My guy lol

Go to !yepowertrippingbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want to get some input about whether your ban was fair.

My final response, not screenshotted here, was:

You left some comments that looked troll-y. I looked over your history and saw a long string of one-line comments in other communities which are also likely to function effectively as ragebait, including telling people to eat poop and talking about shooting people.

I decided to check with you, sent you a reply so you could offer some explanation of what you meant and how it was productive. You ignored that and went on with one-liner comments in other communities.

I decided it was safe to class you as a troll. Like I say, take it to YPTB if you feel that classification is in error. I’m not planning to change my mind because you argue with me.

This is woefully offtopic here. There is a community set up for it which you are welcome to make use of. My guess is the mods here will remove this, because this isn’t where it belongs and it’s just going to crap up the comments for everyone else.

And then, the system established and no one having gone to bat for real to stop it, they’re going to slowly expand the category of people who are “not real Americans” who can get grabbed up into it, and expand their labor pool.

What exactly do you mean by that, please?

Edit: I’m going to assume it means what it sounds like it means.

FUCKING YES

Make them work. Say no. Don’t hope that someone else will stop it for you.

There’s a wonderful story from the Nixon years. This is heavily edited for clarity:

I said to Henry, “You remember what I said in my letter when I came here? Well, you have just called my bluff and my loyalties are to the American people and I’m refusing the assignment, I am leaving.”

And then Kissinger said something that I will never forget. He said, “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment.”

I just came up out of my chair swinging, I was so damn mad, and missed him. He ran behind his desk and said, “I am only kidding.”

I said, “Well, you don’t kid about something like this,” and just stormed out of the room.

Later:

Haig came flying out of Henry’s office. He said, “What the hell did you say to Henry? He is furious. He’s throwing books around the room and screaming and yelling.” So I told him that he said I was to be the staff coordinator and I wouldn’t do it.

At that point Haig then looked at me. He said, “You have had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.”

I looked at him and said, “Fuck you, Al, I just have.”

Edit: “Henry” is Henry Kissinger. Kissinger asked William Watts to violate the constitution, Watts said no, Kissinger insulted him for it, so he tried to punch Kissinger and cursed out the secretary of defense and quit to get a different job. Be like William Watts.

I think Sophie would be very happy to know that almost a hundred years later, people still know her and know her story just from seeing a picture. And of course that everything she was saying was vindicated, everyone who killed her had to flee or be captured or killed before the blink of an eye had passed, and the regime she was speaking against is now remembered worldwide as some of the century’s greatest scumbags. Out of everyone else in the picture, no one has any clue who the other people are, or has any reason to try to find out.

There’s a similar story I think in “Patriots.” Norman Morrison was the man who burned himself alive outside the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Years and years later, either his wife or daughter (I think wife) got to visit Vietnam, and travel around, and at some point early on, she was talking to a group of Vietnamese people about why she was visiting. They all knew who she was. Right away. They all knew Morrison’s story, they’d learned about it in school. She got to talk with someone who was alive during the war, who heard what he’d done at the time, and who told her about how incredibly powerfully it had impacted him. Their whole perception of the US military was as this towering invulnerable robot that had come to lay waste to their entire country. He had learned, at the time while it was still going on, that in the absolute heart of the machine there were still human beings who were willing to give up their lives to try to stop the mechanisms, who cared that powerfully about people they’d never met, never seen, didn’t know the names of, but still were fighting with everything they had to try to protect them and stop all their suffering.

“Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind.”

Dude I got goosebumps.

Watch the whole movie if you have time. It’s not earthshattering, as a movie, it’s just a Chaplin comedy. But it sure as hell has got some moments. I feel like I remember particularly a scene where those two are hanging out on a rooftop with the war down below, trying to stay lighthearted while they watch in the distance the landmarks of the life they used to know go up in flames, one by one.

Edit: https://archive.org/details/the.-great.-dictator.-1940.720p.-br-rip.x-264.-yify

It does seem like it all started around stroke time. I definitely have seen people with brain issues who can still “function” in terms of showing up to work and doing what they’re supposed to, but whose decision-making suddenly becomes really off-kilter in some scenarios.

I’m happy to let the matrix conversation play out without me. If anyone wants to hear my side of the story, they’re welcome to post here where everyone can read, and if not, I’m fine with them conversing and coming to their conclusion.

I’m absolutely sure that there are Lemmy admins who would be in favor of defederating from me, and I think I know some of which ones. But if they’re talking about it on matrix, I’m happy to let that process play out without me. I feel like people generally know what I’m about at this point, and whether or not they’re in favor of it.

Most likely, delusion.

Most likely. I’m completely not joking when I say that not that long ago someone I know was trying to get me to see a neurologist. Team brain damage unite.

In the most recent comment you reported, I specifically made a point to engage with their argument on its own merits first, and then a paragraph break, and only then to get into my strong feeling that they are purely doing propaganda. Actually, the pure lazy flimsiness of their argument, falling into a pretty consistent pattern of how the propaganda accounts tend to “argue,” is one part of what makes me so confident that they’re a troll.

I looked at one of the other things you reported, and it’s a lot the same. I actually engaged for quite a while factually before accusing them of being propaganda. It’s not surprising to me that you will make statements like “instead of dealing with what they’re saying” when even a very brief glance back up at the quoted section of the text will show me doing exactly that:

Ah, yes, the offensive on North Gaza that began on October 5 and continued, until the recent temporary cease-fire. And the war in Lebanon that started on October 1, until that cease-fire, on November 26. Clearly, those are good explanations for why the number of posts “in that timeframe” would have spiked in the week of September 16, continued there for several weeks as we rolled into October, and then fallen back to something approximating the normal level during the week of November 4, and then hit their lowest level since early August, in the week of November 18.

