@sunaurus@lemm.ee please consider this a report for defamation. I doubt that there are any pedophiles among the admins of lemmy.world, and if there are, I don’t think “I got over it” is a good response when asked about details. I think this is of a piece with this post, just a bad-faith attempt to cause strife for apparently no reason at all.

I just know that users from lemmy.world post stupid stuff to me on a pretty regular basis. I’m not aware of any lack of moderation that means that the stupid stuff goes unchecked, except from lemmy.world, as well lemmy.ml, Hexbear, and the like. The flavor is different but the distastefulness is consistent.

I saw the response from sunaurus, which matches my experience.

Maybe they detected the compromise on the secure network, and only after some forensics did they work out that it came from a compromised laptop in a neighboring building.

This is just my anecdotal experience as an outsider, but the volume of nonsense coming out of lemmy.world dwarfs anything coming out of any other server. Three separate times this week I have had groups of people from there aggressively telling me some kind of total gibberish. I thought about defederating rss.ponder.cat from them, just on general principle to encourage people to go elsewhere and improve the overall cultural quality of the network.

I can’t speak to sh.itjust.works, to me they seem fine. lemm.ee I’ve never had an issue with. lemmy.world is just a nonstop fountain of drama and ridiculousness, though. Deliberately hosting and making a home base for UniversalMonk for months, for example, I will never understand.

https://lemmy.world/post/22317681

This is exactly what I said. The claimed evidence doesn’t match the publicly available figures, and the rest is wild speculation with no particular backing. Almost as if “using your own critique” and testing extraordinary claims against known facts before absorbing them, is a good thing to do.

I’m going to return to not arguing with you, after this, but I just wanted to share that a trusted authority agrees with me exactly about how to treat the claims made your first couple of messages.

I really just don’t want to sit and argue with you.

To clarify, I strongly disagree with your linked source, and your initial message where you said the election “was likely hacked.” I looked at the data which your own source led off with, and built its whole argument off. “The key data raising concerns that a hack may have been deployed is the number of bullet ballots which exist for Trump in swing states,” they said. So I looked into those bullet ballot claims, and found that they’re contradicted by publicly available information.

You can call that rabbit-hole diving or tangential if you want. I call it critical thinking.

I mostly agree with your more recent messages, where all you are saying is that the Republicans are dishonest enough that we should be doing recounts and making sure that nothing happened. That part makes perfect sense to me. I have no disagreement with any of the computer scientists who signed the “free speech for the people” letter.

I’ve clarified what I think, probably at too much length at this point. I’m not interested in an extended argument about it or in responding to personal attacks. Have a good day.

I see very little to disagree with, factually, in this message.

You sound like because I took issue with the “bullet ballots” thing, you’re trying to engineer some disagreement with me, backing the goalposts up and then pretending I guess that I would disagree with this new stance. But yes, this mostly makes sense.

So misinformation is different from disinformation.

One of the hallmarks of disinformation is that someone knows they’re being dishonest, and trying to engineer a particular result.

One example is just being totally uninterested in someone who points out that one of your sources is literally making up numbers, and instead going HAM on the original narrative. Throw in some random ad hominem “you may be tired and defeatist” “you just want to give up and let this be over,” and continue the conversation indefinitely just repeating the original narrative any number of times to put it out there as legit point of view, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for adding a new narrative artificially into everyone’s social media.

I have no idea if you’re doing that, or if it’s just a happy accident that you’re doing what that would look like. As I said, recounts sound great. As I said, which you seem to be now acknowledging, there’s no real indication of fraud in 2024, just the fact that out of an abundance of caution, auditing the election carefully would be a great idea.

I don’t have much to disagree with out of your most recent message, and it doesn’t seem you’re interested in doing much more than repeating your narrative and sprinkling in some emotionally laden ad hominem, so I think I’ll discontinue now.

“completely wrong or made-up”

some numbers might be speculation is as far as anyone can take it, and they might not be.

I’m not saying they were speculative. I’m saying I went to Arizona’s elections web site, and the number of “bullet ballots” they say they found seems to be impossible based on what’s up there, and furthermore that the number of ballots they say would have swung the election to Harris, wouldn’t have swung the election to Harris. I think they’re just making up numbers, in addition to some other issues.

Out of curiosity, did you read the comment I linked to? I thought about copy-pasting the whole thing, but I figured linking to it would be fine.

" misinformation"

people keep using this word and “conspiracy” wrong.

