2/10 people on Lemmy, is that you?
1mon 14d ago by lemmy.world/u/Return_of_Chippy in lemmyshitpost
One thing I always hated about microblogs and their character limits was that it was just enough characters to spout stupid bullshit but never enough to explain to why it's wrong.
And you can't just be like "Ok I have master's degree in this specific subject" because then the response is inevitably some form of "ok then please provide sources which would allow me to condense 6 years of your education into something I can refute in 6 minutes, and refusing to do so will out you as a liar."
Why interact on an even playing field? Just make like 15 accounts and convince them they have a neurological disorder like a normal human being.
Every argument on lemmy right there.
Well then they have a PhD of course. In polar bears.
If you're explaining, you're loosing.
Introduction to elementary debate, 17th addition. page 1.
That's fucking idiotic. It's basically formalizing the whole "Whoever talks loudest and proudest wins" instead of "Whoever has the most valid and factual argument wins"
It's unfortunately just how things work. Facts only matter to people who care about the truth, and a lot of people don't.
Facts also only work when people believe them. Yes sometimes you have situations where so much evidence is presented and people jump through hoops to avoid the best fitting solution, such as with the flat earthers. But many times people have been convinced to reject sources and methods or to prioritize one source or method above all others, or they are convinced that their preconceived biases are common sense and take that as a valid source.
Someone who was raised on right wing media is going to have a hard time ever seeing Wikipedia for what it is, a genuine attempt at a neutral and fact based information aggregator and summarizer, because it disagrees with the sources they trust and those sources say not to trust it. Sure it cites its sources in a way fox doesn't, but those sources are often academic and also are likely in that person's zone of disregard.
So how do you change that person's mind? You begin breaking their trust in the right wing media (the right will do the same tactic, latching on to every loss of credibility in academia of liberal institutions). This can be intellectual by having them observe the ways in which their trusted institutions lie to them or changing their mind about something, or it can be emotional by swaying them through rhetoric or interpersonal connections. Asking sincere questions that put the gaps in the lies in focus is a particularly effective technique. But ultimately it's about changing what they see as trustworthy and as a source of truth.
I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I'm also not entirely sure what you're getting at.
What I was talking about:
If you look at the way that conservatives tend to argue online these days, or at the very least the 15-minutes of fame anti-woke-types on youtube and such, there has been a sizeable shift away from truth-seeking as a concept.
The goal with these conservatives is to get in, take a few pot shots, irritate the other person to farm clippable moments, and get out. It's not uncommon to see one of these people withdraw an argument you've beaten, and then ten minutes later give the exact same argument, no amendments.
Their tactics have moved beyond "believing in things." At least on the surface.
And MAGA is not their media figures, of course, but they do learn what works from them.
But anyway, I want to reiterate, I don't disagree with you, I just like talking.
I'm more talking about real life people that you may struggle to convince because you're operating on different paradigms of where truth comes from and what it might be. Some of these people are seeking truth, they just think they already have it and you're the one blinded by ideology.
I think I kind of understand where we're talking past each other.
I'm holding a higher standard for what "truth seeking" means, and I would not describe what I see most conservative people doing, even the offline ones, as truth seeking.
I agree that a conservative watching Fox news believes they are consuming the truth, but I don't think that this is the same as being a truth-seeking person.
I think that the modern, offline conservative is more accepting (just more) of inconsistencies in their worldview than they were, like, 20 years ago. There used to be more cultural emphasis on consistency as a virtue, and less distrust of smart people as a category, and those were things you could more easily leverage against a person.
But as you say, the old tactics still work, it just depends on who you're talking to and when and how. The first step in any rhetorical battle is identifying who you're talking to.
Well if the value of a belief is in its ability to predict the future and people are believing stuff that explains but cannot predict anything, then we can simply figure out a way to set ourselves up for success based on solid beliefs that accurately predict the future while they take increasing doses of cope.
I know it is not that easy but I try to live by that principle. I cannot refute someone's belief that the entire universe started existence 10 minutes ago and everything from memories to tangible goods are simply created from nothing. I can however say that predicts nothing therefore I won't engage.
That's all well and good, but by and large policy defines the human experience. So while they may not be able to change the laws of nature, the laws of humans are wide open to them.
set ourselves up for success [...] while they take increasing doses of cope.
This is all well and good, but they also vote. Their cope will drown us in the Atlantic.
This is fine, though, because there are different ways of convincing people. Some people are moved by facts, and some people by narratives. And some people by power; the stupidest of the three, but what can you do.
A user with the name ProbablyBaysean commenting on a thread about epistemology is peak. What are the odds?
Probably good odds that there is a pun in there somewhere.🙃
People don't give a shit about facts dude
Yup, we all go through the shock you're experiencing, but if you want to influence people who are hostile to your position you need to learn debate and rhetoric.
