V17

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.

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.

I mean, ignorant, fine, but propagandist??

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No idea why you’re downvoted, this is objectively true. One may consider it disgusting or morally indefensible, but a) unless Israel is lying about the presence of legitimate targets in the area it is not illegal b) using civilians as human shields is a staple Hamas tactic.

That is actually how it works. It is not against international law to strike civilian areas if it cannot be avoided in order to attack military targets. It needs to be done in a manner appropriate to the situation, for which there is obviously no hard line defined. Assuming that Israel is not lying regarding the military target around/under the location of this strike (which they probably aren’t, because murdering civilians without reason hurts their interests), it is explicitly legal without any loopholes or weird interpretations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to do. After a terrorist attack like this one, I don’t really see any other option that would realistically be accepted by the government and the population other than attempting to wipe out Hamas completely. Israel is risking many lives of Israeli soldiers in order to reduce Palestinian civilian casualties by deciding to do a terribly difficult ground invasion instead of levelling Gaza to rubble, Grozny style. I don’t blame them for trying to make the situation at least a bit easier by blocking communication of all things.