this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards

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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.

Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.

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All posts should follow this basic structure:

  1. Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
  2. What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
  3. Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
  4. Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
  5. Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

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Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.

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I have the inaugural ban from altmedia.house. Things they like: Mint Press News, Chris Hedges, Tucker Carlson. Things they hate: "disinformation", apparently. (ponder.cat)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The affinity for Tucker Carlson (as well as the other things) is from the sidebar. Apparently their familiarity with Western media is enough to know he is pro-Russian, but not enough to realize that expressing on a leftist forum that they like him, will make them glow a little bit.

The original issue was that they posted a story from Mint Press News, and I dropped them a friendly note that it was Russian propaganda, more or less assuming they had included it innocently (since there was nothing wrong at all that I can see with the particular story, or in fact with any of the stories in that community.)

Things escalated. Fun quotes by the mod from the ensuing conversation:

It's actually not from "New Knowledge," it's from a US Senate report, but I doubt that will make this person believe it any more.

The real disinformation was inside us all this time. Of course, I was banned. Reason for the ban?

Clearly, their disinformation policy is lock tight.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

completely discredited conspiracy theory

Idiot Junior tweeted his own e-mails arranging quid-pro-quo interference for sanctions relief.

Multiple campaign managers were Russian agents. That's not an accusation: they're now registered under FARA.

The day after The Idiot fired Comey, he had a private Oval Office meeting with Russian spies. No American media was present. No American media was informed. We only know about them laughing it up thanks to the Russian photographers releasing the proof.

I miss when there was an argument worth having.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yikes. I didnt know it was that obvious. I'm not in the US though so I guess we all have different focus points.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Even here, there's such a deluge of bullshit, people can miss that they fucking said so, themselves.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

PTB.

I think that instance was only hours old when I censured it in Fediseer and promptly de-federated from it.

Censure reason:

It's like they turned the dumpster fire of worldnews [at] lemmy [dot] ml into an instance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Yeah. If you want some surprises, too, go and look and which user from a different instance was helping them do some initial posts back in the "doing test posts and populating content" days. I guarantee you will find the answer to be interesting.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

lol, I love that despite writing a thorough response they just latched onto the fact that you wrote keke.

Guy sounds like a tool

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

I'm not sure what else I could write to someone who is playing this "gotcha" of saying that some source tries to say that Russia was helping Trump in the election, and that proves that source is disinformation. It seems unlikely that I would be able to find some kind of factual basis that would sway them.

Actually: @[email protected]: You say you like Al Jazeera. I like them too. Here's what they have to say about it:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/18/russia-worked-to-help-trump-in-2016-election-senate-panel

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/17/russia-used-all-major-social-media-platforms-to-aid-trump-report

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/7/us-intelligence-putin-sought-to-help-trump-in-election

Like I say, I'm very doubtful that highlighting any kind of factual reason why what they're saying is a bunch of nonsense, will accomplish anything at all except to illuminate the hypocrisy. But sure, what the hell, it's good to do some due diligence.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

@[email protected] also, quick question: Is literally everyone on your sidebar connected with Russia in some way? I picked Alastair Crooke at random (never heard of him before), and besides having worked very deeply within Western intelligence (which... you are fine with now? in this direction and this direction only, I guess?), he's now writing frequently for the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Is there anyone on the sidebar who's writing in the present day who is not connected to Russia in some way?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are pretty shitty people in their own right

Idk if they're getting funded, but Gray Zone definitely sucks. Their coverage is consistently atrocious, and they publish unmitigated apologia for some of the worst regimes on the planet (specifically Assad). I've made this point repeatedly, but Max Blumenthal - the Gray Zone's founder - actually resigned from Al Akhbar after they began propagating the sort of Assad apologia he's since made a career out of. He later published a piece addressing the merits of humanitarian intervention in Syria in a far more nuanced capacity than anything that's ever appeared on Gray Zone. It seems pretty evident that he's a grifter who's found a very particular niche to profit off of.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I think you know the answer to your question. :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

What a nutjob. Seems you didn't lose much from being banned from there, PTB.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

PTB for sure, this seems like an alt-right troll instance honestly. Probably a good idea for instances who value safety and information accuracy to defederate from it as nothing good can come of a server like this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Agreed

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

PTB

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mintpress has awesome articles and amazing journalism. The mod was definitely right.