Again: The casual blatant disregard for the truth, just saying anything that serves the purpose of your argument even when the truth is literally available up above without anyone even having to click on a source or anything, is a pretty good hallmark for bad-faith posters. You’re emphasizing what sounds like a convincing argument over actually forming together the structure of a successful one. This is, in general, a pretty effective technique, but to someone who examines things critically it starts to stand out quite a bit as a tell. Almost nobody on Lemmy argues like that, either people I tend to agree with or disagree with, but then there’s a very specific contingent of posters that combines that shameless disregard for factuality of statements, with a certain emotional tone, and a tendency to embody a handful of certain specific viewpoints.

I’m on a campaign to get you defederated from my instance

Have fun! You can make a post about me, I think the comments would be pretty interesting.

John Fetterman of Pennsylvania

What the fuck is going on with this dude. I used to think he was a people’s candidate just doing his own thing, but he’s made several bizarre and stupid decisions that I’m aware of.

Yeah. Although, I’m not subscribed to every community on every instance, so there will be some variability to the data.

In this comment, I did the same analysis on posts only from certain lemmy.world communities, which I think will be a lot more reproducible:

https://ponder.cat/comment/1607267

One thing I realized: I think that I was unsubscribed from everything on lemmy.world for pretty much all of August. That could be highly significant to this graph. You can see all the traffic numbers drop down to close to 0 during that time, and then bounce back, with a trickle of votes and comments on old posts, presumably, populating the August posts so there’s a little bit of traffic but down close to 0. I don’t think that impacts the overall conclusion, but it would definitely be worth repeating this on some instance which has been subscribed the entire time, to look at the numbers without having to worry if that is distorting the picture.

I didn’t realize, before I did the broken-down analysis, that I’d been unsubscribed for that time, or that !news, !politics, and !world were so much the dominating sources of posts dealing with Gaza.

I would have no way to check my assertion, so you might be right. I’m pretty confident of it though.

• Aubrey Plaza is awkward, and I have no read whatsoever about whether or not she’s a good person.
• Jennifer Lawrence is somewhat awkward, and my read is that she is a perfectly nice person.
• Sarah Silverman is awkward, and my read is that she is also evil on some level.

I have no idea. Maybe I shouldn’t share with the world these bizarre personal theories about my ability to detect evil in celebrities. I’m confident in them for whatever reason, though.

Yeah. They had reasons for what they did, but at the end of the day, what they thought about politics put them in mortal danger, it was a bad mistake.

I am sorry to get harsh and personal about it. Maybe it was un called for. But they’re in a tremendous amount of real, harsh, personal danger now, just like you are, and I’m being direct with you about how your type of politics helped enable that to happen. It’s not a joke.

I’m not trying to go back and forth, so I’ll end with that much. Apologies for getting personal about it. I think you should think hard on it though. There’s a huge difference between someone not doing enough to protect you, versus someone who actively wants to destroy you.

There are many reasons to be disturbed by capital punishment. These include agonising deaths witnessed in the US, wrongful convictions, the blatant discrimination of criminal justice systems that results in the disproportionate killing of ethnic minority offenders, and the use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes and political offences. In Myanmar, relatives of the executed men were reportedly denied access to their bodies. But underlying all of this is the broader understanding that continues to spread through the world: that states have no right to take the lives of citizens.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, The Guardian from July 2022. Quite well put, to be honest.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/26/the-guardian-view-on-the-death-penalty-a-long-way-to-go

Yes, I know. You said. That’s why I said good luck.

I’ve had this experience with a few different people. Ellen DeGeneres was one. Sometimes you can look at the way someone’s face is, the way they interact with the people around them, and the interplay between the emotions they’re deliberately trying to imitate versus what seems to be their sincere intent, and you can just know that they’re up to no good.

Drew Carey? Fine. Steve Harvey? Dude’s a piece of shit. How do I know? Just look, man. Open your eyes.

Good luck with the next four years, I guess. And be sure to tell anyone who’s Hispanic in the United States how important your thought process was, that preserving their safety wasn’t as big a priority as your political goals in the long run.

Okay. I still think it would have been more productive for you to support the tiny number of sensible people in Washington, Sanders and friends, and try to give them enough power to withstand the great fuckening that the DNC is trying to give them. Or advocate for reforms like RCV that would give third parties some traction. Or just advocate for local justice and protest to make some progress how you can. I’m not saying you are not doing any of those things, but the only thing you have engaged me on so far is trying to make the argument that voting for the Democrats is a waste of time.

Let me put it this way: I don’t disagree with you about complicity by the Democrats in this whole death-cult of a government. If the car is sliding towards the cliff, and the controls that are supposed to stop it aren’t doing what they’re supposed to, that is not a good argument for completely abandoning the attempt to control the car. You vocally oppose the Democrats, and then are somehow blaming me when the non-Democrat who actively wants to endanger your safety comes to power instead of the person who merely wasn’t doing enough to stop it. You already can’t get a passport. If conditions in the US get actively urgently dangerous to your safety in the next four years, which they seem likely to, then it sounds to me like you have your own actions to blame more so than mine or other people who voted for Harris while also advocating for better than the Democrats.