I mean it’s definitely both, but the fashy admins were the last straw.

Yep, entirely fair. S’why I left.

I’m not complaining about people leaving, just saying the bots are not the biggest problem.

That’s fair, it just seems like that if they’re going down the list of problems looking for things they can do to make reddit a better place, it doesn’t make sense to not start at the top.

Yeah it’s definitely the bots and not the fashy admins that drove me away from reddit.

It was just a half-assed attempt to provide an example, I’m just a dude on the internet who doesn’t write headlines all day, I’m sure someone who does could come up with something better.

You know what, I think maybe I was a little overzealous in my reading of that person’s comment. I just went and reread it and realized there’s not a lot there, so I was probably assuming intent or meaning that may or may not have been there. My bad.

There are better ways to say that if that was their intent. Like:

They’ve also pointed to passages of Mangione’s writings, which described Mangione’s deepening fixation on UnitedHealthcare and an increasing malice over what he claims to be the corporation’s greed.

Purported greed just smacks of cowardice.

The first step is not accepting everything you read at face value. Start investigating the claims you see on the news or social media and you will develop a sense for which ones tend to be bullshit and which ones tend not to be, you will learn to recognize the bullshit ideas not because they’re obviously bullshit at first, but because they’re surrounded by the kind of language that bullshit claims are often smuggled into. It’s just pattern-matching, it’s a skill like everything else and you can practice it and get better. One way to do this is to just find a news article, scroll to a random point in it, highlight a sentence that makes a truth claim about something, and go ‘That seems like bullshit, I’ll look for corroborating sources’ even if you’re sure it’s true. Then go do find 3-4 other sources that talk about the same thing and see how they shade things differently. Aside from learning to match the pattern you also learn which sources are more or less reliable, more or less biased, etc. A good tool for this specifically for news is GroundNews, every article they show includes ratings for how biased the source is, a list of other sources that also report on the same incident and what their biases are, etc. Plus it’s been my experience that looking at things from several angles is kind of like drawing a bunch of lines that pass near the point of truth - the more lines you draw, the narrower the space in which the truth must reside, so the easier it is to find the center.

The second and perhaps most important step is being willing to be wrong, especially in public. Be concerned not about whether or not you will look bad but whether or not you are putting good information out there. Develop the habit of stopping in the middle of your political rant or whatever and going ‘Wait, am I sure about this? I should check.’ In a similar vein, get into the habit of providing sources for your own claims, even if only because that reinforces the habit of checking yourself. I discuss politics a lot online and have often found myself going ‘Oh yeah, well <this> is how the world really works!’, then I go looking for a source to cite and discover that I was wrong. Don’t flee from that uncomfortable feeling, swallow your pride and embrace it. The more you get into the habit of checking yourself the easier it becomes to remember to check others too, and again, the more familiar you become with what truth and bullshit look like from the inside and from the outside. It will also help you develop a bit of humility, which is unrelated but still a good thing to have.

Also on the subject of sources, look for authoritative sources first. If you’re investigating a claim about vaccines making people sick, for example, don’t look for news articles about it; go straight to the CDC where they have data about adverse incident rates for vaccines that is publicly available. When you hear about something that happened in a particular place check the local newspapers first because they’re likely to have picked up the story before anyone else and are more committed to providing accurate information that’s relevant to locals than the national media, they tend to sensationalize stories less. This isolates you somewhat from some of the more egregious bias and spin out there.

I’ve been on the internet since like 1992 and I’ve never once capitalized it, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it capitalized. shrug

That country doesn’t exist anymore, and it hasn’t in generations. Anyone who believes otherwise has been drinking a bit too much of the kool-aid. What we have left is a bunch of rednecks who trot out that line about tyranny to justify holding onto their guns, and otherwise a bunch of fat, happy people who have little to no real idea about what’s going on at home, much less around the world.

Mind you, as you pointed out in my comment elsewhere, I agree that it’s hypocrisy and cowardice, but that doesn’t mean I’m okay with expecting people to sacrifice themselves (especially when you’re not willing to put yourself on the line too) for some heavily-propagandized patriotic ideal that is pure fabrication at this point. Especially when the reality is that tyranny has been winning here for a long time and most people seem fine with it as long as things aren’t too uncomfortable for them (which amounts to: they get to drive their big stupid SUVs and watch football and pretend that they’re temporarily-embarrassed millionaires.) The idea of ‘rugged individualism’ has been drilled into this country’s head for at least the last 40 years I’ve been paying attention to politics, not because it comes from the core of our national identity, but because it divides us and hampers efforts to engender class consciousness.

What I’m trying to do here is thread the needle: yes there is hypocrisy and it should be called out, but, as the rest of the sentence you quoted says, it’s also a little bit hypocritical to expect others to do what you aren’t here doing too. I understand the frustration non-Americans feel at the direction this country is going and the implications it has for them, and trust me when I say that some of us feel the same way too. But I’m a disabled man in my 50s, I’m more useful on the information/ideas/inspiration side of things than on the front line.

I’m not “keen”, I’m merely fucking exhausted.

Me too, man, me fuckin’ too.

Oh shit, I missed the word ‘next’ in the headline. My bad.

I find the right balance (for me) to be actively seeking out conversations that challenge my beliefs and worldview, being open to being wrong, and developing a good bullshit detector. I guess growing up during the Cold War helped instill in me a fair amount of distrust for authority of any kind helped. Even still I believed the propaganda about the US being a beacon of freedom and democracy until I was exposed to the truth of the matter, but still, I sought out counter-narratives and listened to the weight of evidence and was willing to admit to being wrong and changing my views, so… shrug

I’m not all that keen on Samsung myself, but the ‘and shit’ here is a stand-in for the other makers of android phones for the US market. I’m sure google would be happy to supply a list, but I can’t be fucked to go find it.

I wasn’t talking about asking others to risk their lives without risking your own though, I specifically said ‘especially keen’, as in eager to sacrifice others for their own enjoyment (or whatever.)

As a way of calling out the hypocrisy of the people who claim to be all gung-ho to stamp out tyranny from behind the barrel of a gun I have no issue with it, but ‘why aren’t you sacrificing yourself to satisfy my vicarious moral outrage’ is a bit fucking rich coming from someone who isn’t also lining up to do the same thing. One might even call that a kind of hypocrisy too.

They’ve also pointed to passages of Mangione’s writings, which described Mangione’s deepening fixation on UnitedHealthcare and an increasing malice over the corporation’s purported greed.

Purported greed? Does any grown-ass adult sincerely doubt that corporations are greedy? Are we so far gone that the media can’t even say that without hedging? What are they going to do, sue? Good luck proving that they’re not greedy since public companies have a legal obligation to make as much money as possible.

And you might likewise be shocked to learn that non-Americans don’t have a lock on the understanding of how maps work, or that the idea of hurling yourself pointlessly at a professional army/police force is just as unappealing here as it is in any of those countries. It’s easy to say ‘Someone should do something’ when you’re not the one who is going to be at risk in the doing, isn’t it? But I’m sure wherever you’re from is perfect, and even if it’s not there’s no reason to worry because others will no doubt be lining up to sacrifice themselves to satisfy your vicarious moral outrage so that you don’t have to get your own hands dirty.

You first. Unless there’s some reason you’re keen for others to risk their lives but not your own.

I’m gonna end the war! Wait this is hard, nevermind.

Obviously I’m speaking in broad generalizations here, I know even billionaires ‘work’ and shit, but they’re not 1/3 of the population. shrug