Obviously. The list you rattled off looks like you did a Google or YouTube search on “gaming influencer” and picked a few random names.

I didn’t Google for those, they were, as I said, the ones I do know.

Don’t spout off uneducated opinions about subjects you don’t know anything about.

I know quite a lot about the gaming space. That doesn’t require me to go look up every middling alt-right YTer or streamer.

If you have an actual take on what I posted, apart from my rw examples being too well-known or something, feel free to post it.

I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

• Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
• Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
• Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
• Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.

Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.

Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.

My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I’ve had levied against me before.

As in, especially during the last election cycle, I had people on BH who have no clue who I am (or that I would and did vote for Harris), trying to chastise me or accuse me of being a troll for “talk[ing] CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, when in fact I was talking about Democrats’ failures in order to try to fix them.

The Democratic Party is at a huge crossroads right now, because it’s lost 2 elections to Trump that shouldn’t have even been close, and in both cases it was with candidates who either 1) had no primary to choose them, or 2) were in control of the Party during the primary. The fact that 2024 happened, and we’re still seeing these takes attacking Leftists (just calling them “fake” doesn’t make it so, no matter how much OP wishes it did), instead of saying, “hey, maybe the Centrist path of trying to work across the aisle doesn’t actually work to counter the alt-Right/ Trump-Right/ whatever you want to name their current brand of bad-faith political gamesmanship”, is breaking my brain.

We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can’t win “doomers” or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.

One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number…

You’re speaking in generalities, and I have no way to judge what happened or was likely the situation, from this statement. You could be describing a random Cyrillic character that wouldn’t be on a non-Russian keyboard, for instance, or you could be describing someone using a comma for denoting decimal places, which is something a British or Canadian would do, even if they’re living in the US. I’m not going to denounce someone sight-unseen based on what you wrote.

I work in infosec, and attribution is difficult under the best of circumstances. If I had IP logs, request headers, UserAgent strings, etc, I might be able to spot a foreign national impersonating an American, but I don’t, and neither do you.

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.

I’ve seen at least 2 accounts on Beehaw, pre-election, who were rabidly pro-Israel. One of them disappeared completely after the election. The other I still see around, still often posting pro-Israel and Israel-apologist content and comments. So in my experience, your ‘tell’ is flawed by being based on a false premise. And that’s just Beehaw. Across all of Lemmy, including the center-right instances? There are absolutely staunch Zionists and pro-Israel users.

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?

Well, since you’re asking me to surmise ‘why’ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you’ve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered ‘good’ among Dem voters).

After we lost, many pro-Israel sources (even in congress) have rushed to blame the pro-Palestinian movement for it, because it allows them to both set up the pro-Palestinian movement as an enemy to the party, and to deflect blame from Biden’s pro-Israel stances for contributing to the loss, both of which serve their interests.

Who are they as a group, or who are they as in, list their names?

Even in Trump’s first term, I heard liberals (often older, homeowners/ wealthier) saying things like, “He’s not good, but the border is a problem. It’s impossible for people to find a job nowadays.”, or claiming that Biden and Harris (the Border Czar, dontchaknow) were letting people ‘flood in’.

This past election cycle, anti-immigrant rhetoric popped up across liberal media takes on what Democrats needed to do differently to appeal to more voters, insisting that Dems actually want to lock down the border.

I’ve already heard one Dem-voting person say that Trump’s “already fixed the border”. They won’t vote for him, but they also won’t brook discussion of any real resistance to him, either. And they are actively hostile to reforms Leftwards, because honestly I think many of them secretly want him to succeed in creating a white ethnostate that benefits them, without them having to endorse it themselves.

How do we identify them?

Talking to people. Discussing current events. Discuss Trump. I’ve seen it most among upper-middle class Boomers, but I am sure there are plenty more across other demos.

If and when we finally escape from Trump and his ilk, we need to have a real discussion and plan for reparations for everyone he’s deporting and detaining (assuming that hopefully they are still alive), and constitutional reforms to limit executive power.

There are too many white liberals quietly supporting Trump’s actions, even if they’d never say it, and we can’t allow the Right to become the “useful authoritarians” for Center-White America to unleash on minorities every couple decades.

they saw “woke” as a reason for why games or movies turned out bad

This only became a thing after the pipeline was established. This rhetoric is what the pipeline feeds them.

I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc. Gamergate in 2015 largely caught the notice of the Right’s political apparatus, and they saw the opportunity to convert the casual misogyny and racism into feeders for their political machine. “Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.

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.

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.

…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?.. 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.

Yes, that would have been a good route, rather than just agreeing with OP and talking evasively about fellow commenters being bad.

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.

