Like was it a meaningful debate or a flat out flame war? And what was the main theme you were arguing over?
Sigh. That under Swedish law, it’s entirely probable that Julian Assange did rape that woman (reddit fanbois are a special kind of special).
That Elon Musk is not a real-life Tony Stark, but is in fact a slightly autistic narcissist who insists on inserting himself into the public eye and has an excellent PR team (reddit fanbois are a special kind of special).
That covid is real, and is bad, and is in fact deadly; and that vaccines are good, not a government conspiracy, and may save not just your life, but the lives of your families and friends.
Probably one of those three.
is in fact a slightly autistic narcissist
SLIGHTLY???
I feel like generally the POV of Musk being a narcissistic freak is now the default tbh, very few see him as the genius eccentric anymore
I would like to believe that, and in the social spaces I frequent Musk’s star has certainly fallen, but the number of people who sunk a ridiculous amount of cash into the SpaceX IPO speaks to there still being a lot of believers in his purported genius.
I know some who dislike musk but are like “he’s just the cash cow that spacex are milking dry, you can support spacex and hate the guy”
Unfortunately a lot of people still see him as an outsider tech genius who is standing up to the wealthy liberal elite. This is despite the fact that he is, on paper, the richest person alive. A lot of people I know, family even, curse Bloomberg and Gates as antichrists pulling the strings of the government puppet, despite the fact that Musk, Thiel, Kushner, etc. are literally doing that shit in the open
Sorry, I don’t know much about Assange but how can it be probable he raped someone “under Swedish law”? Do you just mean Sweden has different definitions for rape and that he might have done something fitting one of those definitions (but we cannot be sure of it because of lack of evidence)? Or something else I’m missing?
There are claims and counterclaims. Both sides sound convincing, but that’s what prosecutors and defense attorneys are supposed to do.
I stated that in a democracy fascist, racist, neo-nazi political parties should not have the right to form, campaign or run for government because - other than the obvious reasons - they are inherently undemocratic. I also added that this is not a paradox of democracy and that claiming otherwise is apologist bullcrap trying to justify fascism, racism or other institutional, totalitarian forms of oppression.
I got death threats.
Edit: maybe this doesn’t apply here since there was no arguing really? 🤔
Yeah, Lemmy is a bit more sophisticated and civil compared to other social media. That is why I always come back.
and that claiming otherwise is apologist bullcrap trying to justify fascism, racism or other institutional, totalitarian forms of oppression.
That’s just making a statement and refusing any challenge to it. Debate means searching for the truth and acknowledging you might be wrong. Now you’re just turning it into a personal attack toward anyone who disagrees with you. It’s intellectually dishonest and in bad faith.
I don’t remember exactly what it was that I said that I got absolutely dog piled on and told I was wrong repeatedly but it had something to do with fire hydrants. 30+ replies telling me I was wrong and stupid and didn’t know what I was talking about.
For the record, I work in water and fire hydrants are very much part of my work. But, a bunch of random people on reddit definitely know better than me. 🤷♀️
They will argue with anyone because there is no consequences behind an anonymous account.
Truth.
Charitably, could there be some kind of regional difference where people living in certain places truly have something different? Over the winter, I came across a thread asking for radiator repair advice, and people from parts of the world with water radiators were very casual “open it up for investigation” while people from parts of the world with steam radiators were like “do not open anything you will die”. Lots of confused comments, too, until someone figured out the disconnect.
I think the thread was region specific but this was a long time ago so I could be misremembering.
did you say that fire hydrants can be other colors than red?
Lmao no but my camera roll proves that. I used to know towns boarders by their hydrant colors before I moved 🤣
If lemmy counts as social media in the context of this question: In one direction it was meaningful, but all I got back was flaming and brigading. But I’m sure they are convinced I have it the wrong way around. I was calling out a tankie for being objectively wrong in their statements, and that their defense of stalinism was stupid.
Seems legit. I hate arguing about politics. I avoid like the plague.
I think as many people as possible should be as well off as possible, with as much freedom as possible, at the expense of as few as possible. I dare you to challenge this standpoint. Sure, how we weigh and balance each of those is up for debate (A debate I am sure neither of us are interested in participating in), but as an outline, I find that only weirdos object to the premise as a whole.
I agree.
Way too many people think trans people’s right to exist is a debate.
