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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2020

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  • social hierarchy studies have primarily been done on lobsters and wolves

    I’m skeptical. I’ll grant you wolves, but even then, wolves I feel are no more or less studied than a bunch of other species which are subject of extensive interest, especially primates, dolphins and orcas, but also lions, hyenas, meerkats, bees and ants. At least those are all studied well enough that we have plenty to pick from.

    I appreciate your point though that its ideologically driven anyway and that it’s all moot and 100% agree.


  • It wouldn’t even matter if it was “right”. The idea of looking to wolves for models of ideal human behavior is wrong for like 17 different reasons, even if it were technically true as a description of wolf behavior.

    P.S. why do AlphaBros specifically look at wolves, or lobsters, to instruct us on social hierarchy? There are so many other animals, those seem pretty random choices. And pretty far afield from humans. Wouldn’t you at least want something more proximate to us humans on the evolutionary tree? Heck, why not just use humans as a reference point?



  • I mean if you are looking for a serious answer, it’s this. You may be able to find equivalences between US and Russian media, at the level of one instance for one instance. What you can’t find is an equivalence in magnitude. For every offense you find in the U.S., you can find the same in Russia but ten times as much, and ten times worse.

    And to me, a test of whether you’re a serious person is whether you have the information literacy to understand that kind of distinction instead of whatabouting and Gish galloping it into the ground.


  • I think there’s a steelman version of that same argument that makes a legitimate point about how Russian disinformation does contribute to the escalation of tensions both in the United States and around the world, and I feel like not only are you not engaging with it, but you’re intentionally not doing so.

    I say that because you appear to only be willing to address yourself to the completely watered-down version of the caricature argument, even when you’re in a thread that directly links to an article that makes some pretty direct points about the reality of actual Russian disinformation.

    Like if you could just talk normal for a second, you might say something like, “oh in paragraph three of the article it says this. But actually that’s not true and here’s my source for refuting it.” Or even “well these are all true but I feel like it’s emphasizing the wrong things and here’s my argument for emphasizing a different thing.” Like just any signal, any signal at all, any whatsoever that shows that you’re in touch with the same set of facts. But you can’t go there, and so you’re chasing caricatures instead.






  • He says he wants blue team to win in 2024, but we are blue team and we hate him!

    Well we’re off to an awfully bad start because this is about the shallowest bad faith caricature I could possibly imagine. Let’s put it this way:

    • Putin absolutely has a propaganda strategy aimed toward the west that utilizes a number of tools and messaging strategies
    • Among the strategies reported on, one has been to escalate existing divisions within the United States, with one example reported on being creating opposing conservative and liberal events and scheduling them at the same location
    • Purin preferred Trump for his first term
    • Putin preferring Biden can be politically damaging to Biden in the context of domestic politics
    • a Trump victory could prove exceptionally destabilizing to domestic politics in the United States

    I’m not even 100% saying I’m right, but every step of this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn’t rely on any outlandish assumptions, and communication about this isn’t helped by mocking people with bad faith caricatures and performative incredulity.




  • There’s a cat and mouse game every few years where you have trolls who poison communities, and communities that adapt their community norms in response, and then trolls who adapt their behavior to new communities norms and on and on.

    I think modernized community norms for 2022 would identify most of the stuff you are doing: expressing disagreement through antagonization and ridicule, gish galloping, one-dimensional focus on controversial subjects, lack of gracious contrition when wrong or even when right, and a cumulative net effect of constantly creating hostile back-and-forths as within the bounds of what it means to be a troll who poisons a community in 2022. If it were up to me we would update community norms on Lemmy to exclude this kind of behavior.


  • You make dozens of comments on a daily basis attacking people over and over, you were catastrophically wrong about fundamental facts relating to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, evinced no willingness whatsoever to engage in self-examination about why you were wrong, and you can’t seem to express disagreement without antagonizing others, have an irritating inclination toward self-satisfied last-wordism which doesn’t make you right but just wrong in ways that are tedious to litigate, and your entire comment history is a history of you arguing with other people 24x7.

    I can’t think of any thread on lemmy where you did anything that was contributing to building a positive community and I think the community would be more healthy without you here.