Yes, yes. That wasn’t the question, though.

Where did you find this story? Do you usually read Fox News, and this headline jumped out at you and you had to spread the word? Did someone email it to you? Do you have a Google News alert set up, to send you stories involving Kamala Harris, so you can post them if they’re bad, and further your mission of anticolonialism? Did you see it on Facebook when one of your Republican relatives posted it? How did you happen to come across this Fox News story?

We’re doing Fox News, now? Huh.

Anticolonialist, how’d you run across this story? Just reading up on Fox News like all the anticolonialists like to do, and you decided to share this story when you ran across it? Or some other way?

Good point. I edited the post.

Tell me more about:

• How Liz Cheney loves Ted Cruz
• Who from “the Cheneys” other than Liz Cheney came to this event

I’m not outraged at your lack of blind loyalty. You can loyalty, or not, to anyone you want. I’m outraged at your twisting of the truth for malicious ends.

gushed about how awesome Dick Cheney was

Except, she didn’t do that. Here are her remarks. She said, at one point, “And I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support and — (applause) — and what he has done to serve our country.”

She didn’t say he was awesome. Or good. Or that she was glad he was alive. She thanks him for his support, as an aside within 1800 words at an event which didn’t have all that much to do with him. Why are you playing up this twisty narrative that that meant she “gushed about how awesome” he was?

However I was planning to vote for Harris so yeah now I’m fucking upset.

“Was” planning?

This is the deal-breaker? She said one nice thing about a bad person, and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter what Trump wants to do with the United States, or what might happen if he wins?

That is why I’m making a specific point about this. You are freaking out in a very calculated way, distorting one sentence at a campaign event into “I wish they didn’t like to dance in the viscera of their millions of innocent victims” and “Being super friendly with war criminals” and things like that.

If you want to find reasons to not vote for Kamala Harris, be honest about why. Don’t pick out individual freakout events that can be spun into something they’re not, and dutifully freak out about them as if they mattered.

Even better, work for change. If you want to support someone that’ll be better than Kamala Harris, no one is stopping you. But freaking out in a particular dishonest way about one thing she said at a campaign rally, and turning it into something very different from it was so you can say you “was” planning to vote for her, sounds a lot like propaganda to me.

You do understand that Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney are two totally separate people, right?

Harris didn’t invite “the Cheneys” to campaign with her. She invited Liz Cheney, a congresswoman who seems to have some significant amount of integrity which is unusual for a congressperson. She also said nice things about Cheney’s father, which you could argue she shouldn’t have, but if this is how hard you freak out that Harris said something nice about a bad person, you must be horrified to the point of screaming panic at how many nice things Trump says about all kinds of overt war criminals in the present day, to the point that you want to very vigorously make sure he doesn’t get elected.

Right?

Somebody told me that the robot moderator is susceptible to vote-rigging, and with my blessing they’re giving me hundreds of downvotes to try to get me banned from my own community. I don’t think it is going to work, but it’s useful as an experiment.

It’s clearly well beyond the point of what would work in real life, since the admins would notice and ban the attempt, as they have some more subtle vote-rigging efforts in the past. I think that, even in the world in which you could get away with giving out hundreds of automated downvotes without someone noticing, this kind of thing wouldn’t work, but I have been wrong before.

To be honest, I don’t think the article makes its case very well. I think Netanyahu is just doing Netanyahu things, and the impact of the current regional war on the US presidential election is pretty far from his mind. It lists some examples from the past which are interesting, but it doesn’t draw any type of solid connection between the current war and the US election. It’s reaching.

I do agree with you that anyone in US politics who is expecting Netanyahu to do them any favors or be responsible with the US or Israel’s best interests, hasn’t been paying attention for years.

Reasonable. I wasn’t trying to jump down your throat about it. I was a little annoyed at the comments which are positing some sort of fantasy scenario where the bot is useful, but where people hate it for irrational reasons. But yours was a reasonable question, definitely, in particular because for at least one account, it looks like what you described is exactly what’s happening.

Big if true.

They have not. I just did some analysis of it, and there is one person whose account has downvoted almost every comment that the bot has left. They have around a thousand other votes, so it’s unlikely to be a single-issue votebot account, but they also have no posts or comments, which is suspect. It seems plausible that there’s something mechanical going on which might be concerning. On the other hand, it’s only one person. There is one other person who has given so many downvotes to the bot that it’s suspicious, also.

Aside from those two accounts, it all looks like real downvotes. There are accounts which have given hundreds of downvotes to the bot, but they’re all recognizable as highly active real accounts, so it makes sense that they would give mass downvotes to the bot.

People just don’t like the bot. Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they’ve given in this comments section as to why?

I’m saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you’ll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.

Every report of bias is from somebody’s point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn’t factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.

Can you give an example of someone who ever posted something disingenuous that MediaBiasFactCheck got in the way of?

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes

It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.

I think there’s a strong possibility that you’re right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it’s getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn’t.

Most people don’t want the bot to be there, because they don’t agree with its opinion about what is “biased.” It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don’t agree with the author’s biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author’s biases.

In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they’re just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn’t want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.

You found another bug in throwaway account detection! I’ve undeleted this comment and, hopefully, fixed the new one too. Sorry about that.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn’t have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don’t have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It’s only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I’ve fixed the code and restored the comment.

And yes, I’m aware of the irony involved. To answer your point, I picked a terrible name for this community. People are not required to upvote you or agree with you, or even be nice to you. It’s meant as a place without toxic low-effort trolling, but certainly people are allowed to hit the downvote button to quickly express disapproval in addition to giving some more well-considered reasons for disagreeing with the stated argument.

What I was going for, unsuccessfully, by saying “pleasant” was that this person can say something like this viewpoint, and other people can disagree with them, but it doesn’t turn into a dumpster fire of personal insults, changes of subject, and wild accusations. At that, I think it’s succeeding, looking at this thread. People are not agreeing but it’s a lot calmer than an equivalent thread in a lot of Lemmy’s politics communities would be.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn’t have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don’t have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It’s only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I’ve fixed the code and restored the comment.

I’d rather we stage a revolution and do away with the current electoral system in favor of one that allows more than two viable parties.

These are in no way incompatible. Not electing Trump will do a huge amount to protect the people who are working on revolution doing away with the current system.

Also, I believe that not caring about the outcome is a valid stance. If you genuinely don’t have any interest in it, don’t have a firm opinion about the candidates, or whatever, it’s fine to not vote. You’d essentially be flipping a coin anyway, so let the folks that care have their say instead.

If you don’t care about the outcome of Harris versus Trump, then you’re either not aware of what’s going on, or in a position of extreme privilege. You’re not a Haitian, or a Hispanic, or God help you an undocumented immigrant, or a left-wing person living in a Trump-supporting area, or anyone who’s near the poverty line, or any other number of categories of people that Trump is going to do incredible levels of harm to.

You also don’t live on Earth, or else you’re going to die with no descendants before the most serious impacts of climate change start to come to fruition.

If you want to improve the current system, “abstaining as a protest” is selling a huge number of helpless and vulnerable people to suffer or die, for no particular benefit to anybody. That’s the point of this article.

It never even occurred to me that carbon capture might be storing a giant tank of gaseous carbon dioxide. I assumed that it meant chemically reacting the carbon into some kind of solid material which was then discarded as waste, because trying to store huge chambers full of gaseous CO2 at a scale that can impact climate change is clinically insane.