Illegal and anti-democratic aren’t always the same thing. You can certainly be one without the other. Though to be clear there have been allegations of outright illegal activity by the Clinton campaign and the DNC as a whole during the 2016 election, but the specifics are fuzzy in my memory and that’s not what you’re asking about so I won’t attempt to address it further here.

Here’s the first article I read through after a quick search to find a source for you. If you don’t like the source I’m sure you can use the timeline and references it contains to find something from a source you prefer.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

Here’s a couple relevant snippets:

So to take [Jeb] Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read. “The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

Eleven days after those comments about McCain, Clinton aides sought to push the plan even further: An agenda item for top aides’ message planning meeting read, “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?"

It’s easy to make her sound like a victim when you ignore the fact that she did everything in her power to rig the DNC primaries in her favor AND propped up Trump’s early campaign as much as she could. The situation we find ourselves in is certainly not exclusively her fault but she definitely deserves more of the blame than any of us do. She set the board exactly how she wanted and still couldn’t win the game.

You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.

I hope you’re right about that but I’ll be legitimately shocked if that turns out to be true to any significant degree.

There are no moderate Republicans. Anyone who calls themselves a Republican in 2024 is a fascist, whether intentionally or not makes no practical difference. They will never ever vote for a Democrat. Calling them reachable voters is so hilariously out of touch that it makes me wonder where you’ve been the last 8 years.

Yes I’m saying that the branch of government whose job it is to craft laws should be the one crafting laws. It’s amazing you can disagree with such a basic statement in such a condescending way and not even question whether or not you’re a acting like an asshole. Take your shitty attitude somewhere else.

Technically their interpretation is correct, laws should be explicitly enumerated by the legislative branch which has the most accountability to voters. We’re all just so desensitized to the fact that Congress is a wasteland of gridlock and special interest money that we don’t even expect them to do the job of creating laws anymore. If we had a working legislative branch this would be a gentle reminder for them to be thorough and use detailed language when crafting legislation, instead it’s a depressing reminder that our government quite literally cannot function without outsourcing the central function of one of the main branches.

That’s not the take you should come away from this story with. None of them should be allowed to do it.

You served your purpose Joe. You saved us from Trump in 2020. I wish you would have done it 6 months ago but it’s time to make as graceful an exit as you can. America has to persevere or succumb to fascism and I feel you’re making the latter more likely. It may feel like abandoning your post but it’s for the good of the nation. We need to look forward and you only remind us of the past. Please pass the baton.

Why doesn’t anyone call him out on lying about running for a second term? I very vividly remember hearing him say in 2020 that he would not seek reelection and yet here we are.

Honest question, what’s there to be hyped about? I haven’t ever looked into its feature set because it looks like ass. Do people just like the Tesla name or what?

What’s there to learn that isn’t already widely known? Existing (copyright) laws are asinine and all corporations eventually become consumed by greed. That’s America in a nutshell.

I mean, everything is made in China. I’m not one to shy away from calling out Republican hypocrisy but this one seems like a stretch. There’s plenty of things to criticize these guys for without making it sound like you’re just looking for something to be contrarian about.

My kid regularly gets a little bit of shit in his underwear and I’ll catch him sneakily changing his pants. When I ask him what happened he always says he was having too much fun to stop and go to the bathroom. If a kid was sick and excited about something, like the Hornet’s mascot showing up to school, I could easily see something like this happening.

Ad partner > relevance

You can say there’s no issues with that system as many times as you like but it’s not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I’m one of them. You don’t seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I’m not going to bother writing out why here but I’ve said more on the topic in this thread if you’d like to understand another perspective more clearly.

Just because they’re already doing it doesn’t mean there’s no issues with it.

It does talk about some steps they’re taking right at the beginning. I missed those initially because on mobile it looks like an ad before the actual article starts so I skimmed over it.

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Sure, but who decides who the assholes are? What standard of proof do they use? What happens to people who almost meet that definition but don’t quite? Some cases are pretty straightforward but many have too much grey area for a simple concept like ‘ban all the assholes’ to hold up without a huge amount of effort that often can’t be provided effectively.

Evidence is key and that can be difficult to get. Additionally, players often edit clips to get the reaction they want from moderators or the community as a whole. The video in the linked article could potentially be a great example of this. The streamer obviously wants you to think they were attacked unprovoked but is that really what happened? We have no context for what led to the recorded exchange. Did the streamer refer to him using a racial slur for failing to hold what they thought was the proper position during the round immediately before the video begins? That doesn’t excuse what the player said in response but it does change the context significantly. If you ban the rape guy and then he releases a video showing the streamer saying even more outrageous things do you reverse the ban, ban them both, or give them both a warning not to be dicks in the future? This is not an isolated incident either. Multiple situations just like this happen every day on platforms with any significant number of users. How do you give each one the time it requires to be resolved correctly? Will you have any players left if you ban everyone who offends someone else?

The point is, policing people’s behavior is very challenging. There are tons of ways to abuse any system you can design unless you record literally everything your users do and that comes with it’s own set of moral and logistical issues. The simplest and most universally applicable solution is to enable users to block other players themselves. Making that impact matchmaking is kind of dumb in my opinion as it just opens up the potential for abuse as you noted. Set up a few very simple ground rules and then let players sort out who they want to be able to communicate with based on how they treat them. That’s the only solution I can see that is realistic and sustainable but it requires users to take an active role in maintaining the community, which they should be doing anyway if they want it to be the kind of place you’re describing.