This in spades. Just like oligarchs’s plan for the inevitable collapse of the financialised global capitalism that has made them filthy rich, is to build billion dollar bunkers and plan to hide in them while everyone else starves and fights over the wreckage.

There are always two ways to deal with a general or public problem. One is to go out and do something, the other is to hide your head under the blankie and try to make sure it does not touch you personally, or your family. The US has been valorising and praising cowardice and selfishness for so long that they now genuinely accept them as virtues…

That’s like… that’s like an open admission that they plan to do corrupt things.

I mean imagine if your contractor said, “Well, I’d like to do this job for you but I want you to agree that you don’t need a quote and you won’t hire an inspector to check my work.” Or if your dealer at a casino said “Let me just deal the hands out behind this screen here where you can’t see what I’m doing, trust me bro.”

Transparency is the only thing that keeps politicians or business people honest.

When they openly say they don’t want transparency, they are telling us that they plan to be dishonest. It’s that simple.

Basically, the Likudnik government in Israel is a big welfare teat for the weapons industries. We the taxpayers see our money taken not to improve living conditions at home directly, but to subsidise selected harmful (weapons-making) industries by way of “aid to Israel”. Now, this helps the people who own those industries and are invested in them and work for them, but it doesn’t help the rest of us any — not like it would if it were invested in our health care system, or schools, libraries, public transit, carbon reduction.

Do we have no mechanism for suppressing duplicate posts? Because this one is in my feed 3x in rapid succession. I mean, the Tyee is great and I support them, and this is an important story, and white nationalists are a security threat everywhere. But I don’t need to see this same headline 3 times in a row…

If this is yet another attack on our public health system, I gotta say that you meet with some authoritarian doctors who minimize or dismiss (particularly female) patients’ concerns in any medical system. At least in the Canadian system you aren’t also dealing with some non credentialled bean counter at the insurance office preventing your doctor from prescribing the drugs or procedures you need. A system that is geared to maximizing profits for shareholders rather than maximizing best outcomes for patients is always gonna be more broken than one whose focus is on delivering health care for everyone.

Not that we couldn’t improve our Canadian health care system, but I have experienced both and believe me, unless you’re rich in the US you also experience long wait times. With the added fun of big co-payments and/or lifelong debt if anything major happens. I lived in the US for about 45 years and thankfully had no really major health issues — despite having a good job and reasonable insurance I would have had my savings pretty much torpedoed if I’d had any major operation requiring hospital stay.

In the US system when you visit a clinic because you’re in pain or have scary symptoms, basically the first paperwork you’re presented with is ‘how are you going to pay for this?” They want proof of ability to pay. The Canadian system felt like heaven by comparison. I’m sure if you’re filthy rich then the US system is more attractive because you can just buy your way to the front of the line and command the time of experts (even if you don’t really need the top tier medicos for your personal problem, you can still hire them). But if you’re just a regular person, you’re much better off in say BC. Alberta, I dunno what to say, y’all seem to be trying to become a satrapy of the US… what’s with that?

But most of the grotesquely wealthy people have been made so morally grotesque by their wealth (or only acquired it by being so) that they almost all seem to be on the other side, bankrolling climate denial and soothing media pabulum. Where are the multi billionaire good guys, the eccentric oligarchs who actually want everyone’s kids to have a decent future?

Whose word do we have that they are “drug” boats? It’s grossly irresponsible for the headline to be written with that presumption.

I often think of an alternative timeline in which the manufacturers of slide rules spent fortunes demonising and smearing the pocket calculator… or the barons of the great hemp, cordage, and sailmaking firms tried to hold back the incursion of internal combustion engines into the shipping business.

That is just how futile and stupid this seems to me.

I guess the difference is that no other industry has ever been so huge, so central, so heavily subsidized by governments, so deeply infiltrated into governments. The fossil fuel industry is unique in human history in its reach, power, and resistance to change.

Well if .ml refers to Marxist-Leninists then I wouldn’t be too surprised if there are tankies present. It continues to puzzle me how soi-distant commies can be rooting for oligarchy as implemented by Putin, but “there’s nowt so queer as folk…”

I do not use VPN. I am a subscriber to CityWest fibre optic net in BC, and I don’t know for sure if my contract includes a distinct IP address. Your theory about randomly getting an IP address that has been used previously for naughty stuff on Reddit seems plausible. I have no idea how I would verify it.

It seems odd that any top-level, site-wide mod would take personal offence at one particular post from one particular user out of however many million on Reddit. You would think they would have bigger fish to fry and fires to put out, if you’ll forgive an unfortunately mixed metaphor.

