I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.

In poll land Brexit never happened, which set the stage for an uneventful 4-year Clinton presidency mostly famous for an iconic photo-op pres Clinton took with the zoo animal, Harambe, following a G20 summit where Xi boasted of negotiating Putin off a suicidal scheme to invade Kyiv, and also of successfully preventing a near-miss that would have led Wuhan to become the epicenter of a global health disaster. With me stranded here on the other side at the Berenstain universe, excuse me if I don’t get ahead of myself celebrating this poll.

I understand your resentment but the restaurant manager is a different user

fuck it, go full mathematician. Serve an empty bowl on the grounds that it’s a vacuous fruit salad, every ingredient in it is a fruit

The “you will all submit to RTO and like it” machine has finally found a way to package this message in a way that wide eyed internet activists will support. Congratulations to them, I guess.

Not quite yet. First a severe crime has to take place due to a scuffle over gratuity. Then Horatio Caine needs to appear on the scene and say “it seems like the situation here…” and put on his sunglasses, etc, and only then we can say that the tipping point has been reached officially.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Think of this like one of those steam reviews: 4,000 hours played, do not recommend

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Excellently.

I got invited to an interview at an absurdist variety show with these weird ethnic undertones (this would be a hassle to explain, just imagine that part of the show is that everyone there is putting on an exaggerated redneck act). They apparently got wind of some scientific publication I was involved with and for some reason decided it would be a great piece of entertainment to have me on. My colleagues were thrilled about this ‘now or never’ opportunity but I had a strong gut feeling that these people weren’t about to laugh with me. Thought about it for a minute and then responded nope, hard pass. Still probably one of the best decisions of my life.

The prime problem is that every social space eventually becomes a circlejerk. Bots and astroturfing exacerbate the problem but it exists perfectly fine on its own – in the early 2000s I had the misfortune of running across plenty of gigantic, years-long circlejerks where definitely no bots or nefarious foreign manipulators were involved (I’m talking console wars, Harry Potter ship wars, stupid shit like that). People form circle jerks in the same way that salts form crystals. It’s just in their nature.

The thing with circlejerks isn’t that there’s overwhelming agreement on some subject. You’ll get dunked on in most any social media space for claiming that the Earth is flat or that Putin is a swell guy, that in itself is obviously not a problem. What makes a circlejerk is that takes get cheered for and upvoted not in proportion to how much they are anchored in reality, but in proportion to how useful they are in galvanizing allies and disrupting enemies. Whoever shouts “glory to the cause” in the most compelling way gets all the oxygen. At that point the amount of brain rot is only going to increase. No matter how righteous the cause, inevitably there comes the point where you can go on the Righteous Cause Forum and post “2+2=5, therefore all glory to the cause” and get 400 upvotes.

Everyone talks a big game about how much they like truth, reason and moral consistency, but in the end when it’s just them and the upvote button and “do I stop and honestly examine this argument that gives me warm fuzzy feelings”, “is it really fair to dunk on Hated Group X by applying a standard I would never apply to anyone else” – the true colors show. It’s depressing and it makes most of social media into information silos where totalizing ideologies go to get validated, and if you feel alienated by this then clearly that space isn’t for you.

Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

Why did you say that name?!

What a disingenuous comparison. This woman didn’t start an insurrection. This is like if Putin had prevented Prigozhin from running, which he would have been completely in his rights to.

The write up Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments explains the underlying dynamics pretty well: by saying “I like this one thing Peterson said”, you assign him karma points and now everything else about him will be viewed more positively. That’s just how people work, and people will assume you know that and are exploiting it.

For example: by linking that post, I effectively supported the effective altruism movement – even though I’m really not a big fan of it – whether I like it or not, because the author is heavily associated with them. That’s how it works, sadly.

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

Bringing up the USS Liberty incident, like bringing up crime statistics in the US, is less the great argument you think it is and more of an ideological calling card. Anyone who actually cares about morals, decency, and the best interests of the civilized world wouldn’t honestly decide that the discussion would be best guided forward by going back in history to cherry pick this one incident that occurred nearly 60 years ago.

EDIT: The upvote / downvote ratio on this comment should tell you everything you need to know about the population breakdown here. People who criticize Israel because of the actual things that Israel does will bring up the '67 expansion, or the high blood price paid in Gaza, or the blockade, or the current extremist government, or whatever else. The USS Liberty is a cynical rhetorical instrument, not a building block of any sane person’s actually, honestly held opinion. Anyone who posts or upvotes this 60 year old incident that Israel has apologized and paid reparations for “because oh isn’t it worrying, isn’t it telling how bad of an ally Israel was to the US that time” is concern trolling and hiding their power level. Simple as.

I understand your anger, but I feel compelled to make some remarks.

The IDF did personally pull the trigger to shoot and kill three of the hostages who were, at the time, waving white flags made from their shirts. This event is surely very telling, and was also immediately considered a catastrophe, with Israeli responses on all ends of the spectrum. On the more sane end you have the official statement by the IDF chief of staff, who didn’t mince words about this:

“You see two people, they have their hands up and no shirts — take two seconds,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi told soldiers in Gaza on Sunday. Halevi said a day earlier that the soldiers who shot the three had opened fire in breach of IDF protocols.

“And I want to tell you something no less important,” Halevi continued. “What if it is two Gazans with a white flag who come out to surrender? Do we shoot at them? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

“Even those who fought and now put down their weapons and raise their hands — we capture them, we don’t shoot them. We extract a lot of intelligence from the prisoners we have; we have over 1,000 already,” he told the soldiers.

Halevi added: “We don’t shoot them because the IDF doesn’t shoot a person who raises his hands. This is a strength, not a weakness.”

Now, given the actual event which speaks for itself, there is obviously a very deep disconnect between what the chief of the IDF touts as policy here and what the soldiers end up doing in practice. You could posit that the chief is speaking out of his ass, but the more probable theory is that higher up on the hierarchy some officers are sincerely convinced that they are leading the charge of the Most Moral Army in the World™, and meanwhile some hefty portion of the boots on the ground have decided to, like you’ve phrased it, kill everything that moves and fuck the rules of engagement. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say this proves such a grand statement such as “genocide is the goal of the Zionists”. Do the events of Oct 7 prove that “genocide is the goal of the Palestinians”? What are we supposed to do with this conclusion? Does it lead anywhere productive?

The hostages are not political pawns for Netanyahu, they are a huge headache for him. Netanyahu could very well easily continue the military campaign just on the promise of dealing with Hamas alone; he would in fact much prefer this, and would like nothing more than to be rid of the constant shouting about the hostages. It’s an open secret that the hostage families have effectively thrown in their lot with Netanyahu’s most fierce opposition; they’re constantly shouting for “a deal NOW” and “negotiate with Hamas NOW”, to the degree that this has become somewhat of a wedge issue in Israel, you’re expected to be a “bring back the hostages, stop the war, reach a deal now, kick out Netanyahu, left winger” or a “push on, let the chips fall where they may, destroy Hamas, keep Netanyahu, right winger”. I am exaggerating but really not by much, and some paper op-eds have written on this topic extensively. The state, for what it’s worth, evidently cares about this issue a lot more than Netanyahu himself does, or you wouldn’t have had the first ceasefire in the first place.

I encourage anyone to read the Wikipedia page on this issue, it provides a lot of sources and goes over whatever evidence the Israelis did claim to have, and how several pieces of it were dismissed as insufficient. I am not arguing with your conclusion here, it’s just that “HA! THIS HEADLINE SETTLES IT” makes for a lousy mental habit.