V17

@V17@kbin.social
1 Post – 73 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Imo it's the latter. It didn't start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don't care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.

Personally I say good riddance, but I'm biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.

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I think that's willfully distorting the situation. Punching down should refer to jokes that seem to be or obviously are made with malicious intent, it's not about certain groups being protected from humor altogether, that's infantilizing. From what OP said and posted somewhere in this thread I don't think their jokes were in any way malicious.

including Pizza; Frozen meals

I have to wonder why that is or if it applies to everything in this category, because some frozen food is literally just normal food, only frozen. I recently bought and ate two cheap frozen pizzas and took a look through their ingredients to see what kind of crap I'm ingesting. One of the pizzas contained the same ingredients that a homemade pizza of a similar type would have, with only one exception, which was a tiny bit of citric acid. Harmless. The other contained added modified starch in the tomato sauce, and surprisingly a bit of dextrose in the dough and on the pieces of chicken meat. That is not great, but since it was listed in the last place and ingredients have to be sorted by the amount present in a descending order, I know that there was less dextrose than salt in the dough, which means the amount was quite small. Still, no preservatives, colorants or flavor enhancers.

There is one difference - making a homemade pizza takes me about an hour because there's a lot of prep involved, whereas this is done in 15 minutes, so I eat it more often. But I have no need to restrict caloric intake, so that's not an issue for me either unless there is some other way in which this is unhealthy.

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RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?

Have they really? Never seen o7 used that way, with o/ it's more understandable, but since one can easily just use \o (or use an actual unicode swastika) I just don't see it getting that controversial. Seems even less known than the triple parentheses thing, which is something that most people who don't spend their lives on the internet never heard about.

This isn’t so much a war as it is a mass execution.

The rocket attacks may be, but the ground operation in Gaza is going to be anything but. There's going to be a lot of casualties on Israeli side before this is over and the first waves of wounded soldiers started coming into hospitals around Gaza right on the evening when the invasion started.

I don't think you understand what I mean, so I'll try to rephrase.

Knowing that bad shit is happening and accepting that it's bad shit is one thing. Wallowing in it and pointlessly arguing about it (not normally discussing it in a measured way) is a separate thing that is not necessary and helps neither the ones participating nor the community in general. It's possible to do it differently and many are capable of it.

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

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Yeah, I get people are against the invasion, but if they cannot see legitimate and obvious reasons for restricting options of (human or machine) communications, they're either completely ideologically blinded or stupid.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I've heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you've had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you're 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you're 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it's easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I'm happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it's quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I've heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating "if I really have to use it, there's no reason why my family should go deaf in the process", heh).

major explosion killing 200+ people

Is there any proof of that? From what I saw the estimates kept going down and down, with various OSINT groups claiming likely proof of merely tens of people and actual intelligence agencies more conservatively 100+, but not 200. It seems unlikely that if Hamas had the bodies of 200+ people they would not even take photos for propaganda purposes.

My experience is that firstly Lemmy is not that diverse and secondly that there are platforms that are not that diverse either but are much more open and capable of discussion. Tildes for example is in general too progressive for me (I'm not from the US, so I don't really fit into its politics/culture wars left-right division, though I'm closer to the left), but it's nowhere near as toxic as political threads around here and it's normally possible to have discussion and disagree in a civil way.

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This is the problem though. It's fine to mention them and be informed, but there is no need to wallow in how horrible the world is and shut down anybody who disagrees, which is what OP is complaining about (and what IME really is happening in news-like and political threads). Those are two separate things, the second one is a choice and there are places where it doesn't happen.

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I switched from OneNote to Logseq. Its feature set is pretty much completely different, but in the end I realized it's fine with me and resulted in my notes being more useful.

The main downside that I see now is that it's kind of slow - much faster than the Electron version of OneNote was last time I used it, but slower than old native OneNote app or Obsidian. Otherwise its main differences from Obsidian are that in Obsidian the basic building unit is a page, whereas in Logseq it's a paragraph (and, usually, its sub-paragraphs - it's an outliner), which Obsidian can only do with plug-ins and not as seamlessly, and that with Obsidian you pretty much need to use community plug-ins, whereas with Logseq a lot of the functionality is built-in.

It's open-source and uses markdown, not completely standard, but close enough for the files to be entirely usable if Logseq ever dies. Its community is smaller than with Obsidian, which is a downside, but it's not exactly obscure either.

Really probably the most important thing about Obsidian and Logseq is to read an article or watch a video about how automatic backlinking works. It's especially useful for something like Zettelkasten, but it also works for more "normal" approaches as well as concepts like Getting Things Done.

