[META] Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively
Cross-posting this from the Science Communication community over on mander. It’s not directly politics, of course, but anyone political will probably immediately recognize its value, and even necessity. Love how concisely he put everything down though, this is a quick read.
[META] Russo-Ukrainian War information spaces on Lemmy and beyond
So, before I get started, I just want to firmly lay out my own personal support for Ukraine. I’ve been banned from lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] communities before just for saying Slava Ukraini. I do my utmost to assist the Ukrainian cause, from cheering their victories to talking to other Americans about the importance of the war there. I’ve picked my side, on purpose, and I’m at peace with it. That said, I can’t help but notice a slow shift in the tone of Russo-Ukrainian War information spaces that severely disturbs me. The liberal west is based around a set of values. Freedom, mainly, that’s the “liberty” at the heart of “liberal”. Unless it’s hurting someone else, everyone should, as much as we can manage, be free to do as they wish. This leads us to do things in a certain way, and it’s “that way” that we use to look for and identify our friends. Many people over the decades have tried to drag us down, paint us out to be just as bad as everyone else. While we certainly make mistakes, I think you have to look no further than our domestic strife and what each side is fighting for, to see that this love of freedom and life is still strong. Free speech, very important. Freedom to be gay, also very important. Liberty, freedom. Do as you wish, and leave other people that same freedom. So, what I’ve been seeing that disturbs me so, is a slow shift in the tone of pro-Ukrainian voices towards a greater hopelessness and despair. A larger amount of censorship and banning here on Lemmy, but also in other places. A greater emphasis on the fear and violence of war, which is replacing and supplanting the admirable courage and hope that was so powerful in the initial days of the war. I hate to say this, but it’s starting to look from an outside perspective that … maybe we were wrong, maybe the Ukrainians are not actually all that different from the Russians. I personally refuse to believe this. I think the trials and horrors of war are simply wearing them down, and that’s why I’m making this post. I hope everyone remembers, we live in a hard reality, combating not just Russian influence, but our own domestic problems trying to turn us into another Russia. We cannot allow this to happen, and the first line of defense against it is found in our own courage, our own heart. I would remind everyone that the most effective weapon the Russians have is their information warfare, that splits us from our countrymen and allies in good old fashioned divide-and-conquer. They can pretend to be us, they are smart enough to do this, and they can cleverly wreck our morale from within. We must fight this. What fights it is courage and freedom, two things that build morale in others, instead of tearing it down. To quote a famous American: “Give me Liberty, or give me Death.” Those are the options Patrick Henry considered. “Just do what it takes to survive.” is not listed. This is the American heart, so strong it even gets turned against us in the form of domestic, American terrorism–Americans killing Americans. It’s not perfect and it’s not pretty. And, if anyone wants to join us from authoritarian control, they’ll find that blood and suffering is involved to get to it, and does not disappear once you arrive. The rewards, though, of having a non-totalitarian ruler, are worth it. Keep the faith my friends, long, gruelling wars with setbacks can still be won. We can someday see peace and freedom, it is possible. Just not for all Ukrainians. This is actual hard reality, accepting the unfairness of the world, and dying for it anyway. Personally, I was losing hope myself, about 2 years ago. One single man actually turned that around for me. Zelensky, and his courage, and the powerful Ukrainian heart he seemed to awaken. Don’t let the Russians drag his name through the mud, he doesn’t deserve it. Don’t let other Ukrainians act like orcs, they can do better. We must not be like the Russians, otherwise we deserve no better than the lives they get. Slava Ukraini.
World War Two's 001 -The Polish-German War - WW2 - September 1, 1939 [IMPROVED] [11:36]
Advice/tips/guides for a new scout?
So, finally decided to pick the game up recently, and really enjoying it. But, I do have to admit, I’m a little rusty with shooters in general, and the scout role is pretty chaotic sometimes. Anyone have advice/tips/reliable guides they prefer for the scout class specifically? What kinds of things do scouts do, especially newbie ones, that kinda bug you? What are the things a really good scout does that marks them as a really good scout? So far, I find myself focusing kinda heavily on combat just because it’s an obvious thing I can do, and zipping behind a bug to blast it in the ass with a shotgun is really fun. I assume that’s not really my #1 job though. I keep our cave lit up pretty reliably, but should I be doing more … actual scouting I assume?
Where did all this reddit hatred come from?
I know we pretty much all hated spez for all the shit he pulled, but a few weeks ago the tone towards reddit itself around here was more neutral. People liked it here on Lemmy a lot better, but people weren’t hating on the old place so much. Recently I’m seeing this huuuuuuuge surge of just pure fucking hatred leveled at the site itself. Anyone else notice this or is it just me? I mean, I was there because I thought it was alright. I hated spez for fucking it up and completely screwing his communities over. But I never hated reddit itself, and I still don’t. Otherwise I would’ve left a lot sooner. Do you personally hate reddit? If so, why?
This fine young gentleman came in, he would like his dance moves appraised please.
AlexRollinsNFL's The Ravens have (finally) freed Lamar Jackson [11:11]
With fantasy season starting up here soon, and hoping none of you are in my league, thought I’d share one of my best research sources. This guy does breakdowns of specific players, plays, coaching strategies, etc, and is frequently one of the first guys to start noticing something. Once the season gets rolling and he starts getting more game film to work with, he’s frankly amazing sometimes.
