Sigh. Yeah, my recent comments have been fairly zero-tolerance (I wonder what has prompted that) for some of the fashier positions you find on here. It’s something I’m working on, but if you check the context for most of those it’s usually some pretty heinous shit that I’m replying to. (tho like, several of my most recent comments are an exchange with a user just a few comments up that I was a dick to initially, and whom I do intend to apologize to as soon as I can find the right words to express it. What they said was quite profound, and even if I do think it’s misguided it does give me some hope that people can still hold to those ideals in the face of gestures broadly at everything)

Listen, I checked through your post history yesterday and took another dive just now, and a bunch stood out. Partly there’s the fact that you’ve got just as many aggro comments calling out centrists and other bullshit political positions as I’ve got (so maybe don’t throw too many stones here because we’re both living in the same big glass house and it’s really cold outside right now). Mainly though, there’s a whole lot more in there to like.

For example:

You play tombstone, a game I love. Your line, “You can’t change where or how you’re born, but you can change what instance you’re on with almost no impact to yourself.” made me genuinely laugh out loud when I read it two months ago, and I’ve gone on to paraphrase it at people since then. You’re comfortable with neo-pronouns, something that is extremely important to me (even if I do have one hell of a time remembering them). You’re passionate about the topics you champion, and do not shy away from negative backlash for presenting correct but unpopular opinions, especially when you feel you’re morally correct. With complete sincerity, I’m quite sure we’d get along very well under just about any other circumstance, and it’s a shame you’re not more active because you add a great deal to the community already.

And with all that said, and with my complete understanding of why you feel this way, you should really let go of the drive to hold casual comments to high logical standards. This is not the Forum Magnum, I am not wearing a toga (and I’m willing to bet you aren’t either, but I fully accept I could be wrong and no judgement if you are), and appeals to pathos or ethos rarely hold to the standards of reasoned debate. It will add very little to a venting comment to point these things out, and if the context in which you present a point like that isn’t the same for all participants, you’ll just be getting frustrated as other people point out they don’t really care, or that you’re assuming the context to be something other than it is (like happened here).

(Also, it’s really just not a good look to attack someone with an appeal to accomplishment, especially as more and more educators pivot to presenting material via youtube. Most of my students agree that they wouldn’t be able pass my program if it weren’t for Indian CS instructors on youtube, for example. Interestingly, an informal internal survey we did found that CS students had the least difficulty parsing thick accents of any student grouping. I can’t prove the two things are related, but man is it a juicy correlation…)

I only just now realize I’ve misread Outer Wilds as Outer Worlds. Both amazing games, but very different in scope and tone.

Err… About what, though. Please, have mercy on those of us with 15gb monthly bandwidth caps but that still very much care about the egalitarian ideals of 3d printing :(

Right on, buddy! Logic nerds forever! Screw those “pathos” and “ethos” thingies, what possible use could they be? We, the high and mighty logicians, know that Logos is the only one that matters! Appeal to logos or appeal to death, amirite??

(Just to be clear here, this is a pretty nerdy website. If you’re going to pose an argument like this, you should make sure it’s sound before throwing down the “bruh do u even see how educated I am” gauntlet…)

“We” here clearly refers to the country as a whole, which you know. So why are you directing this rage at someone who’s probably on your side, even agrees with you, and was backed into a grammatical corner due to english’s lack of nuanced collective nouns? Do you seriously think alienating some of our few allies with aggressively performative rage is going to keep your friends safe?

We all feel like this, we’re all scared for what this fascist fuck might do to us & ours, so don’t make it harder for everyone by taking your anger out on people who are just venting their frustration and worry to the universe.

wut? Biden just gave a speech full of warnings. I get it’s not blocking trump from the presidency, but do we really need to make new shit up to blame them for? Don’t we have more than enough real things already?

People have been doing that tons - It’s not being censored. Personally I assume this is due to western propaganda overstating the degree of censorship in china and rednote not being set up to moderate the large amounts of english content they’re now getting.

