Trump Says Hunter Biden Should’ve Gotten the Death Penalty for Not Paying His Taxes on Time

YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldbanned from sitebanned from site to politics @lemmy.world – 284 points –
Trump Says Hunter Biden Should’ve Gotten the Death Penalty for Not Paying His Taxes on Time
vanityfair.com
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Can we not inflate his bullshit on this new site though? Like... This is just him saying whatever random stuff to stay in people's minds. There's no meaning behind it and there's no action either. It's just actual clogging up of more important politics and news.

Unfortunately, the guy is the leading contender for the Republican nomination for President. It's important that people (especially independent voters) know about this crap before they consider voting for him.

No, that isn't really true. He needs to be isolated like the mental plague that he is. He is memetic poison. "Let people decide" basically lets them get infected.

Anybody who doesn’t have a pretty good idea exactly who he is and what he stands for after all this time is probably never going to.

That is why we have a down vote option which I highly recommend using for items such as this. The community controls what it wants to see.

It isn't exactly a matter of wanting or not wanting to see it. You know the addage "any news is good news?" By posting content that keeps a person and their commentary in the forefront of people's minds, that person gains an audience. That audience will contain people who can be swayed by the snake oil, but who would otherwise be reasonable. Or in short, posting their content facilitates radicalization.

That said, while content from harmful influential people needs to be approached with caution, I don't see this as promoting Trump's action/behaviors. To me it reads more like a "not the onion" headline. I'd be disappointed if anyone felt that the death penalty was warranted for late tax filing, but I suppose it's possible.

Does Lemmy have a way to filter keywords? It would be helpful for people to be able to blacklist keywords so a user could choose to avoid seeing, for example, news about Trump or content with sensitive topics.

We need that slashdot system of vote + mark "insightful", "flamebait", "funny", etc etc. add more categories as necessary so posts can be scored on multiple axes.

Sounds good to me, as long as there's a way for instances/users to disable those filters. Since they're more in-depth/granular, I suspect engagement with them would be lower, so there's a higher risk of a smaller minority using it to dictate the conversation. But I'd definitely be interested in seeing that in action. It could be really helpful for giving people tools to shape their feed.

Do you really think if a Lemmy instance or vanity fair banned anything about Trump it'd make him less influential? Maybe if there was a media wide blackout, but so long as Fox News exists and asshole oligarchs can buy all sorts of giant megaphones to push their messages, I think the rest of us only have a choice in whether we offer dissenting opinions or stay silent

I generally agree with you. I don't know that it matters so much whether articles are posted, it matters more that people continue to speak against the ideology and don't allow fascists to take the stage. Seeing others' support a cause lends it credence. Seeing that a cause exists lends some, but not as much as active support would. Seeing people voice disapproval helps to take away that credibility.

That said, the principle generally makes sense that spreading an ideology's message helps that ideology spread. The impact of posting an article on Lemmy is likely to be small, but non-zero. It's a matter of providing access to a fresh audience. Fox's viewers are thoroughly saturated with hateful rhetoric already, so there aren't many left to radicalize who can be reached by that message. Exposing a fresh audience to the content expands its reach and potentially radicalizes new people. Plus, exposure to new hateful messages can deepen the entrenchment of those who are already caught in the web.

Upvoted for a thoughtful reply, and I think your point about "providing access to a fresh audience" is a good one in theory, but I don't know if this article is really spreading the ideology's message. It's reminding us that one prominent proponent of that ideology is still out there and saying stuff, but the framing of it is pretty explicitly "hey, look how hypocritical the fascist tax cheat presidential candidate is being again".

Honestly, I'm not sure if I would've written it because anybody who would be convinced by this should already know all this stuff, but I think this author was at least trying to do the right thing here, and I don't think this is anywhere near as harmful as, for example, bending over backwards to make Trump seem like a normal politician and rephrasing his quotes so they sound less insane like I've seen a lot of outlets that desperately want to be considered politically neutral do.

Dude, you posted it. If you recommend downvoting the post, delete it.

He is recommending if you dont like the post downvote it. Also if you dont like it... dont open it.

do you even realize why people don't want to spread this kind of content?

I understand I just think your argument is weak for it. You are telling someone to self censor news they post and you could just as easily self censor news you read.

If it's such a trigger topic for you that you lash out on someone posting news about it then maybe you need to self evaluate and make better choices about what news you take in.

You are telling someone to self censor news they post and you could just as easily self censor news you read.

the problem isn't the news i as an individual am reading. you do not understand the problem.

I understand, I just dont think it is the "problem" you seem to think it is.

so you're just oblivious to the last 8 years of US politics. okay.

I've been around the past 8 years. I'm just not trying to bury my head like an ostrich because I cant control what I read.

I get the argument that we shouldnt be revering these people by continually discussing them. But my beliefs are more along the lines that history should be discussed and the action of these people should be discussed so it stays in the forefront and people know.

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This isn't reddit where they inflated the upvotes. You all control if something gets pushed through to the lemmy servers homepage or not.

reddit doesn't inflate the upvotes lol. they, for years, deflated the votes to make smaller communities appear bigger compared to the main subs.

Reddit created popular to boost posts for sure.

That's not the same as inflating scores, and that's what the feature is designed to do, make smaller communities more visible. The didn't remove hot or rising to make it either. This is a wild conspiracy you've manufactured here, considering they explained why they made these changes when they made them.

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