I think the userbase of a community being clueless enough to tend to upvote anything vaguely good-sounding is a big factor in me eventually deciding to unsubscribe from that community. It doesn’t seem like it is a fixable problem once it develops.

He already did. “Thermoelectic cooling: It’s not great.”

“There’s just one little issue with this technology. It’s not very good. Like, at all.”

Sure, why not. I’m a little bit reluctant to play the game of declaring instances as “officially bad” and refusing to have anything to do with them; lemmy.world and midwest.social are both on that communities list in places even though I have grave concerns about parts of their core moderation teams. The world just isn’t a perfect place, Lemmy included, and refusing to play with it until it gets into perfect shape may not be productive. I may be very noisy about complaining about certain instances but shunning them completely is different.

But that said, having it be officially and overtly illegal to say “Israel bad” on a politics and world news community is such a significant problem that I guess it would be better to honor the people who are trying to set up a replacement (similar to how I don’t have !worldnews@lemmy.ml anywhere on there). I’ve updated it to switch to the dbzer0 community instead. Thanks for the heads-up.

See also:

!communities@ponder.cat

https://ponder.cat/post/1349429

Also, here’s a list of some of the busy communities I am subscribed to if you want to see:

Little late guys

But what the fuck, I’ll take it. Now see if you can snatch Netanyahu and put him in The Hague where he belongs. That would be a solid start.

Also establishment media: What the fuck, why are we dying

Thank you, I hope it is useful

Absolutely. When I’ve been in a bad place mentally in my life, I literally wouldn’t eat except about once a day when I became starving. It was like the whole system that was supposed to make sense of what I was feeling and take actions to fix something that was producing a “bad” signal just was burned out, not working at all.

I started seeing a therapist, and a big part of her solution was for me to go on antidepressants. I refused, stopped seeing her, and continued roughing it out unsuccessfully on my own. Great stuff. Better now. I would say that not being able to function enough to feel hunger or eat when you’re hungry is a bad place though. That’s pretty far down. I would take it seriously.

I have not a lot of input about how to get yourself out of that way or what to do. Not sure if you’re even looking for advice anyway, or just curious. If you are looking for advice, then about all I can come up with is this: A lot of life is habits. Habits don’t consume mental energy, and so if you have a lot of good ones, you’ll automatically be doing a bunch of great stuff without having to expend. It’s like autopilot. And, it feeds on itself: As you’re taking better care of yourself you’ll have more mental energy to expend to make deliberate choices and put in effort, and you can get to new places. It’s crazy how much freedom life really has, it’s wide open. But it’s not automatic and your brain and your self are one of many types of limited resource that can stop you from getting there.

A lot of it starts with just your thoughts: Your visions for what you’re trying to get to. It has to translate to action to do anything, but having the vision will make the action easier, it’ll give a reason. But recognize that setting the habits in the beginning is mad hard. Chip away at it, keep building up that consistent track record of the stuff you want to see yourself doing starting small, try things and adjust as you go. It’s harder than it seems but you can make small changes consistently and it can work. It’s just hard.

Agreed. I have such a distrust at this point of any media that fits a particular format and style, and that whole instance checked a bunch of the boxes.

Like, as far as I know, “Drop Site News” and “In These Times” have not done a thing wrong, and still every time I see them I instantly think “What the fuck! Are you guys Russian? What are you up to?”

It’s all just stories, stories and habits.

Did your water come on when you turned on the tap today? Well, somebody somewhere has a checklist they’re in the habit of doing, because they’ve been given the idea that it’s important. They will never meet you, probably, and it wouldn’t impact them directly in any way if you didn’t have water. But, because of all the habits of them, you, and all the people in-between the two of you that connect you: You got to drink and shower, instead of having to hike to a well in the back yard.

Same for the people that built your cell phone, same for the people that decided that you can have groceries at the store because you told your side of the story, same for the people keeping Mahmoud Khalil in prison or letting him go. Don’t ever let people tell you stories in the head are not important. They’re near top of the list of the most important things we have.

