I didn't call them children because they disagreed with me. Plenty of people disagree with me, it comes with the territory of me being an opinionated loudmouth, and honestly it rarely bothers me.
I called them children because they were bullying and banning a trans person when she tried to disagree with their handling of trans issues, while crying about "abuse" if people dared to give their friends downvotes, among other similar behavior.
Citation to remind about specifics if you want it
It's a really good question. So democracy isn't a magic bullet. Putin gets elected every term, Hitler got elected (more or less). One element of democracy actually working the way it's supposed to is the freedom to vote, but also one element of it is subjecting the machinery that selects candidates to people's meaningful input, one element of it is a free enough media and educational system so that people will be able to put their votes in with some understanding and knowledge behind them.
Right now, we sort of have the first, kind of, but the second and third elements the US just doesn't have. It's barely functioning. I think it's not really surprising that the results we're getting are so objectively horrifying. I just want to describe the problem in terms of how it actually developed. This whole diagnosis where "Of course the Latinos had perfect knowledge of what Trump was going to do, but they voted for him anyway, so now it's their fault that it's coming true after they voted for him" is just very obviously not true to me. Obviously they were fooled in some sense about it, because he planning to directly endanger them and their families' safety, so we need to get to the bottom of how that happened and what can be done about it in the future. I do think there is some role played by, roughly speaking, "Latino culture is macho in some ways and Trump did macho messaging that appealed to them." But saying that's the whole way it happened (as some people are apparently) is 1,000% missing the point to me.
Let me ask you a question: The behavior of Sinclair before this happened, when they were just buying up local TV stations and corrupting them with propaganda ("this is extremely dangerous to our democracy"), was that fine? Because they're a private company, and free speech? The government wasn't involved in that.
Was Apple TV cancelling Jon Stewart's podcast because he criticized China fine? I don't think the government told them to do that, that was just a private business doing private business things.
I'm not asking if those things were legal, I'm asking if you think there was nothing of concern about them.
https://lemmy.world/post/35806638
I literally don't see even a single comment saying that the Netherlands is bad for not having done this previously. Let alone anything like this or this.
Most of the people in Gaza are not attempting to fight back, they're just getting killed. It's little kids and families, mostly. I think Hamas at the start of the "war" was about 45k people... they've killed several times that number of Palestinians at this point. They're just blowing up apartment buildings, hospitals, and universities. Gaza City was the last place that had any kind of real civilian life, and they're rolling into it now (and still not allowing food, people are starving in the streets).
This is a "war" like Ted Bundy was fighting in a "war."
I think there are a lot of accounts on Lemmy that make a little cottage industry out of making accusations of genocide apologia any time they want to vilify someone. I think they also have multiple accounts (or coordinate between themselves), so that it's a tide of people making the same bizarro-logic attack, which of course other people then join in on because groupthink. As you've experienced it is pretty effective. Chin up lad, you're fine, they're just being dishonest and vicious for whatever reasons of their own.
In particular, if you're criticizing Bernie Sanders because he's not awesome enough, then that means you must be so awesome you're on a whole nother level. And if anyone disagrees, it just means they're not awesome, it actually proves your whole point. Job done.
it’s just people probably sharing that post in a group chat, and downvoting it
Yeah, probably. I didn't look too closely but they did look like real accounts from what I saw, and the timing to me seemed absolutely impossible to have happened that way without some kind of coordination. Isn't that the exact type of thing that they described as "abusive" and deserving of a ban when it happened to them, though? That's why I thought it was ironic and hilarious, and why I brought it up when someone else mentioned the exact same behavior from someone else who was banning for downvotes. I do think it's sort of a notable (and obvious in retrospect) confluence of behaviors, for the reasons I explained.
IIRC, at the time you were on a full “dbzer0 has turned power tripping” campaign
I guess that has changed since the post today about goat and !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works just banning everyone from dbzer0
Not really. I don't operate along the lines of "everything my friends do is always fine, everything my enemies do is always bad." I do understand that a lot of people on Lemmy do seem to operate that way, but I just kind of call balls and strikes as I see them.
I'm pretty sure I actually prefaced that whole initial dbzer0 drama by saying that generally I had liked the dbzer0 team in the past, and I spent quite a long time going back and forth with db0 specifically, because if someone I usually think is a decent sort is doing something weird, I feel like they deserve hearing it directly to their face.
Overall, I walked away from that interaction thinking that the dbzer0 authority team is kind of children. I still think that, I think I was giving them minor grief more recently about doing something else that I think was dumb. But it doesn't mean that all of a sudden if goat bans anyone from dbzer0 I'm going to start to go "YEAH THEY'RE THE ENEMY GET EM GET EM." Like I say, I know a lot of people on Lemmy seem to operate that way. I do not. I think goat has been weird about a bunch of stuff (and seems actually malicious, as opposed to the /0 team which seems more just kind of childish but nothing really ill intentioned.)
Hopefully that is allowed. I feel like there's somewhat of a possibility that needling the dbzer0 admins and being publicly critical of them is going to result in them turning into Brendan Carr to my Kimmel and deciding that they're allowed to silence or punish or fight me because of that criticism.... meaning interpreting that in the mold of "dead set against dbzer0" -> "enemy" and reacting accordingly, mirror imaged to the way they react to "positive about dbzer0" -> "friend." Maybe not, the admins themselves haven't really done anything like that so far, but others like the slrpnk admins definitely have. Let's see. My general attitude to speaking my mind is more along the lines of "I can say what I want to say, even if it involves some kind of criticism of somebody, and in particular if I think you're being a blockhead I'm going to tell you about it." IDK what most of Lemmy is doing with their tribalistic alternative to that, but that's how I do it.
Hey wait, don't go. So there's a prize hidden in one of those YouTube videos: Bernie Sanders says something about AIPAC. What does he have to say about it? I'll give you an upvote if you can find it and tell me.
Yes yes please continue, I'm totally listening
Yeah, maybe that's fair. On the other hand it was pretty clear two years ago that Israel was a genocidal monster, it just has become a lot more unanimous and urgent viewpoint since they started a new phase of the active genocide. But yeah, posting the thing about evacuating babies from Gaza isn't nearly as suspect two years ago as it would be now.
To me, the thing with PugJesus seems a lot more suspicious. That raised a ton of red flags for me, I don't really see any reason you would do that whole sequence of actions if there wasn't some kind of plot behind it. And then, looked at it that light, it starts to become a lot more weird for them to start this super public beef with dbzer0.