It’s not just about the person you’re talking to, though. For every comment, about 99% of the people reading it will be different from the person who you’re “officially” talking to.

If there can be a catchy way to make it happen, maybe “Uses a terrible source” could be paired with “Uses a source terribly.” The thing where they cite a real source while insisting it says the opposite of what it says is really notable when it happens.

https://lemmy.ml/search?q=natopedia&type=Comments&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=false

Having an objective source of truth undoes their way of doing things, so they have to dismiss anything from Wikipedia out of hand. As is tradition, their way of doing that is to assign it an insulting nickname so that anyone who brings it up is subject to bullying.

No, you’re a Zionist front. And you’re transphobic.

Other suggestions:

• Before we talk you have to watch this YouTube video
• You’re a transphobe!
• “already been debunked”
• You just hate leftism!
• “NATOpedia”
• Bad sourcing (in particular citing a source that says the opposite of what they say it says)
• Ignoring inconvenient questions
• Controlling the conversation (ex. insisting that a counterpoint is “not what we’re talking about” so refusing to address it)
• Changing the subject

Like it’s such a weird comment.

Taken factually, yes. It’s not meant factually. It’s meant tribally, to tag someone as “enemy” by assigning something irredeemable to them and marking them as a hated enemy in the eyes of the group. That’s why the tags are always the same, and have nothing to do with anything the person actually said or did.

But why should we give Tankies liberal fairness when they despise liberalism?

Because it’s an important way that people who are confused by that tribalism can get un-confused. There is a strong impulse to “fight back” against the “enemies” or dunk on them, which I’m guilty of plenty of times, but also, I do think that being normal and reasonable with people helps to defuse that “all your enemies are Zionist neoliberal CIA NATO Hakeem Jeffries supporters” propaganda.

A big part of the .ml echo chamber is really emphasizing to each other what their opponents believe, so they won’t have a chance to hear what the actual “enemy” point of view is and they won’t believe it when they hear it. I think that is such an important part of the propaganda specifically because if they get to hear what the actual viewpoint is, it makes a lot more sense and undoes that “they are horrible and enemies on purpose because they hate you” worldview.

A lot of the “deprogramming” that you hear about from tribal identity comes from direct personal interaction with the enemies, and realizing that they are just people with sort of reasonable ways of looking at things. That’s not what they were raised to believe about the enemies, it can be powerful to undo it.

Me? Transphobic? You seem to have the wrong guy pal

It’s part of their MO. Anyone who disagrees with them in any way is (a) Zionist and (b) transphobic.

It is part of why they stake out these absolutely wild positions (we need to not call out Dragonrider for trolling / Hamas didn’t rape anybody on October 7th), to bait people into disagreeing with them from the “wrong side,” and then they can get all scream-y about the accusation and have something real to point to that actually sort of vaguely looks like they have a point. Then, they take that little grain of sand and spin it up into a world-spanning pearl where the whole of MOG is Zionist and transphobic. It actually works pretty well.

Oh… it honestly didn’t even occur to me that anyone might be using “Nazi bar” in any sense other than talking about dbzer0 here, simply because that is precisely what is happening to them which it sounds like db0 is realizing.

My bad. Cowbee is out of his damn mind although I guess that’s not new. I honestly don’t even know what he’s trying to get at there, I guess it could be some kind of Karl Rove tactic where they simply pick things they’ve been accused of and repeat the accusation back at the accusers without it really needing to make any sense. But regardless, it’s still relevant that “Nazi Bar” has nothing to do with literal Nazis. They don’t need to be accusing MOG of being Nazis for the analogy to hold (although like I say I have absolutely no idea what the logic would be under which it would).

There are multiple experiments which show pretty clearly that humans are wired to organize into “tribes” and then will go to war with a pretty shocking level of vigor against the enemy “tribe.”

https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lesson-of-a-lifetime-72754306/

I think maybe it should be kind of a “separation of church and state” thing that the instance administration and defined “correct culture” for any Lemmy instance should be separated from any kind of tribal identity. I think it is abundantly clear at this point that all the instances that are organized around a particular tribal identity inevitably become senselessly dark and combative with other instances, who they perceive as “enemies” because they are allegedly not with the received wisdom and correctness of the tribe.

It’s an analogy. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

In this case, it is saying that the tankies are so obnoxious that once you let them in the door and make it clear they’ll be protected there (even indirectly by banning and being hostile to “turbolibs” who are arguing with them), they will completely ruin your space by driving everyone else away. It’s nothing to do with literal Nazis.

Honestly props to db0 for recognizing the problem, I think. And yes, multiple people told him this would happen and he ignored them or made fun of them. Oh well lol, hopefully this will be a learning experience and we’ll all come to a better place as a result.

True. And London is still around, and Istanbul, after their empires fell. But there’s enormous suffering in the meantime, as you said, and the empires usually don’t come back once their day is over.

I’m not trying to be pure doomerism. Things will continue regardless. Part of it is just trying to come to grips with the reality and what’s coming, to figure out what I could even do, where is the solution or the survival to maybe be found.