I meant what I said. I’m saying that this thing, which takes data which as far as I can tell is clearly wrong, and spins a specific narrative about what “likely” happened, citing things which kind of look like reliable sources but aren’t, trying to blur the lines between a reliable source making modest claims and a wildly unreliable source making much more aggressive claims, is misinformation.

If someone was just mistaken about the election, or asking questions because they were shocked because Trump won, something like that, that’s not misinformation. You posting this factually-wrong thing, and then being totally uninterested in questions of factual accuracy about it but just kind of dissembling into “some numbers might be speculation” as if it doesn’t matter whether the “bullet ballots” thing which is the crux of their whole argument, is true or not, is misinformation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation

This sounds like misinformation to me.

Your link makes reference to two open letters to substantiate its claims:

• https://freespeechforpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/letter-to-vp-harris-111324-1.pdf
• https://substack.com/home/post/p-151721941

The first doesn’t allege any particular wrongdoing, in this election, but makes the very valid case that considering that election software was definitely compromised by the Republicans in 2022, we should out of an abundance of caution do some recounts. That makes perfect sense to me. Some amount of recounting and auditing are part of every election, but sure, doing more sounds like a really good idea.

I looked at the second already, which makes much stronger claims, and it looks like its numbers are completely wrong or made-up, and there are other reasons to think it’s pure hogwash. I touched on it here: https://ponder.cat/comment/951779

The more substantial weight of expert consensus behind the first open letter does not apply to the second, and most of what’s in your link seems to be drawing the conclusion of the second, saying that the election “was likely hacked” and constructing a pretty extensive theory for how based on, as far as I can tell, nothing that is true.

It feels to me like someone is trying to spread a particular narrative that this election was stolen by Trump, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.

The idea of privatizing things and opening up the engineering to the private sector actually makes quite a bit of sense to me. The idea of running space travel based on fixed-price bids is absolutely insane.

When things don’t go to plan, which they never do, at least one factor will have to flex: Quality (i.e. safety), mission scope/schedule, or cost. You’re already facing constant pressure for safety to be the thing that flexes, so why would you add additional pressure by assuring that people will lose money if things drag on, so safety is the only thing that can give?

My guess is that the people making these statements are part of the “adults in the room” who are in denial about what kind of operation they’re part of. I think they’re likely to be overruled and the guy is likely to stay.

Yeah, could be. The other thing I thought of was maybe there’s something about sorting by “Active” that means that my comment pushes it up into being seen by more people, and that’s why there are more comments when that happens.

It’s just odd, though. The flurry of responses that come in-between a stable “fuck the Democrats” narrative at the top of the comments, and another “fuck the Democrats” narrative at the top of the comments, aren’t really any kind of disagreement with me. It’s just other top-level comments and random conversation. I would have to be able to show a little snapshot of how the comments looked at different points in time to really put across what it is about it that makes it seem really weird to me, honestly.

• Raw emotional appeal, themes of betrayal
• Tying everything back to not voting for Democrats as the most important thing
• No real engagement with anything I said, the whole comment was just about the suspicious timing of comments. I wasn’t trying to say it’s weird that someone would blame something the Biden administration did on Biden. That part makes sense to me.
• “Democrat leaders”

Yeah, sounds about right.

It’s so weird. It’s like a mad libs that only comes up with one answer.

“US Government fucked something up again because of course they did.”

“Let’s n͟o͟t͟ ͟v͟o͟t͟e͟ ͟f͟o͟r͟ ͟D͟e͟m͟o͟c͟r͟a͟t͟s͟!”

Like yeah, Biden did some unexpectedly good stuff on the climate, and some standard Democrat stuff which definitely isn’t great. This is part of the latter. I’m not even sure it matters, since Trump will be in charge of implementing this treaty so it was DOA anyway, but regardless of that: Did you guys forget the real life Nazis are going to be in charge in a couple of months? It’s going to take a ton of work to even have elections in four years that we can not-vote-for-Democrats in, let alone some good progressive change to keep pushing the Democrats towards something resembling a decent environmental policy. Just not voting, and then sitting back all satisifed like “that oughta do it,” is such a mind-boggling strategy… and yet it’s the one that always gets consistent airplay.

Turning against the corporate Democrats, because their environmental policies are bad, will not get them replaced by something better. Turning against the corporate Democrats will probably result in one-party rule by the Republicans for a generation, with horrors environmental and domestic the likes of which no one of this generation has witnessed.

