mozz

Would you agree or disagree with the bullet points I listed in the body? Follow-up, would you agree or disagree that those are consensus views in the comments I linked to?

See this seems perfectly coherent even if I don’t agree with a lot of it - I actually do agree with the idea that Russia is motivated by a desire to keep hostile alliances from creeping up literally to their border, in a way that’s not readily understood in the West and leads to things being provocative from Russia’s POV. But also, I think that’s often not the intent from the Western side, and I think the Magnitsky Act and the subsequent reigniting of the Cold War and Russia’s extensive interference with US domestic politics is also vital context, and I think the idea that the Ukraine war is a “ploy” that the US invented is very obviously not accurate. But like I say, sure, this is a coherent thing we could talk about as to why I do or don’t think it.

But none of that is what’s on the other side of the link up at the top. If there are people on hexbear / lemmygrad who think the kinds of things you just said, they are currently being drowned out by people who think Russia is on the verge of winning the war and anyway they’re just trying to help Ukraine and the West is trying to destroy Ukraine, and similar comically insane things, who will just get super hostile if anyone disagrees with them about any of it.

They could always go the fuck home

Hexbear: Literally the most insane and aggressive disagreement with literally everything and everyone, including yelling and cursing and deleting comments and banning people who disagree with their insane viewpoint

Me: I think your opinions are not correct

Hexbear: Why are you SILENCING MY DISSENT this is unfair

Makes sense to me. "I know more than Bill who is a waiter, and Joe who does tree work, and those are my only two friends. Therefore, I guess I am a genius. The world must know my wisdom."

The same thing happens when people get to college sometimes.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, my estimate in the modern day would be that "ACAB I saw a bad video on Youtube, we need communism" would turn into "oh my god what the FUCK they literally came in my house because I said the wrong thing online and SLAMMED ME ON THE GROUND and now they're NOT LETTING ME OUT OF PRISON this is literally SO BAD LIKE THEY'RE NOT ALLOWED TO DO THIS".

But yeah, the general principle that they don't have any degree of connection to reality with what they're saying, I'll agree with you on.

Yeah. It's a pretty heartbreaking statement about the nature of the system -- like if things were set up reasonable, she'd clearly be fine, but she's not.

Or "you think CHINA's justice system is bad, have you heard about the police in AMERICA?"

It's like a sore tooth, I can't keep from poking at it.

I also learned just now that the collapse of the USSR and and its former constituent countries in the 1990s is an example of how great communism is, because when the communism went away, everything got worse. It's flawless logic; I can see no counter argument.

Yeah. There's this culture of lemmy.ml, too, that's elevated arguing in bad faith to this sort of "this is the way" status. Like if you're calmly citing sources and asking questions, that is "sealioning" which is a bad thing to do, but hurling abuse at someone who you don't agree with is fine. Also, I've noticed a common thread of behavior which is telling other people what those people believe and then disagreeing with it. Like hey, you disagreed with some ludicrous thing that I said, so that means you're a "centrist" and you support establishment Democrats and Israel, and so now I'm gonna go HAM about telling you how wrong you are for supporting the Democrats and Israel even though you never said those things or anything even roughly similar to them. It's like a little one-man band of internet debate. The other person doesn't even really need to be involved in the process at all beyond showing up and saying a couple things enough to be branded as the enemy.

At one point I thought it was bots. Like they're programmed with this pattern of general hostility pushing a certain viewpoint, that doesn't even need to have anything to do with what the person they're talking to is saying, and that's why it's so bizarre in the flow of conversation. But now I'm not real sure about that. IDK. Maybe it's not worth time trying to figure out, but it is a mystery to me that I wish I could know the answer to.

More than once I have seen the same person express both "America is evil and the whole system needs to be destroyed" and also "Joe Biden is bad for the country and I can't support him", and asked the person, well if you think America is bad and Biden is harming the country, doesn't that mean you should support him being in charge, so he can do more damage to this evil thing?

It's just so... weird.

Like it seems like they genuinely believe it. I can't see that it's useful to have a whole server of propaganda-bots all just talking to each other; it seems like probably some decent number of them are real actual people.

I feel like I have a pretty good handle at this point on why people hold weird political opinions on the internet, but the whole "Russia's the best, Russia's totally winning the war, anything and everything in the Western media is lies, RT and SCMP are the only things you can trust" viewpoint is still a mystery to me. The best thing that I can come up with is that it's a sort of little self strengthening propaganda-box like some authoritarian religions -- like "every source that doesn't agree with me is lying, don't believe them" and a few other key principles that make it hard to break your way out of once you're in it. But I don't know. Like I say I can't figure it out.