My father once yelled at me because he tried to to tell me a story about a friar in the 1600’s whose faith in God granted him the power of flight and I assumed it was a joke. It was not a joke.

Nothing? Who said anything about doing anything to them?

By the way, while I’ve got you here, did you know that a mod of c/Germany (as well as most of feddit judging by the upvote ratios) thinks you’re a rabid antisemite who wants to kill all Jews, and thinks people should go to Gaza to join Hamas, because they misread some of your comments defending their policy? I was wondering if you’d do me a favor and explain to them that you’re on their side, I doubt that you’d want that sort of libel going around.

Feddit.org now bans

• The sentence “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”

• Comparing Israel to the Nazis

• Calls to end Zionism

• Calling for the dissolution of Israel

What’s the appropriate legal punishment for murdering 45 children? Because I think that all those responsible, including Netanyahu and Trump, should face the same punishment for this that an ordinary citizen would.

I just quoted what you said. Your real position is crystal clear, you’re a Zionist who thinks criticism of Israel should warrant a ban and also be illegal, because you view anti-zionism as a “dogwhistle” for anti-semitism. You are not, however, “happy to stand by it,” because you’re hiding behind all these excuses about “complying with the law.” The problem is you slipped up and gave the game away with your “dogwhistle” line.

It’s so funny how you types are constantly hiding behind the law and saying, “I didn’t make the law, I don’t agree with it, but they have to do this to avoid legal liability, hands are tied” and then five seconds later you say stuff like, “criticism of Israel is a dogwhistle for antisemitism.”

You’re a coward, refusing to admit your real positions because you know you can’t defend them.

Why would they have to “go” anywhere?

It’s very frustrating and the thread I linked made me feel like I was losing my mind. I try to seek out perspectives I disagree with but a lot of times I just end up concluding, “Damn, these people are even worse than I thought.”

What gets me is how wildly people in the thread blew it out of proportion. You had someone quoting “first they came for” as if lifting sanctions on a leader we installed is comparable to the Holocaust.

It’s like everyone needs everyone to agree that every time Trump sneezes, it’s the literal worst thing that has ever happened, and if you push back on anything ever you’re the enemy. These same people fantasize that they can win elections by appealing to moderates.

But the thing that really grinds my gears is how they all default to hostile intervention in foreign countries despite knowing absolutely nothing about their situation. The “null” position should be leaving everyone alone, but instead, it’s whatever the government or media tell them. Or in this case, whatever a random tweet from a crypto grifter tells them. And they will try to bring down the hammer of social condemnation and use things like this as a way to equate communists to fascists and kick us out of spaces, even when they aren’t actually at all invested in the issue.

Buncha clowns.

The right has their fair share of infighting. They may all want heirarchy, but they disagree on who should be on top. They can all agree on scapegoating an outgroup, but disagree on which people fall into that outgroup. Like, the ultimate endgame of fascism is for the last fascist to kill the second to last fascist for not being white enough.

They appear to be united because most of us don’t go into their spaces and lurk, because, I mean, ew. If a Trump supporter came to Lemmy, they’d find people quite united against them, and if one of us went on Truth Social, we’d find them quite united against us, but that doesn’t mean they actually get along internally.

I have seen people waxing poetic about Imperial Japan

What? Who? Where? That’s an absolutely wild take.

Both of us won out from that exchange.

You might want to look into what happened to the French government and its leadership shortly after funding that little proxy war. Let me give you a quick rundown, because I enjoy history:

The American Revolution was incredibly expensive and put France into an extreme financial crisis. Of course, the court’s extravagent personal spending didn’t help things (and made for better revolutionary propaganda), but in reality it was about 6% of total government expenditure, while loan payments, mostly from the war, represented around 50%. Even with very high taxes, it was impossible to balance the budget. A report from March 1788 estimated a deficit of 20% of expenditures, which could only be made up by more borrowing