The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor.
I struggle to recall any “meaningful” debates.
There is no debate. Everyone has the right to exist. How could someone argue against that. They are just shouting idiocy.
how dare you say we piss on the poor
The treatment of those with disabilities or who are just down on their luck, by the mostly apethic “I’m alright jack” public. I’ve had many arguments with those who thought that just because somebody needed benefits that they were milking the system.
The most disgusting and revolting thing I can read on the subject from somebody is “if I’ve managed to get by fine without state help and support, so can/should they”… And yes many do actually think this way, sometimes even to those who need wheelchairs or other aids.
Sometimes I’ve managed to convince them to care about somebody other than themleves for a change, sometimes I’ve caused them to go away thinking about it, and other times I’ve caused them to double down on their stance.
Either way, the engagements were meaningful and eye opening and I’ll defend this position until the day I die because nobody has any business being that disgusting towards other human beings.
I agree. Sometimes people who value equality forget about equity. That is helping others to achieve their own level of equality. A person in a wheelchair needs a ramp, a person with an invisible illness needs accommodations, too. Equity is almost always overlooked but it is necessary for true equality to occur. I wrote a whole paper about this in college.
That all genocides are bad and if you deny Ukraine or the Uyghurs in China being genocides then you’re bad too.
Who believes a genocide could be good? That’s ridiculous.
Go ask the people who love Mao over on ml
I believe a genocide of mosquitos would be good.
Nope. If the mozzies went away, nature would probably collapse. They’re important food sources for a lot of animals
Just the one species that carries disease is enough.
The term genocide implies the intent to eradicate a people. While Russia has definitely used genocidal language in the past, I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to claim that this is what they’re actually intending to do. As far as I can tell, they just want to conquer the land and rule over the people there.
If you look at what they did in some of the territories they have now left, like Bucha, and at their abduction of Ukrainian children to then be russified, there are definitely genocidal aspects to the war.
The purpose of the whole war is not genocide, but within it are acts constituting genocide.
Stealing Ukrainian children and re-educating/raising them as Russians is definitely genocidal.
There is a meaningful difference between:
- Russia committing specific acts that could legally qualify as genocidal, and
- The war as a whole being accurately described as a genocide.
Under international law, genocide requires the specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is a very high bar. It’s not enough to show that terrible things are happening to a group. You need to show that the perpetrator’s goal is the destruction of the group.
Under international law, genocide requires the specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Yes, and stealing their children and forcing them into your culture fits that description as it has several times in human history, including with Residential Schools in North America.
It’s cultural eradication.
I’m honestly not sure if I would call the overarching conflict a genocide, but Russia is absolutely doing genocidal things with the intent of eradicating Ukrainian culture from the contested regions.
Do you deny that there is white genocide in South Africa? Or that Europeans are being genocided through “the great replacement”? Or is it possible genocide is a serious accusation that requires serious proof and questioning shoddy proof is not bad?
What makes questioning the holocaust (much like the genocide in Gaza) so heinous is the fact that it is so incredibly well documented that the only possibile explanation for questioning, downplaying or denial is pure hatred. On the other hand in Xinjiang, a tourist hub with millions of tourists every year, in an advanced country where almost everyone has smartphones there is essentially 0 evidence of genocide. Unless you believe the Chinese government has secretly developed teleportation or invisibility or some such nonsense that merits questioning that in all these years no reputable organisation has called what’s happening a genocide that there is no real proof and that the 2 biggest faces of the movement pushing for the classification are American intelligence linked Christian evangelical “on a mission from god to destroy china” (Adrian zenz) and a Guantanamo bay torturer (Rushan Abbas).
Or that Europeans are being genocided through “the great replacement”?
You’re a fool. Europeans are deciding on theur own to not have kids due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, but those countries still need labor to keep things running so they use immigration to bring people in. That’s all there is to it.
If European countries would actually address the issues leading to younger people deciding to not have kids, then there wouldn’t be a problem.
But they won’t do that, because then the economy wouldn’t be build to cater exclusively to their version of the baby boomer generation.
That’s the point I’m trying to make dumbass. Just because someone calls something genocide does not make it genocide if you don’t have some serious proof to back it up.
I get it now. You’re just a tankie/wumao that’s salty about someone mentioning the Uyghur Genocide.