No, OP is most definitely attacking specific positions, not just behaviors. Here’s a position-agnostic version of their list:

• Claiming to be part of the target group
• Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the target group
• Encouraging others not to vote or to vote for alternative candidates
• Highlighting issues with the target group as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the opposing group
• Attacking anyone who promotes defending their political power by claiming they are not true group members and that the attacker is “an actual member” of the group
• Using the group’s worst policies as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the parent political system
• Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism

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

I don’t believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it’s a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don’t think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they’re just people who’ve given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

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!

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 these comments who are in the grouping I’m talking about” is quite similar to “there are people on Lemmy…"

“There are people in this room who are bad” is quite similar to “there are people in this country…”

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?

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.

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.

You’ve run this line with me before, and against others (including in this thread). What exactly that OP said did I misrepresent?

It’s so frustrating to see so many comments doing exactly what the post is pointing out, either deriding games as a medium, or “gamers” as some monolithic group of disaffected young men.

Games are a medium, same as books, movies, or tv. They can convey any message, and yes, many games do have Progressive (or even Leftist, see Disco Elysium) themes. But unlike TV, books, and movies, where there is a constant stream of political interaction from both Left and Right wings’ political apparatuses, there aren’t really a lot of Leftist political entities attempting to reach young men via videogames.

Name one Left-wing gaming influencer apart from Hasanbi (who it should be pointed out, many Democrats tend to hate on). I can list off at least 3 different right-wing ones off the top of my head (JonTron, Asmongold, Dr Disrespect), and I don’t inhabit those spaces, so I’m only going off the biggest names. And that’s not even beginning to get into the gaming-adjacent Rightwing influencers who those gaming influencers direct their fans to.

It’s a pipeline, and we don’t have one on the Left.

I remember the first time AOC played Among Us, and it was a huge deal for us on the Left, because it was possibly the very first time we’d seen a Democratic politician actually engage with games publicly.

Gaming is literally the largest entertainment medium now by a large margin (yes, larger than movies and tv), but we don’t see politicians putting out lists of games to play like they do books or movies. Instead, most times we see an article about a Democratic politician somewhere like Kotaku, it’s often because they’re trying to blame video games for something.

So instead we have largely ceded the gaming sphere (not the games themselves, but the areas of discussion around gaming) to the Right. They pull in disaffected young men, tell them women and ‘wokies’ are the reason for their problems, and then hand them off to overtly political folks who transform that general disaffection into right-wing political capital.

I think you’re misunderstanding what “taking games seriously” means in this instance.

The Right takes the political power of games seriously. They understand that games can be tactically used as an access route to young men, to influence their politics. They know that it is just another medium like TV or movies or books, and don’t eschew interacting with them for political purposes like Democrats traditionally have.

That’s why it was such a big deal when AOC played Among Us (and later, her and Walz streaming various games). It was a politician on the Left actually ‘deigning’ to interact with young people in a platform that they inhabit, and not belittling it.

The closest equivalent person we have on the Left to people like JonTron or other YTers who mix Right-wing talking points with games to draw young men into their pipeline, is Hasan, and Democrats treat him like he’s practically Ted Kaczynski in waiting.

But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay.

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.

These are contradictory statements.

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.

You use the standard straw man of “anyone who disagrees with you” being put in this category, but that is not at all what’s happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is what’s going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.

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.

This is not talking about an attack vector in the abstract. You and Philip directly asserted that users in this post are part of this group, and even went on a little self-congratulatory rabbit-hole trek deciding that they’re probably AI as well.

There are examples, to be sure, but pointing them out or accusing them of working for anyone in particular would be counter-productive.

You already did that, the second you asserted that some people here in this thread are part of this group. Hiding behind, “oh, I’ll say they’re here in this thread, which means their usernames are here to see and speculate upon, but I won’t explicitly name them in my comment, so I can pretend that this is only abstract discussion” is just being evasive.

I’m seeking to illustrate the behavioral pattern, the weakness that it exploits, and the damage it can do, which I expect to have much more efficacious results.

You’re using terms like “behavioral pattern” to lend your post an air of scientific truth, but this is literally nothing more than rank aspersion. The list of behavior you laid out is rife with strawman positions and imprecise, improvable propositions.

How precisely do you define “Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left”. “Most” is a vague, moving target. What qualifies as “dismantling… power possessed by the left”? That’s an assertion of outcome, so are you asserting that you have some evidence tying posts here to a reduction in Leftist political power? Obviously not, but it’s a useful claim to use for attacks since you’re now working off a much worse impact than just political disagreement.

You haven’t shown any damage, but you certainly seem happy to use the mere claim of damage and “abstract discussion”, to call for direct exclusion or expulsion of people from Left spaces.

