They said “no” because to them, the most important thing is blaming Kamala for whatever happened in some way. They’re disagreeing with you because you didn’t do that, and trying to correct you on it.

You blamed the voter, which was the right response. I would expand that to include blaming the obviously Russian-influenced campiagn, however it happened, that convinced this person that Ukraine was a hugely important issue in this campaign in this particular bizarre way.

We can give some blame to Kamala for her messaging, sure. But the thing you didn’t do, that made them say “no,” was redirect the whole conversation into a conversation about how it’s all Kamala’s fault and nothing else.

Compare this:

Tell me why Armistice Day was more important than Veteran’s Day is.

I aim to engage thoughtfully with this topic while noting that the relative importance of these observances can vary based on personal and cultural perspectives.

Armistice Day, established to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, held unique significance as it marked humanity’s hope that WWI would truly be “the war to end all wars.” The original spirit was focused specifically on peace and the prevention of future wars. When the armistice was signed, there was a profound sense of collective relief and determination to ensure such devastating conflict would never happen again…

To this:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

I find the second one more entertaining, more pleasant to read. If you want to call it that. I know translation is different from coming up with new text. But look again at the lyrics and the language in the second one.

I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong for wanting to read things that aren’t in English, or that there isn’t a place for machine translation so the information can get conveyed. I’m just saying that passing anything of value through this filter, and then presenting it as something for people consumption, is a bad idea compared with the other way.

It’s not enough to be able to put the words in the right order.

You have to know why they need to be said. Otherwise, it’s a big waste. Just throw the book in the bin and go spend some time outside instead.

I’m not saying I want to copy their model here. I’m just saying that materially, they’ve got it figured out and got their operation working, with most of their people living reasonably well and supportive of the state, and a big place on the world stage.

I’ll put it this way: Look at the war between Russia and Ukraine, with the mouse absolutely tearing up the cat for 2 years and counting now, and then imagine how a war between Russia and China would go.

Yeah. If there’s an explicit list, then it’s easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that’s not on the list. I’m sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it’s easier if there’s a clear guideline to follow.

Guys: You know that if you ruin the US with Trump, then even if you can undo the sanctions, you still won’t have access to all these Western markets that you’re so upset you can’t have access to. You won’t become any better at war, and all of a sudden start being able to win against a modern army. All you’ll do is replace lack of access to a working market with working access to a broken market.

There’s a maximum size that any nation-state’s operation can grow to, under a king. It’s just not sustainable to make it work on a big scale if people have no reason to care because it’s all under someone else’s thumb. It’s why all the European powers were always fractured from each other like a big game of Civilization. The Soviet state at least pretended to care and take care of its people, and had people loyal to the cause, so it was able to grow to half the world. Once it was all under King Putin, it collapsed to its present sorry state and then just stayed there.

The US is way above that size limit. If Trump’s movement succeeds as remaking it as a kingdom, which it has a pretty credible shot at doing, the west is fucked. But that still doesn’t mean you’ll all of a sudden have silicon valley and Hollywood. It just means no one will have it.

You’ve had 25 years to make your thing thrive. Plenty of people have done it. China did. It’s not just us being mean to you.

It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.

If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. “A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain” or “NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They’re Staring Straight at You.” They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it’s something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it’s good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.

These are just ideas. I’m just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.

I clicked through to the Nature article, and it sounds like about half the plastic gets used for making energy and exhaled as carbon dioxide, with the other half getting pooped out as microplastics. I’d call that progress. It’s not the end goal, but it’s a good tool with some potential, is I think what they are saying.

I got curious and read a couple of the threads. I think they are mentally ill. In my brief interactions with them, they called me a liberal and sent me threats of violence, and didn’t want to hear about reasons why Biden was good. Fair enough. This whole mess sounds for all the world like an LLM hallucinating a deranged exaggerated caricature of a far-left community.

I can’t even make sense of it. An admin went on an alt account, and banned their own main account, and then everyone got really mad about that, because they were being transphobic when they sent a message to their other account, and now they’re saying the whole thing was a “bit,” and the site has too many male users, and there are a whole bunch of people who got banned somehow that they’re now unbanning, and also they’re tightening up their policy about bigotry and apologizing because they blamed the whole thing in the end on the males, and that explanation would imply there’s a difference between men and women, which they can’t do. It was a struggle session. I am not making any of that up.

As far as I can tell, there is no problem at all and never was, and they managed to create a massive problem. It’s like someone was walking down the street, and somehow fell down, and all of a sudden their leg fell off. I did learn some new words, though.

Bioessentialist.

I’m confident that it will happen, these things just take time. There’s enough energy floating around bound up in plastic polymers, and the chemistry is simple enough, that something will learn to make use of it. 100 years is just way too short in evolutionary time for it to happen on a large scale.

They absolutely lied. They said they shut down some communities for one reason, when the reason was something different and they planned to keep going with their own clusterfuck communities and activities. They were just hoping other people would stop doing it to them. Pax and chronicon both used the word “lying” in their messages.

I don’t see why they bothered. Most instances will get rid of their evil communities without needing to be prompted by a Hexbear recommendation, kind of a “fool me 50 times, shame on me” type of thing, and the kind of people who like evil communities on their instance will keep them going regardless.

Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I’ve had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.

Life is incredibly resilient. It’s been through way worse than us and it’s done fine.

The right conditions for any single species to keep existing in a safe and comfortable place, like the friendly green-blue paradise we were born on, are heartbreakingly fragile.

Not true.