And it's not about who's loudest but who's most convincing. And for opinions that facts and logic didn't get you into, facts and logic (alone) won't get you out of. You need to speak to people's emotions.
That's why it's spiralled into a meme war. The problem is, the fronts are all quiet, and every side is only memeing internally.
Some sides send trolls to fracture the other sides from within. Other sides just tear themselves apart because performative virtue signalling is more important to them than progress. Still others are just echo chambers that huff each other's fumes to reinforce their own delusions.
There's no good-faith discussion being had. Most people aren't capable of holding one, so it isn't worth trying to engage.
Maybe we need specialized "information operations" cells which infiltrate right-wing spaces and spread deradicalization propaganda (like "follow the white rabbit"), but I feel like that would require more coordination and organization than the left is capable of...
that's because neurotypicals don't actually care about logic and data, they only care about your seeming proud and self-confident because that makes you appear as a might-be feudal lord in their eyes and they love that shit.
That's precisely what paves the way for the kakistocracy we're living through now.
George Will on Donald Trump and Twitter.
"It's perfect for him, because he can encapsulate everything he knows into 140 characters."
i wonder how intentional it was.
more argument = more engagement = more ad watching = more money
I doubt they thought that far ahead, at least when Twitter was starting. Smartphones didn’t really exist back then, except maybe some BlackBerrys and Palm Pilot-type phones. The 140 character limit on Twitter was so the tweets could fit in a standard 160 character SMS message. It operated basically entirely over SMS; I’m not sure they even had a web version in the early days. I still remember getting messages on my flip phone from 40404, the number they used. Once I was in the Oregon desert on vacation for a week without signal and when I got back to a signal my phone kept buzzing for 20 minutes as all the tweets I’d missed were delivered. No algorithm back then, you got everything from people you followed, and no advertising either.
I mean, the character limit was there originally because twitter's gimmick originally was that you'd post via SMS, which has its own char limit. They've raised the limit even before the musk takeover, so I'm inclined to believe twitter motivates ragebait in other ways.
"Never argue with stupid people because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience." George Carlin
The common pattern I see often is that they simply refuse to address or even acknowledge your points and instead just spout even more bullshit. Once I see that, I just block and move on.
I have no time for intellectually dishonest people.
The entirety of the alt right playbook is such a good series
Gish galloping is a well known argumentative technique to avoid scrutiny. It works so well, that now the US government is using a version of it to destroy the government at a rapid pace.
If the American Republic survives I suspect one long term change we'll need is to introduce classes on political and rhetorical life to schools. Train people on how to have constructive discussions and how to recognize bad faith rhetorical tactics. We're seeing now just how effectively bad faith tactics can undermine critical thought. This of course will have to be paired with teaching emotional intelligence.
If the goal of our education system is to produce good citizens of a republic and effective stewards of democracy, we need to be putting more time and effort into that. If my schools could fit religion classes in and still be a better education than public schools they can find the way to teach these things. Philosophy classes every year would probably have done me much better than religion classes.
You’ve put a long form version of a theory I also have been thinking of: we need to do better for future generations by teaching and actually supporting critical thinking skills. I’ll also add empathy, which supports critical thinking and is not always hard wired in every human brain. Both are skills, much like emotional regulation and resilience. Personally, I would have benefited greatly by learning critical thinking and interpersonal skills at the age of 16 vs. whatever ‘algebra’ is supposed to be.
Essentially, and TLDR: We need to teach young developing minds how to think, not what to think. We can do even better by teaching said minds that while we are not defined by our thoughts, we have much to learn by observing them instead.
See I actually think math is one of the things that absolutely shouldn't be cut, but it needs to be framed better. Algebra is logical thinking and in some ways can be thought of as mastery level arithmetic.
I think a lot of teachers are really bad at explaining why certain topics are included in education and this results in the "when will I ever use it?" And then these teachers will respond with a few real world examples if they can think of any (and let's be real, a major portion of why you learn algebra is because it's a prerequisite to high school level science classes, most everyday algebra is minor). But when you explain to people that they're learning algebra because it's a manifestation of logical thinking and it is a means of understanding how numbers interact with each other which will come up in science classes as well as business classes and will convey a generally useful background of understanding that will be useful at various points in life, then they're more likely to be receptive to it.
And therein lies the additional thing. If you don't explain to students why philosophy, rhetoric, and emotional intelligence are important for them to learn, many will slack off and not absorb it. I know I resisted in literature and writing classes because I didn't understand that those are meant to be teaching critical thinking, analysis of media, and effective communication. They managed to beat it into me thanks to some good teachers, but I took the attitude of "I'm going into STEM why do I need this." Hell my government teacher was the only high school teacher that actually presented an effective argument as to why his class mattered for every student: that we were on the verge of inheriting the government and we needed to learn how it works in order to be good shareholders of it.
