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.

I literally picked up one of the oldest of the old school oscilloscopes from a clearing-out-the-lab table and had it in my closet for years. Never did a thing with it. But it’s an oscilloscope! Badass.

Read the link. Pretty much every example where FDTD was used as a guidebook, the ruling regime had even more of an open violence policy even than the modern US (although, we’re catching up fast).

The idea that the secret police might be shooting people in the streets or throwing them in prison for trying to change the system isn’t new for fascist systems or a sudden and unique problem we’re facing.

That’s why the powers that be picked Bari Weiss, they need to distort the reality in order to get away with it over the long run.

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.

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

TL;DR A livable society needs an active, engaged citizenry fighting for good things to happen. When a dictatorship arrives, that society has a lot of tools they can use to resist, for the simple fact that any dictatorship is basically just a handful of people at the top who are dependent on everyone else doing what they say. They’re a lot more fragile than they seem.

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.

What once protected the child becomes exhaustion in the adult. Anxiety is not a brokenness. It is adaptation. It is the nervous system saying, I learned this to keep you safe. Healing does not come from fighting the system, but from slowly teaching it that survival is no longer required. This is why the 30-day healing journey exists, not to fix you, but to gently guide the body out of constant alertness, one day at a time.

I mean, aside from the “30-day healing journey” this sounds pretty genuine. Although, I think it is probably slop-ified from Thich Nhat Hanh.

Oh… seems like so yeah. That is disappointing.

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.