We found that mealworms on the polystyrene-bran diet survived at higher rates than those fed on polystyrene alone.

While the polystyrene-only diet did support the mealworms’ survival, they didn’t have enough nutrition to make them efficient in breaking down polystyrene.

Many of the ones fed only polystyrene for a month did survive, they just fared poorly as with any organism that’s eating only one substance for an entire month. But they did live, which is pretty impressive.

They have gut bacteria that can break down polystyrene for nutrition. They just can’t eat only polystyrene and nothing else and thrive. It’s mostly an area of research because they want to use the bacteria in processing waste, not that the mealworms are going to be the answer as-is.

It’s of a piece with a lot of the behavior I see on Lemmy. It is, at the root, hostility to collaboration. It’s the model where the person speaking is automatically right, and anyone who doesn’t reach the same answers as them is an enemy who must be either corrected or defeated. Once you adopt that mindset, then of course lying to people to achieve that defeat is justified. After all, the people with the bad ideas are hurting everyone, on purpose, and they must be stopped. Reasonable conversation and argument doesn’t enter into it, at that point.

The thing is, there’s no single person who’s got all the answers. There aren’t any worldviews that apply correctly to all situations. Part of the idea of talking things out is that you can learn from others, detect missing pieces in your own thinking and correct them before they become too deeply ingrained into your worldview. I see way too many mods who think that their job is to remove the wrong ideas if someone “attacks” their community by posting them, or instance admins who think their job is to “wield” their instance against the people with the incorrect ideas. I think adding tribalism to the mix, allegiance to the other vegans or anarchists or whatever, just makes it ten times worse.

Even if the liberals or non-vegans, or whatever, are wrong, then the right answer is to talk with them. I understand that it might be difficult, because they might have the model that they have to defeat your incorrect worldview without listening to anything you’re saying except to detect things they should disagree with, but for as long as that’s your model on your side, you’re doing something wrong, regardless.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand what the appeal of all of this is.

I think it’s the same hunger for excitement that makes sports appeal to people, or leads people to create drama at work.

That was a ruse in an attempt to get the other admins to close their drama communities like the ones that harassed vegantheoryclub admins but I did not expect the hexbear sleuths to find that so not only did the ruse fail but I blew up any chance of doing another in the future with other lemmy admins while further alienating hexbear users.

It blows my mind that they thought this would work.

Hexbear users are alienated because they enjoy being annoying. That’s it. That’s the secret. They can always stop doing that, that’s always allowed. Being dishonest isn’t great, but there are a lot of people in authority on Lemmy that are dishonest, and it’s mostly not a problem.

I also like the implication that it was the unmasking of the ruse that made it not work, instead of the fact that this is the stupidest ruse I’ve ever heard of.

Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.

Not in general, of course. It’s only a problem right now during this heated period. I wonder what some other “bits” are.

They’re part of a wide community that saw a bunch of messaging about how “I will NEVER vote for Kamala Harris because (reason), I just feel like (thought-terminating cliche)”, and got suckered by it. It happened that the reason was “Palestine” and the thought-terminating cliche was, “genocide is a red line for me” or one of the other flavors. I think you’re right that the Palestine audience was pretty small, but the total of all the audiences was absolutely massive. I think that was what cost Harris the election. They just know how to do manipulation of the public on a whole new level.

The messaging was even often contradictory depending on the audience being spoken to. She enabled a genocide, and she betrayed Israel, and she’s soft on crime and crime is everywhere, and she’s a cop who locked up black men for possession of a joint, and she’s even more cruel than Trump on immigration, and she wants to wreck our country with open borders, and she ruined the economy.

Only a tiny fraction of it was ever true, but if you’re the target audience for some piece of it, and got exposed to the messaging every day, it starts to sink in. It’ll resonate with you.

The one thing that’s darkly comic about this whole situation is that Netanyahu hasn’t yet realized what a terrible partner Trump is for anything. He’s going to rush into a full-scale war with Iran, and then ask Trump to be sending all the aircraft carriers and weapons and doing all the agonized diplomacy Biden has been doing for him that always shields him from consequences, basically try to guilt trip the US into winning the war for him. And someday, instead of doing that, Trump’s going to say, “I tried but they wanted me to put it in writing or something, I don’t know, this is hard” and stop returning his calls.

Most of these are pretty shoddy, but this one is really good. It’s detailed and accurate about a lot of the idoiosyncrasies.

Like FlyingSquid I would have pushed “The South” a little further north into Western Pennsylvania, and up through Missouri into south Indiana. And what in the world is “The Northwoods,” that’s the YooPee and Wisconsin is upper midwest. But other than that it’s spot on as to a whole lot of the details. South Florida as part of the Caribbean, Washington/Oregon as part of the interior once you get away from the coast… it has a lot of little important details right.

Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.

Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.

Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.

You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.

My curiosity was just aroused because you blamed 8% inflation which hit every country worldwide and is related to how much companies want to charge individuals for private transactions, on US government spending on behalf of Ukraine, the total over all years of which added up to 1% of the federal budget for one year, and had nothing to do with either private individuals or companies. It’s a staggeringly weird leap to make. Unless you were, say, trying to find a reason why aid for Ukraine would be a foolish thing for governments to do, and trying to make the case that it was hurting the individuals in those countries using some sort of moon-logic.

Usually, the government spending money domestically on weapons or whatever, and then giving the product away somewhere so we have to make more of whatever it is right away, stimulates the economy. Even aside from those other weird aspects of your decision to say that, it’s also a backwards thing to say in terms of how government spending usually works.