*James Donald Bowman

How do you see a lack of something?

In regards to Trump, by measuring it relative to the critiques of other liberals, especially when they are in a race for the US presidency.

If there’s more criticism of Dems, it’s because opposition to Trump is already consensus, so there isn’t really more to say about the matter, where as people on Lemmy still have some support for the Dems.

Extremely well said, and a good point. I’m not sure it explains everything, but it’s something I should definitely consider.

So stop trying to split hairs and pretend that you’re not accusing us of being pro-Trump and say it to my face.

I’m not sure how I can be more clear. I will try a more direct, succinct approach. I AM NOT ACCUSING YOU (OR ML) OF BEING PRO-TRUMP. I’m saying I observed a lack of anti-Trump sentiment in the run up to the election RELATIVE to the anti-Harris rhetoric. That is all. Lack of “anti” sentiment DOES NOT EQUAL “pro” sentiment.

No, this isn’t what I’m saying. Please read what I said again.

Apologies for misrepresenting you. That’s why I tried to remove the imperfect analogy and talk actual facts.

What I’m saying is that our opposition to Trump is already understood so there’s not really a lot of reason to just reiterate it over and over, with everyone agreeing with each other.

That’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint. What I don’t understand, then, is that MLs opposition to Biden and Harris were also understood, yet it was reiterated again and again.

Did you now? I’d love to see a link to that. My standard is, “If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.”

Being able to remember exactly which approximately 7 month old post it was and dredge up the exact comment is a tall order. I don’t bookmark this stuff to use as gotchas months later. It probably involved a couple of you big dogs like brain or flyingsquid.

This has all gotten wildly off base, though. This is my only claim: In the run-up to the US election, I observed a lack of anti-Trump sentiment in the run up to the election relative to the anti-Harris rhetoric. It was extremely frustrating then as those of us that had to deal with his first term saw the danger and now as I have to deal with these fascists dismantling my country.

Now, you can claim I’m full of shit, that I’m wrong, that there was exactly as much anti-Trump rhetoric as anti-Biden/Harris, that I moved the goalposts by not initially stating this was months ago (fair), but that is what I saw and why I left. Obviously, .world has it’s own issues, but I’ve spent entirely too long on this site already.

The accusation that you’re trying to get people to believe is that .ml gave preferential treatment to Trump with the intent of helping him to win and cause instability.

Edit: I just reread this part and should address it.

The accusation that you’re trying to get people to believe is that .ml gave preferential treatment to Trump with the intent of helping him to win and cause instability.

You’re correct. I’ve posited a couple theories trying to make sense of the imbalance of critiques and that is one of them. I have no proof of that and should just stick to the facts. Thanks for pointing that out.

I’m not sure if you meant to reply to me. I never said anything about Tankies, although I can see how offering my observations as a small critique of .ml could be seen as tacitly agreeing with the OP.

First of all, I’m sorry you left ml because of external pressure. That’s not right or fair. I guess there’s some truth in all the leftist infighting memes.

I agree with practically everything you said, particularly the comparison between ‘tankie’ and ‘woke’. I don’t utilize any blocking, though, because I like to be open to all viewpoints.

I hate crawling someone’s history, but since you asked I did take a look. It’s great to see that kind of content. I should have been more specific, but my .ml observations are older than your history (mainly the run-up to the US election). So, admittedly, I’m a bit guilty of “A lot of assumptions about folks just for being members of .ml” since I haven’t been there in months.

Perhaps. I’m smart enough to know that, like everyone else, I can be fucking stupid sometimes.

I was deliberate to use the word assumed, because it was just based on a hunch. That hunch, however, was predicated on observations of how nothing critical could ever be said of Russia.

For example, I was confused about how everyone was (rightly) denouncing the invasion of Palestine, but not the invasion of Ukraine. The most explicit reason I ever received was, apparently, Ukraine is just chock full of Nazis and Putin is simply liberating the innocent Ukrainians. I know there is a lot of history to distill and this is not the best forum for it. It just seems like such a waste of lives on all sides.

So, it stands to reason since ml is reticent to criticize anything about Russia and I see a lack of criticism about Trump (who is buddy buddy with Putin), that may be the cause.

I know your main shtick is to be incendiary, but I just thought I would expand on my reasoning just in case you wanted to have a human conversation.