Fuck off
Or I am someone who thinks German evangelicals on missions from god to destroy countries and Guantanamo bay torturers are bad sources of information while first hand reports from delegations, the OIC and the UN are more reliable.
have you watched any vlogs from tourists in xinjiang?
I have been there personally
The skewers alone made it worth the train journey.
Since 2014, the government of the People’s Republic of China has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
In 2014, the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Xi Jinping launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism, which involved surveillance and restrictions in Xinjiang. Beginning in 2017, under Xinjiang Party secretary Chen Quanguo,[2] the government incarcerated over an estimated one million Uyghurs without legal process in internment camps officially described as “vocational education and training centers”, in the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since World War II.[3][4] China began to wind down the camps in 2019, and some detainees were transferred to the penal system, while others were transferred to forced labor and factory work programs.[5][6]
In addition to mass detention, government policies have included suppression of Uyghur religious practices,[7] political indoctrination,[8] forced sterilization,[9] forced contraception,[10][11] and forced abortion.[12][13] An estimated 16,000 mosques have been razed or damaged,[2] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[14][15] Chinese government statistics reported that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%.[9] In the same period, the national birth rate decreased by 9.7%.[16] According to CNN, Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization.[17] Birth rates in Xinjiang fell a further 24% in 2019, compared to a nationwide decrease of 4.2%.[9]
The Chinese government denies having committed human rights abuses in Xinjiang.[3][18] International reactions have varied, with its actions being described as the forced assimilation of Xinjiang, as ethnocide or cultural genocide,[19][20] or as genocide. Those accusing China of genocide point to intentional acts they say violate Article II of the Genocide Convention,[21][22][23] which prohibits “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, a “racial or religious group” including “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “measures intended to prevent births within the group”.[24]
At the United Nations, several countries, predominantly in North America and Europe, signed letters condemning China’s policies. On the other hand, several countries, predominantly in Asia and Africa, signed letters supporting the policies as an effort to combat terrorism in the region.[25][26][27] In 2020, a case brought to the International Criminal Court was dismissed because China is not a party to the Rome Statute, meaning the ICC could not investigate them.[28] In 2021, the United States Department of State declared China’s actions as genocide,[29][30] and legislatures in several countries have passed non-binding motions doing the same, while other parliaments, condemned the policies as “severe human rights abuses” or crimes against humanity.[31] In a 2022 assessment, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that China’s policies and actions in the Xinjiang region may constitute crimes against humanity, though it did not use the term genocide.[32][33][34] In 2026, the OHCHR described China’s policies toward the Uyghurs as potentially amounting to “forcible transfer and/or enslavement as a crime against humanity.”[35]
I could dive deep on the issues of sourcing for this article (like the very first source being Guantanamo Bay torturer and US intelligence asset Rushan Abbas) but I think a more interesting question is why this article’s title was changed from genocide of to persecution of? Why does the OIC say there is no genocide? Why does the UN refuse to classify the situation as a genocide?
The better question is why do people deny genocides?
So you think there is white genocide in south Africa and white people are being genocide in Europe through the great replacement? Or is it possible that questioning things not backed by conclusive evidence is not bad but in fact the good and normal thing to do?
Your whatsboutism is transparent and looks foolish.
It’s not whataboutism. If simply calling something a genocide makes questioning the basis of the claim evil then it only makes sense you believe all accusations. You must clearly stand with white South Africans and white Americans and Europeans against their genocides.
Or maybe questioning claims that are not backed by conclusive evidence is ok.
Buying a Pixel to install GrapheneOS is not the only reasonable alternative to mainstream Android.
Each person has their own threat model. My priorities will be very different from a journalist in China, a whistleblower, or even my own mom. Some are more at risk of ransomware and a device with root is risky. For myself, I’d incur that risk as a power user and would rather my phone can be backed up so I don’t have to worry about it breaking. GrapheneOS devs/followers believe that security is the only thing you must ever want, nothing else matters, and everything else is irrelevant, as though Google or street thugs will come to your house and exploit your bootloader if you don’t give them data voluntarily. They just don’t realistically question the statements the project makes, like what threats are worth mitigating (ubiquitous tracking? Who cares, I’ve got security patches and a locked bootloader!) and what options they’re giving up by using GrapheneOS that’s about as locked-down as the average Samsung phone. The marketing game is super strong because it’s hard to argue against at scale: everyone’s situation is different and “don’t you want to be safe?”
