I expected a lot more pushback on here for calling this out as terrorism than I got… I took a several month hiatus from this site and before I left it was all “you’re just being hyperbolic, Trump is just going to enforce the immigration laws exactly as written.” It seems that nearly all of those people have rethought their opinions in light of recent events- which I guess/hope bodes well for the chances of our country coming together in a unified way to stand against this.
The unfortunate reality is that lots of those people were agents of propaganda, such as Russian bots. The goal was to get the authoritarian elected and the ball rolling - so they're all gone now.
I took a vacation from this site many years ago because it was clear that the moderators of this site were at the very least complicit in the rise of bad faith user moderation, from both bots and so-called "fellow travelers."
The only thing I can't decide on is if YC let this rot take hold because they were also fellow travelers, or if they made the wrong choice that a good number of failed internet social spaces make in following their own stated guidelines to the exact letter at the expense of all common sense and decency.
Not that it matters much in the end - the end result is what we got.
Seems very plausible but how can we be sure of that? There definitely were two groups, one had thoughtful counterpoints, and also histories of insightful comments on other topics, and could usually be persuaded eventually with some extended discussion. The other group had usually no post history and literally just posted things like “cry harder libtard.”
The latter were probably just bots/scripts but I’ve often thought it hilarious to wonder what their lives are like if they were real people that spent their day responding “cry harder” to genuine concerns over human rights violations and atrocities. Do their partners and family know about it? Do they have some sort of personal narrative that makes them a hero for being like that? Is that just how they relax and blow off steam after, what I can only assume was a long hard day of strangling hookers and shooting puppies?
I saw many people expose shallow, hateful views that had account creation from 2017 and earlier with a comment history to then sort of come out the wood work here and basically say, "mandate, this is what the american people want." There is a large support for DOGE on this site.
