Are you doing research for a personal project or just asking for a friend?

Or the policy where they separated children from their parents and then didn’t keep track of who was family of whom, so that it was very hard and sometimes even impossible to reunite the family again in the future. Pure evil.

So I’m thinking out loud here and this is probably going to be controversial … But what if Harris took on a comedian (or an oaf) as communications director, to purposely do gaffes and create controversies, so maybe the for profit media might like her more. Basically a modern court jester.

I always thought things like Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes were very funny. A bit embarrassing for sure, but also pretty funny.

Apart from that 1 diner, she is also openly supportive of several talking points of Russia, such as saying that … nato expansion is to blame for Russia invading countries; the USA shouldn’t support Ukraine; after the euromaidan revolution neo-nazis came to power in Ukraine …

And she also has geopolitical goals of Russia that she thinks are good ideas, which she basically shares with Trump: supporting Brexit, disbanding NATO and saying that the USA should abandon smaller nations to Russian and Chinese aggression for appeasement. Worded differently of course, but that’s what it comes down too.

And she must also know that Russian agencies have massively promoted and aided her in the past. She’s more than a useful idiot for Russia imo.

This makes a lot of sense. I do indeed stick to all on lemmy and the ignorant downvoting that often happens, reminds me of what would happen in default reddit subs like worldnews. My opt in reddit subs indeed had a way better crowd. The frontpage of Lemmy didn’t used to be this way when I first joined though.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.

I wasn’t party to it from the start since I’m not a vegan and I didn’t see the original discussion, but from my understanding: Vegans were having a discussion on the possibilities and risks of vegan cat food, in the vegan community Lemmy world. A Lemmy world admin invaded that discussion and started using his admin/mod powers to push his unsubstantiated opinion on the subject and silence the voice of users who had another opinion. And now apparently there’s new rules being added to justify that kind of admin behaviour.

And this is also apparently not the first time that that admin abused their mod powers, since I read a few comments in this thread saying something like “oh, an admin abusing mod powers, that’s probably going to be xxx again”.

That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn’t safe either.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

Lemmy is still very left though, even when not federated with the tankiest instances. My impression is that it’s not an influx of more right leaning people, but rather that the increased popularity brought in a wider audience, which also brought in more people who are unwilling to consider or respect alternate viewpoints, no matter how well argued or founded those opinions are.

I read a post by a vegan in this thread who wanted to try a vegan diet for their cat, so they went to the vet for a plan, tried that vet approved plan, but their cat didn’t like the food so they switched back. Imo perfectly reasonable and well argumented, no risk or harm to the kitten at all, and yet massive downvotes.

My scalp condition is that I have too much hair. Too dense and thick, it gets greasy after not washing it 1 day, so I don’t even dare to replicate your experiment.

I also used to have a cold weather dandruff problem, but that was solved entirely when I started always air drying after every shower. Thanks to a random tip years ago on reddit. My dandruff problem was apparently because of humidity.

I’m sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it’s not personal or any widespread resentment.

I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It’s not easy to do it well, it’s frustrating, it’s thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it’s not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.

The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn’t be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.

Self reflection is also important, it’s important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it’s a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.

Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:

• You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don’t use them as such.

• Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.

• You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it’s possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.

• The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.

• The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it’s a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you’re making it about you as a person. I really don’t think that was their intent.

Nope, that’s not how it works.

There are instances that only allow up votes. There are people that will up vote any post by a dev as a show of appreciation for the effort, without necessarily thinking about or agreeing with the changes.

If you want a poll, then you have to do a proper poll. Up- and down votes are not it.

Nowadays Finland is the go to example on misinformation education: https://osis.bg/?p=4450&lang=en

An article with some examples and explanation from Finnish teachers: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html

“All this comic does is bend history into absolute knots to try and sell an image of what a democratic revolution would look like, but the tone and telling it represents is blatantly revisionist to a fucking maddening degree.”

I’d say that’s what they’re talking about.

And I agree with them, imo this comic is absolutely not working for getting the intended message across.

Edit for clarification: i realized during first reading that the devil’s advocate in the comic was meant to represent USA republicans, but I still think that the comic doesn’t work.

Convergent evolution. Some eagles are evolving into chickens. A new species of murder chickens.

What happens when the bias checker is biased?

The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It’s just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about “we” and “our” in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the “checking”. The site claims to be objective, but there’s been enough examples to show that it isn’t (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).

The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to “several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system”.

For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I’d say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it’s easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it’s also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying “data”, you’re just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.

Some cruise missiles are able to do all those, like the tomahawk missile fe: https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/tomahawk-long-range-cruise-missile/

To me, this drone missile looks like a smaller, much cheaper version of the traditional cruise missile. Cheap to build (relatively), easy to transport, fast to launch, hard to intercept: scary times for Russia.

My family (parents etc) have mostly learned their lesson now after all the news coverage, but before that I used to resort to hiding my good non sticks whenever they were staying over. If my parents complained about the shitty old pans that were available, then I pulled out my very sticky nonstick ceramic pan that they had roughed up despite my protests. I’m never throwing that shitty ceramic pan away, it’s way too effective as a rhetorical ploy now.

Friends I still mostly don’t trust since I don’t know their kitchen habits well enough, but they’re less likely to try to help with cooking anyhow, only with dish washing and there it’s easy to hide the wrong sponges.

If your chipped nonstick is teflon, then it’s garbage now imo. I would never cook in it again, too risky imo.

And I now realize that I’ve become paranoid in my own kitchen.

I was wondering what “feminist propaganda” was and apparently it’s talking about misogyny.

Another forbidden topic seemed to be targeted at criticism of misogyny at Game Science. The company has come under fire for lewd and sexist comments attributed in media reports to its founders as well as recruiting materials from 2015 replete with sexual innuendos. Those original job postings and comments were deleted, and the company has not commented. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/asia/chinese-videogame-wukong-censorship.html

But this anti feminism attitude is not limited to this 1 gaming company, but government policy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/feminism-in-china-internet-crackdown-erase-womens-voices/100165360

It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.

We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.