That historical events can be approached and assessed without contemporary extrapolations. But to boil down years of internets, including old ezboard forums, I’d say it’s been over the Clean Wehrmacht theory/myth.
I used to be really into WW2 history communities and I would routinely approach things objectively and piss a bunch of nerds off who pervert history and just want to obsess over how Hitler could’ve won.
So I have argued far too much with people who hate Hitler just because he lost the war to Stalin. Like, primary sources would mean nothing. I’d have correspondence transcripts from commanders and diplomats, and they’d have their latest Hearts of Iron game run.
those folks aren’t interested in history, they are interested in fantasy.
for a lot of folks, that’s all history is, or why it’s fun, it’s the fantasizing about it. It’s not the boring staid work of a true historian who is looking at boring crap like cargo manifests to piece together the reality of history.
They’d sure extrapolate into conclusions for contemporary society and modern politics from those fantasies, which was the usual source of contention to start arguing.
For some reason they’re ceded the right to call what they’re doing history and not fantasy. Hence things like the Clean Wehrmacht theory become more than fantasy to folks.
Probably 15 years since I had more than a 5 or so back and forths about anything. I lose interest and just stop replying.
That nun-chucks don’t follow Whip physics
Do they?
No. Nun-chucka are a solid equal cross section, whips taper, so with a whip the force in the first section passes more speed to the next thinner section as mass decreases the speed increase per conservation of energy.
Doesn’t the intervening chain allow for the whip mechanics?
No because the chain then goes back to another nun-chuck nullifying anything that the chain could do in between.
That’s an amazing distinction.
Nah. If you’re able to get nunchucks to break the sound barrier you’re either doing something very wrong or very right.
I would say it’s mostly topics I’m not actually arguing about.
I tend to point out false statements or false assumptions. I do it regardless of the topic or my position on an issue, but usually it’s taken as general opposition to whatever the person was saying. So they call me a shill or demand that I prove a ridiculous point of view they imagine I must hold. It’s like only The Enemy is expected to care about the accuracy of what The Right Side says.
I always hate when someone I agree with makes a stupid argument. Then if I point out their bad argument, I look like I’m arguing the other side
i hate it when someone argues with me by telling me i made a stupid argument by making a stupid argument.
usually my falsely attributing a fallacy to me, which they themselves perform in their counter-argument.
and then they basically go ‘no, you were illogical first, if you don’t admit it you are stupid and I am smart’.
OK, really big-brained logic there.
Same.
Right here on Lemmy, someone argued with me for weeks that the mathematical conventions on order of operations can be proven, and that all calculators obey them. You can find calculator manuals with explicit examples that don’t obey the conventions, and as a one time mathematician, his attempts at proofs are pathetic. Anyone who persists with him no matter how polite, will be faced with rudeness and condescension.
I found the guy on Mastodon where he peddles the full suite of common mathematical wrongness (he thinks 0.999… ≠ 1) and recently he tried to do an inductive proof in an “educational” thread and got completely schooled by someone else. He was unable to understand that he was wrong.
He claims to be a maths teacher, but his ability ran out at school and he’s to arrogant to realise.
Were you arguing with Terrence Howard?
Lol, he’s not quite that loopy!
Mathematics will always fascinate me. I am too wise to argue with experts on it. I am not that naive. I love the YouTube channel Numberphile. It really kept my attention better than “college math” lol.
Numberphile has some great stuff :)
Being cursed with a memory good enough to recall some of my math teachers, I’m absolutely willing to believe that someone as comically incompetent as you describe could be a math teacher.
i had a horrible math teacher for two years in high school. there are tons of awful teachers out there who know nothing about what they are teaching… they are just doing a rote job and teaching blinded from the same textbook for decades on end.
about 80% of the teaching staff at my high school were of that ilk. They just wanted an easy boring rote stable job and they got summers off to party/travel… and I meet teachers who basically say this is why they wanted to teach.
I think I had like 3 teachers in secondary school who actually knew what they were teaching.
I used to go out of my way to argue with people on Facebook about vaccines and about representation of minorities in media. I liked to yell at antivaxxers and bigots
Idiots who don’t understand that vi is better then Emacs
:q!
