I’m discussing the specific choice of what rhetoric they decide to use, not why they are using it. Why they are using it is fairly obvious at this point.

There are many different lines, arguments, whatever that could be employed, though. By paying attention to which ones are specifically chosen, you can learn more about their target audience, which is larger than simply fans of a white, ultra-nationalist ethno-state. Hence their need to continue to use rationalizations like this, instead of being forthright about their intentions.

This one in particular surprised me, as I didn’t foresee it. They’re usually more predictable than that.

It was kind of inevitable, unfortunately. After we impeach one of them for even legitimate wrongdoing, if they do not counter-impeach us, they lose perceived legitimacy, which weakens them.

They had no other strategically sound moves, when you consider their goal of hanging onto power regardless of the wishes of the voting public.

That’s a clever line of attack, but having an opinion does not constitute a conflict of interest. Otherwise there would be a whole shit-ton of recusal happening every day.

A conflict of interest usually involves some form of monetary compensation or other fiscal benefit.

It’s kinda hard to wrap your brain around sometimes, but bad people can be patriots too. When you have a proper, full-scale war going on, these people become a resource like any other.

Anti-corruption is great during peace time. Necessary, even. But it cannot always be the top priority in all situations, that’s just not practical.

I would even argue that if you’re not continually adjusting your priorities as situations develop, you’re not a very good leader. So yeah, buy his guns now. Throw him in prison later. Can even confiscate back some of the money you paid. You have to win first though.

… they can’t find someone to come up with trivia questions worded in reverse word order? That’s really not that hard.

Ooh! They should use ChatGPT!

Yeah, all the time. It’s the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don’t have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don’t like them, but at least they’re engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people’s buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That’s an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don’t bother voting while I’m there, so I answered inaccurately. I’m just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don’t downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it’s probably not a troll, I don’t downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don’t downvote through people’s comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don’t upvote very often either, since I’m reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

This comment is hilarious, and it being downvoted is sad.

I mean, yeah, that’s pretty much what they do, isn’t it?

If either of those figures is actually accurate from an end-user standpoint, then the entire downtime must be coming during my primary periods of usage.

Intelligent is where it goes wrong. They only claim to like intelligence, because that sounds good to claim. They’re actually extremely anti-intellectual in basically every way you can be. Real jocks vs nerds stuff, for people who never outgrew a HS mentality.

I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There’s an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different “flavors” that combine to create more complex examples.

It’s the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You “look at it” first. Almost without fail.

No, salt would probably not be an effective method. If you’re going for the hydrophilic method like that, you’re better off using honey, which was used at several different spots throughout history as a wound dressing.

While we can do much better nowadays, it does have some anti-microbial properties and could definitely be better than nothing.

If all you have is salt, you could try making a saturated saltwater solution and using that, but it’s not going to be as effective. These are not particularly good methods in general, as there are many, many pathogens that can resist them in a wide variety of ways. (like, viruses not necessarily needing water to still exist, for instance)

It’s been this way for weeks, actually. I haven’t seen a graph of the uptime, but I’m sure one would look extremely ugly, based on my own user experience.

This right here is an alt, and despite the fact that I don’t prefer to comment from it, since I won’t necessarily check in soon to see replies, it’s seeing some heavy use.

The attacks a few weeks ago weren’t a one-off, they never stopped. It seems down maybe half the time or so?

One of the many ways we (all of Lemmy) are not quite ready for the mainstream yet, we still have basic technical/security issues to resolve. Soon, though.

I’m not him, but now that I think about it, there is a tendency for many people to prefer the more generalized term.

Where scientists don’t tend to use the word scientist as much, I can’t recall ever seeing the term in a journal article for instance. (I don’t read many, but I’ll read an abstract here and there) I’m not sure why. I expect it’s some categorization thing, where not all scientists perform research, so researcher is the more precise term. I’m just guessing as to the reason though, I do not have a PhD.

Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

How do they change their innate intelligence? We’re not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?

We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone’s capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.

I agree, the cross-posting gets annoying. Why do people insist that everyone who is interested in a certain topic needs to participate in their post, so it has to go on every community?

People did not do that on reddit. They just made one post and waited for interaction.

We’re getting there, still in the very early stages here. One thing I’ve noticed is how extremely techy the initial community here was, something I personally collided with like a bit of a wrecking ball. People in general, not just techy people, tend to assume others will approach things similarly to how they naturally do. So they don’t necessarily always see problems that others might stumble over, ahead of time.

Now that we’ve started growing more rapidly, these problems of scale, where they now have to anticipate problems they did not have to anticipate before, all are coming due. So, growing pains.

This is why I have not been inviting people to Lemmy yet, I’ve been waiting until it’s more polished for the mainstream. It’s also why the graph is trending down. We’re literally not ready yet for the mainstream, in many, many different ways.

Also useful to remember, we’re only done getting big growth spikes if spez is done pissing off reddit. I doubt he is.

Why does the purpose the data was collected for matter? Either the data is suitable or not. The motive of the pollsters who gathered it is irrelevant, isn’t it?

Correct, if you only use Lemmy, you would not need to worry. But most people still use google products.

He types in all-caps exclusively now.