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.

There is a crack

In everything

That’s how the light gets in.

-LC

I don’t think the dog bit the cop because the cop was being the aggressor. Dogs are fine with being aggressors or “their people” being aggressors, it’s the whole job of police dogs and they love the fuck out of it. I think probably the cop was being an asshole and the other guy was not, and also, it’s a dog, and so doesn’t completely know what’s going on but knows that its job is to bite people. And so, here’s an asshole! I’ll bite him, that’s my job.

(K9 handlers are supposed to prevent this type of thing, but the world is not a perfect place in execution)

You’re close. Tankies are supportive of anything that lines up with the state-sponsored propaganda they consume.

They might “think” Trump will at least bring peace, during the election as a reason to not oppose him. They might hate Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but love particular Russian-aligned US politicians who are ten times more “problematic” or pro-empire than those ones (or other particular ones they also do extensive hand-wringing about.) It’s why they all support Maduro, it’s why they hate Ukraine but support Palestine, it’s why they love software like Lemmy but hate software like Wikipedia, it’s why they are worried about green energy in Europe which isn’t “practical” but also hate Biden because he didn’t support clean energy enough, and so on and so on. Their collection of anecdotes and arguments is pretty much a perfect match for the Russian disinfo machine and there is literally no other thought process I can come up with that arrives at such a specific and self-contradictory assemblage of stances.

They’re just dim enough to get taken in. What proportion of them are true disinfo posters, and what proportion are genuine people who are simply dim enough to get fooled and so self-select themselves into the community, I have no idea, although I would love to be able to find out somehow.

“Our”

lmao

The people who are actual expat Russians, I kind of get it. I don’t look at them as maliciously intended for the most part. It is a hard thing to grow up in a whole family / society / system / government, and then get out into the wider world and learn your whole people are looked at as big pieces of shit villains to almost everyone. It’s not his or his family’s fault where they were born. And I assume they’re not pieces of shit on a personal level or anything. So 100% I can understand the temptation to start doubling down or “fighting back” to stand up for the honor of your people. Especially when the governments doing the dis-honoring are, themselves, kind of pieces of shit on the world stage also in various provable ways.

Also, I don’t think the Russian educational system is real real good as far as history and political science, in some specific ways that just add more additional pieces to the cognitive dissonance puzzle. (I’ve heard people quote particular nuggets of disinformation to me as sort of “something everyone knows” in a way that makes me think maybe they picked it up from school and just have never re-examined it since.)

I think it’s just a lot to overcome and a strong temptation to slot into a mindset where actually you and your family are the good guys, after all.

I was searching for some nonsense on .ml to post, and I stumbled sort of unintentionally onto a hilarious history of Yogthos’s summary of the Ukraine situation.

First, in early 2022, he was insisting that they will not invade and it’s all just Western lies. Then, he said it wasn’t really an invasion, they just wanted to protect some Russian speakers in the east and maybe a little regime change. Then he said that this invasion was going great, going to achieve all its goals soon, and it was all the totally predictable result of the West’s actions as all serious scholars knew. He really emphasized that all of us were going to see what a horrible thing we had had done to Russia (?) when because Russia refused to deal with us anymore, everything became triple the cost here and civil unrest in the streets, since we wouldn’t be able to buy from Russia anymore.

Then, after a while, he dropped both of those ideas and just kept repeating that it was all the West’s fault that it came to this horrible thing, and he just cares so much about Ukraine that he wants the West to give Russia everything it wants so it can end. After all, he has family in Ukraine.

0% making any of this up. I thought about putting together a little post for MOG showing the progression, but my motivation for these things is waning… I feel like people have got the message at this point as to what he’s about lol.