hostage like we could ever give into enough demands from them that they will release us.

If the system is demanding that you support concentration camps, your main concern should be the destruction of the system by any means necessary, not the reduction of harm within it, and any measure that could be directed to the former instead of the latter probably should be.

If, hypothetically, the government demands that you choose between Hitler and Mussolini, the correct measures to be taking are ones directed at toppling the government.

Yeah, some ethnically-Polish dirt farmers in western Ukraine were really helping the Nazis when the OUN-B rolled up and engaged in the morally neutral act of killing them and their children.

That’s a much lamer deflection than anything she said. Why not just post some racial caricatures? Why not deny the Holocaust? I promise you that would produce at least as much contempt (and probably more, due to personal proximity). I think the reason that you said one and not the other is pretty obvious, which is that you duly recognize that what I just mentioned is repugnant and inappropriate to do for the sake of “trolling” but bear no such consideration for the line that you ended up providing. I’d suggest that that’s why you offered it in such a generalized way, because when someone thinks for even a second about what you’re really saying, that you’re downplaying a massive genocidal campaign, not just owning teh Reds, then suddenly it doesn’t feel like fun and games anymore.

Get a fucking grip. Be anti-ML all you want, I don’t care, but if you’re resorting to sounding like an actual fascist to own the tankies, you clearly lack the moral high ground you imagine yourself to have.

You of course are the instance owner, but I think people who encourage such repugnant behaviors (like whoever that is in the screenshot) shouldn’t feel comfortable if that’s how they’re going to behave, and everyone else can simply not engage in genocide denial if they want to feel comfortable.

I agree they are still kind of deflecting, even accepting that they should out the other user.

Might be worth re-evaluating what sort of people and narratives you’re listening to if you recognize that the one post is genocide denial. I agree with the instance owner that one should take ownership of their actions, but I also very strongly believe that it’s worth outing people encouraging saying such repugnant things.

I’d also be a little concerned that there were people (“tankies”) who pretty calmly tried to explain this to you, you seemingly ignored it, but someone from your ingroup going “this is dumb and embarassing” shocks you awake.

I feel like it could be a joke about Klan robes (which is also meant to look like a ghost, so I guess it’s what you said).

I don’t even understand what you’re insinuating. The DPRK’s goal is to be sanctioned? They wouldn’t be doing things differently if they weren’t sanctioned? You know they violate the sanctions constantly, and often it’s just to do some small amount of normal trade, right?

I don’t like Juche, but the point of it in this context isn’t to avoid trading with countries, and indeed to considers it better to be able to trade with countries. The goal is to be able to survive not being able to trade in the case where that’s the unfortunate reality, something that was only solidified by the experience of the Arduous March. Strategically, it is obviously something they should be maintaining and one of the main reasons they survived.