• 104 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

    I don’t think it’s a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.




  • A appreciate your work demonstrating The Cradle’s support for the Russian state. It’s the first time I can remember seeing The Cradle posted on here, and in between being subscribed to these communities and my contributions to LemmyWorldDefenseHQ, I have not seen The Cradle spam as a reported or observed problem.

    I’ve read the article, and I find it valuable. I’m alarmed that the Lemmy World !politics and !news mods have failed to demonstrate the pressing need for the ham-fisted gatekeeping and censorship regime they’ve implemented.

    Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and !politics and !news are flagship communities. I would like to see the Fediverse overtake corporate forums, and learning to approach the spectrum of journalistic credibility with nuance is an essential feature of a better version of social media.




  • Oh, so if he sincerely believes in genocide, it’s fine.

    Regardless of our conflict, we can agree that Pepe Escobar is a shithead.

    There’s an old joke that goes:

    Two people, a Hexbear and a Solarpunk were arguing. One said,

    “On my server I can reply to an admin and say “I don’t like how you’re running things on this instance!”

    “I can do that too!”

    “Really?”

    "Yes! I can reply to an admin and say, “I don’t like how the SLRPNK admins are running things on their instance!”

    My concern is that the criteria you are using to justify banning The Cradle would also ban most United States media as well. I value the principle of a free press, and what you’re proposing is inconsistent with those values. It’s easy to call for the ban of information that disagrees with us, but unless we develop a more nuanced approach to combating propaganda, we risk replicating the values of the authoritarian systems we oppose.




  • I disagree, and that’s part of the reason I’m so strongly opposed to Lemmy.World’s use of Dave Van Zandt’s site in their bot. Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

    This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. You can read more about those principles here.

    MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.



  • I agree, Pepe Escobar’s take in that opinion piece is complete garbage. It should be noted that it is an opinion piece with the sub text “The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

    Shutting down the entire journal because one columnist is a Putin apologist isn’t what the concept of a free press is about. I’d be less alarmed by mods shutting down a post of that columnist for genocide apology. It looks like it’s only one featured columnist out of five occasionally posting garbage like that, and the bulk of their focus is on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

    Alan Dershowitz, famous for his shit takes, has apologized for torture and genocide and continues to be frequently featured in The Boston Globe, Haaretz, and The Wall Street Journal. Since those sources are posted freely, it would be inconsistent to ban The Cradle over Pepe Escobar.

























  • At the last family reunion, my mother and I were in charge of making all the food. We spent 3 days getting all of the groceries, and stacked fruits and vegetables in the family room, filled the bathtub with ice to keep the meat, and stacked the drinks in the garage.

    We fried the meat, boiled the noodles, mixed the salad, and cooked the chili. The entire counter and range were covered in pots and pans. Most of the intermediate cookware had been rinsed and was in the process of going through the dish cycle while we were setting tables out in the yard, when my Mom realized she hadn’t made any red pea soup. Her brother was flying in from the island for the occasion and she knew it was his favorite. The bag of peas had hid under a couch pillow, and we missed it while making the rest of the meal.

    We didn’t have enough time to wait for the cleaning cycle to finish, so I dumped out a shallow stainless steel flower vase and put that over the flame. There was no time to soak the peas, so my mom just mixed them raw with the broth, yams, carrots, milk, and spices, and then transferred them to a clean bowl once the cycle was complete. The soup didn’t look right, though. The peas and broth are supposed to have a full ruddy color, but the result was a much darker red like a beet.

    When uncle arrived he was really pleased to see we’d kept him in mind, but after the event was over and everyone had gone home, we found a pile of wet peas dumped behind some bushes. I learned a very important lesson that day: Those who make peas full-red solution in posse bowl, make violet-red solution inedible.