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…

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.

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 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.