Both are OK tools and are similar in many ways, but they're quite different from OneNote. Downside of both is that synchronization between devices sometimes creates issues unless you use their paid service.

I just looked through there and those alternate comics that they make are hilarious.

Calling other people idiots and then continuing with the rest of that message is not a good look.

Well the rules are pretty clear in that you can call other people's ideas stupid, but not other people stupid. Personally I prefer spaces with hands-off moderation and focus on free speech, but those generally don't work in a general discussion platform without any implicit gatekeeping to keep idiots away, so I'm giving this style a chance and so far the results have been far better than most places on Reddit on Lemmy.

Did you mean "social democracy"? I don't think there's actual socialism anywhere there - that's still capitalism, only with a strong welfare system, which has downsides, but it's obviously viable at least in some societies.

This is especially true for lemmy.ml. Political arguments and circlejerking sometimes start in completely unrelated topics and comments literally saying that every right winger is a fascist get lots of upvotes. It's like a distilled version of some far left subreddits.

FYI rationalists are an actual group and although they're largely weirdos, there's pretty much zero overlap between them and PragerU conservatives.

Israel has killed thousands and displaced millions…because they think it’s their god given right to conquer the land. most of the country agrees that arabic people should not have the right to live in land that was palestine a few years back.

The goal of palestinian nationalists is literally the same thing with the roles reversed. I fail to see a difference apart from the fact that Israel is stronger and we're more critical towards it since it's a democracy and should know better.

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I'm mostly staying in an invite-only board in my local language that's been functional for like 20 years now and is smarter than Reddit has ever been, but I'm also spending some time on Tildes, which is honestly not bad. Like lemmy, it has a pretty strong leftist bias (which is a problem for me because not being from US or western Europe I don't really fall into their left-right division), but it's much smarter and less toxic, so disagreement without too much bullshit is possible.

Again though, my point is that Hamas as an entity wouldn’t exist if Palestinians were considered regular citizens and not forced off from their own property.

This may be true and it would be good to consider this when deciding what to do after Hamas is gone, but it doesn't change anything about current situation. The fact is that thinking a military checkpoint would filter out terrorists is incredibly naive, and whether Israel cares about the lives of civilians or not likely wouldn't change this particular issue at all.

Meh. I could literally say the same to you. I repeated what you said in an ironic manner, but I was serious about it. But it's not like our argument has any influence on the real world anyway, so we'll see how the situation develops in a year or two.

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My experience so far has been:

  • "default" reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of "the algorithm" which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.

  • customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I've had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.

  • Lemmy... Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they're the worst things that happen there, but because they're so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don't agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you're from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you're probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the "go make your own subreddit" copout is not very practical, here "go make your own instance" seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.


That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It's even smaller and it doesn't really try to be a reddit alternative, but it's considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.

Deimos is a dumb piece of shit. Evidence is that Tildes is somehow still invite only after like five fucking years.

Why do you think this is a bad thing? The best discussion board that I've been a member of by a wide margin (not mentioning names, it's all in Czech anyways) has been invite only for 20 years now. It's a tried and true way to limit eternal september as long as the community is active enough to not die out, which hasn't happened yet on Tildes.

I agree, with one exception:

Reddit’s early days were similar, but internet culture has definitely gotten more intense since the early 2010s.

Has it really been that way? I've been on reddit since 2010 and from what I remember it was definitely much more nerdy and full of tech people who live on the internet, but I don't think it had much in common with what we call "terminally online" today. I associate "terminally online" with people who really care about things like culture wars and trying to push their views on others, spending a lot of time arguing about it. Whereas reddit in 2010 was much more homogenous - the stereotypes about forever alone IT nerds with nerdy hobbies were much more true than now, but that meant there were nowhere near as many cultural things to argue about. People sometimes had really weird or controversial opinions, but there was not a lot of added toxicity about it that's omnipresent now in the discussions.

Ime the "terminally online" problems with toxicity and culture wars only started around 2014-15 with the rise of "online feminism", that seemed like the first big division into two hostile groups that spent significant time just attacking each other.

Israel is a powerful nation with all the options they can imagine on the table. If they can’t imagine another option then that’s on them.

You say that, but I don't see any other way to remove the Hamas threat than what they're doing. Is your argument just "Israel is all-powerful and they should find a different way even if we don't see any!"?

are you making the argument that the correct response to a terrorist attack is to genocide the people where the terrorists are based?

What? I'm mentioning Grozny. Have you heard about Grozny? If you haven't, maybe I understand how you could interpret my message in that way, though I still don't think it makes sense. In the second Chechen war, this is what Grozny looked like after Russia was finished with it, most likely on false pretenses (putin faking appartment bombings around Russia and blaming it on Chechens). They simply turned it to rubble.

