Schadrach

I used to joke back in 2014 that if Milo Yian-whatever, Ben Shapiro and Gavin McInnes just had a biweekly meeting and decided on a hand sign, an image and a word to use heavily in social media for the following month that everything could be made into a dogwhistle within a year.

We really don’t do that here, because we skip the rehab part almost entirely because it’s bad for the profit margins of private prisons.

You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.

it would be nice if the democrats fucking tried.

They think they don’t have to, they just have to keep you scared enough of the GOP that you’ll vote for them out of terror. It’s how Biden won the first time, after all.

As far as the US goes, Democrats are basically the best you get that has any chance of winning an election and she was their choice for 2016. I even held my nose and voted for her in the general (but not in the primary).

I won’t argue that progressives and the like shouldn’t be trying to either drag the party leftward or organize at a scale that they can actually win elections at some levels without needing the name Democrat behind them.

To be fair that’s an improvement over the previous test since you could reuse the frogs while you had to kill the rabbit. Even older ones involved peeing on grain. We’ve known that there was something different about the urine of women when they are pregnant for a shockingly long time, but couldn’t explain exactly what in any real detail until fairly recently.

And I absolutely believe you’d hear some folks joking around about “coming for their children.”

I strongly suspect if he ever responded with a source it would involve a carefully trimmed clip from that SF gay men’s chorus piece that caused a stir a while back, found a link for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOQF4kadHA

An entire piece built around the lines “we’ll convert your children” and “we’re coming for your children” that’s pretty prone to having unfortunate clips cut from it to scare right wingers.

“LGBTQ+” is not an organization. It’s not a religion or a creed. It doesn’t “say” anything - and, in fact, isn’t even an “it” in the context you’re using!

It’s a term for a group of people that have nothing to do with each other, other than some shared traits. In your comment, replace “LGBTQ+” with another word for a group of unrelated humans. “Blondes,” maybe, or “women,” “men,” “dark skinned folk,” “humans,” etc. You can’t put something like “Americans” or “Christians” in that sentence, because those are too specific.

Can you see the problem now?

Except in that case you can’t exclude anyone from “the LGBTQ+ community” provided they are not straight or not cis. See people talking about Milo Yian-etc back in 2014-2020, or people’s reaction to radqueer shit.

It’s not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas

Good ideas, but terrible messaging. For example, imagine you wanted to sell Appalachia on the idea that the coal market is in decline so we should look at expanding other market sectors in the region so the entire region doesn’t increasingly resemble dead mine towns as time goes on. What’s the single worst possible way you could try to express that idea to those people?

“I’m going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business” - Hillary Clinton, 2016.

I’m fond of this one in particular because “They’re putting chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay!” is both one of the craziest sounding things Alex Jones has said, one that was literally memed on for years as THE example of how nuts he is and also one that’s technically true.

Thank you for answering them before I could get back to Lemmy.

Because it’s not in rainwater, it’s in runoff from cities and dairy farms. The chemicals in question are basically synthetic estrogens and their metabolites and frogs are just more sensitive to those in the environment than mammals.

I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

The only thing I know about the procedure for tightening Usain Bolt is that I am not part of performing it.

This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.

Which when you try to say it as written sounds like some degenerate version of “lick nuts” which is possibly not intended?

I mean, he’s not going to have black tea anyways as it won’t have been prepared correctly.

I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?

Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

No, not at all. There is a single coherent timeline. The world as it exists now is the final total of all time travel that will ever be going to have occurred to points before now.

You could try to go back and kill Hitler, but we already know you failed.

Eh, some of them. You weren’t generally banned for “merely” being right wing. But pre-Elon you generally had to toe the line a lot more to avoid being suspended or banned if you were overtly right wing than if you were liberal or left and now it’s the other way around.

Just like how the blue check started as an “I am a public figure and this account is definitely who I appear to be” mark and that’s it, then it became a mark of who you knew/could bribe at Twitter to move the process along and could be revoked for saying the wrong things on Twitter (for example everyone’s least favorite gay right wing provocateur Milo Yianwhatever had his blue check stripped for saying something too offensive well before he was banned), then post-Elon it became just a subscription service.

There was also a tendency to quietly artificially reduce visibility for a lot of right wing voices or hashtags. For example, female MRA and member of Honey Badger Radio Hannah Wallen literally got a bunch of her fans to do some pretty elaborate testing of her account at one point after her engagement numbers suddenly and mysteriously dropped and it turned out many of her posts were invisible except to people that followed her that she also followed, even to people specifically looking at her feed.

Certain right wing hashtags would have numbers that should definitely have them trending but mysteriously weren’t (or would be for just a few minutes and then suddenly vanish despite gaining popularity in the meantime), certain liberal/left hashtags would be trending despite seemingly not having the numbers for it to be organic, that sort of thing. Because Twitter moderation was curating what was and was not “trending”, literally blacklisting certain topics and bumping up others because of the visibility that being trending would afford.

It was all really, overtly obvious if you watched for it, like how certain accounts would be shadowbanned on Reddit for reasons that were both obvious and not spam-related despite shadowbanning supposedly only being employed as an anti-spam tool, or how certain subs would be allowed to openly ignore certain sitewide rules.

Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?

Any idea which subs are banning like that already?