Yeah, that seems to be the point. He’s again appealing to his macho fascist supporters by further enabling abusive behaviour. Domestic violence has been decriminalized for years already in Russia, violence against outgroups is allowed/encouraged, they have a national snitch on your neighbour system, … It’s become a true fascist society.

Yeah, I think the joke isn’t working sorry.

Running a ship aground is something the crew does to their own ship. It does not involve other ships, only their own ship + the ground of a landmass.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_grounding

I can’t say that I’m surprised that the pope is endorsing someone who so eerily fits the description of an antichrist, which in this framework makes the pope a false prophet.

An article with some reasonings as to why Trump fits the bill: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/is-trump-the-antichrist

Are you doing research for a personal project or just asking for a friend?

Dogs also love to wrestle over the stick/ball/… Think 2 dogs holding onto the same stick with their teeth while growling and pulling as hard as they can, they’re having fun.

The dog I grew up with (malamute) would fetch something once and then have you try to get it out of her mouth, which was impossible to win for a human, so you’d have to feign giving up and then she’d drop it. And if you then threw away the object again, she would give you “the look” after which she would saunter off and ignore you. So I’m pretty certain that she didn’t like fetching, but she loved wrestling and pulling.

Or the policy where they separated children from their parents and then didn’t keep track of who was family of whom, so that it was very hard and sometimes even impossible to reunite the family again in the future. Pure evil.

Reporting what questionable government sources say without enough due diligence is not the same as supporting the actions of that government. If I say that Davy was beating up Mark because Mark stole his cookie according to him, but then it turns out that there never was a cookie, then me wrongly reporting about the cookie does not mean that I ever approved of Davy beating up Mark.

I found that the NYT editorial board opposed the war in an opinion piece that was released just prior to that war, so I’m of the opinion that they opposed it. Probably as one of the few media outlets in the USA.

And I find it funny that the first and most prominent article in the pbs link is the NYT criticizing the reporting of the nyt, that’s promising at least. The smh article reads like it’s written to lay the blame for being dragged into the war with someone else, a narrative of “we were all duped, if only we could have known beforehand and we would have acted differently”, conveniently ignoring that there were enough other international sources that called out and demonstrated that the wmd evidence was very flimsy.

Do you have examples of that support? Or an article/report that lays it out.

When I looked for it, I only found the opposite; https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/opinion/saying-no-to-war.html

So I’m thinking out loud here and this is probably going to be controversial … But what if Harris took on a comedian (or an oaf) as communications director, to purposely do gaffes and create controversies, so maybe the for profit media might like her more. Basically a modern court jester.

I always thought things like Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes were very funny. A bit embarrassing for sure, but also pretty funny.

I nearly always scroll lemmy on my phone, so when I can’t find the Waldo right away, I zoom in and start panning around. But with this find Waldo picture, I can actually spot the leopard easier when not zoomed in. It just pops out for me, my cat has probably trained me too well.

I think the issue with the boredpanda picture is that the original photo was already fuzzy (long distance shot I think) and a compressed jpeg. Someone at boredpanda then cut out a too small part of that and jpeg compressed it a 2nd time, giving the leopard additional dazzle camouflage on top of it’s natural camouflage.

https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/0b31d94e3bff7d6804274d24562f62cd?width=1024

From https://www.escape.com.au/news/snow-leopard-perfectly-camouflaged-in-mountain-terrain-baffles-the-internet/news-story/bcc5e99d35292787175a13f489ebd7aa. Brought to you by reporters copying things of reddit, but at least escape didn’t butcher the image, unlike boredpanda.

The photographer’s website wouldn’t load for me, so I don’t know if it has a better quality available.

Apart from that 1 diner, she is also openly supportive of several talking points of Russia, such as saying that … nato expansion is to blame for Russia invading countries; the USA shouldn’t support Ukraine; after the euromaidan revolution neo-nazis came to power in Ukraine …

And she also has geopolitical goals of Russia that she thinks are good ideas, which she basically shares with Trump: supporting Brexit, disbanding NATO and saying that the USA should abandon smaller nations to Russian and Chinese aggression for appeasement. Worded differently of course, but that’s what it comes down too.

And she must also know that Russian agencies have massively promoted and aided her in the past. She’s more than a useful idiot for Russia imo.

This makes a lot of sense. I do indeed stick to all on lemmy and the ignorant downvoting that often happens, reminds me of what would happen in default reddit subs like worldnews. My opt in reddit subs indeed had a way better crowd. The frontpage of Lemmy didn’t used to be this way when I first joined though.

After hiding behind an adblocker for years, it’s easy to forget what a hellscape a lot of the internet is. Thanks for the reminder.

For surfing and opening links, I use Firefox + ublock origin + noscript on my pc & android devices. I still use chrome for logging into services because more and more sites depend on popups and scripts for no good reason. It works pretty well most of the time.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.

I wasn’t party to it from the start since I’m not a vegan and I didn’t see the original discussion, but from my understanding: Vegans were having a discussion on the possibilities and risks of vegan cat food, in the vegan community Lemmy world. A Lemmy world admin invaded that discussion and started using his admin/mod powers to push his unsubstantiated opinion on the subject and silence the voice of users who had another opinion. And now apparently there’s new rules being added to justify that kind of admin behaviour.

And this is also apparently not the first time that that admin abused their mod powers, since I read a few comments in this thread saying something like “oh, an admin abusing mod powers, that’s probably going to be xxx again”.

That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn’t safe either.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

Lemmy is still very left though, even when not federated with the tankiest instances. My impression is that it’s not an influx of more right leaning people, but rather that the increased popularity brought in a wider audience, which also brought in more people who are unwilling to consider or respect alternate viewpoints, no matter how well argued or founded those opinions are.

I read a post by a vegan in this thread who wanted to try a vegan diet for their cat, so they went to the vet for a plan, tried that vet approved plan, but their cat didn’t like the food so they switched back. Imo perfectly reasonable and well argumented, no risk or harm to the kitten at all, and yet massive downvotes.

I’m sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it’s not personal or any widespread resentment.

I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It’s not easy to do it well, it’s frustrating, it’s thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it’s not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.

The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn’t be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.

Self reflection is also important, it’s important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it’s a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.

Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:

• You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don’t use them as such.

• Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.

• You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it’s possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.

• The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.

• The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it’s a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you’re making it about you as a person. I really don’t think that was their intent.