I would also apply that exact same thing to the breed of Nancy Pelosi Democrats that wants to hang the progressive wing of the party out to dry. It seems like after a few days of panic after the election, everyone forgot what we’re in for. We need allies at this stage. Or we will all hang separately, and like that.

Everyone’s been ignoring it and discouraging dissent against them on Lemmy

This narrative that “everyone” on Lemmy loves the Democrats is very weird. You can deal head-on with what I’m saying, it is fine, you don’t need to agree with me. But the “Democrats aren’t great” consensus on Lemmy is not exactly a persecuted minority, please don’t try to introduce a narrative that they are.

I noticed something weird about the comments here.

20 minutes after the post, treefrog posted his comment defining a “Fuck the Democrats … I’m done voting for them” narrative. I’ve noticed that a lot of topics on Lemmy get tied back to not voting for the Democrats.

There then followed about an hour of, basically, silence, with that “Fuck the Democrats” comment as the top comment. Then I posted my response, disagreeing with treefrog.

After that, the next hour or so featured, not 0 comments like the previous hour, but 4 different comments. The only comments that got made, outside of my discussion with treefrog, were:

• A top-level comment saying “Fuck the Biden administration” which took over the comment top spot
• Other replies to treefrog’s top level comment, pushing my response down

The total result is that the top two comments say “Fuck the Biden administration” and “Fuck the Democrats”, and then there’s general less focused conversation after that. The narrative is back, in these comments, that the right response to this is not to vote for the Democrats.

Maybe this sounds like conspiracy theory rock, but I’ve noticed this pattern before, where there’s a “fuck the Democrats” narrative in the top comments, with the comments otherwise being quiet, and if something changes that narrative among the top comments, there’s a little flurry of activity until the narrative is reestablished, and then things quiet down again.

Maybe I’m nuts. It definitely was notable to me, though. Especially given the weirdness of reacting to this particular story by instantly reaching for “Let’s not vote for Democrats anymore!” as the solution to environmental problems. Like… out of all the strategies or reactions you could have, that’s the first one that comes to mind?

Edit: Clarifications

Edit 2: The person who reported this for “incivility”… lol.

You mentioned a lot of strategies we can use to fight for what we want, and then said that none of those will work.

No, I said all of those will work, to some degree. Even refusing to vote within a targeted framework, where you’re demanding certain concessions in exchange for your vote as part of an organized coalition, putting effective pressure on the party to make specific changes, is a pretty good strategy. It’s how some key environmental legislation has gotten passed in decades past.

Letting Democrats know that they can’t buy my vote with corporate campaign donations, is me fighting for what I want.

In exactly the same way that refusing to touch the steering wheel until the car starts going a better direction is fighting not to crash the car.

Advocate for environmental groups? Give grief to the Democratic party, try to extract concessions from them, since they can at least be bargained with on environmental issues, where the Republicans literally want to have the environmental groups shot by the National Guard? Support particular independent candidates, inside or outside the Democratic party? Advocate for voting reform that gives third parties a realistic chance, to put pressure on the Democrats?

Nope. It’s just “Let’s do the Republicans.” In the current system, that’s what will happen if you don’t vote for Democrats. Changing that system sounds great, but disengaging entirely isn’t the way to do that.

At a broad foundational level, the American system is based on this: Concentrations of money and power will always attract corruption and tyranny. Always. It’s just how government works. The Democrats are like that, the Republicans are like that. The Green Party is too. They pretty much instantly folded to malign influence, before they even really got started, and now they’re a tragic explicit spoiler candidate puppet that isn’t even making a convincing pretense of environmental progress as the goal. Even if your goal could succeed completely, and starving the Democrats could make them wither and get replaced by one-party Republican rule, and then something better arose in their place, without the generation-spanning catastrophe that would be that one-party Republican rule… whatever replaced them, would still be open to corruption.

There is a way to make progress. You have to fight for what you actually want. It’s not easy. But the strategy of simply refusing to engage with the power-brokerage system, because the people currently in charge of it are bad people, brings broad smiles to the faces of all those corrupt Democrats who are annoyed they had to pass a little bit of climate change legislation and corporate tax increases under Biden. They love hearing that you’re getting out of caring about politics. It means they can start to cater more to their core constituency. And they’ll be fine, whether the Democratic Party does an inch to benefit the working class or not, or even if it stays around or not.

It’s only the people in Washington who are trying to work for working people or the environment who will be hurt by your strategy.

“My babysitter has clearly been drinking. That’s not ideal. I think I’ll let this serial killer watch the kids for a while, instead.”