But without it, your post very much was just another person using the word as though it was fine to say and weird that people wouldn’t say it.

No, that’s something that came entirely from you. My comment merely pointed out a failure of the article to say what it was talking about.

It’s important to be careful when communicating with others about issues that feed strong emotions in us. It’s all too easy to project meaning that isn’t there, and mistakenly vilify someone based on our own biases.

And with it being at -5 when I posted, I wasn’t the only one that read it that way.

Yes, and at least some of that was surely due to the influence of your comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect

You even felt you needed to correct it after I left.

That’s faulty reasoning. What I added was not a correction, but an explicit statement of what should have been obvious to a reader who wasn’t looking for a quarrel. In other words, I went the extra mile to do the reader’s job for them. My addendum doesn’t imply fault in the original.

I did this only because I’m familiar with the way misguided replies can lead to toxic snowballs on web forums, and I noticed that your comment had the potential to start one.

In retrospect, with the added context, I can see what you originally meant.

A simple “I’m sorry for mistakenly chiding you” would have sufficed here. Good day.

As my post would have referred to your first sentence absent the second.

There was never a point where my comment contained the first sentence absent the second.

And you’ll notice everyone read your post the way I did before you edited it. When I came along, you had -5.

Bandwagoning is very common on web forums. People are easily influenced by the first reply they see, and will often click a vote button before thinking about what was actually written.

The paragraph I added was to try to guide people away from that bad habit once the bandwagoning had already started. It does not imply fault in my original comment.

When I am the listener or reader, any time my first impression of a comment is negative, I consider it my responsibility to stop and consider other meanings before crying foul. That’s the only way we can avoid miscommunication, after all, since it’s not possible for a speaker or author to predict every potential misinterpretation, and the burden of avoiding it should not be entirely on them. I wish more people would do the same.

They edited their post to be completely different from when I replied.

No, I did not. I added a second paragraph to address your obvious misinterpretation.

The first paragraph is what you replied to, and remains intact. You could have tried to understand it on its own, but instead you chose to look for an excuse to chide a stranger. That was unkind, unwarranted, and unnecessary.

The question asked by throwback3090@lemmy.nz stands.

The edit to my comment merely added the second paragraph, which explicitly spells out what should have been obvious to anyone with basic reading comprehension skills, or failing those, at least a modicum of simple human kindness.

Keeping the other branches of government in check is point of the US Congress.

So far, this Congress has enjoyed extraordinarily high quality of life (funded by taxpayers) for relatively easy work.

They have also played a big part in allowing things to progress to this point.

Now it’s time for them to step up and do their fucking jobs.

If they feel threatened, then I would suggest they get the help of a government agency equipped to protect them. If that’s not enough, they have plenty of money to hire supplementary guards.

Useless headline. The R-word is apparently “retarded”.

I spell it out here because this isn’t mentioned at all in the article. Figuring out what it was talking about required finding and reading text that was embedded in an image on x.com.