ada

A week? Those are rookie numbers!

Lets just say I don’t agree. I find paper so frustrating. I lose it, or I can’t decipher what I’ve written. I forget it on some sessions… It’s an ADHD disaster. But with a laptop, even if I forget it, I can still use my phone to access the character.

I even use digital dice rollers when it’s not a PITA to share the results with the rest of the table.

Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right?

Why would it be banned?!

I honestly can’t remember the last time someone in one of my groups used pen and paper. Mostly (but not always) the dice have remained though!

I learned as a GM to set expectations.

“I don’t want to have to fight and force you in to making this game work, because even though I’m GMing, I’d like to enjoy myself too. You need to create a character that will want to stick around with the rest of the group. You don’t have to all get on, or have deep attachments, you just need a character that I won’t have to railroad”

That’s not common in Shadowrun… 30+ years playing and running that game, and I’ve never encountered it!

Exactly. I’m not running to chrome with it’s defanged ad blockers and Google stink.

People see the same ideas echoed over and over again, and eventually it shapes how they think. That’s why regular, everyday people, people who aren’t even political start parroting right-wing talking points. Even my kids and their friends are saying this stuff.

You are 100% correct on this part.

The problem is, arguing with them magnifies that effect, it doesn’t challenge it.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t push back. I don’t mean smile and agree, or just ignore them. Deplatforming works, protests work, proud visibility works, civil disobedience works. Responding negatively works. Making it so that there is a social cost to being a transphobe works.

But debating them isn’t any of those things. Debating them is engaging with them, and in the act of arguing with you, they actually solidify the beliefs they already hold, and this is especially true of heavily polarised issues. Here’s some research on it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01623-8 (PDF link), and an article that goes in to the topic a bit https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-is-it-that-even-proven-facts-cant-change-some-peoples-minds

As much as it feels right to argue with them, all you are doing is strengthening their already held beliefs when you do. It might feel like its helping, but it isn’t. You’ll read my response, and you’ll likely go “screw that, you’re wrong, I’m going to keep arguing”. And that’s the exact effect I’m talking about at play. Every time you argue with someone, they have that same internal reaction to your comments, no matter what you say, or how strongly you believe it.

There is a manual way to import posts one at a time, so that’s a option.

That’s exactly how I did it when we spun up the new instance.

And once all the of the content was here, we transferred kicked off the transfer process.

It’s not feature complete, as you said. In our case, it broke, because of a bug around the way it handled community names that use upper case letters, which required editing the database to fix

But despite that, at the end of it, we have the old content on the new community. Even if it doesn’t federate, it’s not lost

The piefed community migration feature does import old posts, but it doesn’t refederate them, so they’ll only be visible to local users

So you allow them to influence other people with their ideas?

No, absolutely not. I run instances to give gender diverse folk safe spaces. I ban transphobes the instant they appear, I don’t debate them. Offline, I’m visible, active and proud. I am an volunteer at my local parkrun, I’ve spoken openly with people at my workplace, I’ve hosted a queer community radio show, I host a vodcast, and I used to be active in organising events for my local gender diverse community. Because what gets people to change their minds, is an emotional connection with the group they’re targeting. When they start to see us as people, just the same as them, then they start to make choices that aren’t harmful to us, and they start to wind back their own arguments.

Pushing back is incredibly important, but debating them isn’t effective. Like most people, when confronted with debate points in regards to a topic they hold on to for emotional reasons, they will shift goal posts, and only see the things that validate what they already believe, whilst ignoring the things that challenge it. When they get to the point where they’re ready to challenge their ideas (because their emotional position has shifted) then, lots of the talking points you would normally debate become relevant, but by that stage, it’s a discussion, not a debate.

I drink lots of water, but I add coffee…

You can’t rationally debate someone out of a position they didn’t reach through rational consideration.

Something fell over in our server, so Kaity is spinning up a new server and rebuilding lemmy on it

You can’t opt out of capitalism. You can opt out of not funding Rowling

We bypass the issue. We use DJI mini mics, which allow you to connect multiple mics to a single base receiver, and that receiver appears as a stereo sound source.

If making excuses for virulent transphobes is the best of lemmy in your mind, I’m concerned about what would qualify as the worst…

like madlad, woosh, etc

I haven’t used Reddit for years, and I have no idea about those terms. If they’re a Reddit thing, I don’t recognise them.

Lemmy is also less tolerant of debate bros.

So yeah, they’re different

As I said, if not voluntarily giving money to or making excuses for someone who will use that money to hurt people is too much to ask of someone, then their context and intent is quite clear.

Including yours.