But yeah, I generally agree we need to teach kids how to think, but also we need to teach them why we're teaching them what we teach them. And we need to commit the resources to it.
In science there is an answer "you are not even wrong" which is a polite way of saying that wat you said makes so little sense, that it cannot even be disproven.
Originally used by Wolfgan Pauli, I believe. He also said “I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.”
My version of that is "Well, you can't argue with that."
So often it's me typing out a big old comment. Realizing I can preempt some nuance to help the conversation. Thinking of a dozen more little nitpicks that might happen and realizing it's just not worth it and it's really the idiocy of the argument that's making it so hard to explain myself.
You encountered Brandolini's Law aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk bullshit than it takes to produce it.
Exactly that, one bullshit goes into circulation, it spreads everywhere strengthening its flawed position. And just like it was said, facts dont even matter at that point - requiring a novel approach to disprove it.
Hi, are you me?
No they are me
I see you have met my in-laws. This isn't just some boomer humor, they have truly transcended their Fox News addicted roots and now get really angry about aliens, chemtrails, and all sorts of bullshit.
Same here man. Its insanity. It has to be the lead. People can't be this stupid otherwise right
Ruts in thinking. Fox News has given them the tools to win any argument with little effort on their part... Any person attempting to provide a sound argument is flooded with BS and gives up... Which they consider a win.
I honestly have no idea, but I suppose it could be the lead. My own mother is bonkers and is starting to remind me of the crazy old mother from Requiem for a Dream.
Same.
I met a guy in a sauna the other day who started preaching to me and saying that he doesn't believe in science because it contradicts the bible story of creation.
I just had nothing to say to this man. His perception of reality is so far off base that I cannot comprehend his thought processes.
Maybe the temperature of the sauna was a little too high? /s
I went to a catholic school in my country. We got teach biology, evolution, genetics and we also got sexual education including abortion (the practice was illegal at the time). One of the first things that i remember from our teology classes was that "we shouldn't take what is written in the bible in a literal sense and that it was written to a particular volk in a particular time by men"... and the example the Father used was specifically the Genesis, meaning "earth was not created in 6 days".
I read stories of those lunatics, i mean, those who trully are in a crusade against reality. Are those more common over the equator or something?
did you ask him why he thinks that the bible is true?
"Because it is the word of god"
"Ok, and you know that because...?"
"The Bible says so.'
"And why do you think the Bible is true?"
Rinse and repeat
This is what lead me to question my own faith: just someone asking honest questions with real curiosity
Keep it mind it can take years for those seeds to bloom from doubt to realisation
I was trying to relax in the sauna, so I didn't want to get into it. Which is part of the problem with preaching like that!
That's a classic one too
Do you think he understands everyone else's though processes? Presumably if you were surrounded by guys like him then you would be able to comprehend the way they think.
There are some people who have just been filled with so much wrong information over the course of their life that it's impossible to reach them. Anything you say to them will have a keyword that puts their guard up, any fact you share would be fake news. It's like their brains have been encrypted with the propaganda and hate. It's pavlovian. I try to recognize it in myself and maintain an open mind but it's hard.
Now imagine that they're your parents.
It's fucking awful.
I don't have to
Now imagine it's your children too.
Very true. And we have to remember that our own views are informed by years of study/observation in areas other people will not have paid any attention to. So often it would take a book worth of real life examples to give someone the same background experience, and they would have to read that book carefully over many months for those examples to sink in, and still then they might think those are cherry-picked examples, whereas you came across them organically.
It hurts man. Especially knowing that the road I took has crumbled behind me, like in those old Looney Tunes cartoons where someone redraws the road lines to lead people off a cliff. Everything at a user level online feels like an infomercial. All of it has that veneer of being fake and cheap, trying to sell you something while pretending not to.
I know what you mean. But it doesn't have to be that way if enough people walk away and decide to do something positive instead.
Its unethical to have a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.
"Right extremists are defending Democracy"
Just 2 weeks ago and I still haven't recovered from hearing that in person.
this could be because they understand "democracy" completely differently, though honestly it's probably just a cover for "our way of life" or "our interests"
like when the US goes to the middle east to spread "democracy", they're not actually spreading a better quality of life for the people, just violence and bloodshed. could be that your acquaintance meant it in that way.
Allegedly the guy who shot Charlie Kirk was a right extremist who's take was Kirk was too moderate.
So far I think it's a net gain for democracy though.
It's an interesting hypothesis
Wasn't that assumed because of the family, but he actually turned left?
Utah County prosecutor Jeffrey Gray said that Robinson's mother told investigators that her son had become more political over the last year and had started to "lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights–oriented".
Fair enough.
