Whelp. So I actually had the most interesting discussion I’ve had on ML. Generally, I ignore the nasty comments there and only respond to those who are actually trying to have a somewhat decent discussion. They’re few and far between, but they exist. Which ended up happening - I had an extended discussion with Cowbee on what a dictatorship is and what democracy is. While IMO there were pretty huge gaps in his arguments, I have to respect that he actually engaged in the discussion without the usual name-calling, putdowns and insults I’m used to on that corner of the fediverse (yes, it’s a low bar, but credit where credit is due). And I’ll be honest, it was a fascinating window into the world view of people who think like that. Call me crazy, but I actually learned something.
At some point, the discussion started going in circles, and I figured there’s no point continuing, since as far as I could tell, everything relevant had already been said, and he didn’t exactly seem to have anything new to add, either - so I stopped responding. (To be fair, I stopped responding once before because life got in the way, but the discussion resumed after I noticed that the thread was actually still alive for whatever reason.) This morning, I wake up - banned for 6 days. Reason: imperialist. The discussion had next to nothing to do with imperialism. It’s like whoever it is who banned me didn’t even bother trying to give a proper explanation. Meanwhile comments like
That’s literally exactly what that means you fucking moron
didn’t get a ban, even though they’re in blatant violation of rule 1:
Be civil and nice.
Interestingly enough, my comments are all still up. I’ve tried to archive it (unfortunately neither archive.org nor archive.is worked) because I actually genuinely found the discussion interesting, even if Cowbee’s arguments ended up reinforcing my own opinion more than I thought it would.
Weird place, ML.
EDIT: I checked lemmy.ml’s modlog and interestingly enough, my ban isn’t listed there, even though I’m very clearly banned from the community. Not sure what’s going on there (or if I’m maybe misunderstanding how this works)
Expecting any sort of coherent and good faith argument on ML (and specifically from Cowbee) was your first mistake there. They’re going to run around in circles specifically to provoke you to say anything that can be stretched into a bannable offense, and if they can’t, they’ll make it up.
Their stance is basically what MAGA is but you swap American conservatives for Soviet and Chinese totalitarian dictatorships. Whatever the Good Camp does is good by definition, everyone else is bad by definition.
Unrelated but I find it really funny that everyone here knows cowbee lol, lemmy is funny.
Besides the bots, there’s only a few thousand of us regulars. Most users aren’t here full time. Imho he’s the street corner preacher raving to the night about conspiracy theories and only making bad arguments . On the next corner over is Desalines.
They are often in discussions regarding anything ML related (even to the point some accused them of using bots to write comments), so it’s difficult to avoid noticing them if you care at all about anything related to their instance. Like, for example, my country is currently being invaded by russia who they defend, while branding me and other Ukrainians as Nazis. Not easy to remain indifferent with that.
They insult you for your nacionality? that sounds silly, and xenophobic and even if we say it is true, it would be an awful generalization.
But honestly I wouldn’t care, I mean it’s the internet, people have all kinds of opinions, that’s both the beauty and ugly of it… kinda but still, not like you can do much anyways. But I am guessing you don’t engage anyways.
My current Lemmy instance isn’t even federated with .ml or other tankie instances, so no, I don’t engage directly. And yet they position themselves as one of the “main” Lemmy instances for general use on the basis of Lemmy developers also being admins and mods on .ml. So I do participate in communities like this one, which calls out their most egregious bullshit.
And also even funnier everyone here hates them.
That’s the thing, though - I actually found the arguments somewhat coherent, which is the reason I continued the discussion - something I’m not used to from ML. Otherwise I would have stopped responding a long time ago.
I mean, I know those are the stances there, but I still find it interesting to understand how they get there. Incidentally, I’ve also had plenty of discussions with people who are in the MAGA direction (those more IRL), and at least some of them I found very interesting - and they also taught me to understand how they think, which is one of the first steps to effectively counter that ideology IMO.
I’ve perked through the thread you’ve linked. It certainly seemed coherent, but at one point I’ve realized they started arguing an opposite thing from the OP.
I’ve been in a few arguments with .ml regulars in the past. When I realized they all eventually boil down into goalpost swapping and spamming paragraphs of text with dubious source links, I’ve stopped engaging. It’s fun the first time, then it’s all the same.
Holy crap, I didn’t even realize that… I had just about forgotten about the original même.