I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is "to the left of them"
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we're missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it's extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn't take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we're giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it's why they're targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
This is you directly asserting that people in this post are part of OP's supposed group. This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.
I was not calling for OP to call people out, I was pointing out that their choosing not to do so meant that there was no way to repudiate the assertions. If someone who fits your supposed 'pattern' proves they're not in fact a bot/ troll/ AI/ etc, you can just claim they clearly weren't who you were talking about. It's a set up for a No True Scotsman argument.
Which is all well and good to claim, except that both OP and you clearly think some of those people are in this thread, based on your own comments, and many of the people disagreeing with OP here, I haven't seen around much on BH, and none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes. That doesn't look to me like "a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving", it looks like you're absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.
Sure it is. "There are people in these comments who are in the grouping I'm talking about" is quite similar to "there are people on Lemmy who are in the grouping I'm talking about." In both cases, we're talking about the problem without starting an unproductive and maybe-totally-wrong accusation against any single specific person.
Again, I don't really want to single out any specific person, since there's no way to be completely sure and there's so much overlap between someone who is doing propaganda and simply someone who is arguing in bad faith. And what's the point of starting the big argument that will surely ensue. I will say, though, that there is someone in these comments who I replied to who is exhibiting some of the behaviors OP described pretty much to a T.
Look through my history. How many times (for whatever timeframe you have time and inclination for) have I disagreed with someone, and how many of those times have I chosen to "attack" them in this way?
I actually agree with some of the people who I believe are these accounts, on some things. They tend to be stridently pro-Palestinian for example, which I think is a way to give themselves cover. Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can "attack" the viewpoint I agree with? That doesn't make any sense. That's an example of what I'm talking about with "ways of behaving" that are separate from the viewpoint, without needing to accuse any specific person to explain myself.
I can't make you agree with OP, and of course you are not required to. But you seem to be extremely persistent, here, in interpreting something OP is saying which has some widespread agreement as obviously that they are saying some other, different thing.
So now you've shifted from "you got them riled up", to "there's one specific person in these comments". Thank you for proving my point about moving targets.
And before you try to claim you were using 'them' in the singular, your next comment was "They all speak sort of similarly to each other, too.".
"There are people in this room who are bad" is quite similar to "there are people in this country..."
This is a red herring. OP is calling for people to exclude and block in order to box out political disagreements from being visible, not respond with attacking comments. I can't see your blocklist, so I can't see who you are 'attacking' in this way.
You've run this line with me before, and against others (including in this thread). What exactly that OP said did I misrepresent?
...
Surely you can see there is not a contradiction between "there are elephants in this room" and "let's talk about one specific elephant in this room"?
Dude, that's how I see it. Sorry if that upsets you. Not sure what else I can say about it.
I'm not OP. I actually don't think blocking them is a good idea. I think disagreeing with them in a particular way, and talking about the problem in general to spread awareness, is the right answer.
As I keep repeating, the politics or the substance of the disagreement has nothing to do with it. It's to do with a particular argumentation style.
I actually think you could make certain rules for communities that had nothing to do with calling out propaganda accounts, that would do quite a lot to address this problem, simply because the accounts I'm thinking of depend so heavily on certain types of bad-faith behaviors that are problems regardless of who's doing them or why.
Would it make you more comfortable if I made a separate post calling out particular types of behavior that I think are a real problem, and then we could talk about that without needing to accuse anyone of doing it because they are propaganda? I can do that. That actually might be a better way to go, because there are surely non-propaganda accounts which would be in that category which we should be addressing, and then there is no risk of someone being "caught up in the net" so to speak when they are genuinely not doing propaganda.
You said, more or less, that the issue is boxing out particular viewpoints. OP is clearly talking about behaviors and motivations (murky as that second one is to intuit), which is different. That's the core of the misrepresentation.
The problem is that all of these work together. You're in OP's post, agreeing with OP, making assertions that you see these 'behaviors', while never once previously disagreeing with OP's remedy. Severing out of a key aspect of their post, in one comment, at the bottom of a long comment chain, while only expressing agreement elsewhere? I think it's fair for me to say you are boosting OP's position.
Yes, that would have been a good route, rather than just agreeing with OP and talking evasively about fellow commenters being bad.
No, OP is most definitely attacking specific positions, not just behaviors. Here's a position-agnostic version of their list:
These are generic behaviors that would make the post not specifically about a particular group of people that OP has an issue with.
The dead giveaway is the one I bolded, because OP's version is specifying the Party itself, not simply the Left end of the political spectrum.
"Highlighting issues with Socialism as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Democratic party", for example, would run afoul of my "behavior-only", version, but not OP's position-specific version, so the only logical conclusion (which the rest of their comments definitely support) is that OP would in fact not have an issue with the behavior in that instance.
I think @Thevenin has the right of this issue in both of their comments: https://beehaw.org/comment/4660421
Side note: after our "discussion" a few weeks back, I went and read some of the interviews David Hogg has given since his Vice Chair win, and I'm pretty excited for how he's talking about changing the DNC!