I wonder how many of the toxic “left” accounts in the study were ones who also happened to show a suspicious pattern of echoing Russian-friendly or not-voting-for-Democrats-friendly talking points.

Certainly natural home-grown political toxicity is, as it’s always been, a feature of anyone on the internet who’s talking about politics, right or left. But I’ve absolutely noticed on Lemmy that the same users who are incredibly toxic about their approach to anyone who disagrees with them, also tend to sometimes have other anomalous funny ideas.

The recount they’re complaining about is required by state law:

https://www.wgal.com/article/pennsylvania-us-senate-race-casey-vs-mccormick-recount-update/62936018

Yeah, I did figure that out after the whole conversation.

Having to input your email address, or just lie and click “I’m already a subscriber” which shows the article, or reload the page apparently, is not a paywall. Also, it would have been easier for these people to just do any one of those three things than to come into the comments with their mouths open, making a demanding noise like a little baby bird.

I think we should normalize showing respect to the sites that want to try to get paid for spending the money to put their good articles together, and de-normalize treating that behavior as some kind of affront against the reader and immediately start whining about it. (As if that wasn’t already clear from my rude messages about it so far.)

I don’t think you are lying, but I do think that you are mistaken. I think there’s probably a significant overlap between:

• The population that has a knee-jerk “paywalls are bad” reaction, not really knowing or caring that it takes money to put together quality journalism, and that the people reading that journalism have some responsibility to make sure it can continue, if they want to be able to read it
• The population that might see a “please donate” popup and react with a knee-jerk “ARHGHGHAFSASDHF PAYWALL OH NOES” reaction and close out and start whining in the comments, not bothering to find the “close” button or read closely enough to notice that it’s not a paywall.

You and the other person have shown yourselves to be part of population #1, so I’m assuming that you’re also part of population #2. This site does not have a paywall. Maybe I’m wrong and they just suddenly decided to reverse their whole funding model and install one, in a haphazard fashion that disappears if someone goes back and loads the page again, but I lean towards my explanation.

What did this paywall say? I simply don’t believe you. Was it this message?

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I just gave them $25, just to irritate the two of you.

What? They pop up a box asking for donations, but there’s no paywall.

Radioactive materials really are the closest thing we have to ancient demons.

They can give you unlimited power, but it’s always an uneasy bargain. They must be contained in special places where no human can go, and the people tasked with keeping them sealed must be vigilant, with never a moment’s careless inattention, or they might get loose.

If anything ever goes wrong, they wreak havoc. And afterwards, that place is cursed beyond repair. No one can look upon it. No one can go there. If they do, they will die in horrible ways, with no hope of salvation. Machines that try to trespass will break. Film cannot develop, or is ruined. They must simply be left in the tomb, alone and undisturbed, forever.

That one grainy photo of the elephant’s foot is absolutely chilling to me, like a monster from another world lurking silently underground.

You can also bargain with them to destroy the cities of your enemies. There is no limit to the power. Whole continents laid waste, simply by the right type of priesthood making the right incantations. But for almost a century, no one has dared to do it, because of what might come.

I completely agree. Usually the clue is when:

1. A whole bunch of people all start saying the same thing at once
2. They all really want to say it, even bringing it up in contexts where it doesn’t completely make sense. Also, when you examine it, it doesn’t completely hold water. It’s just a single thought-pattern that matches up with the appropriate concepts, not necessarily something with any connection to reality.
3. They want to “talk” about it, but not in the sense of a conversation, or arguing for its connection to reality. They just want to repeat it, with various levels of insistence, and they don’t respond in a meaningful sense to questions or counterarguments. They just repeat the same thing they said before.

Number 3 is sometimes hard to distinguish from just normal internet jerkwaddery, but the conjunction of all the factors, along with the ever-present conclusion “we’d better not vote for Democrats,” is pretty noticeable once you start looking for it.

There’s a good example here: https://lemmy.world/comment/13459406

Notice how he fills in both sides of the argument to keep it going, to be able to keep repeating his points. For example I say “I also think it’s partly the voters’ fault” and he responds with “I don’t really understand what you’re getting at here. It seems like say you aren’t blaming voters.” I say “I can blame Biden for committing a crime against humanity by arming Israel, instead of doing the human thing,” and he accuses me of sowing division and blaming the voters, and keeps yelling at me that the Democratic Party is at fault.

Again, it’s hard to distinguish from just how people talk about politics on the internet, but the uniformity of the themes and the absence of any attempt at even reading other people’s messages and being responsive to them starts to look a little bit glaring after you run into this stuff a few times.

I wouldn’t check it, though. If I were going to go that route, I would just transfer my whole account over. I think just waiting until the fix gets implemented is the way to go.

That’s a shame… if it’s set for an upcoming milestone then probably it’s not an urgent problem, but that will undo a lot of the usefulness I can do in the meantime, yes.

They didn’t say that, no. This guy tried to hedge it a little bit, by saying that Trump was much worse but stopping short of saying that people should vote for Harris as a result.