That’s why this is a witch hunt, and not an appeal for moderation rule changes.

the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates

The problem is, this varies from person to person. My team divvies (or did, I quit not too long ago) up tasks based on what different people enjoy doing more, and no executive would have any clue which repeating tasks are repetitive (in a derogatory way), and which ones are just us doing our job. I like doing network traffic analysis. My coworker likes container hardening. Both of those could be automated, but that would remove something we enjoy from each of our respective jobs.

A big move in recent AI company rhetoric is that AI will “do analyses”, and people will “make decisions”, but how on earth are you going to keep up the technical understanding needed to make a decision, without doing the analyses?

An AI saying, “I think this is malicious, what do you want to do?” isn’t a real decision if the person answering can’t verify or repudiate the analysis.

There are an awful lot of unsubstantiated claims being made in this thread, especially wrt what these supposed maga-bot/trolls all claim or do.

If the post contained any actual examples of comments that OP believes are either bots or trolls, it might be possible to actually analyze whether their assumptions and claims have validity.

As it stands, however, making broad insinuations about the ill intentions of anyone who disagrees with you is not very Nice, and is certainly not Assuming Good Faith.

The mods here are very active, and very capable. We don’t need people starting witch hunts here to “root out the fake Leftists”, and based on OP and some others’ reactions in this thread, that’s clearly what’s happening here.

From the title, I thought the article was about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, aka Barsoom (1911 onwards). Calling those “kids’ stuff” or implying that’s how they were viewed feels pretty elitist all on its own; they were pulpy, sure, but still considered reading for adults. It feels kind of like the author wanted to concoct a reason to discount the much earlier sci-fi work(s) from having been “serious”, so any consideration it was given (which at the time, was pretty significant) could be ignored in favor of handing Bradbury the credit.

But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.

Books are not required to address one’s personal list of important themes to qualify as “serious”.

he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.

No, he had continued in the footsteps of Burroughs and even moreso Wells. If you don’t measure your own interests by the level of recognition that “intelligentsia” (i.e. critics who deride anything but the stuffiest non-scifi, non-fantasy fiction as “kids’ stuff”) give it, you’ll have a much better reading experience.

but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,”

Yawn. This genre gatekeeping is neither useful nor enlightening. There are still plenty of stuffy, self-important critics today who dismiss sci-fi and fantasy as “kids’ stuff”, so it’s not like Bradbury put those bad opinions to rest for sci-fi, just as Tolkien did not for fantasy. Chasing the approval of people who otherwise despise a genre should not be the goal for works of that genre.

This is the newest ‘think of the children’ panic.

Yes, social media is harmful because companies are making it harmful. It’s not social media that’s the root cause, and wherever kids go next those companies will follow and pollute unless stopped. Social Isolation is not “safety”, it’s damaging as well, and social media is one of the last, freely-accessible social spaces kids have.

We didn’t solve smoking adverts for kids by banning kids from going places where the adverts were, we banned the adverts and penalized the companies doing them.

Gentle reminder that actions should not be discussed with strangers, and elevated actions should never be discussed online/ digitally at all.

this guy’s left, and you’re anti- him

What part of “reserve judgement” do you not understand?

If he’s not a child molester, then I support him fully too! Isn’t that a weird way to frame things?

It wouldn’t be if he was the Vice Chair of an org that had historically been run by child molesters, as the DNC has and is run by Centrist Neolibs.

If he is not a neolib, he would be the exception to a very longstanding precedent of DNC leadership, so I think it’s a very fair question to pose, especially right when Sanders and AOC are making news as they are.

The DNC leadership is not going to go down without swinging, and I fully expect them to try to co-opt Progressivism as a label and redefine it rightwards. Like I said, if he’s not that, and throws his weight behind established Progressives or better, awesome!

But I will heavily scrutinize anyone that any DNC leader is backing; we don’t need any more Fettermans or Sinemas, even if it’s just a post-election “conversion” to the Center.

Centrist Dems are half the reason we have Trump. Don’t try to frame this as some anti-Left thing, this is about milquetoast, feckless neolibs who have and still do spend enormous effort preventing the party from actually aligning with its voting base.

If he’s not that, I support him fully! But until I see that, I’m not going to celebrate just because he’s young.

But go off with your ad hominems! They sure worked this past election to cajole support. /s

I will reserve judgement until I see precisely who he intends to replace them with.

His adoption by a lot of centrist Dems, and his absorption and placement as DNC Vice Chair makes me wonder if he’s just the Centrist Dems’ vehicle to remain the top influence in the party by replacing old Centrists with young Centrists.

Edit: To clarify for anyone else who is confused, I really hope he does what he says he will! We need lots more young progressives.