there isn’t a whole ton of legitimate reasons why civilians need .50 cal rifles.

We should be asking the opposite question. What are the legitimate reasons civilians should not have them? I can’t think of any. .50 cal weapons are not used in crime or mass shootings.

By default, everyone should be able to do everything. We impose restrictions when the costs to personal liberty outweigh the benefits to society.

Nice writeup but there’s one key piece of information here that’s wrong in the context of reddit.

The “bot overlord” can easily tell if an account is shadowbanned. I use my trusty puppeteer or selenium script to spam my comments. After every comment (or every x interval of comments), I load up the page under a control account (or even just a fresh page with no cookies/cache, maybe even through VPN if I’m feeling fancy, different useragent, different window size… go wild with it) and check if my comment is there.

Comment is not there after a certain threshold of checks? Guess I’m shadowbanned, take the account off the list and add another one of the hundreds I have to the active list

The fact is that no matter what you do, there will be bots and spammers. No matter what you do, there will be cheaters in online games and people trying to exploit.

It’s a constant battle and it’s an impossible one. But you have to try and come up with solutions but you always have to balance the costs of those solutions with the benefits.

Shadowbanning on reddit doesn’t solve the problem it aims to fix. It does however have the potential for harm to individuals, especially naive ones who don’t fully understand how websites work.

I don’t think the ends justify the means. Just like stop and frisk may stop a certain type of crime or may not, but it definitely does damage to specific communities

I’ve been on reddit for 15 years and I’ve been banned from dozens of subs. I got banned from /r/libertarian for quoting Wikipedia page of Libetarianism. I got banned from /r/geopolitics for linking a report on the effects of 2019 sanctions on Venezuela. I got banned from /r/socialism for bringing up Henry Ford and his influence on the 40 hour work week. I got banned from /r/kratom for mentioning it’s an addictive substance that bindes to opioid receptors. Got banned from /r/the_donald back when it was a thing, don’t even remember why.

If you’ve been talking regularly on reddit and you haven’t been banned from at least a handful of places, then in my opinion you haven’t actually been saying much.

I believe we need to democratize the banning process and make it more transparent. Sort of like criminal justice system. Jury of your peers. Make a case in your defense and let everyone see it.

The way it’s handled right now is authoritarian and allows any mod to arbritarily silence views they personally don’t like, even if the community at large would have no issue with.

I think private platforms that do this are acting in an unethical manner. Lots of things that are perfectly legal but of dubious morality. Like fucking a 16 year old as a 40 year old man in Wisconsin or used car dealerships.

There’s a sub to test if you are shadowbanned. The mods set it up so automod automatically approves any post there, so that way even if you’re shadowbanned you can post.

Then a bot goes through and scans to check your comments and sees if they show up.

When shadowbanned, people can still see your comments if they go onto your profile. They just won’t see it in the thread.

You ever seen a thread that says something like “3 comments” and you click and only see 1? 2 people commented that were shadowbanned.

I’ve gone through the sub and browsed through profiles of people who were shadowbanned. Some of them posted nothing controversial to warrant a shadowban.

I’ve seen reddit accounts who regularly posted comments for months all at +1 vote and never received any response or reply at all because nobody had ever seen their comments. They got hit with some automod shadowban they were yelling into the void, likely wondering why nobody ever felt they deserved to be heard.

I find this unsettling and unethical. I think people have a right to be heard and deceiving people like this feels wrong.

There are other methods to deal with spam that aren’t potentially harmful.

There’s also an entirely different discussion about shadowbans being a way to silence specific forms of speech. Today it may be crazies or hateful speech, but it can easily be any subversive speech should the administration change.

I agree with other commenter, it probably shouldn’t be allowed.

The goal was always to help just enough to keep Ukraine alive as long as possible but not to actually let Ukraine win.

It’s because the purpose is to hurt Russia and help our MIC. Everything else is rhetoric and propaganda. Russia has controlled Ukraine for centuries. Nobody actually cares about Ukraine strategically except for Russia. They are willing to sacrifice infinitely more for Ukraine than the West.

The only way to really save Ukraine at this point is to send troops. And that isn’t happening unless we are on the brink of WW3. Which may very well happen, but I think probably not for at least another 5~10 years and Ukraine war will over by then.

Chomsky had a phrase along the lines of: we will fight forever- to the last Ukrainian. Basically switching up the “fight them to the last man”

Realistically, we all know where this war is going to end. At some point in the next couple years it will end in a negotiated settlement where Russia annexes some territory and maybe Ukraine is forced unto neutrality.

The only other possible scenario is a hot war between NATO and Russia.

We know Ukraine doesn’t have the offensive capacity to recapture territory and everyday Russia takes some village or another. Moving like 10 miles a month but moving.

So assuming that’s true, for the sake of discussion, what are the possible benefits and the possible negatives from continuing to support Ukraine?

Pros:

Our MIC gets a nice shot in the arm and shareholders are happy. They get to funnel more taxpayer funds into their portfolios.

Russia has to spend a dramatically increased number of resources in order to capture the land. More Russians will die, more Russian tanks will be destroyed, etc.

Cons:

Ukraine will be destroyed. As of November of last year, costs for reconstruction was estimated at $350B. That has likely increasing dramatically. We can barely pass $60B worth of military aid that mostly benefits our defense contractors. You think we are going to front them $500B?

Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of additional Ukrainians will die. They already lost over a quarter of their population. They won’t recover for a century.

Is it really worth it? Are we really that cynical? It’s not only conservatives that think this way.