Stepos Venzny

People getting nuked is the scenario you’re describing as weird to not be excited for.

This was done by an actual bullet. Other people present were also shot.

Trump’s pretty crazy but I don’t think he’s “plan to intentionally get grazed by a bullet” crazy.

1. Correct. The belief that one person is lying is an inherently more reasonable position than believing that a group is conspiring against you. Individuals lie all the time and for all sorts of reasons.
2. If I believed you incapable of critical thinking I wouldn’t be pushing you to exercise more of it. Everybody is emotional and everybody is vulnerable to emotional manipulation. That’s why journalists’ bosses push them to write sensationalism, that’s why the algorithms push sensationalism to the readers. Everybody involved is incentivized to be dishonest because dishonesty works.
3. I didn’t say it was an advertisement, I said seeing it as an advertisement is not unfounded. You didn’t tell Auzy you disagreed with them when you brought it up in this thread, you said they were crazy for thinking it.
4. This bullet point needs further breaking down:

In order to make a post, one needs to personally endorse both the source and content,

When one makes a post without any commentary that separates one’s perspective from that being shared, one already has endorsed both the source and the content.

because by sharing the wrong articles that you found interesting that other people might like to discuss here on this forum, you may be promoting capitalism.

It’s not that you’re promoting capitalism, it’s that you’re extending its reach. If you do not impose your own standards that are separate from those that brought the content to you then the only standards involved are what is profitable for somebody else.

Sharing unique reports from a small political fringe site like thefreethoughtproject.com that are unreported in other sources is a form of promoting capitalism, while in general sharing journalism from large news corporations like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times does not promote capitalism.

I never named any sources, let alone comparing their relative validity. I’ve never heard of your small political fringe site until this thread and have no idea how legitimate or illegitimate it is. But what I’m asking you now is, how did you come to hear of it? My belief so far, as I’ve already stated, has been that you’re sharing things that you saw on social media and you’ve rather conspicuously not denied that. Why do you think you were shown a small political fringe site?

Is it a good source? Is it a bad source? The decision to bring it to your feed was not made by an entity which distinguishes between those two concepts, it only knows your patterns of past behavior and looks to inspire reactions from you. What kinds of reactions? It doesn’t care about that, either. If you spread to others what it spreads to you uncritically, you are extending that fundamental disregard for meaning. But you have the disadvantage of being a human being. People will anthropomorphize the algorithm by projecting your face onto it, read intentions into your words.

So try actually having some intentions for a change.

I’m not actually here to discuss the articles so I’m not going to get derailed by detailing my thoughts on them when the subject I’m in here to talk about is you.

And, no, Auzy is not being a conspiracy theorist because the theory being proposed contains no conspiracy: they’re just accusing one individual of lying. And I’ll reiterate that I think they’re wrong because you don’t think of the messages you share as being your own in the first place. What it looks like to me is that you’re just sharing things that were brought to you on other social media platforms that inspired strong feelings in you and inspiring strong feelings regardless of objective reality is what social media entirely and news stories largely exist to do.

Let’s look at how you behaved in the other thread Auzy mentioned, to illustrate this. You were more talkative in that thread so it’s a better illustration of what I’m talking about.

They say it looks like you’re advocating for people buying guns, you respond by citing a history of conservatives trying to take guns away from progressives with the insinuation that this is evidence that it’s correct for progressives to own guns. They say that that response makes it look even more like you’re advocating for people to buy guns, you respond by saying you wish people didn’t need to own guns but reiterating that they totally do need to own guns. They complain that you are continuing to advocate for gun ownership, you respond by posting a photograph of a man with a message written on his guitar that more people should have guns. (I assume from context I was supposed to recognize him as a sort of appeal to authority, of left-wing street cred for promoting gun ownership, but I’m not into music so I don’t know who it is.)

Now in this thread, you refer back to that and say that was evidence of Auzy being a conspiracy theorist on the basis that… you repeatedly affirmed that you did in fact hold the position they said you held. You consider yourself anti-gun on the basis that in your vision of a utopia they wouldn’t be around and thus you call that accusation unfounded but your action is that you promote widespread gun ownership by sharing this article that says the threat of gun violence is the solution to a societal ill.

You deny that it is a feel-good story but the subject is that there is an organization taking care of those in need. There is a long history of news media framing acts of charity like this as evidence that society is a good place because people are taking care of each other when it would be more accurate to frame it as society being in a bad place because charity is the only avenue these people have for getting help. Fake feel-good stories. Auzy says that article is fundamentally a gun advertisement and, indeed, the headline names a specific model of gun; it could have just said “rifles” but instead it name-drops a Colt product.

Does that prove the article is being deceptive, that you are being deceptive? No. Again, I’m not here to have that argument. What I want to point out is that it’s also not at all an unreasonable takeaway to believe those things because, if it was deception on either or both fronts, this is what that would look like.

You should be choosy about what you share, thoughtful about why you’re sharing it and what your feelings about it are, thoughtful about what it means about you that you’re sharing it. Otherwise, you’re just another unwitting mouthpiece for the raw machinations of capitalism.

I hold every post to the same standard. The reason I only chose to speak up in this one is because of the way you responded to that criticism. You called Auzy a crazy conspiracy theorist, sharing an image of a guy pointing at a bunch of disconnected details. But there is a connection between all of the articles you post: you posted them.

My goal here is to help you understand that you aren’t “the messenger” that saying refers to. The messenger doesn’t choose what messages they share. You weren’t assigned the task of posting these articles, they aren’t answers to questions you got asked. If you keep denying responsibility, keep making defenses of yourself instead of the words you spread, that’s leading down a road of thoughtless regurgitation.

At the time of writing, Auzy’s accusation has a score of 10 and your comeback has a score of 3. Three times as many people seem to disbelieve your intentions as believe them.

Were I in your position, this is the sort of thing that would make me question why it is I come off this way. A good starting place would be to actually respond to specific criticisms of this material rather than using memes as thought-terminating cliches.

See, I don’t think you are being deceptive but I am worried that you post articles without thinking of those posts as coming from you just because other people actually wrote the articles. You got accused of being deceptive because you posted articles that are themselves deceptive and then you ran that accusation against your own intentions rather than the material in question. But the truth is that these words become yours when you share them uncritically so you are responsible for their content.

It’s dismaying to hear those words but it isn’t surprising. I don’t know how much of the sentiment is delusion and how much is dishonesty but, like many Democratic politicians, he has a pattern of painting politics as a bunch of reasonable disagreements that we can and should compromise on when he’s not discussing an individual issue.

So because the issue at hand is whether candidates should accept election results and all other political disputes are momentarily valid, the message he wants us to hear is: “The other guy wouldn’t accept what the voters say but I would. See how much more mature and level-headed I am?”

What terrifies me the most is I think saying that is the right move, politically. Most of his prospective voters are in denial that the right is becoming overtly fascist and would be turned off by the appropriate reaction to the idea of Trump winning again.

Do you disagree with anything Hedge said up there? Because you sound extremely argumentative in tone but you don’t seem to have claimed anything that contradicts any of it.

I believe it’s a reference to when his penis was famously described as looking like the little mushroom people from Mario games.