Blackbeard

Blackbeard , 16 hours ago

Public polling is showing that Harris would get a big boost in voter support if she and Biden went for a weapons embargo.

Source?

Blackbeard , 4 hours ago

Thank you.

Blackbeard , 6 days ago

The Green party was represented at the Supreme Court by Jay Sekulow, a Trump ally who was part of the president’s legal team during his first impeachment trial.

Yeah sure, it’s the Democrats who are being dubious here…

Blackbeard , 5 days ago

…you want to use State power to bar a US citizen from running for office because she appeared in a photo, but you’re accusing us of being arbitrary and authoritarian?

Blackbeard , 5 days ago

The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency appeal from Nevada’s Green Party seeking to include presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in the battleground state.

Blackbeard , 6 days ago

The party doesn’t care about him, specifically. His polling has been under water for months, and anyone who’s not utterly delusional knows he’s about to get thumped by Stein. They’re now worried that if he stays in the race over the next month and a half, he will continue to be a lightning rod for Democratic attacks, especially on abortion, and that’ll continue to dampen Trump’s messaging. Still not convinced NC could go blue, but if it does, Robinson will be hugely responsible for it. He’s a fucking moron who makes Trump look sane and stable.

Blackbeard , 6 days ago

He’s term limited.

Blackbeard , 11 days ago

rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-brin…

Blackbeard , 11 days ago

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

Blackbeard , 11 days ago

I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Blackbeard , 15 days ago (edited 15 days ago)

I heard, “This…motherfu-- former president.”

Blackbeard , 16 days ago

Removing for editorializing the title, and locked due to multiple violations of Lemmy’s ToS.

Blackbeard , 21 days ago

Wait, was he the good guy with a gun or the bad guy with a gun?

Blackbeard , 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

…which we just did.

Edit: Downvoted for removing the bot like people asked. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

We do. Admins found dozens of downvote alts and nuked them at the same time. Seems folks aren’t content to just state their opinion and leave it at that, and instead they feel compelled to overwhelm the system to give the illusion of uniformity.

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

First, admins have pointed out that dozens of accounts (now banned) were being used to artificially boost certain kinds of feedback and bury others, so if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid. Those could simply have been the comments those alts decided they wanted to push to the top, to make their point.

Second, we’re volunteers who have a few hours set aside each day to open a discussion into things that need to be updated or changed, and the vitriol that’s been hurled at us is disproportionate compared to the ostensible “damage” being done by a single automated script. One moderator threatened to resign over the hate that’s been blasted into their face. It took us less than two weeks to post a request for feedback, and then to act on that feedback. You (the disapprovers) all got exactly what you wanted. Pardon me for being blunt, but what the hell else are you expecting from us?

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

We have been discussing the content of that feedback for about a week now, both with the broader moderator/admin community and within this team, and since most of us aren’t online at the same time (we have jobs) it takes a few days for the whole team to see and respond to opinions. Given that many of us disagreed on the best path forward, we had to come to a workable consensus. We have now acted on that feedback in accordance with the wishes of the community, so your claim that we had no intention to do so is significantly off the mark.

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

I’m telling you that the way you’re reading the comments has no bearing on what was actually happening behind the scenes.

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

You’re taking the wrong lesson from these findings.

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

I didn’t claim there was no consensus, or that “all” the downvotes were sockpuppets. We have evidence that some of them were, which makes distilling the overall sentiment pretty difficult.

Blackbeard , 26 days ago

Yes, it is personal. The fact that one mod almost resigned over this means that whether or not people intended for it to be, the criticism was in some cases very personal. And we have evidence that , which makes our job more difficult because there’s no way to tell how many of those comments were upvoted because many people agreed with them, versus a few people agreeing with them so intensely that they were willing to break the rules to prove their point. At the end of the day, people gave feedback, we reviewed it, and the bot is gone. We didn’t ask for it to be created, had no role in coding it, didn’t ask for it to be rolled out, didn’t turn it on, couldn’t change it, couldn’t turn it off, and gave the admins time to try their experiment while we determined whether or not it made sense for the community. It wasn’t our bot.

Blackbeard , 26 days ago

Maybe. Nothing has been developed yet, so everything is very much up in the air.

Blackbeard , 26 days ago

Like I explained to you yesterday, none of this feedback has been ignored. We took 12 days to review it, and we acted accordingly.

Blackbeard , 26 days ago

1. Thank you. I don’t have that kind of audit authority and all we were told is that vote manipulation was occurring. We’d love to have you join the team if you’d like to help.
2. We took all of the feedback seriously because the bot is gone. I’m really not sure why people keep pretending like we haven’t already acted on it.
3. That you’d call this “spreading FUD” or"bad faith" is, frankly, insulting. I can only act on the information I have. In the end, I said that manipulation made assessing the situation difficult, but we still followed through accordingly. We are volunteering our time, and you lying about our intentions isn’t helping either.

I only have a few hours per day to devote to this. If you think you can do better, then step up.

Blackbeard , 26 days ago

or that votes on upvoted comments ought to be ignored because of vote manipulation

No one on the mod team said that. If you’re going to appeal that we be honest in our engagement, the least you can do is be honest in yours.

Blackbeard , 25 days ago

No, in this community. We were told that the admins found a vote manipulation ring in our threads. I don’t have admin level access, so I have no idea where they voted for what.

