this post was submitted on 24 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.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- Don’t use private communications to prove your point. We can’t verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don’t deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don’t harass mods or brigade comms. Don’t word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
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.
YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless Mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
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Fair enough. I’ve been a smart-ass my whole life, so I’m not going to argue against that.
No issues with that either. That doesn’t exactly refute my point, however.
This I don’t agree with, and your definition of it seems somewhat strange - especially the part about distorting what others say, which I don’t admit to either.
Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. - Wikipedia
Saying “I don’t understand” isn’t sealioning if I genuinely don’t understand. If someone doesn’t like what I’m saying, I don’t engage with vague accusations - I ask them to be more specific so I can respond to what they’re actually saying, not what I imagine they’re saying.
I’ve only claimed that “human shield” doesn’t fit the definition in this specific example, but when people provided examples of other cases, I didn’t claim they weren’t true. I condemn the IDF’s use of human shields just as harshly as I do when Hamas uses them.
To me, it seems hypocritical when people criticize one side for something the other side is demonstrably worse at - but I’ll grant you that, in this specific case, I’m assuming bad faith when I really can’t know anyone’s intentions or underlying motives any more than they can know mine.
Also, saying that I “defend the IDF” is a pretty vague claim. Yes, there are more things I might defend the IDF for than Hamas - but that doesn’t mean I blanket-approve everything they do. I don’t defend the use of human shields, and I don’t defend genocide. You may argue that I’m "effectively" doing so, but since that’s not my intention, I don’t accept that accusation. I could just as easily flip that around and say people here are defending Hamas - which would equally misrepresent their views in most cases.
Now, as you’ve probably noticed, I tend to be a bit provocative in the way I comment - that’s intentional. Like trolls, I am baiting for a reaction. The difference is that: 1. I actually believe what I’m saying. 2. I don’t act in bad faith (or at least not with bad intentions). 3. Getting a reaction isn’t my end goal - I use it as a tactic to get people to engage with me. I also intentionally don't tend to caveat my points because othewise my every response would just be a list of what I'm not meaning/saying.
I still stand firm that Felix has made multiple false accusations against me and has consistently behaved in extremely bad faith from the very beginning. It’s pretty clear to me that this all started when he asked for examples of extremism on Lemmy, and one of the multiple examples I provided was of someone advocating for the abolition of Israel - something he clearly had a strong emotional reaction to. That reaction seemed to prompt him to dig through my post history, looking for anything to support the assumptions he had already made about me.
At no point did it feel like it was about the actual content of my claims - it was a personal smear campaign, not an argument. I think that compairing the lenght of our moderation histories is quite revealing.
Finally, as a side note - I hate responding to multiple points like this in one post, but I don’t see any other way to address everything you brought up. If you still want to continue the conversation, I’d much rather focus on one or two specific claims you feel most strongly about. But if not, I just want to thank you for taking the time to write a thoughtful response - and above all, for your civility. Social media needs more people like you.
Then I'll focus specifically on sealioning. This instance is heavily politicised (and that's good), so plenty people here can discuss IDF, Hamas, the ongoing Nakba etc. better than I do.
Those bullet points are just examples of sea lion behaviour. The common elements between all of them is that 1) they aren't valid argumentation, and 2) they force the "sealioned" to provide pointless explanations, until they lose their patience; and distorting what others say is a way to do it.
You might have done it either "accidentally" or "on purpose", but your claim does distort what I said. Because, again, it is not about disagreeing on definitions; it's that it was obvious why people were calling you fascist, even if your comment shows bewilderment about it.
Wikipedia itself lists multiple definitions. The core is the same, and shared with the definition I've provided.
It's a red flag, you know? On itself it might not be enough to say "this is a sealion with 100% chance" but, together with other red flags, you can pretty much spot a sealion with damn good accuracy.
Are you referring to your accusation of hypocrisy and me then talking about the definition of the term “human shield” - even though that’s not what you meant? Because if so, that wasn’t me intentionally misrepresenting what you said, but rather me genuinely not understanding what I was being accused of and trying to respond anyway, hoping that somewhere in my word salad you might find an answer to it.
What I could’ve done instead was keep asking you to be more specific - but then that could’ve just been interpreted as more sealioning (i.e., demanding pointless explanations). Was that the only example of me doing this, or were there others? I honestly struggle to give you a broad explanation here, but I can definitely explain my reasoning behind individual replies I’ve made to people in these threads.
As for people calling me a fascist - like I said earlier, that had nothing to do with what I’ve said about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I’m not sure anyone called me a fascist for that - not even Felix, at least not explicitly. He was just pointing out what he saw as the absurdity of me wondering why people call me that, while (in his view) I was expressing clearly fascist views.
The implicit accusations of fascism came in a thread I made a while back where I was asking about a heavily moderated discussion community - one where mean-spirited, hostile replies wouldn’t be tolerated. People interpreted that as me advocating for “free speech absolutism,” as if I wanted a space like Twitter where anything goes and people get banned for pushing back. But that clearly wasn’t what I was asking for.
That thread got a lot of people suspicious about my motives, asking what kind of topics I’d want to discuss there, and claiming that a space like that would inevitably become a breeding ground for fascism and pedofilia. So it’s not that people directly called me a fascist - but in my view, it was heavily implied in how I was treated.