The interesting thing of course is that if this thing is systematic — if Reddit is doing sitewide permabans on users who talk sh*t about the present US regime, because Spez is running scared like the other techbros — it’s unlikely to become a news story because none of those people will be able to come back to a Reddit group to discuss what happened to them. I do seem to detect a bit of a pattern in the responses thus far to my maiden post (and subsequent comments on other ban stories), a pattern that would be newsworthy if it is real :-). but since Reddit is one of the prime aggregators of internet news and trends, it’s unlikely to get any attention since we are all banned from Reddit. Bluesky is not topic oriented, afaik — it’s person-oriented. I have not yet checked out piefed.

Yeah, Reddit was getting pretty bad for attempted gamification — “congratulations, you’re on a 13 day posting streak! Keep it up!” And so on. Very insulting to the intelligence.

I did rather like awards until they were taken away. It was nice to be able to give something (even of only virtual value) to someone whose post or comment I really appreciated. And it was nice to get that kind of appreciation in return if I wrote something that was helpful or enlightening to someone else.

But the whole karma score thing… very leaderboardish.

I think the problem with Reddit is that its essential governance model is authoritarian not democratic.

Mods have absolute power and there is no due process, evidentiary standards, jury of peers, outside review, ombudsman office, etc.

Basically, suppose some users conspire to dogpile on you and file N complaints against you w/in a certain window… you get auto banned. If a tetchy mod doesn’t like something you commented, they can ban you from their sub on a whim. There’s not much in the way of an appeal process.

So it’s a bit like an authoritarian state where you can be arrested due to anonymous denunciation, or because the local chief of police doesn’t like you, and you’ve got no Miranda rights, there’s no habeas corpus etc. There’s no investigation or disclosure or trial process. If the mods of a sub are reasonable and ethical human beings, and you were unfairly banned, you can talk to them and get reinstated. But if the mods are arbitrary and capricious in their power, you’re without recourse. There’s no mechanism by which other members of the sub can vote on whether the mods were right or wrong to kick you out, for example.

I continue to think moderation is important and can’t be dispensed with altogether. No normal person really wants to spend their time in a hellhole of screamed insults, obscene threats, hate speech, legions of stupid bots etc (like the cesspit that Xitter has become, yikes). But I think it should be modelled a lot more on law enforcement IRL, with similar rules and guidelines for protecting civil rights and ensuring transparency and some limits on the power of individuals in authority.

I actually don’t mind fairly strict moderation, as I’m not a big fan of insults, rudeness, racial/sexual slurs, etc and am quite happy to live without them. But I don’t like mysterious bans with nonsensical “explanations” such as I just experienced. If I’m gonna get a ban I want to see my own words quoted back at me, with an explanation of how they violated policy. It’s a fair cop if I did in fact break the rules for the sub or the site. But telling me my “other account(s)” are breaking rules, when I have no fkn other accounts, is just infuriating.

I am new here (just got the dreaded permaban after 8 years on Reddit and 660K karma). Do I have to create separate Lemmy identities on the different servers or can I use my original Lemmy.world identity to participate in all groups everywhere? I love the fediverse model, conceptually, and it seems like the logical next step (I abandoned google in favour of proton about a year ago, now it looks like Reddit has pushed me out the door so I’m joining the Lemmyngs :-))

I had 660K karma when I was excommunicated (apparently by robots) from Reddit last week. It happened shortly after I said something (I can’t even remember what) critical and angry about the US bombing Iran. I don’t think it was anything particularly fiery or profane, even. I had no sense of “this is risky to post” when I wrote the comment.

The ban explanation made no sense, it claimed that it was because of “repeated rule violations by your other account(s)” — I have no other accounts, I’ve had only the one Reddit account for 8 years. So the ban justification was bogus.

I’m beginning to wonder if Spez has got a directive to deplatform all the anti-war, anti-Bibi, anti-Trump voices from Reddit. That’s seems paranoid, but it would make sense to kick out the higher-karma accounts with followers first. It’s hard for me to come up with any other explanation… I’m seriously puzzled and of course, I can’t go back to Reddit to discuss it!

When did this happen?

I’ve participated loudly in Reddit subs focused on antifascism, anti-ICE, left activism, and recently anti-Iran-bombing discussion. I just got permabanned about a week ago with a very weird nonsensical justification, “rule violations by your other account(s)”. I have no other accounts, I’ve only ever had one Reddit account for the last 8 years. I had 660K karma at the time of the ban and about 70 followers. I earned the karma the hard way, it was comment karma over many thousands of comments. Not a karma farmer.

Is there something going on? Is Spez under orders to get rid of antifascist voices? Or am I reading too much paranoia into what might just be really sloppy automod software with no human oversight to rectify errors?

Have you any idea why you were “awarded” a permaban?

This just happened to me and I’m clueless. The ban message (which came almost 2 days later) said that it was because of “repeated rule violations by your other account(s)” but since I have no other accounts this was incredibly confusing.

8 year Reddit veteran with 660K karma, so I’m really baffled.