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.

I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.

I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report.

Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.

Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.

Romania is not the priority, just like the US is not the priority for Trump and France is not the priority for Le Pen.

Hey Russia, how’s that “it’s unacceptable to be surrounded by enemies” strategy working out for you

Sure seems like everyone’s super relaxed and letting their guard down, being okay with your chosen candidates as they usually have been, and et cetera

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

Well… that was not the variety of crazy that I had expected to be at the root of it.

Yeah. I’ve started to get suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell you that they are bold leftist media, and they’re bringing a needed perspective that is super-vital and not just all propaganda and lies like everything else is. It sort of reminds me of those bank billboards that say, “To us, you’re more than just a number.”

Update: It looks to me at least pretty likely that !altmedia@altmedia.house is also Russian propaganda. Maybe they just wanted to post this thing, and are short of any of the critical thinking skills that would let them evaluate my argument that MPN is Russian when I told them it was. Mostly they seem to be posting pro-Palestinian stuff from reliable sources. But, the sidebar is super sus to me.

Until January 2nd, 2025 the 'WorldNews` subreddit, with 40 million users automatically subscribed, had an ‘Israel at War’ livethread constantly at the top.

This community was founded to dissent from this forced perspective, and present the Palestinian and anti-establishment position in general.

Fine. I actually completely agree with this, I took a quick look at some of the pinned /r/worldnews threads about Israel’s wars and “wars” and they’re completely full of pro-Israel bullshit. My initial assumption is that the inherent corruptibility of the Reddit / Lemmy moderation model has rendered /r/worldnews subject to propaganda from Israel, but who knows. But yes it’s some bullshit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1h3nk2e/rworldnews_live_thread_israel_at_war_thread_79/

It’s a little bit weird that they are pretending that anything on Lemmy needs to have this pro-Palestinian iconoclasty brought to bear, when everyone on Lemmy is pro-Palestinian anyway, but sure, whatever. Anyway, reading further:

This community is ‘AltMedia’ in the Mearsheimer and Walt sense. Not the Richard Spencer sense.

Not sure why those are the only two options…

And then below that is where it goes off the rails.

This community likes

John Mearsheimer

Good stuff if a little bit of an odd choice for the number 1.

Edward Said, Noam Chomsky

Great stuff

Chris Hedges

Well that’s an odd choice. All I really know about the guy is some email list that gets sent to me that has his name on it which occasionally says some very bizarre stuff. For example “The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil.” He apparently used to be an extremely bold anti-Iraq War voice back in those days, which is obviously fantastic, but since then…

Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016. Hedges, who has claimed not to have known much about the network at the time, was approached to make a show by RT America president Mikhail “Misha” Solodovnikov, who promised him complete editorial independence.[44][57]

On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works, with Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows. On Contact was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, RT America’s first significant award nomination, but the award was won by Steve.[44]

On March 3, 2022, RT America ceased operations following the widespread deplatforming of Russian-sponsored media caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[44] The run of On Contact ended.

Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.[44]

On May 27, 2020, Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections. After being informed the following day that running for office would conflict with FCC fairness doctrine rules because he was at that time hosting the nationally broadcast RT America television show On Contact, Hedges decided not to pursue office in order to keep hosting the show.[63][64]

Anyway. Back to the list:

Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson

I don’t recognize all that many of the names on their list. But, the people that they “like” that I do recognize that are in any way active in the modern day, there is a very distinct through-line (pretty much universal) about how those people feel about the invasion of Ukraine.

Anyway, YSK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSKrC7dGcY

What the fuck

TIL. I’m so confused by this concept.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/142zr10/what_does_critical_support_mean_in_leftist_spheres/

What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That’s… that’s how it works. If you’re not some kind of “YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever” idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that’s happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect “which side” is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person’s brain.

Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to “Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting” more often than not. I don’t really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.

There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.