• PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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    2 days ago

    My ass. I wish the mods had banned obviously disingenuous “let’s let Trump win to make a point, what’s the difference anyway” made-up critique that blamed Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation, under a tissue-thin pretense of “I just care about the country sooooooooooooooooooooo much that I’m giving well informed constructive criticism.” Instead we had to just yell at y’all about it in the comments, which since there were hundreds of posts and comments every single day with that viewpoint was always a losing battle. Even trolling of crayon-quality transparency of the UniversalMonk variety was explicitly allowed by the mods, and people who objected to it too strongly got banned for it.

    The whining about how you’re not allowed to get your message out, which is constantly broadcasted on every channel where you’re claiming you’re being silenced, is just part and parcel of the alternate reality you’re having a good bit of success in constructing. MAGA does it too, it’s part of the package.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      You do understand that your cynical lying about the past is why your camp is losing the argument? I mean, I don’t dislike you, at least not personally, and and even if I have to drag you by the hair onto the right side of history, I’ll at least afford you the charity required for you to fix yourself.

      There is no point in bothering with conjecture regarding the bans. They happened, its documented, any one can look it up. It doesn’t help your following arguments to simply lie about a reality people can easily go reference for themselves, if they didn’t live the experience themselves, as many of us have. A conjecture rooted in the same cynicism that cost us the election.

      Now as before, your cynical misrepresentation of the arguments which were made also works against you. We argued that without replacing Biden, we’d lose the election. And we had the same claims you are levying, here, now, levied against us them. That we were secret Trump supporters. That we were the ones costing the Democrats the election. And then, as it does, the truth of the matter has a way of finding itself out. And we who stayed focus on an accurate and valid criticisms we’re proven right. In-spite of this, and this is the true cost of cynicism, you continued to reject the analysis and criticism of those who got it right. Instead of showing grace and changing, yours doubled down on your wrongness, when even the beltway insiders had the humility to recognize how wrong they’d been. No. No instead you embraced the worst instinct: to double down on the cynicism. Harris needed to pivot away from Biden’s policies and political techniques to come back in the extra innings she was afforded. But no. The cynics won the side-line arguments on how to handle the extra time we got on the clock (and let us not forget, these same cynics were the ones arguing against replacing Biden), and we all suffer because.

      We should listen to the people who got it right, to begin with, and who stayed right the whole time. We should ignore those who are guided by cynicism and fear. Sacrificing your values for billionaire donations isn’t just morally abhorrent: Its also bad strategy.

      • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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        2 days ago

        There is no point in bothering with conjecture regarding the bans. They happened, its documented, any one can look it up.

        Can you look them up, and show them to me? I came close to digging through the modlog myself, to prove that the number of times in Dec 2023 / Jan 2024 that someone was banned for posting a poll showing Biden behind was 0.

        We argued that without replacing Biden, we’d lose the election.

        I said that with replacing Biden, we’d lose the election, because the exact same arguments that applied to Biden would get applied to Harris, plus some new ones, and all the forces that marshaled a variety of bad-faith bullshit against Biden would start to do the same against Harris, and people in this country literally can’t tell up from down when it comes to the election. And, in the election, that’s what happened.

        A lot of what you’re saying happened also, yes. I’m genuinely confused about how you’re accusing me of being cynical about it or telling the Democrats to be more right wing. What statements did I make that led you to think that?

        • Milk_Sheikh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 day ago

          I said that with replacing Biden, we’d lose the election, because the exact same arguments that applied to Biden would get applied to Harris, plus some new ones,

          Are you genuinely, seriously, trying to pretend that Joe “We beat Medicare” Biden was the better candidate to beat Trump? Bruh.

          This absolute baldfaced refusal to accept reality from Democrat loyalists up and down the party structure, makes the whole party look unserious. Team sports, ‘my guy can do no wrong’ horseshit that they also see from the MAGAs, but team red talks game about inflation and the economy - and isn’t the incumbent seen as responsible for it.

          • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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            1 day ago

            Are you genuinely, seriously, trying to pretend that Joe “We beat Medicare” Biden was the better candidate to beat Trump? Bruh.

            What? No, not even slightly. I’m saying that the people who are extensively hand-wringing about how these specific Democratic candidates fucked everything up, should be sparing at least one or two words for thirty years of Democratic fuckery laying the groundwork, the media pretending that Trump was a controversial but ultimately capable businessman who would fix the economy that was hurting them so badly, and any particular thing the Democrats did wrong was justification for having a multi-week freakout, and also the fact that most Americans get their political news from TikTok and Facebook if they get it at all.

            Biden was old as fuck and it was a massive problem, even before the debate. I’m saying that none of the most serious problems got solved when he was replaced. And look… they didn’t.

            • Milk_Sheikh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              18 hours ago

              hand-wringing about how these specific Democratic candidates fucked everything up, should be sparing at least one or two words for thirty years of Democratic fuckery laying the groundwork

              I agree (and did), but posting that context often was dismissed with “it’s election season, quit posting FUD if you’re not a troll/bad-faith”. Y’all weren’t there for the discussion even - as was shown with Gaza.