Blackbeard , 25 days ago

Yes, cutting a snippet out of a sentence with broader context is a classic form of bad faith argumentation:

if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid.

The “if” conditional is pretty fundamental in that sentence. To cut it out and then paraphrase it to mean something it doesn’t is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Blackbeard , 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago)

Yeah, we were told they disrupted a downvote ring. I have no fucking idea where those accounts voted, except that we took vote totals with a grain of salt because we were in the dark. I’m frankly used to being bombarded with downvotes every time i comment in this community (edit: One person went out of their way to downvote each of my last 7 comments, for example.). So in my eyes, votes were (and continue to be) compromised, and we were informed about the ring while we were deliberating bot feedback. I tried to connect the dots with incomplete information because I’m not an admin. What else are you looking for here?

Blackbeard , 25 days ago

Yes it does.

Blackbeard , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

I argued against the bot for a week. I hated the damn thing, and I pointed to the negative feedback as evidence in my discussions. I also held off on making sweeping assessments or making any rushed decisions because a vote manipulation ring was simultaneously uncovered, and we had no idea how deep the manipulation went. Could the feedback have been manipulated? No idea! Should we go by votes only? No idea!

I took the time to let the team read the feedback and discuss the costs and benefits, and in the end the votes were only part of the picture. Another part is the visceral commitment of a vocal minority to overwhelming the community with commentary (and reports) to such an extent that the people who are calm and supportive get drowned out and downvoted, along with anyone who happens to agree with them. Not entirely sure those folks have committed as much energy to downvoting every critical comment as was the case on the other side though.

The team took 12 days to work through disagreements (there were many) so we could come to a consensus position, and lo and behold, the bot is gone. The fact that the people who want the bot gone feel like they’re being dismissed is flabbergasting to me. It’s gone. Mission accomplished!

Blackbeard , 29 days ago

Removed for using the slur “retard”, please edit in another adjective so I can re-approve your comment.

Blackbeard , 29 days ago

Ah, noted for next time. Thanks for your patience.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

Isn’t that what the bipartisan bill that Trump killed was intended to do?

From what I know it included more money for detention beds, immigration judges+staff, asylum officers, lawyers for unaccompanied minors, and border cities, plus expedited work permits for folks already in the system, allowance for asylum officers to close out a claim rather than going through immigration courts, 250,000 new work visas, work authorization to the children and spouses of people who have H-1B visas, and also work eligibility for immigrants awaiting visas if they have a U.S. citizen spouse or fiancé or if their parent is the spouse or fiancé of a U.S. citizen, as well as workers who have claimed asylum but who have not yet had a hearing.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

That’s what the bipartisan border bill tried to do. Trump killed it.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

I’m highly skeptical that anyone in the GOP would a) have trouble crafting a campaign message that trashes an ostensibly “clean” bill or b) lose any support over a vote either way. Anyone who cares about abortion or voting rights is already voting blue, and anyone who’s voting red at this point won’t care about this procedural tactic. We’ve been hammering Dems to get GOP votes “on the record” for decades, and it hasn’t really been the factor that moved the needle in any meaningful way.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

You literally just moved the goalposts. First it’s about putting the GOP on the record, and now it’s about motivating voters? Who exactly are you catering to with that tactic? And do you have proof it does either? I’ve never seen any.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

You…you think Democratic voters need Republicans to vote against abortion rights to justify going to the polls? What kind of half-baked logic is that?

Also I asked for evidence it works that way. Got any?

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

So no then?

Blackbeard , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Evidence should be easy to find if the effect is as obvious as you suggest, no?

edit: Look, as charming as this back-and-forth is, I’d like to present evidence to the contrary. This kind of gesture doesn’t register at all with voters, and makes zero difference in their motivation to vote, because Democrats tried to codify abortion rights into federal law in 1989, 1993, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 and folks like you are still clamoring for them to “just do something”. If they open the floor for another inevitably doomed bill and do more “something”, people will still bitch and moan that they’re not doing anything, just like they always have.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

We cannot take action on content that is not reported. I had to search through the context to find this one.

Blackbeard , 28 days ago

lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

Please show more kindness in the future.

Blackbeard , 28 days ago

lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

Blackbeard , 28 days ago

lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

Blackbeard , 28 days ago

lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

Blackbeard , 28 days ago

lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true

Blackbeard , 27 days ago

We’re not developing anything for market and had no role in creating or implementing the bot. Also we have full time jobs, are volunteering our time, and had to convene to review the pros and cons. If you think you can run things more smoothly, you are welcome to join the team and contribute time and energy to the effort. Don’t expect users to show any gratitude though.

Blackbeard , 1 month ago

Been focusing on this and another small patch for about 2 years. The up front work was a bear, just to get rid of the grass down to the root (those fuckers are DEEP) and get all the plants established during the right seasons. I’ve also installed a drip irrigation system that can compensate for some of our really dry periods during summer, which took a full weekend. Once the plants are in and mulch is down, really the only maintenance is keeping bermuda and sedge from popping back up. The first year required extensive weeding every month or two, but the second year has required very little because most of the soil is totally shaded out. It kinda supports itself now. My only problem at this stage is that the liriope border was pre-existing, so bermuda still spills out from existing root stock from that area, which means I have to more aggressively weed/trim that border. I benefit from the walkway being a natural barrier for encroachment from the rest of the lawn, but it’ll still take another year or two before the bermuda is totally neutralized.