This does not support my hypothesis
My hypothesis is that the reason we've been seeing a lot of significant assassination attempts come from people who had been far right but are recently disillusioned or having a leftward turn is that the right has been priming and training itself for political violence for years (since about Ruby Ridge and Waco) and been engaged in the behavior they're justifying their training and rhetoric by saying they need to violently stop governments from acting this way. So you have people ready to do violence, prepared to stop overreaching or totalitarian governments, and when these people stop being blinded by the propaganda, they start to see that behavior in their party and the ones who were actually ready to do violence do it.
I used to work with people who would smoke whatever weed their friend gave them but wouldn't get the covid vaccine because "you don't know what's in it"
Every maga I come across. Just a bag full of excuses for pedophiles.
Those are one of the groups I'm talking about
Same thing for me with tankies. Just a bag full of excuses for authoritarian regimes.
MAGAs. Sometimes I don't even debate them, I ignore them and talk about them as if they weren't there, make fun of their arguments, laugh at them, mock them, just generally bully them, without even addressing them directly. They really hate that.
MAGAs and Anti-Vaxxers are about the only acceptable bullying targets, and they should be bullied as viciously and as relentlessly as possible. The damage they have done is incalculable, they deserve it.
I've yet to encounter either on Lemmy.
Oh they're out there. Talking ABOUT them, instead of talking TO them pisses them off because they are looking for an argument with a "Liberal®" so they can practice the conservative debate skills they hear on the radio or TV when the host sounds so smart debating nobody. They think they can do it for real (they can't), so it is immensely frustrating when their intended target won't engage, and mocks them instead.
Finding lemmy requires a certain level of knowledge they don't really have. They go for the path of least resistance: Reddit.
This reminds me of that quote
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]
The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one's community.[3]
This explains a lot. Thank you.
i made this into a post
This is wrong because it assumes refuting bullshit always takes the same form, and this little issue with it has seriously strengthened the Ben Shapiros and seriously weakened the Normals.
More people pointing out that Brandolini's Law has this unintended side effect would probably actually fix the problem, and nobody has to be a villain to do it.
I haven't got the time or the energy to argue against your point. 😶
It's not worth the effort to break down their position, and present coherent arguments back to them. They'll just completely miss what you're trying to say, and blast back more incomprehensible BS. It's just raw, blind, ignorant anger, most of the time, we can't refute emotion with logic, they just don't hear it.
Thankfully the fediverse is still small enough that blocking people has a noticable effect. On reddit, for every person you block there's 4 more to take their place.
Yes, I block them, after I make sure that they're insistent on being disingenuous, and not merely misinformed.
Related: Pretty sure I've blocked most of the .world moderators/admins at this point.
Yeah, I have a pretty low tolerance for the argumentative bullshit. That's not why I'm here, and I often don't give a shit if someone is wrong.
See I enjoy arguments, they can be productive and interesting, but I don't enjoy arguments with people who are not honest with themselves, argue in bad faith, people who are either deliberately putting words in your mouth, or end up doing it because they are insistently ignorant.
I never block. I post a lot and blocking doesn't stop them from seeing and commenting on my posts.
I don't care what idiots think, I enjoy not having to see their thoughts.
If I've blocked someone and they're commenting on something I've said... I don't care what idiots think.
So far I only really experienced this with two people on the Fediverse. @SmartmanApps@programming.dev (I have no compunction about ing him, I assume he's blocked me since he stopped replying to me ages ago - does that mean I win??) seems mainly to use the internet to further his incorrect beliefs about maths. He's a maths teacher, but his knowledge seems to run out around the end of high school maths (contradicting some high school maths), and he doesn't have the intellect to understand how maths beyond that point even works: he fundamentally doesn't understand what a mathematical definition is, for example, so when he reads standard sources he doesn't even understand how they contradict him.
Everyone else pales in comparison.
omfg you weren't kidding. just wasted 15 minutes scrolling through his comment history. multiple pages were for a SINGLE COMMENT THREAD where he just dug his heels in about operator precedence of all things and refused to budge. completely and utterly closed-minded while being ignorant to anything much beyond middle-school level. I feel sorry for the poor saps that tried engaging with him
Yeah that was me, and now I made you suffer with me! Mahahahaaa!
But to be honest I found the whole thing quite entertaining. It's a puzzle working out what the hell he believes, because he doesn't actually have the level of awareness and understanding to state his position clearly. So every conversation he has on this it's five levels of back-and-forth before he reveals that actually he thinks that, in working out an expression like a(b+c) the very first thing you must do is apply the distributive property to turn it into (ab+ac), because he has got it in his head that the term "multiplication" only applies to multiplication with an explicit symbol like a×b, and if there is no symbol he thinks it's completely different. Hence when order-of-operations rules say "multiplication" after "brackets" he thinks that does not apply to the aforementioned case. And then his lack of awareness comes in, because it's not just that he doesn't realise he's wrong; he doesn't even realise that nobody else is doing it that way.