Israel could do this and get away with it just like Russia did, and their reasons for attacking Hamas are more serious than reasons Russians had to attack Chechnya. Instead of doing that they chose to do a ground invasion, which will reduce the loss of civilian lives and infrastructure, despite the fact that it will dramatically increase the casualties on Israeli side.

That is not genocide, that is deciding to avoid genocide in a situation where they could likely get away with it.

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I wonder how the Jews of Europe would have responded if the worlds response was “Well we’re not really sure we consider this a genocide. Lets wait a year or two and see how this shakes out.”

That is not what I said or meant. You keep misinterpreting my words to fit in your view of "anybody who disagrees with me has to be malicious". That is not how reality works.

You are a coward and a sorry creature. Its terrible what happened to Israel due to Hamas. But it in NO WAY justifies any course of action that Israel has since taken. Do better.

You seem to be so convinced by only exposing yourself to completely one-sided views that you cannot even imagine that someone could disagree with you without being evil. You did not respond to most things I said in this discussion and now you're calling me names. You're the one who should "do better", as useless as the phrase is.

You are extremely naive if you think that a military checkpoint would solve this problem. Egypt was not able to stop Hamas terrorists and their supplies going back and forth through the Rafah border crossing to commit acts of terror in the Sinai peninsula for example. And that was during "business as usual", not in a situation where potentially hundreds of thousands of people would likely have to go through.

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Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

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This is the video

The source is supposedly Al Jazeera. It certainly looks real, but I'm not going to call it "confirmed" like the dude sharing it just based on that. We'll see in the following days hopefully.

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One of the issues is that there are no leaders apart from Hamas in Gaza. It is possible that the majority of the population would want different ones (there is not much evidence of that, but it's difficult to get that information), but Hamas made sure that there are none.

Both are entirely possible, even at once. Also it's not just "exactly this", it's generally a broader range of topics. And, to nitpick a bit, "relatively objectively" is not the same as "totally committed to the most objective possible view".

For another example of the former, as the guy below you says, years ago this was the exact modus operandi of (the english version of) Russia Today, until it reoriented and started targeting straight up pro-russian conspiracy nuts. Sputnik I think was always a bit out there, but I'm honestly not sure.

This is absurd conspiracy-nut level of thinking. Among other reasons because this will likely end Netanyahu's career after the war ends, he's no longer immediately needed and investigations start (Israelis have a history of actually doing those properly because most see it as an existential threat to not have functioning defense mechanisms), and I'm pretty sure that he knows this. Which means that the reason for him to do this anyway would be because he's so selfless that he doesn't care about his career or power (even though after losing his career he's likely to face lawsuits for other things he's done) as long as this goal is completed. I hope you see how nonsensical it is for a super-populist politician under the threat of several investigations to selflessly give up his career and power.

In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically "reddit-left" people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they're actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don't seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.

Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.

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The problem is that the people OP complains about generally don't want to see anything else and pointlessly argue with you if you do it. Personally I'm slowly ending my Lemmy experiment and posting somewhere where the majority cares and is capable of normal discussion.

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They can use special ops.

If they could, they would have already done so.

They can appeal to the Palestinian people.

They're doing that as well, but thinking that this would solve the situation is LOL, LMAO even.

They can revise their foreign policy to not set these situations up in the first place (see the previous 20 years of Israeli policy towards Palestine).

I see we're getting back to "well they should have done xxxx". Israel stopped the occupation of Gaza and let them have free elections to govern themselves. As a result Hamas with a stated goal of destroying Israel won and started doing terrorists attacks on towns around Gaza. So Israel built a wall. So maybe Palestinians can revisit their foreign policy towards Israel (see the previous 20 years of Palestinian policy towards Israel).

They arent’ targeting Hamas, they are targeting any Palestinian with a pulse.

Again, if they did that, they would have been levelling Gaza to the ground without risk to their soldiers, they have the resources to do so. They announced in advance that they will do an assault on northern Gaza to give civilians the chance to leave and go south for now, and even if they initially gave them ridiculously short 24 hours, the actual time given was days longer than that. Only, a large part of the civilians were prevented from doing so... Not by the IDF, but by Hamas, wanting to use them as human shields as usual.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a genocide and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a monstrous terrorist attack and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

If Israel actually commits genocide, I will change my position. So far that does not seem to be the case.

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As far as I know, they released some of those photos publicly. I rely on word of others because I have no interest in seeing it, you can google it yourself.

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