This financial crisis led to the king calling the Estates General, something that hadn’t been done in hundreds of years, to bring representatives of the three estates (nobility, clergy, and everyone else) together to work out a solution. When an agreement could not be reached, the representatives of the third estate left the Estates General and declared that they were creating a “National Assembly,” which claimed to represent the popular democratic will, and started work on a new constitution. The royal family ended up declared traitors and got their heads chopped off. And the rest is history. (My source for this is an old book I own called The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre)

So, dumping a bunch of money on a proxy war in a bid to raise their geopolitical status and undermine their rival didn’t really work out so well for France. They were so focused on playing geopolitics against Britain, but by failing to address declining conditions at home, they created a much more dangerous domestic threat which brought about the government’s downfall.

My apologies. I tried to control-F and apparently that doesn’t work on usernames.

In any case, my take is essentially just, “Hands off Syria.” I didn’t think we should arm him, I don’t think we should sanction him, etc. I don’t really think that’s a shit take, but it’s certainly drawn some criticism over the years.

Cool, so then, why did 1500 people just upvote a picture of a tweet calling him a terrorist, and criticizing the lifting of sanctions against him? Why did only like 40 people downvote it? That’s what I’m calling out.

Where were you when in that thread, by the way? Why are you criticizing my take and not that one? Don’t tell me you only saw the thread sitting at 7 upvotes and missed the one with 1500. My bad.

you’re putting in 20 times the effort

Not generally something to brag about, but then, as a BlueMAGAt, reveling in ignorance and low-effort responses is pretty expected. Maybe you should just start changing “U-S-A” at me, wouldn’t that be even less effort, and therefore better?

Yes, I’m sure that the thing that will finally get Jan 6’ers to turn on Trump is checks notes lifting sanctions on Syria.

No, it’d be innocent Syrian people who would be doing the crying, if the sanctions were pointlessly prolonged, which 1400 people just mindlessly signed off on with zero understanding of their situation. Something that you mysteriously don’t seem to mind at all.

All I’m doing is fulfilling my moral duty as a citizen of the empire by calling y’all out on it.

You “don’t waste your time?” Then what are you doing right now, exchanging these quips?

you certainly didn’t garner much of it

Oh no! You mean some of the 1300 people who mindlessly upvoted this meme, displaying a complete lack of understanding of the situation in Syria that it was talking about, don’t respect me? How can I live with myself?

I try to hold people to a higher standard of discourse, because I want to have intelligent, informed discussions. When people demonstrate that they’re either incapable or unwilling to meet that standard, then what’s the point of being nice and polite to them?

The reason I’m here, instead of just surrounding myself in a circlejerk of people who already agree with me, is that I want my views to be challenged. But my views are not challenged by meme-level takes and soundbites and knee-jerk responses with no interest in actually understanding the subject being discussed. Provide me with an actual challenge, and you’ll find me to be the picture of civility. The problem is, no one can.

I’ll own up to one thing, which is that I singled you out coming from a place of already being frustrated with the community for upvoting this garbage. The reason that that’s so frustrating to me is that I consider it a moral obligation to take the time to understand a country’s situation before supporting intervention in it (including sanctions). Failure to do so is the cause of a massive amount of pointless suffering in the world. But perhaps that frustration should have been directed more generally at the community.

If there was some kind of other interpretation to your comment than that you had replied thinking that this had something to do with the Qatar plane situation, then I apologize, but I still have no earthly idea what that alternate explanation is.

I’m very proud of that rep sheet, it’s full some of my greatest hits, tyvm.

There might be one or two comments that were deserved, but the vast majority of the time, it’s because I committed such crimes as, “asking for evidence instead of accepting claims blindly” or “winning an argument against a mod.”

Unfortunately, this community generally follows a very low level of discourse, which is how things like OP are met with 1300 upvotes, and correcting people for getting things wrong is met with, “Ok? So what?” instead of, “Oh, my bad, thank you.” Things like that do tend to make me lose a bit of respect for people.