YSK: How Lemmy Works
Why YSK: Because intuitive explanations are few and far between, and the technical explanations often present too many “trees” and not enough “forest”, which is just how technically-minded people are trained to approach things. Forests are, after all, made of trees, and it’s not their fault we don’t care about individual “trees”. This then, is my unprofessional attempt to consolidate everything I’ve read over the past three days into one, easy-to-understand explanation of how all this shit works in lay-person’s terms. Due to my amateur background, I may have details incorrect, and I would request that anyone who catches anywhere where I have made a mistake, even a small detail, to please correct me. I will also include a few links to my best sources at the bottom. tl;dr style explanations will be included after every paragraph in parenthesis. So, let’s begin: Imagine you have reddit. Fantastic, it’s a giant forum composed of a whole bunch of smaller, sub-forums. But let’s take this one step further. Why have just one reddit? Why can’t we have lots of reddits, each capable of having its own complete set of subs, where each reddit is independent of every other one and has its own web address? Okay, let’s do this, and push it to the extreme. Let’s make it so everyone can make their own reddit, even individuals. So you, if you wanted, could set up your own complete reddit, with just you in it. You could have all the subs, r/TIL, r/TIHI, r/pics, etc etc, all with just you in them. You have total control! But you have no content and are probably pretty lonely, right? We’ll get to that. Let’s call this Self-Hosting though. (So, we now have a situation where many whole reddits can individually exist, each in the vacuum of space.) Now let’s fix that content and loneliness problem. What if we allowed each reddit to communicate and share content with every other reddit, similar to how subs can communicate with each other? Boom. We just created a spider-webbed network, of countless individual reddits, each composed of subs, that can now all share content back and forth. Let’s call this big spiderweb an over-reddit, to contrast it with subreddits. (Now instead of a two-tier system of isolated reddits and their subs, we have a three-tier system, of over-reddit [the “Lemmy-verse”], reddits [Lemmys or Instances or Servers], and subs [communities or sub-lemmies].) But, we actually have a technical problem. How do these individual reddits find each other? How do they know the other ones even exist? They could be on servers on opposite sides of the planet, with random web addresses. Obviously we can’t just guess. So, okay, let’s let users solve this for us via crowd-sourced labor. We don’t have to find all the reddits for them. Let’s just design the system so that the reddits only find out about each other after any random-ass user introduces them to each other. We’ll call this batching, they can do it with the reddit search bar. Then, we’ll wait for that random-ass user to actually subscribe to any new sub/community over there, which they’ll only do if it’s any good. Once this is done, now the two reddits and that one sub become connected, not just for that user, but their whole reddit userbase too. The rando doing the search and subscribing simply introduced two good reddits to each other. Now that they know about each other though, they’ll share content back and forth freely, with comments, votes and posts all being visible to both reddits. Let’s call this “federating with each other”. It’s not too different from neurons in the brain reaching out to each other, really. (To find and connect the disparate, scattered reddits into our over-reddit, we use crowd-sourced labor.) Well, that’s it. That’s the Lemmy-verse. But what about this Fediverse? Well, okay, remember what we did with reddit, and giving it a third tier of over-reddit? Let’s do the same exact thing with twitter, facebook, youtube and every other thing we can pull out of our asses. Let’s let all of them share and access each other’s content with the exact same structure and system, so now you, hanging out in your reddit, can get all the tweets too. We’ve made a fourth tier now. The Fediverse, which is most comparable to the internet itself, and includes the Mastadon-verse, the PeerTube-verse, etc etc. (Why stop there…? reddit is chump change, let’s just do this to everything.) So, that’s it in a nutshell. That’s how this shit works. And the next time someone says it’s like email, I’m going to climb through their computer screen and smack them. It’s only like email at that technical, “trees” level, and when you go up to the more intuitive “forest” level, this just serves to confuse the ever-living hell out of everyone. (I’m a bit of a dick.) One last detail: Admins can whitelist (allow-list) or blacklist (shadowban) other Instances/servers. As an example, one of the other largest Instances has blacklisted (shadowbanned) us here at lemmy.world, because we were producing too much spam. As a result, until they undo this, all of us here are shadowbanned from their Instance/server. We can see their content, they can’t see ours. This enables them to control how much connection they have to the rest of the Fediverse. (Let’s not forget to give admins the power to stop people from other places bothering them, if they do not approve of the content. Very important feature.) Sources: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html [https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software)] https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy [https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387939 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36387939] Again, if I’ve made any errors, regardless of how small, please let me know below. This is intended to be another reference material for lay-people, so accuracy is important. However, outside of major errors, I will not be editing this post to correct it, as I would prefer any corrections to be delivered from the full perspective of someone’s individual expertise, instead of being translated into my own words. (I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. Scroll down for people who do.) Hope this helps. edit for grammar/cleanup
YSK: This service needs more content creators, and you can invite them.
Why YSK: We have a significant number of users now, and yet the amount of content to scroll through is still fairly small. This is because not all users are the same, and while the majority prefer to lurk, and a much smaller minority prefer to comment, the percentage that really likes making posts, memes, art, rants, videos etc is extremely small. One way that we can all assist with this is to simply make content ourselves. But even if you don’t want to do that, you can still help by finding productive creators elsewhere on the internet and telling them about us. Many reddit users are still simply unaware that we exist. They don’t know that there is a community of consumers here, waiting for content. They don’t know that if you can navigate reddit, then you can navigate this. Lemmy is just not as complicated as it can sound at first. So, if you want, simply invite them. Give them a link to a community down here that would fit the content they like to produce, and let them know we’d love to have them. Because we really would love to have them. Let them know that you, as a fan, would love to see them here. After all, wouldn’t you? Thanks for reading.