I'm still not completely convinced he's not a troll, but his dedication across platforms* to this one topic, and his lack of versatility as regards trolling on other topics, pushes it onto the side of sincerity.
*I googled his username and have seen him push this line on GitHub, math.stackexchange, and Mastodon - where he also has pet topics about how 0.999... ≠ 1 and how Cantor's theorem on the uncountability of the reals is wrong because, get this: infinite sets don't exist - both of these being more entertaining but worse in terms of disinformation
fuuuuuuuuck
infinity not actually existing gotta be the funniest of them all
Well, modern-day finitists, and through much of history many mathematicians, also thought that there was no such thing as "actual infinity" but only "potential infinity", so that it was illegitimate to think of "the entire collection of natural numbers" as a collected whole. But this isn't what he thinks; he's denied being an actual finitist. (He probably doesn't have the capacity to really understand the distinction between actual and potential infinity). He just thinks there's something special about sets which means they can't be infinite.
My guess is that in some textbook he read or used, it says words to the effect of, "we will only use finite sets" or "the cardinality of a set is the number of elements it contains", and has taken this to be gospel truth. This is, at least, what has happened with order-of-operations, where he misconstrues the statement about simplifying algebraic expressions, "first expand brackets" as being about order-of-operations. So he has form for treating sloppy wording as the word of God and ignoring any other textbook's phrasing.
In the case of order-of-operations I think this is because he believes with religious fervour that mathematics "is never ambiguous" and so the slight ambiguity between the two ways of calculating an expression like a/b(c+d) (namely: do you divide by all of b(c+d) or only by b) must be resolved by some rule, somewhere, and this is where he has found a way.
I once found usenet messages from my granny in web archive - probably long lost now (she was already dead when I found them, and they were at least a decade old then - she was the tech-savviest granny I ever knew). She was engaged in a fierce debate about religion, so telling people they're wrong on the internet must run in the family.
7/10 ppl online.
But w lemme its still 7/10....but there's obly like 10 users so I can handle it.
online arguments never change minds, they only serve to galvanize each persons prior beliefs
Its not about changing your opponent's mind. It's about the people reading along. You aren't talking to your opponent. You're talking to the audience you share with that opponent. Never forget that.
False. I was deeply religious growing up but can remember the exact "debate" with an online athiest that planted the doubts and lead to my deconversion.
disagree, I've changed my mind several times through online arguments. Not always a flip but often reality is not as binary as you think and opposition has some important points.
- This is not always true.
- There is a third person in this equation.
The majority of my currently held opinions on things have been shaped and influenced by over a decade of online forums discussion boards and conversations with strangers who hold different views as mine
I usually explain the phenomenon of the internet similar to that of the printing press. It makes the smart people smarter (easier access to information) and dumb people dumber (they can’t detect misinformation and manipulation thus will trend towards the worst possible outcomes). If you are a smart person without access to higher education YouTube and Wikipedia is the greatest invention of mankind; if you are a retard then YouTube leads you to binge watching Candace Owens
i don't see it that way, my views have changed significantly because of the discussions i've had (mostly online)
I think this is mostly true IRL too
People will not show you that they've been convinced, but inside something may have shifted.
People will not show you that they've been convinced,
And this is a major fucking problem imo.
If people would just be ok with admitting they were wrong about things, the situation wouldn't be nearly as dire
Keep in mind that they themselves probably don't realize things have started shifting. They just have an inkling of doubt that they need space to nurture into something more.
I speak from experience, being wrong about something and not knowing it feels exactly the same as being right about something.
Probably true...
You're wrong and I am going to harass you until you change your mind to prove it!!
Oh, wait…
Most people read internet comments even if they never participate. Regardless of what they say they will be influenced by those comments. If you never have the argument your view will be represented and will die out.
I try not to argue with people on the internet. Its a complete waste or time and im actually surprised by how many people do it.
I dont think you can change anyones mind with comments.
My mind has been changed by comments on here.
People can be quite informative, patient, and empathetic. They can write eloquently and persuasively. I'm glad for those people who have helped me change my mind on topics where my view was wrong because of my ignorance or flawed logic.
But in all honesty, I probably would have been better served by in-person public discourse on those topics instead of spending my time reading a bunch of takes from strangers on the internet. In person, you (usually) know everyone participating is real. You can gauge their sincerity by their tone & inflection, facial cues, and body language.
While my mind has been changed by people on here commenting, I still would much rather step away from the internet and talk to people face to face about the topics that effect us the most.
As have mine many times. But there are certainly many people for whom learning something new is not in the cards as they have failed to learn so many other things in their life that they've come to some sort of dead end where they think they know everything yet know nothing useful to intelligent conversation.
