Indeed, it might be neat to stop such things, wherever they occur.

More people die on average every week in American school shootings but… okay.

Calendar, remind me to ask StackOverflow tomorrow if I can parse HTML with regexs get someone else to do my class homework for me?

TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚​N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

Sweet, my summoning spell worked!

Nah - back then, that was a problem for tomorrow’s (now today’s) politicians to have to solve. So long as it worked to put Trump in power, and attempt to remain there, everything was going to be A-okay. And that’s my problem with that kind of thinking: it works, but it’s always only ever short-term for some reason.

Oh no, if only this entirely predictable outcome could have somehow been… predicted?

I guess we didn’t threaten enough doctors and nurses lives and families /s.

But the (clickbait) title got people to (click) talk about it so… it accomplished its publishers’ goal, nonetheless.

Thanks!:-)

Are you implying that the credit is here? If so, where? I am not seeing it.

You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

Why is “Threats” in double-quotes? The fact that they are “threats” is not in question - these are not “alleged threats”?

I see that it comes from the article, but that only pushes back my question as to why the article does that. It also puts “hard right” and “all-out” (and “holy war” and “race war” and “dangerous” and “evil” and “demonic” etc.) in quotes too, which should not be, but those at least are all more discretionary, whereas putting “threats” in quotes like that calls into question their validity.

He can love his son and also democracy and justice too - i.e. allow his son to go to what will surely be like a resort vacation spa that they will call “prison” (not bc he’s special, just bc he’s rich).

To name one example, he deregulated the inspection of train safety, despite internal whistleblowers (who were ofc subsequently fired) claiming that the industry was not regulating itself in anything remotely resembling a “safe” manner. Keep in mind, this was before all those famous train derailments happened. Multiple people especially train engineers predicted they would happen, they went to a large amount of trouble - and were fired as a result - of warning that they would happen, but Trump ignored all of that and deregulated the industry to help make it more profitable… and then the derailments happened, whereupon we all paid the price. Socialization of costs, privatization of profits, it is the exact opposite of both socialism and of capitalism both - it was sheer foolishness, period.

And ofc there was his handling of the pandemic - note the initial cause of the pandemic was not his fault, but his poor handling of it is on him. First, at minimum, if nothing else “the buck stops here”. But above & beyond the latter, as the audio recording with Bob Woodsworth revealed, Trump knew that the virus was airborne - he told his friend that much - and yet even knowing that, afterwards he lied and told people that it explicitly was not airborne (again, to aid “the economy”, at the expense of the workers who died as a result). When others, e.g. Bill Clinton, have lied previously, conservatives got angry and tried to impeach them - and rightfully so - so why ignore it when it happens on the other side? Also this lie, measured in the form of “excess deaths”, contributed to the deaths of more Americans than all of our wars combined. That seems like “harm” to me.

Then too there is how he inserted himself between a Congressional decision and the intended recipient of funding, with his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian government to “just do me a favor though”. By some definitions of the word that might even have constituted “treason” - I am no lawyer though, so be skeptical ofc, especially extreme claims require more extreme evidence, which the first impeachment trial was meant to bring forth except it was halted by Republicans in Congress.

The list really can go on and on… whatever you think of conservative vs. liberal philosophies, or of Republican vs. Democrat politics, he really was quite a dangerous President. Yes, most of us are still alive after his Presidency, but again… many of us are not now, with a good number of those deaths directly traceable to his decisions. Biden may not be “good”, but extremely few Presidents in all of American history come close to how dangerous Trump was, by many objective metrics. History will reveal that, but right now it can be difficult to distinguish b/t the lying liberal media and the lying conservative media sources both lie, for the sake of their own profits. In all of that muddiness of facts, it can be super difficult to find out what is really going on. But the fate of people in and maybe the fate of our actual nation is on the line, so it is worth the effort for those of us who would consider ourselves “leaders” aka citizens, whose votes will determine the course ahead for us all.

And if you happen to die in the meantime, well then in that case you cannot sue :-P.

I wonder if somebody shot the guy?

I want to be able to say it is copium, where they want to do well but are just hiding the truth from themselves how predatory the game would be.

But I cannot, bc some people in the world really truly are like that. Sometimes they make games and sometimes they merely play them.

Don’t forget the rest of your phrase there: justify… “to who”?

If to you, he would have to do a LOT more than he has, for you to still buy in despite seeing that.

To them, merely having the title of “CEO” seems to be enough, to those who refuse to dig deeper. pOsItIoN oF aUtHoRiTaH.

They will be shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED when their money goes poof.

Put another way, your question presupposes several things, e.g. “In a fair world, how could that be allowed to happen!?”.

BTW, Donald Trump lowered the funding for the SEC, the agency responsible for investigation of financial fraud matters. Also he + the Republican Congress lowered the funding for the IRS too. After ACTUALLY “defunding the police” with his right hand - while simultaneously claiming that the leftists wanted to “defund the police” with his left - we will see a lot more of this than we did in the past.

In the past, criminals feared the police and did not want to get caught. Now that there are fewer investigations into financial frauds… we have FA, and we are about to FO.

(1) ngl that is amazing, a heart-warming story

(2) still fuck Elon Musk

On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.

I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.

At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.

For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.

Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

For-profit enterprises hijacked people’s various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a “notifications” button, with a badge saying that you have “messages” waiting to be reviewed. 🤮

At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate “news” page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.

I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.

I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.

Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish “your (sic) stoopid (sic)”, they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use “tricks” like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.

So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.

And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.

You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.