Right. So you said that the reason that you didn’t see anti-Trump content on .ml is because he’s pro-Putin, but how could I possibly interpret that as you claiming that .ml was pro-Trump?

Because you became instantly defensive and jumped to a conclusion. I get it. There are a lot of people that are rabidly against ml. I’m offering one small critique based on my observations there. One more time, just to be clear, I saw a ton of anti-Biden/Harris chatter and practically zero anti-Trump. This does not mean ml is pro-Trump. I am not claiming and never claimed ml is pro-Trump. I’m not saying that I saw pro-Trump content. It was just this weird black hole of direct criticism surrounding him. Now, this was all in the lead up to the US election, so I’m happy to see that perhaps this has changed (based on your links).

It’s not a “false-equivalence.” You can’t just drop “false-equivalence” and dismiss any comparison you don’t like, you have to actually explain why it isn’t equivalent.

Sorry, I thought it was fairly obvious. I was speaking about specific anti-Biden/Harris vs anti-Trump content. You tried to generalize it back to puppy murder. Those two things are not equivalent. Let’s ditch the analogy. If I understand you correctly, you are saying it’s good enough to criticize the bad actions the US is taking without having to denounce each and every bad actor and I mostly agree. What I’m saying is I saw specific (well-deserved) criticisms of, for example, how terrible Harris would for Palestine, but most brushed aside comments about how bad Trump would be. I saw people trying to get commentors to say one bad thing about Trump and they just wouldn’t do it. I mean, at that point, it’s dance monkey dance so I can understand how they would dig in their heels.

I really wanted to like it there and I think I’ll give it another shot. It just seemed, at least during the election, the point was more to destabilize than to actually further leftist ideals.

Thanks for the links. THAT is something actually substantive that goes against the narrative in the OP. I’ll try to explain the errors in your interpretation and expand on the false-equivalence claim tomorrow.

Wow…came out awfully aggressive there (which I guess is part of why ml gets such hate). I’m more than willing to admit I’m wrong. I’m just sharing my experiences in the ml community. Lots of good stuff going on there, but there’s definitely some issues. I’ve seen you a lot and I know you like to pick fights, but I’m mostly on your side. All I said was I never really saw any explicit anti-Trump sentiment. The absence of it is just weird. You cherry-picked a couple lines and never addressed that observation.

You attempted to discredit my claim (with no proof), then said I missed the point of the analogy (with a terrible false-equivalence).

You attacked the idea that ml is pro-Trump (which I never claimed).

Then you brought out the tired liberal brianrot line, assuming incorrectly that I am a liberal. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so fucking wrong.

If you want to engage in good faith, I’m here. I think you’re a pretty smart dude, but ignoring some of the problems of the ml community doesn’t help it grow and affect more good.

P.S. I haven’t been on ml in a few months. If there are any anti-Trump posts, I would love to read them. I could be way off base here.

I think that’s kind of the point. In all my time on .ml, I saw daily posts and comments that were anti-Harris/Biden (and for very good reason). I never saw one that was explicitly anti-Trump. I assumed because he is very pro-Putin.

So, to make your analogy more accurate, it’s like everyone focusing on puppy-murder #1 and ignoring puppy, cat and goldfish murderer #2 because he also likes my sports team.

Like, it’s super easy… Fuck Biden because he allowed Palestinian genocide, but fuck Trump too because he has advocated for worse. I rarely, if ever, saw the latter on .ml.

Unless things have gotten better for the Palestinians since he took office. It doesn’t seem to be the case, but I sincerely hope so.

Somebody said Mierdas

I know it’s capitalized, but I read it as a generalization like Band-Aid, Frisbee, or Chapstick. Most people aren’t referring to only the name brand versions. Of course, maybe I’m wrong and I missed out on my perfect zero.

Ones mind boggles.

Not supporting this dude, but I watched the whole video and he never once said it would be better if everyone got measles. Maybe I missed it; if so, please correct me. He mentioned a waning effect with the vaccine vs full-blown infection, which I highly doubt is accurate (I’ll research it later), but that’s a massive stretch to get to the headline. He even recommended vaccines and said they will be available for free to anyone that needs them. I’ve gotten a little lazy in fact checking left leaning stuff because I always felt it was a little more trustworthy. I’m just starting to wonder how much I’ve been blindly accepting because it conforms to my biases.

I always liked this one.