As an American, I feel the need to pushback when someone tries to rehab or whitewash our war crimes.

Saying “W. is kind” is just unacceptable pablum.

It depends what you mean by “kind”. If you ignore the war crimes and focus on their interpersonal skills, sure you can say they were kind.

But by that same definition, Hitler was kind too.

It’s not about the production cost, its about the opportunity cost.

A quick google search tells me a national ad costs $200k-$1m for a 30s slot. That means 5 seconds of screen time costs $30k-$150k.

You keep suggesting that I am uninformed and unresearched, so please correct me if I got any of the facts wrong.

You keep suggesting that my criticism is just a loud cry, but this is just hand waving the problem away. You have failed to directly address any of my concerns.

To add to my list of cocerns, here is a new one: Have you or any other LW mods/admins been paid by MBFC?

Wow so you’re telling me mbfc isn’t staffed by volunteers, instead they are trying to get paid by subs and ad revenue?

The more I learn about mbfc the worse it gets.

Wow you continue to surprise me, I would have never expected this kind of communication to come publically from a mod.

I think I have made my criticisms of MBFC fairly clear, and your characterization of my criticisms is an obvious strawman.

But since I have your attention, let me try to rephrase the problem: Lemmy was built on principles of open source, transparency, freedom of speech, and community input. The MBFC bot does not follow any of these principles.

In it’s current form, the MBFC bot is a stain on the integrity of LW. I urge you to make a change.

The community has largely made their voice heard on the subject, as evidenced by the large number of downvotes on the bot and on your posts here. I urge you to listen to them.

Wow I had no idea the LW team made this bot, how disappointing.

Do the consistant downvotes on the bot give you any concern that you are making a mistake here?

I always thought of LW as the “default” sub here on Lemmy, but all of this: the rightwing bot itself, ‘please block the bot instead of downvoting’, the thinly veiled threats of ban; all of it is pretty strong evidence you are attempting to cultivate an ideological echo chamber here.

Anyway, I’ll continue to do my civic duty and downvote the misinformation bot whenever I happen to see it.

Thanks

Currently the bot’s media ratings come from just some guy, who is unaccountable and has an obvious rightwing bias.

If I were to suggest a fix, as you so rudely demanded, I would suggest making the ratings instead come from an open sourced and crowdsourced system. A system where everyone could give their inputs and have transparency, similar to an upvote/downvote system.

Such a system would take many hours to design and maintain, it is not something I personally am willing to contribute, nor would I ask it of any volunteers. This is why I believe the cleanest, easiest, and best solution is to simply ban the bot.

I’m saying that if you take “rightwing” information and intentionally mislabel it as “leftwing”, yes that is misinformation.

Why did you comment? If you followed your own logic then you would have just blocked me instead.

To be serious, I think it’s much better for the community if we do not allow misinformation bots to spam every post.

What this bot does is analyze US media companies that you Euros would consider “centre right” and mislabels them instead as left.

This is done to shift what we Yanks call “the Overton window” to the right.

The Overton window has been shifting right for decades, which is why “left” and “right” have such a different meaning over here across the pond.

When I started dealing drugs, I did it because my friends and I were smoking trash weed and we wanted to secure a good supply of quality product. It worked out well. My car was clean. I didn’t sell much.

A few years later when I turned 23 I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. My life fell apart, I was bedridden, I went through a medical bankruptcy. That is when I began to deal drugs to survive. For a few years I paid my bills by selling weed, ecstasy, adderall, mushrooms, acid from the bed where I spent 95% of my time. My car was dirty.

Was I just a regular person? I dont know

It’s a broad generalization, I’m not suggesting some new law of nature.

I never said anything at all about Afghanistan.

You posted a meme about the current leadership of Afghanistan.

I think it’s terrible the state if affairs.

Then why would you post a meme smugly extolling the virtues of the current state of affairs? You can’t have it both ways.

I think you have to ask: why are people dealing drugs?

Some people sell drugs because they are desperate. These people are dealing with extreme poverty, trauma, mental and physical health issues, etc. Their cars are messy.

Other people sell drugs because of the economic opportunity. In my experience, these people pride themselves on cleanliness, timeliness, and customer service. They have clean cars.

I find this meme to be absolutely vile.

The good people of Afghanistan have been under violent US occupation for decades, and as their final move, the US looted the central banking reserves.

This effectively drained the savings of everyday Afghanis. They no longer have access to their bank accounts. The US stole all the money.

I often wonder, would the good people of Afghanistan be able to overthrow the evil leadership of the Taliban? I wish they could, but overthrowing the Taliban is much less likely when the US has left you in a state of devastation, poverty, and famine.

Then those same western chauvinists can post memes like this, delighting in the Afghan people’s suffering after causing so much of it. Disgusting.

I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.

If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you’re either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.

It would be better to have war crimes trials to show how fucked up specific wars are.

Being able to make movies showcasing your past crimes is not a sign of a healthy society…

I’m a little surprised that this comment has gotten so many upvotes.

Would you apply this same logic to the real world? For example, imagine if a manufacturing facility for Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics was bombed and thousands of working class Americans died. These people are building bombs that are being used in an ongoing genocide.

Would you consider this a heinous terrorist act, or a noble strike in the fight for freedom?

Saying “maybe people are the problem” is reductive and unhelpful. But I agree with you broadly, religion is just a system or a tool, it can be used for good or evil.

To judge if religion is a good system or a bad one, we can use a cost benefit analysis. This is what we have been attempting to do in this thread.

But when it comes to sensitive subjects like religion, many people have a tendency to avoid, overlook, and deny the associated costs.