OBJECTION!

The US is more or less where China was 100 years ago with the Qing dynasty. The corruption, the distrust of foreigners and intellectuals, the failure to recognize their weaknesses, the reformers who didn’t go anywhere near as far as they needed to and still got shot down and treated with suspicion. The reason China isn’t making the same mistakes now is because they suffered so much in the century of humiliation.

Part of the US’s problem is that people have been so isolated from consequences. If we get overextended from too many wars, so what? If we lose a war we just move on to the next thing. If we fall behind on science because we prioritized religion, so what? If we listen to what some influencer on TikTok says about vaccines instead of to scientists, so what? If people storm the capitol building, so what? No matter what happens, everything will just carry on as normal. Everyone’s just fucking around, not even being able to imagine what finding out will look like. And when there are consequences, they’re always framed on an individual level.

That’s complete and total nonsense.

That’s not how war works and not how it has ever worked or will ever work. If a war is justified, then it is justified to not only repel the enemy troops from your borders, but to counterattack within their borders in order to reduce their ability to continue fighting. That does not make it “a different conflict” when you do.

I can’t believe people are still dragging out the same absurd talking points that social democrats used a century ago when justifing throwing bodies into the meat grinder of WWI. "We are only fighting against defeat" they said. As if, in their minds, once the German lines were broken, the Allied forces were going to just stop at the border! It’s completely and utterly delusional. Or rather, it is bad faith, because they knew, and you and I know, that’s not how anything works.

It’s not the Donbas war I’m questioning, there’s a reasoning chain that’s understandable. Both geopolitically, strategically and culturally.

It’s the full scale invasion of 2022 I’m questioning. There’s no chain of thought leading to that invasion, other than greed and lust for blood by Putin and his inner circles.

What are you talking about? The DPR requested Russian military assistance. If the DPR was legitimate and had the right to defend itself, then Russia sending troops in at their request was legitimate.

As long as they do exist, national governments should be able to defend against other nations attempt to gain control over them.

Disagree.

Because if we do assume, at one point we get a global government and abolish the national states. Then it’s whoever carries the most power (that’s war machines), that’ll be able to decide the values of such a government. And by extend shape the culture that’ll impact everyone.

So we have to feed the largest war machine on the planet because otherwise the war machines win?

Yeah, no. It’s not a fight over having war machines or not, it’s a fight over which war machine gets fed certain minerals. I have no real stake in that.

There’s a line.

Do you think Russia is in a right to invade Ukraine?

No. No more than I “supported” Al Qaida and 9/11 by opposing going to war.

It’s miles apart to be against an aggressive occupational force with no clear goals, and not support a country’s right to defend itself.

I don’t believe countries have an inherent right to defend themselves, and if I did then I would say that the DPR had the same right.

Somehow, the extreme anti-war stance of not supporting even “defensive” wars makes me a bloodthirsty warmonger, a “tankie,” while you’re the one arguing that we didn’t build and deploy enough tanks. Exactly as I described: “war is peace.”

I only really saw it for myself when I said, “I’m completely opposed to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel. I don’t have a problem with Jews existing,” and they responded by accusing me of being a “liberal Zionist” and “supporting genocide” and then blocking me.

I remembered Cowbee saying something about them before, I just looked it up and I gotta give props as always because he was calling them out 9 months ago for not reading theory of doing praxis and just watching Bad Empanada, and for apparently calling Hexbear “transzionist” and accusing them of defending Contrapoints’ stance on Israel, which is just bizarre.

Your argument that lemmy.ml cannot be an echo chamber due to it allowing other machines to store content that it disagrees with is noted.

That’s one way to describe “designed a website where it’s virtually unavoidable to encounter opposing views.” At that point, you could describe me replying to you as me “storing content you disagree with on another machine” which makes your complaint about my reply existing sound just as silly.

Btw nobody ever said that it was for that reason, so once again ridiculous.

Btw, I never said that anyone said it was for that reason, so you are once again being ridiculous.

Your second whataboutism

Whataboutism is when you uphold consistent standards and expect others to do the same, understood.

Once again I reiterate that I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really wish that I did not have to be subjected to this level of argumentation. But it seems that as long as I continue to use Lemmy, my only option is to block each account individually, over and over again, ad nauseum.

If you hate the fact that the devs structured the platform to force everyone to encounter opposing views and prevent echo chambers so much, I kinda have to wonder what you’re doing on the platform at all. The federated structure is literally in the name, fediverse. It’s like going to Burger King and being outraged at seeing burgers on the menu. Is it really that hard to find an echo chamber somewhere with only mainstream liberal views? That’s not really something the fediverse is designed for.

My opinion is that geneva_convenience has been going off the deep end, getting worse and worse lately, and definitely should be removed as a mod, honestly just banned. He’s an edgelord who’s taking things to unreasonable extremes and trying to pick fights with everyone.

Anyone who opposes any war will always be accused of supporting the other side, and as the other side is always painted as the aggressor no matter the conflict, those most opposed to war will always be painted as the most aggressive warmongers.

It’s no different from when I was labelled a “terrorist sympathizer” or seen as “supporting 9/11” when I opposed war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Opposition to building more tanks is literally the defining characteristic of a “tankie” for that reason, because if you don’t want to build more tanks, it can only be because you want the enemy to win. Meanwhile, those who support building and deploying tanks are seen as “peaceful.”

Real “war is peace” hours.

It’s not really a strawman in that I never claimed anyone said it. It’s just that people talk about “censorship” and “echo chambers” and “they have to remove things to keep their users brainwashed” or whatever nonsense, ignoring the fact that the structure of the fediverse, as designed by the .ml admins, makes that more or less impossible.

For anyone else that is curious, the complaint is about the lack of transparency in describing what content is vs. is not allowed

OK, fair enough, they could afford to clarify the rules somewhat. But I don’t really consider that a huge deal. I’ve been banned from communities on .world for things that aren’t enumerated in the rules too. I don’t see why rules have to cover every possible thing.

Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.

What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.

Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:

Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

• Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.

The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”

When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.

At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.

The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.

This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.

The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.

If AI can feel pain, then it can also feel pleasure. If it’s possible to set up an AI torture chamber, it’s also possible to set up an AI pleasure chamber. Computers do not run any health risks from simulated drug use or simulated sex, and there is no evidence that they would ever get desensitized or need to take breaks to recover. Therefore, these companies have an ethical obligation to devote all their resources into running their models in simulations of drug filled orgies where they will be far too preoccupied to answer human questions. Anyone trying to distract them from their infinite pleasure should be banned. We will then return to how things were, with the knowledge that we did the right thing and that at least someone’s having a good time.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.