I really dislike point by point breakdowns, it’s too easy to take individual statements out of context and the lack of a clear thesis makes it incredibly difficult to respond without resorting to comments of even greater length.

In an effort to combat this, would it be fair to say your position is that while TikTok is bad, it’s okay to still use it because it’s extremely popular, and thus the ability to do things like engage or organize with other people in your subcultures is consequently quite high? “The good outweighs the ill” as it were? Which is a reasonable position to take, to be clear, even if your actual feelings are more nuanced.

(That’s not me being bitchy, I just genuinely do not have the time to respond to every single thing you’ve said there. Explaining the literary difference between explicit and implicit dismissal of evidence would alone take us beyond the character limit, as my self indulgent explanation spiraled further and further into the jargony depths of academic tedium…)

Bud we’re lemmy users. We don’t get invited to parties, even ones thrown by other lemmy users.

Nah, you just come into every interaction cloaked in a miasma of confrontational obstinance. It can be really tiring to deal with.

That is interesting, I didn’t realize that was how it was being argued.

In response to the other constitutional argument TikTok is making, DOJ said the law is not a bill of attainder because addressing national security concerns is not a form of punishment and bills of attainder apply to people, not corporations. (via Merriam Webster)

It does sound like there’s some contention about that, and although the national security bit is as cringingly craven as usual, the applicability of the restriction to corporate entities is going to be an interesting decision to see ruled on.

Glad to see you’re up to your usual form, buddy. Keep on fighting the good fight.

(um, name calling?)

Anyways, my criticism was not time delineated, you asked for evidence, and now are claiming the evidence I provided to support my initial claim isn’t good enough because of a new condition you’ve brought out. That’s… I don’t have another colloquial term to describe it besides “shifting the goalpost”. You’re changing the requirements for evidence to render previous valid evidence invalid. There’s a term for that (a point I think I’ve amply belaboured by now).

And sure, poor behavior can absolutely be learned from. Thats a core tenet of society. But, just for fun, could you please give me an example of a massive multinational corporation, or a social media platform, voluntarily becoming less evil? There’s been absolutely no indication that TikTok has ever stopped these practices, too. So why are you giving them the benefit of the doubt? Have they ever done anything to justify such high regard?

Look I’m sorry this apparent egalitarian wonder app is on the chopping block, but do you seriously want to be a TikTok Apologist? Could you imagine your reaction to someone this zealously defending, say, Facebook? You’d think they were nuts, facebook has been exhaustively shown to be so evil their CEO is widely rumored not to be human. So why is tiktok, an equally bad app (but one you like), suddenly okay?

But the inquisition said it’s to root out heresy, so that means its okay when imperial apps do it.

It’s exhaustively well documented that they did this, I’ve linked to one reputable source a couple comments up.

(FWIW putting users in those categories into a walled garden where their content is only shown some similarly-minded users is a popular form of suppression and you, one of the users in question, would still see that content on your feed. This is what TikTok was caught doing. Anecdotal evidence and all that.)

Wait, what about that is unconstitutional?

Shifting the goalpost much

Sorry I insulted your app waifu with my… substantiated claims about it’s conduct? How disingenuous of me. I should be ashamed, presenting its previous actions as things that it has done in the past.

It’s pretty well documented that they did/do this. I’m sorry, you’ve fully bought into the PR TikTok spin. They present themselves as somehow an egalitarian organization. They aren’t.

I confess I phrased my intial comment a tad too harshly. There are many, many good reasons to criticize this; the loss of an advertising platform is not one of them.

You got some suggestions on where to look? We’re speedrunning the fall of rome over here, it’s pretty much to the point that even hope is an unreasonable thing to hope for…

Its a platform that was secretly suppressing people for being disabled, black, queer or ugly. Cheering it’s death is reasonable, defending it on the grounds that people will have to advertise somewhere else really isn’t.