Thats good. I just learn shallow stupid stuff on here myself. Top topics are memes, big tech dystopian stuff and Trumps daily shocking statements.
It's not about your opponent. It's about your shared audience. Tailor your arguments to convince the community reading along, not your opponent.
For me its not important if the community is convinced. :) I always make my own decisions in life and sometimes its against what the community thinks.
Its a fun and engaging way to pass the time on occasion.
Yeah sure, but it has no hope of changing any opinions. But I agree. It can be a fun activity anyway to pass time.
1/5
A fifth out of one
Went to the UK and the director was shitting on vegans. I said, "you can hate them but at least they're good for climate change" (I ignored mentioning I was a vegan in the past). Holy fuck, non stop verbal diarrhea. He said that global warming isn't true because scientists have agendas. Global warming is when seasons change (I think he was being funny or facetious about that). He also said eating meat had some carbon in their bones and that's good for the earth or some shit.
I wasn't able to get a word in. I did eventually say that his definition of climate change would be agreed by no one. Then he came at me again and eventually ended it with "well, you started it".
I said, "yes and let's end it and move on"
He did not and then said more random shit.
It's hard to win an argument with a smart person. It's damn near impossible to win an argument with an idiot.
The point you know you've beat an idiot in an argument...either they wanna fight you, they start attacking your character or they end the argument with a bullshit excuse.
Yeah, but then why have you bothered?
Why indeed? After a while, you learn to not bother in the first place.
To pat yourself on the back
For the love of the game. I'm a world-class hater.
I live in rual northern Nevada and everyone here is hardcore brainwashed republicans. I used to try to correct them when they said dumb shit but it just made me look stupid, so now I just watch and listen to there ramblings. It’s more entertaining for me and less of a headache.
I lived in rural Idaho during the Obama years and I can't count the times I had to hear people joking about lynching him. My kids even reported to me their peers would regularly fantasize about shooting the President on the school bus. It was a real eye opener for me and I lost what little respect I had for conservatives.
Same here, actually that is still a thing. The day after Obama won in 2008 I came to work you would’ve thought a second 9/11 had happened. People were legitimately depressed and in raged by it.
No, I've never tried interacting with myself like that.
Sounds like BS to me.
That's like 5 out of 10 on reddit.. so yeah.
Thing is out here, there is less polarization and if you've got the links and the facts that are verifiable, people can and do go "Ah! I did not know that... thanks!" and mean it.
Which I love.
In my wise old age I don't waste time on fools. I no longer have the patience. I used to try to talk them out of whatever stupidity they're peddling and it was rarely successful. Not worth the effort.
Yes, i have meet a person before. I have also commented on the internet.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
That fact that there is a term for it is just as depressing.
My dad..... Ugh
The denominator is divisible by the numerator.
2/32 people dont know what youre talking about mate
Yeah. I’m aware of that fact, sad as it is.
Sure. Charlie Kirk was a fantastic example.
He's alive debating gun laws on here, that video was AI.
"No. You're dumb. I refuse to elaborate further."
That's the only answer you should give them. More than that is wasted time.
I have heard the way to do it, is to take their crazy and take it WAY past their line until they back off themselves.
Moron: "There are only two genders!"
Normal: "Right?!"
Moron: "Ma-"
Normal: "Trans and supergay".
No comment on the contents of my example. It's the only comic strip I remember at the moment.
I had the misfortune to run into one of those tankies I had heard about on here. They are like the extreme alt right. In that they go so far left they go right.
Like they literally blame feminism for Trump. It felt like talking to a maga. Making up their own definition of terms. Refusing to acknowledge actual definitions.
I didn't realize who it was at first then took the time to read the user name and was like . Ah. .. yes. Your reputation proceeds you. I should not engage with this individual.
Other people had made a post mentioning a few problematic users and this person had been mentioned and other people had chimed in with comments regarding said individual too. This was a while back but yeah...
Some people are just made for blocking.
MAGATS
The general public on games development. Sometimes even game developers on games development outside their usual sphere/scale. None of us are immune to Dunning-Kruger.
Yeah, everytime Kenny the fascist comes to tell me the woah's of the world from his perspective. They get one conversation when I establish their position. The second convo is to establish my own. The third and subsequent conversations are purposefully hostile.
You have to maintain hygiene when dealing with these creatures.
Yes, religious pshychopath lady I know that thinks earth is 3000 years old and that democrats want to turn the US into Russia.
Yes yes, they love Trump as well, only watch fox and oann, etc.
Help. These people vote.
religious pshychopath lady I know that thinks earth is 3000 years old
Heresy! Everyone knows the earth (and the universe) was created in 40004 bc
i feel like this is talking about me.
however it's not bullshit, it's often just another point of view, and people should get more exposed to that. it's not as if i'm being mean or obtuse either. people downvote me because it doesn't (yet) fit their world model
"Yet" in that context is hilariously egoistic and arrogant, good job.