Yeah. You can solve the problem in a bunch of different ways:

• If you have enough people unified and together, you can run candidates and win elections with actual humans with good intentions, instead of this crew of criminal ghouls who are running the country
• If you have enough people unified and together, you can stage a general strike with a clear list of demands, and bring the existing system to its knees until it takes those specific actions without having to go through the whole tedious “governmental” bit or figure out any new system
• If you have enough people unified and together, you can just fight a war and replace the current system with something better (although, be very careful what new system you put in place, often violent revolutions are followed by a system even worse than the bad system they were fighting to overthrow).

The problem comes when you don’t have enough people unified and together. Trump is actually doing a lot to try to create that in the populace, but it’s not happening. Maybe a little bit, we’re doing way better on that score than the German people did, but still it’s not even close to what we need. People are scattered, they’re on their phones, they’re working all the time just to stay in their housing and fed. They don’t have news, and they don’t have the education and historical background they would need in order to really make something solid and good if they did manage to seize the reins. It only really becomes a big deal when ICE comes to your community. A lot of people I talk to have no idea that any of this is even going on, or have a wildly distorted view of it, because they are completely tuned out from anything resembling information about the world and events.

I think we’re just fucked. I think it’s the end. Trump isn’t even the worst of it, although he has the potential to bring down the final curtain in ways that will be hard to come back from. But the show was in its final act long before he came along.

I honestly wish I knew something to do about it. These problems are long and deep, they don’t arise overnight and the answers don’t come quickly even when people start working on them.

I’m trying to help you. I think if you quote the exact wording, it’ll help you realize something, and me quoting the wording didn’t seem to make much of an impact, so I’m trying this approach.

Anyway, I was happy to move past that and address the substance of what we’re talking about at some significant length and answer your specific question, because it is an important question and I’ve got some things to say about it. If you’re not happy with that idea I’m not sure what to tell you lol.

What was point 1 in the comment you were answering? The exact wording, I mean.

When I said “Example, please” I wanted an Example of a subject that the “Capitalist Media” has completely kept the USA in the dark about.

Sounds good. You gotta be more specific then, you were answering a point number 1 with a response numbered number 1 that had nothing to do with that specific question.

(I made an edit to my answer BTW to answer your specific question with some details and comparing it to health care in the 1990s, check that out if you didn’t see the edit yet.)

This new question, I addressed here:

https://piefed.social/comment/9553470

And then there’s some back and forth about whether or not there actually was the type of embargo on these topics that I’m claiming there was, which still didn’t come to much of any conclusion, but I laid out my side of it at least. I won’t say they kept people completely in the dark, but enough so to prevent any useful action from being taken on it until their monopoly broke up in the early 2000s (and still to heavily heavily mute a useful response from taking shape). Other examples include the deaths of Iraqi children under American sanctions or American sponsorship of torture and anti-democratic movements in South and Central American all throughout the late 70s and early 80s.

You’re being quite poorly behaved in these comments, acting in bad faith as a troll completely uninterested in thinking or learning about the topic. The ignorance and incuriousity is exemplified, I think.

But that’s not a surprise lol. I’m done now, just making the point for the record. Have fun with your trolling, I hope your engagement with your specific chosen style of engagement goes really well for you and leads you to happiness about your participation.

I feel like this is some kind of friendly fire because the tankies got you all spun up to look for enemies lol

There’s a specific point I am answering here:

1. Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism “socialist”. This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.

1. Example, please

There’s a separate conversation about what are the issues that no big media in the US is willing to talk about, and how that list was in the year 2000 versus today, but that isn’t this conversation. I’m literally just answering examples for point number 1, because it definitely is accurate that some (emphasized) journalists (to use the word a little bit loosely) will cover any middle-of-the-road normal Western democratic policy as “socialism” because they are wildly capitalistic. I feel like you are responding to some different point than that here, which again is fine if you want to talk about that, but it’s separate from this conversation. Right? Doesn’t that make sense?

Edit: To answer your specific question, no I don’t think that it is universally true that the media unanimously refused to say anything good about social security or Obamacare. I do think that it was pretty much universal that they refused to say anything good about universal health care in the mid-1990s when Clinton was trying to do it, which led to its defeat. That’s sort of my central thesis in some of my other comments here, that up until about 2000 big business had a total monopoly on media in this country which led it to be pretty easy for them to defeat anything to the left of Thatcher or Reagan that tried to rear its head. When Obama tried again in 2008, they had maybe about 60% control, which was enough to lead a lot of people to hate Obamacare even up to the present day but their control had slipped sufficiently that he was able to do some weakened and distorted version of health care without it being just completely vetoed by the insurance companies because of their and their friends’ control of media.

Aren’t you a little bit curious about what the answer might be?

If you don’t know the answer, I can help provide it. Maybe it might spark some kind of curiosity on your part…

(I feel like you’re not trying very hard to engage productively here lol)