              But the basic fact is that the candidate(s) and party apparatus either: A) Fundamentally failed to read the room and see the obvious discontent and voter backlash over several policy stances and material realities, or B) Knew all that and still decided to run the campaign they wanted to, whilst cynically wielding the Republicans as a worse option to impel democrat voters on the left, so they could run to the center and abandon the working class to the Republicans

              Nobody forced them or their staffers to pick option B, even as their own internal polling showed their defeat was all but assured under option B. And here we are.

              Biden was old as fuck and it was a massive problem, even before the debate. I’m saying that none of the most serious problems got solved when he was replaced. And look… they didn’t.

              So when do I get to play the ‘Quit spreading FUD’ card then? Because as you said, if nothing was going to fundamentally change re:platform, why not present a new and younger candidate after Biden’s cognitive meltdown, and claw back some of the party’s reputation with the electorate? Why not hold a ‘speed primary’? Why let cynicism win out and accept Biden drowning the party with him, because ‘nobody else can do better’ while he’s an elder lich that refuses to let go of power?

              • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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                17 hours ago

                Honestly, I’m just sick of having the exact same conversation an indefinite number of times every time I come to lemmy.world.

                I’ll keep it short: No one from the DNC is on Lemmy. When you post on Lemmy, you’re not successfully talking any sense into the Democrats. You’re speaking to people who are deciding how to vote, whether to vote, how to get involved with activist organizations, and also just in a truth telling sense helping all of us make sense of what’s going on. The problems in American politics go way deeper than one candidate or one party. You are not saving the Democrats by making these recommendations, although they’re not really wrong, but you are attempting to take 100% of the oxygen away from other problems (which are also very real) which we are all similarly mostly-powerless to fix but which are also significant problems.

                You’re also arguing against a bunch of stuff that I, at least, never said, which I understand is fun to do but it’s not real productive for us making sense to one another. I’m happy to talk with you, if you do some homework first: Find 5-10 different examples of me talking about Gaza, what a problem it was, and how Biden was complicit in it. Once you’ve done that (it should take literally one text search, use the @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat account since this one is new), we can chat.

        • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Can you look them up, and show them to me? I came close to digging through the modlog myself, to prove that the number of times in Dec 2023 / Jan 2024 that someone was banned for posting a poll showing Biden behind was 0.

          Yes and no. Yes I can, in that I’ve built out at least some of the tools to do so. I can’t in that I’m still at work today and haven’t returned to that project in quite a while.

          • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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            1 day ago

            So anyone can look it up, but in order to look it up, you’d have to build some tools and it’s a whole project?

              • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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                21 hours ago

                Well, I wasn’t the one who said it was easy (and IDK that digging through the modlog is the easiest way even for someone who is sure that it happened to find out when it did), but sure. Here are all the posts from Dec 2023 and Jan 2024 that were removed that had “poll” in the title:

                7554770 | 2023-12-29T13:56:49.802793Z | Sarah Huckabee Sanders lowest approval rating for governor in last 20 years, Arkansas Poll says | https://www.thv11.com/article/news/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-lowest-approval-rating-governor-20-years/91-c76da35b-4704-46de-abc0-0a42ee19ea95
                2806047 | 2023-12-29T13:18:36.770457Z | Trump Fan Who Threatened Poll Workers And Officials Sent To Prison | https://crooksandliars.com/2023/08/trump-fan-who-threatened-poll-workers-and
                2461059 | 2023-12-29T13:18:19.629020Z | Donald Trump Has an Absurd Amount of Support From Republicans Who Believe He Committed “Serious Federal Crimes”: Poll | https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-ron-desantis-2024-poll
                3653177 | 2023-12-29T13:16:15.792290Z | Democrat Adam Frisch leads against Rep. Lauren Boebert in poll for 2024 race | https://www.denverpost.com/2023/08/22/adam-frisch-lauren-boebert-poll-2024-race/
                10024810 | 2023-12-29T13:08:37.582079Z | Trump Shares Poll Result Predicting 'Revenge' And 'Dictatorship' As Top Priorities | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-poll-dictatorship-revenge_n_658beb48e4b0cd3cf0e41a98
                

                I was assured there would be some that showed Biden behind in the polls, that the mods were trying to cover up…

                It’s a silly thing to get hung up on, but it helps to demonstrate that the person I’m talking with is talking about some situation that didn’t happen in reality.

            • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced. I could dig far enough into my comment history to find them. In-fact I was digging through some banned community members and found some examples just the other day.

              What I’m doing is far, far larger in scope. I’m not trying to find one instance, I’m trying to find all of them. I’m also interested in correlating that to “shifts in the overall narrative” to the sub. And I’m trying to do this across several prominent subs. And I’m not doing this in an adhoc way. When I have results they’ll be publishable.

              I’ve built some of the more important tools already which allow me to pull the entire comment history of a user and perform significant sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, etc… but some aspects aren’t reliable enough yet to be completely useful.

