You're welcome to your dickness. The name is terrible. It just means no trolls.
@TheDude@sh.itjust.works I don't know where to put this for sh.itjust.works, so I'm picking an admin at random.
Here's what happened:
On and after October 7th, Hamas combatants invaded Israel, committing rape, gang rape, and sexual torture among other crimes as they went.
Then, the Israeli government exaggerated what had happened, fabricating outlandish stories to accompany the genuine ones, because lying and demonizing Palestinians is in their DNA.
Then, the New York Times published a story featuring both true and false accounts of sexual assault, ignoring people within their organization who were trying to raise the alarm that some of the information they were relying on was not credible.
Then, supporters of Palestine seized on the inaccuracies in the Times's reporting to try to pretend that no sexual assault had ever happened. Hallmarks of this type of disinformation include zeroing in on irrelevant questions. Were the widespread rapes that occurred during the invasion officially ordered by Hamas leadership? What sorts of evidence did Pramila Patten's investigative teams find, and what sorts did they not find? Did the Israeli government lie? By focusing in on these questions, it's possible to produce answers which create a strong impression that the question you have asked is, "Did Hamas commit widespread rape on and after October 7th?" and that the answer is no. But the answer to that question is clearly yes.
Here are Pramila Patten's findings: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147217
They speak for themselves. She's very open about her methodology, her sources, her conclusions, and the boundaries of her conclusions. The rhetorical methods of the people who seize on or exaggerate those careful boundaries, as a way of attempting to argue that she didn't actually find clear and convincing evidence of widespread sexual assault, also speak for themselves.
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.
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.
Yes, not all young men are stupid. That's an unfair stereotype. I do think it's fair to say that as a group, they're more likely to be too disorganized to vote, compared with other demographics, and I think that's doubly true of the subset of them that Trump is trying to appeal to by appearing on bro podcasts.
I don't see anything about preventing corporate landlords from buying it all and renting it back to us.
They were banned from !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net ages ago, and just now starting posting new stuff there under new accounts.
You could be charitable and say that they probably didn't understand how Pleasant Politics works, and had no idea that they were banned.
Or, you could say that this user has such a clear pattern of badly-intended participation that this is clearly in the spirit of ban evasion regardless.
To me, it would be different if they were coming with a post apologizing about trying to antagonize the whole community, and promising to be less toxic in their future interactions, and asking for a second chance. They're not doing that. The fact that they're not even bothering, just saying that they plan to continue the same obnoxious conduct as before, trying to innocently claim that they didn't mean anything by it, and avowing to skirt carefully within the letter of the law, would mean that common sense would motivate a ban regardless and they don't deserve any extra leeway when rules are broken, even if it was honestly unintentional in this case.
It's up to you. In my opinion no good can come of having this person involved for as long as they really want to defend their right to troll, but it's up to you.