Well, there is a 50/50 chance it can be correct at some point.
Thats generous
This reminds me of talking to tankies on Lemmy, which is probably a futile endeavour.
For example, they seem to think that Russia's imperialist invasion of Ukraine is justified. They think that Russia murdering Ukrainians with missiles and drones is justified. I can tell them that these actions are wrong, but they won't listen.
they seem to think that Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine is justified.
They don't see it as imperialistic. With other motives it's easier to justify.
Yeah I guess they see it as the plucky underdog of Russia taking on the decadent oppressive behemoth of the West. Invading Ukraine isn't taking on the West though. It's just Putin's attempt to subjugate Ukrainians to the will of Moscow.
Why do you think that it is a clear cut? Splitting Russia from Ukraine is a Western goal and there has been enough financing that it was more than wishful thinking.
yeah you're not gonna convince people who have the violence and bloodshed running through their veins; where would you even start to discuss that?
i think international law should be based on some principles that are easy to see for everybody, the whole russia situation is all fucked up and it's largely because people in russia often have such a bad quality of life that it turns into "seeking an external enemy to blame it on" which then leads to invasion.
living through .ml during the first days ruzi invasion of Ukraine was quite something.
Just look at the comments that aged like fine barrel of milk: https://lemmy.ml/post/180102sadly the wayback machine didn't archive the most toxic drivel I've seen there. At this point it was very apparent that .ml is going the way of all social reject social networks like voat or minds etc. there's a point where a social network crosses this threshold and becomes irredeemable and that was that point for .ml
This was part of why I wanted an unencrypted “X-Domestic” HTTP header. Cannot be sent across national borders, under penalty of…wrist slaps.
Not a full betrayal of one’s identity, but it could at least be used to declare “Hey, I’m a resident of the country you’re in, talking about our politics”. We know there’s an abundance of foreign manipulation going on, we just don’t know how much exactly.
Yeah. They think it's me, I think it's them
I wish more people simply... Learned how to shut up.
It would also be great if people learn that being offended is a part of life and turning into a fucking Karen is not acceptable.
I certainly get accused of being that person often enough, but I’m right >95% of the time because I don’t really argue unless I know what I’m talking about.
Me, an intellectual:
People with positions of leadership in businesses and political organisations routinely tend to be like that.
My pet peeve are the smug intellectuals.
So 0.2 people? Who are those decimals?
Yes, it's me
Because I don't come to these spaces to discuss other people's feelings about things, I come to them to see whats in the zeitgiest
2? more like 6
If actual conservatives existed here I'd agree.
Conservative ideology is about defining underclasses that have fewer or no rights. Sadly, that type of hierarchical thinking is present everywhere and probably in everyone to some degree or another.
So we're not immune.
Sounds like a .ml thing.
Conservatives do exist here, there are plenty of people that actually believe Harris would have been a good president or that the US is capable of good actions.
I've even see people unironically support USAID and the NED. That kind of far-right bullshit is why some of us left reddit.
Yeah you're proving the point I made by expressing your standard for "conservative". Lemmy has the slightly left of center, left, leftist, extremist left and anarchists/communists. Which is fine, its my preference too. But it's not a representation of the actual political spectrum. If you think it is you're in an echo chamber.
'Conservative' is conserving the old world. Conservatives in the 1800s wanted a return to feudalism as a reactionary backlash to liberalism.
Liberalism and liberal ideology has been the only 'valid' ideology for states for 2 centuries.
It is conservative to defend liberalism. It's conservative to defend neoliberalism.
In order to be 'progressive' you have to at least be a 'radical' socialist that wants the abolition of capitalism.
Yeah like I said, you're continuing to prove my point.
I'm correcting your point. Yes, a lot of the US is conservative. Most of the world isn't. Only a US-Centric viewpoint would define liberalism as anything other than a conservative old-fashioned ideology only held by people that worship nazis.
You're a shining star absolutely perfecting the point I made. Thank you for enforcing the facts I stated. The "most of the world" you're talking about extends mostly to a dozen European countries with few exceptions. Not to an actual majority in regards to population. You're absolutely killing the game when it comes to my post.
Actually I was exclusively talking about China and SEA, not Europe. While there are a couple of European countries that are aiming towards socialism most of Europe is pretty far right.
You're doing the thing perfectly.
How the fuck is USAID "far right bullshit"?
How is the US propaganda source that statistically only handles a partial clean up of US military and intelligence community actions 'far right bullshit?'
If I come into your home, kill your pets, piss in your fridge, and mutilate your children, but then I pay someone to come in and give you some new food so I can print in the news paper that I am kindly and benevolently feeding a victim of a tragedy... am I the good guy?