Chris Hedges even moreso.

Tucker Carlson however is a massive fraud which should not be on the list.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am not even a little bit surprised to hear you say that.

It doesn't seem either that anyone on the pro-Mint side is interested in looking at the many objective reasons why Mint Press News is Russian propaganda. Their whole strategy is just pretending I am saying something different than what I'm saying, and then poo poo-ing that imaginary thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You sound like someone who has never read mintpress. Their sourcing is probably the best of any newspaper.

This was great recent article. https://www.mintpressnews.com/betar-the-far-right-hate-group-helping-trump-deport-israels-critics/289301/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yes. RT and Sputnik and making up sources completely and making up random shit that got a journalist deported, make for the best of any newspaper. Clearly. Such things are to be emulated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

"Oh look at my cool Wikipedia page which is completely written like a slander piece in a way no other Newspaper is and all the sources refer to other websites"!

How are the Israeli mass rapes going which the mainstream Western newspapers reported to have seen video evidence of by the way? Israel said they suddenly have no evidence of it all. Why are their Wikipedia pages not filled with how they spread massive lies about WMD's in Iraq?

The Syria case is a peculiar one which may or may not be true but no conclusive evidence has ever been brought forward. The reason the chemical attack case is extremely sketchy is that America declared that to be their red line to start bombing Syria. Then "suddenly" a massive chemical attack happens and America starts attacking the Assad government which was very convenient to its opponents.

Assad was certainly no nice guy, but the recent Syrian takeover by Al-Qaeda and its instant capitulation to America, promise to normalize with Israel and tireless work to arrest all Palestinian resistance groups and fight Hezbollah only makes it pretty obvious that these groups fighting Assad were no more than American proxies doing their exact bidding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I don't know what I was expecting lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Wow, every news site I thought was good is actually Russian propaganda. How do people even find this out? I couldn't tell.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I found out by looking Mint Press up on Wikipedia, I can't remember whether there was something that made me suspicious or if it was just checking up on sources randomly. I think I read something weird that made me want to look it up.

Most news sites are not Russian propaganda. Al Jazeera is good, a lot of Western sources are good, random people on Substack are often good. If they don't come out of the blue with some kind of incongruous view on the Ukraine war then probably they are fine.

https://rss.ponder.cat/communities has a good selection. New York Times and The Atlantic have some weird stuff (including but certainly not limited to how they view Israel), and for the Drudge Report I have to have a massive blacklist of bad sources that I don't host when Drudge reposts them. Other than those caveats, all those seem pretty good to me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It's getting to be where news from everywhere and anywhere is some sort of propaganda for some side. Are there any truly neutral new sites anymore?!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If your instance has a tesseract interface, you can turn on the option to show badges that give clues to the political slant and factual trustworthiness of news sites.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But where does that judgment come from, and how does a user know that this, itself, isn't propaganda?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It comes from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

If you want to know how they determine their ratings, you can look at their wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check

If you're looking for some scientific way to figure out if you're being propagandized, then this isn't it. If you're looking for something that's almost always right on the mark, then it's good enough for that. Which is why I said it "gives clues", and didn't say it's the authoritative way to know.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It comes from https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

Oh then no thank you then. Even in that Wikipedia article they talk about the bias that the company has. In fact, Wikipeida says "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."

So no, I'm not gonna use a site that just uses "feels" to determine if something is bias or not.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago

That’s a misrepresentation of how they work, but I’m not gonna hold a gun to your head. Mostly because I don’t feel it’s important enough to me that you use it to argue about the matter.