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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 11th, 2024

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  • Bullshit. I’ve never once commented in your community, but you banned me today, probably for downvoting the obnoxious, self-righteous memes that your sub periodically dumps in my feed. And surprise, surprise, now that you’ve banned this, “carnist rhetoric,” your downvote percentages don’t look so bad! You went from only getting 40% to 70% upvotes on posts to 80% to 90% in the last 8 hours. You’re not giving people a, “well deserved time out,” you’re gaming the numbers to manufacturing consent.

    The worst part is I actually defended you guys during the catfood debacle, saying that no matter what you thought of the content, the admins were way out of line to override your moderating decisions. If I’d known you were going to be as petty and manipulative as they were, I would have kept my mouth shut. On the bright side, your naked attempt to make your community look less unpopular is the best argument I’ve seen for anonymizing voting on Lemmy.




  • I’ve said this before, but create a new license requirement for these, “light duty trucks,” that are causing all these problems. Right now a standard Class D allows any chud to drive one of these things. If you want to drive something that weighs more than 5,000 pounds, you should have to get a special license that teaches you about how huge their blind spots are and why they aren’t crash-compatible with normal cars.





  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldEmpathic
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    20 days ago

    I’m sure you’re right about the context, but this still isn’t a great look. I also assumed that this was a reference to the very recent event, not a four year old interaction with someone who isn’t running for office this election cycle. I don’t think that’s an uncommon or unreasonable mistake to make.








  • Fair enough, I’ll adjust my search terms to see if I can find anything on that. I agree that Assange is a PoS, and it does seem like his Kremlin ties are genuine. I tend to be skeptical when the security agencies tell us someone is secretly a Russian asset (like when the state department revoked Snowden’s passport while he was stopped in Russia on his way to Ecuador, then accused him of going there to aid Russia, even though they literally forced him to be there), but it certainly seems like Assange had or developed an interest in aiding the Russian government.

    Wikileaks was unfortunately too centered around Assange himself, and only had a non-governing advisory board as it’s infrastructure, so there really was no way to separate the organization from the man. It’s a shame, because I think the work they did (especially early on) was very important, and I think the world is worse off without an organization like them.


  • I’m like…80% sure that’s not true. I don’t remember any story about GOP emails, and I can’t find any reporting on it now.

    That being said, I’m not giving Assange a pass. At the time he was getting Podesta’s emails from Russian hackers, he was declining to publish a cache of Russian government documents. It’s possible that dropping those leaks was part of his negotiations to get the Podesta emails, or that he had just developed a strong anti-U.S. bias after being imprisoned in an embassy for 4 years, but that’s still no excuse for violating the Wikileaks’ founding principle of holding all power accountable. Also, beyond the bias problems, I think the sexual assault allegations against Assange are credible, and he should have been prosecuted in Sweeden. Wikileaks was a very flawed organization, and Assange is a complete piece of shit.

    However, the U.S. didn’t want to prosecute Assange for the Podesta hack, or Russian espionage, or sexual assault. They wanted to prosecute him for telling the world that the U.S. military murdered two Reuters journalists. For all of Wikileaks flaws, they did some important work, and there’s no one willing to do that work now that they’re gone. A great example of that is all these legacy media groups sitting on Trump’s emails but being too scared to publish them.