              This is some example output using flyingsqids data: https://tmpweb.net/jS19ePfgNdz0/

              (scroll to the bottom, then scroll up instead of starting at the top)

              The first analysis is a “trolling/ not trolling” analysis. Then its a frequency analysis. I used squid because of their preposterous number of comments. Some weeks they were commenting almost ever 3 minutes for hours on end.

              If life we’re simpler I’d be further along on this project, but alas, the bills. They do not pay themselves. And its a hobby thing I’m not getting paid for, so its the last to get access to my time.

              • Proudly Green@feddit.uk
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                17 hours ago

                I’ve built some of the more important tools already which allow me to pull the entire comment history of a user and perform significant sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, etc… but some aspects aren’t reliable enough yet to be completely useful.

                this sounds gross and very much like witch-hunting and stalking. yes, all comments are public but u coming up w a tool just to find someones and analyze and make judgement on them seems gross and out of line. think of how fasicst and controling that sounds. what if some republican was doing that and bragged about it? think about that

              • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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                1 day ago

                I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced.

                Could you find some examples from memory that you experienced, for me?

                I feel like we keep having the same conversation here.

                • Proudly Green@feddit.uk
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                  17 hours ago

                  happened plenty and you guys still witchhunt people who didn’t seem to worship everything dem lol luckilly lemmy is so dencentralize that they don’t have to be silenced no matte rhow much u wish they were

                • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  Ozma’s ban comes to mind pretty lazily. But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.

                  • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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                    22 hours ago

                    return2ozma was banned because he was posting a nonstop flood of articles, and admitted to the mods that he basically just searched out bad stories about Biden and posted them whatever they were (even some ones he didn’t try to defend any kind of factual accuracy of), to bring “balance.”

                    I actually don’t agree with making that the criterion. I think it’s of a piece with lots of types of lazy and unproductive moderation that happpens on lemmy.world. But, I definitely agreed with banning him, for the same reason that I would expect to be banned if I went to your favorite community and posted 15 stories a day about “Five things you won’t believe about what Biden accomplished during his term in office!” It’s not about the viewpoint being prohibited from anyone expressing it (and, of course, the fact that we’re having this conversation and you haven’t been banned for expressing criticism of the Democrats is an obvious counterexample to you trying to say that’s banned on LW). It’s about one person spamming to try to promote it.

                    But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.

                    You said anyone could do it, you said it was super easy, just from memory. We’d be having a different conversation if you’d said “Anyone who felt like taking a bunch of time away from their job could probably put together a script to comb through the whole database to find the single example you’re looking for, because I’m sure at least one exists, although I can’t do that whole endeavor right now I’m confident that it would work if someone did do it. I’m very tired and such a thing would be horrifying and unfair if someone asked me to do it. I just know some other person who had a lot of energy to spare could.”

    • Maeve@kbin.earth
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      2 days ago

      Alternate realities, certainly unlike not making a PR at GitHub, rather than unhinged accusations that spent over an hour doubling, tripling, quintupling down for a couple of hours…

        • Maeve@kbin.earth
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          2 days ago

          Oh dear, he’s going down the list of fallacies, after calling us disingenuous, when I clearly attacked unhinged posts.

          • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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            2 days ago

            You attacked me on some totally unrelated topic, instead of addressing anything I said about this topic.

            If you disagreed with me about whether or not it’s totally cool and normal for Lemmy to send people’s admin passwords back to the mothership, you could weigh in over on that topic back when we were talking about that (and I’m pretty sure you did). It’s all good, the issue is fixed now whether or not it was an honest mistake in the code, and we all had our say on it.

            Now all of a sudden we’re talking about some totally different issue, and whether or not anyone in power on Lemmy was “suppressing” or “banning” criticism of the Democrats during the run-up to the election (they were not) is left on the table, forgotten.

            Here’s more explanation if you need it, with some examples of how attacking past unrelated arguments or issues can be a good example of using ad hominem to deflect from anything about the issue currently under discussion:

            https://practicalpie.com/ad-hominem-fallacy/

            When someone uses an ad hominem fallacy, what’s going on inside their head? Often, this tactic is a defense mechanism. People tend to resort to ad hominem when they feel backed into a corner or threatened in some way.

            Instead of tackling the issue or the argument being discussed, it’s easier—and emotionally safer—to attack the person making the argument. This is often an unconscious response fueled by cognitive biases like the “confirmation bias,” which makes us more likely to believe things that align with our existing opinions.

            Launching an ad hominem attack, on the other hand, is quick and easy. It’s a low-effort way to feel like you’re winning an argument, even if you’re not actually engaging with the issue at hand. It’s a psychological shortcut that undermines rational discussion.

            This is why I always regret it when I go to lemmy.world lol.

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Can you explain how this fallacy applies? Also, dick move posting pictures of text without a transcript.

          • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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            1 day ago

            Because instead of addressing anything at all about what I said, they said more or less “but you’re the person that said (totally unrelated thing) which I don’t agree with therefore you’re unhinged.”