No. I am attempting to generate positive propaganda to help people ignore the fact I caused the entire fucking situation to begin with.
There are no USAID projects that cannot directly be linked to a US military or intelligence operation. None. Not a single one.
What about the assistance with AIDs, malaria, smallpox, clean water in Nepal, Ebola in Sierra Leon or the disaster relief after the typhoon in the Philippines(a quick short list)? Or was that all CIA black ops psyops bullshit?
The diseases the US has been experimenting with since the 1950s, many times on its own population e.g. the Tuguskee experiments?
AIDs, smallpox, malaria and ebola came from the US and they all started in the 50s? Do they also use weather machines to hit countries with disasters so they can provide aid? You're doing the thing in the post perfectly.
It's called soft power.
You can disagree with how it was done, but the results are undeniable (and have only been made more clear since it was shut down)
People not starving to death or dying of disease is a bad thing, obviously.
...The results have been terrible for the entire world besides the US.
My favorite are the anarkiddies who will be the first to tell you that corporations and capitalist states are lying propagandists, but when you say something remotely positive about China or the USSR they start talking like a 1950s US History textbook written by the CIA.
The english speaking world may be largely secular, but its a Protestant secularity. The same pattern of behaviors and underlying assumptions just transfers over to politics.
Every instance of Christendom leftism is actually untrue and wrong and doomed to failure except for the personal beliefs of me and maybe a few people in my local church discord group.
And the emphasis is always on personal beliefs, rather than actual actions. It's how you get the Lockheed Martin engineer who "hates capitalism". Doesn't matter that they're contributing to the globe-spanning death machine, because they personally believe the right things in their head.
Yeah you nailed it. China and the USSR have done soooo much for working people around the world, but because they have states, they are somehow more evil than the capitalist states to these people. They hate MLs more than billionaires it seems.
MLs are cool as long as it is "their" billionaires. See China pumping out more billionaires than the US and Russian oligarchy. These billionaires good, US bad.
I personally hate all billionaires so I can't see eye to eye with them.
Why would you think MLs are cool with Chinese billionaires?
Because they have told me so on many occasions.
I once had a lot of respect for leftists, that was before I got to know ML.
Now I rarely run into a leftist I can agree with. The majority here are campists who live in an alternative reality of Russian/China disinformation.
I don’t believe you. No actual Marxist likes billionaires.
No true scotsman, lol.
Or just an accurate understanding of what Marxism is. Saying that a Marxist can approve of billionaires is like saying a MAGA can loathe Trump. Like sure, maybe one or two people exist who identify that way, but it’s fundamentally the opposite of the ideology. I think it’s far more likely that you’ve just made up a straw man, if we’re throwing around logical fallacies.
We were talking about ML not your true scotsman.
I find it funny you have to argue with my personal experience with ML and even funnier to say it is a strawman. Cheers!
I think you should at bare minimum voice some opposition. It helps you reinforce why you believe the things you do and it shows the readers that this idea is present. We are where we are today because the smart people refused to engage and failed to get their side of the argument into public discourse.
If I open a comment section and its full of tankie opinions I have to comment because I dont want the majority of people who lurk to think lemmy is only tankies.
The fact that I'm a 2/10 isn't even the reason I'm so full of shit though.
OP has a 5 day old account, just saying.
This is my return. I was Chippys_Mittens before. Had an issue with the email associated. Spent about a year here talking to people before probably. More or less I think.
I stumbled into a thread the other week of someone who tried to argue that basically, there exist non-invasive non-native species, as well as native invasive species.
Eh, no buddy. The Venn diagram is a single circle. Everything inside is native and therefore not invasive, and everything outside is invasive and therefore not native. Invasive === NOT native.
Lemme has many...
A person who is looking to understand and be understood doesn't come across that way.
It's not dumb, and it's not overwhelm. It's an attack, a set up for something violent, or at best someone who doesn't realize they're aiding such a thing, as they're in the middle of actively doing it.
It's a large number of family members. It sucks, because I grew up looking up to these people, only to lose respect because they believe whatever they see on Facebook.
That's when I just link them to a mental health services site and move on.
Yeah, people who still consume animal products.
Oh, also people who just blame capitalism for everything, especially when it comes to any kind of change in their lifestyle or even the slightest inconvenience to their daily routines.
Meat is murder, but veganism is genocide.
Fight me w your pale pasta fueled arms. I dare you.
Edit: wait, you won me over with your closing position. Now I love you, lets run away together.
How is veganism genocide? Not agreeing with the approach of the person you replied to but that’s an odd statement to me.
Oh 😅 Yes absolutely. I’m the monster in this comic.
Baiting a baiter isn't gonna catch you anything with me.
Veganism is a hard one. I know its the right moral position for me but I cant bring myself to adhear to it.