• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    22 hours ago

    You should also know that the person you’re talking to was talking up the Greens in the US, saying that it makes perfect sense for people to support them instead of Democrats and saying we needed to reform things to try to get them in power, back when that was the electoral message that would produce a particular impact on the electorate. It’s only in Europe that they have nothing good to say about the Greens. They also contrasted Trump’s environmental policies favorably to Biden’s, who they said was causing all kinds of environmental problems.

    https://ponder.cat/comment/332122

    https://ponder.cat/comment/332206

    https://ponder.cat/comment/332283

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      For all I know that user may indeed be sus, but not because of those comments, which don’t say what you claim they say:

      1. The first comment wasn’t “talking up the Greens;” it was accusing the Democratic Party of disregarding leftists. It did not say that people should not vote for Harris; it only explained why they might make that choice. Furthermore, it cast that schism between leftists and Democrats as a bad thing that would lead to disaster, which is the opposite of advocating for it. Especially in retrospect, his criticism of the Democrats was correct, and so was his prediction that Harris would move further right and then lose.

      2. The second comment did not say that Trump’s environmental policies were better than Biden’s; it said that the pandemic was a good example of degrowth. At most it was a fatalistic “the outcomes under Trump will be better for the climate because he’ll fuck everything up so bad that the whole economy will grind to a halt” sort of argument.

      3. In the third comment, he was arguing against protest-voting for third-party candidates under our current first-past-the-post voting system.

      Frankly, I think @federalreverse@feddit.org acted hastily and should double-check your “research.”

      • federal reverse@feddit.orgM
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        15 hours ago

        You’re right in that the comments weren’t talking up the US Greens specifically and I did act a little hastily. However, I did also look at the things they post, they are pushing very different narratives in quick succession and they’re trolling a lot, especially in comments. This is a selection of just posts:

        Both the election manipulation and the AI flag-truck meme I find rather irresponsible, especially when posted without comment. Similar for the pro-Trump article which in my eyes really needs commentary.

        However, their comments don’t follow a single pattern, they are apparently not always trolling, and they do consistently say they’re from Texas.

        Anyway, unbanning, I guess. Thanks to you too.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          Don’t get me wrong: for all I know, maybe a ban is justified. I just didn’t think those particular comments previously cited were enough to do it, and I’m glad you investigated further.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        15 hours ago

        What I said was:

        • “the person you’re talking to was talking up the Greens in the US” - Third link, “it might be nice if we had real proportional representation - party ballots and larger congressional delegations - such that voting for a Green or Libertarian or Reform party ballot means you might actually be sending someone who shares your views to the assembly”. There was none of this concern trolling about “The Green Party has been doing far too good a job of sabotaging itself … Lay voters are not going to be inspired to vote for your bloc on the grounds that Russia is being very mean and unfair to you.”
        • “saying that it makes perfect sense for people to support them instead of Democrats” - Same citation as previous point
        • “saying we needed to reform things to try to get them in power” - Third link. That was the point about proportional representation. There was none of this “too good a job of sabotaging itself”. It was just well-intentioned attempts at reform to help them to get into office, instead of kicking them when they’re down for failing to get into office. And then, in the Europe, it’s reversed, where the Greens are the ones who get kicked if they’re doing a bad “job” getting into office, instead of that meaning they need help because they’ll do good things if they get in.
        • “They also contrasted Trump’s environmental policies favorably to Biden’s” - Second link. Yes, they described Trump’s plan as “degrowth,” and raised specific misleading criticisms about Biden’s IRA, which had had plenty of time to come into effect and start dropping emissions by the time they wrote that. Now that we have Trump’s actual policy changes to compare that claim to, claiming he’ll do degrowth looks even more fucking ridiculous than it did before, as long as you’re not trying to give him credit for Covid degrowth. Do you want citations? I can probably give you ten for absolutely tectonic climate fuck-ups he’s been trying to make happen in the last month. He’s already been firing crucial climate scientists. No one at Exxon is getting degrowthed.
        • “who they said was causing all kinds of environmental problems” - Second link. They blamed Biden for the fact that extraction is still rising as it always is, which I guess is fair if incomplete, and then turned around and airily dismissed the IRA as nothing of consequence. The IRA was the single biggest action any American president has ever taken on the climate, by almost a factor of 10, and it’s already reduced emissions. Of course, now that Trump is running around cancelling pieces of it left and right, its future impact is heavily in doubt. Thanks.

        I think that’s every piece of my statement, and where it is supported in the links I gave. Your summaries are also wrong in places, I think, but mainly I want to focus on where every piece of what I said is backed up somewhere in the citations I gave, instead of getting into an extended tit-for-tat.

    • albert180@discuss.tchncs.de
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      22 hours ago

      Talking them up in the US makes perfect sense if you are a Russian bot, because it steals voters from Democrats and makes it more likely for the GQP to win