Some of his other cofounders, as of election day, were still saying people should leave the line blank or vote for Jill Stein. She got almost as many votes as Harris did, in Dearborn, and Trump picked up something like 20% more votes than he had in 2020.

I’m not interested in echoing our points at each other indefinitely.

I’m sure she would have gained some number of “uncommitted” voters by verbally coming out against Israel’s actions. I’m saying there are other voters she would have lost.

I keep acknowledging that Biden deserves blame for his horrible Israel policy. You keep insisting that that represents “division” and “blaming,” because I’m not willing to also assign the exact same blame to Kamala Harris, exclusively, and hold the voters completely blameless on their side.

This will be my last message on the topic, since you seem to want to keep repeating your same arguments. I just wanted to clear up those two points.

Blame can be shared.

I can blame Biden for committing a crime against humanity by arming Israel, instead of doing the human thing and letting the electoral chips fall where they may. I’m not convinced it would have been the winning strategy in the election that you think it would have been, since there are a lot of voters in the US who are perfectly comfortable with killing Palestinians because they don’t really understand what the nature of the conflict is, and would see any arms embargo as betrayal of Israel in their time of need after suffering a horrific attack.

I can also apportion some blame to the voters who doomed Palestine, I think irrevocably, by letting Trump get elected. They can all be responsible for what’s about to unfold.

I’m definitely blaming the people who organized the “uncommitted” movement. That’s different from the voters. I keep saying the first one, and you keep bringing it back to the second one. This particular example of one person who’s personally responsible for pursuing and advocating a counterproductive strategy which will hurt the Palestinians, yes, I can definitely blame.

Alawieh was at least saying Trump would be worse, by the end of the campaign, but there were other co-founders who weren’t even saying that, who were recommending leaving the line blank or voting for Jill Stein. Well, they got their wish! Kamala didn’t win. Now, probably millions of people are going to die because of it. It’s not a game.

The uncommitted movement was at least 1.5 million people in the general election, enough to win the swing states but not enough to explain the 10-20 million Americans that were not convinced by Harris’ Campaign to go out of their way to vote. That shows that there were many other issues with her campaign. She did not address the material needs of the working class, she ran to the right on immigration and American Jingoism, and ran another neoliberal platform of ‘nothing will fundamentally change’ when people are angry at our failing institutions and desperate for change.

If I have cancer, and the doctor tells me about a treatment but isn’t persuasive enough about it, and I ignore them, and now I’m going to die, is that the doctor’s fault?

You’re holding Kamala responsible for three decades of Democrats ignoring the working class, and for Biden’s policies, and for a huge amount of misinformation attacking her about the economy or whatever to people who then bought it. Okay, sure. If she had been more persuasive or had better messaging, it might have helped. That doesn’t change the fact that if people had voted differently, that definitely would have helped.

To me, that’s the killer flaw of these things.

It would be great if they were designed from the ground up to be good machines for running models, say with a GPU that had a copious amount of memory that didn’t cost $1,500 for an add-on. Unfortunately, to do that they’d have to create something from nothing, so instead they’ve added something that is worse than most GPUs, added some dumb software which is designed to pair with the ultimate result of disappointing people, and called it a day.

Blaming voters is just sowing division when we need unity and solidarity to fight against Fascism.

Nothing anywhere in these comments was blaming voters. I was blaming the people who organized a whole campaign specifically to sow division and interfere with support for the only possible alternative, in this election, to full-on fascism.

I also think it’s partly the voters’ fault, in addition to being partly Biden’s fault. But I was pointing out voting numbers to argue for how effectively this particular campaign had sowed division, not to say it’s exclusively their fault.

Also, aren’t you a Stalin person anyway? Shouldn’t you be happy about the collapse of the US’s effectiveness to influence events in the world? Or is the nick meant to be ironic or edgelordy?

My point is that if the child isn’t vaccinated, and then dies of whooping cough, the uncle who put together a whole organized program to educate the family about the dangers of vaccines bears a lot responsibility for the tragedy.

Yes, even more so than the pharmaceutical companies who lost the people’s trust through their actions.

It would still be a heartbreaking loss if it was just Palestine that’s going to be lost. But the scale of the global tragedy is going to be much greater than just this man’s country. He’s helped to doom, not just his own family, but millions of other people’s families who weren’t even involved.

It is hypocritical for him to say that costing Biden votes is “campaigning for Gaza,” then translate that over into costing Kamala Harris votes even though she’s not the one who’s been making these genocide-friendly decisions, then suddenly be panicked that Trump is clearly going to make things quite a bit worse and it may be the total end of his country and his ethnicity on the planet. That was the totally predictable result of his method of “campaigning for Gaza,” and many, many people told him that, and got accused of being pro-genocide shills for the Democrats.

If his movement had campaigned for Gaza in pretty much any other way, or if he had come out and admitted now that they fucked up and asked for help in pressuring the Trump administration or the global community, this wouldn’t be posted here.

https://newrepublic.com/post/188048/michigan-dearborn-arab-americans-election-harris-trump-stein

Jesus, I don’t like that.

If it was only him and the stakes weren’t so high it would be an okay joke.