While the !worldnews@lemmy.ml community has always been a little feisty, the flood of Redditors has turned much of any contentious subject into pure mud slinging. Take the recent post “Ukraine war: Kyiv claims its first victories of counter-offensive”. The discussion featured these insults:
- cia and nafo freaks
- I don’t think the person you’re responding to has the capacity to realize anything except their own delusions
- hasn’t achieved reading comprehension
- tankie
- fascist
- gargling Putin’s cock
- weasels
- So I sincerely ask you to either become a better person or just stfu.
- loonies
- Russian dick train
- willfully obtuse
And that’s just half of the page. Seems like it’s time to have at least some basic civility rules in place before this community is nothing but personal attacks.
On one hand, sure we could all do with some rules on civility.
However, people who support Russian claim to Ukrainian territory (not those that support and end to suffering, there’s some nuance there) are, to me, despicable. In the same vein that we must not tolerate intolerance, I don’t see that position as a viable position to take.
I’m all for vitriol when pointed at a handful of pre-selected targets. You can hate nazis, you can hate pro-russian pundits, and you can hate the guy who sold Ea-Nasir that bad quality copper in 1750 b.c.
and you can hate the guy who sold Ea-Nasir that bad quality copper in 1750 b.c.
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Is “slightly left of center” a euphemism for liberals or actual leftists? All of the vitriol, personal attacks, and hate that I’ve seen here has been liberals and the like attacking actual leftists. The leftists I’ve seen have been attacking ideas, and aren’t aggressive in doing so (calling an idea stupid is not the same as calling the person with the idea stupid). On the other hand, I’ve seen liberals attacking people (not ideas), being aggressive (“get fucked” etc), advocating for creating and re-inforcing an echo chamber (you know seeing dissenting opinions is a good thing, right?), trying to push people out of an existing space that they founded, and all-around not having meaningful discussion.
There seems to be something causing people to get irrationably angry and go on the attack when confronted with something that questions their beliefs. It doesn’t make sense to me. What causes the aggression? Ego?
There is one dipshit who keeps taking a “pro-Russia” line in the shittiest most obnoxious way IMO. I have my own analysis of the conflict that doesn’t involve unilaterally backing Ukraine, but that person really mucks it up so I can’t really share anything about it. Not sure if they are “leftist” but whatever.
I completely agree that insults like this are “pure mud slinging”. As I said elsewhere, I know reddit was basically a rage-engine, generating and thriving on rage, but that’s not real discussion. That’s “engagement” in the most cynical sense. Real engagement is discussion, back and forth, even with (especially with) disagreements.
I just saw a thread where one person’s “contribution” was literally nothing other than trying to combine the same 5 words into different insults in response to reasonable comments. There’s a difference between ending your evidence-backed reasoned comment with an insult or derogatory remark, and having the entire content of all of your comments be personal attacks or insults.
I’m unsure how I feel about making a rule around such a thing, because the mere presence of insults is not always enough to declare the comment(er) detracting; when the entirety of someone’s comment history is just that, then things become more clear-cut.
I don’t want an echo chamber. I want to see dissenting opinions. But I want those dissenting opinions to be in good faith, and not backed by aggression. I don’t want to see the content of people whose sole intent is to cause outrage and troll.
