V17 @ V17 @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

My experience so far has been:

• "default" reddit, like /r/popular etc. has been worse, because reddit started using some form of "the algorithm" which pretty aggressively pushes controversial subreddits with high engagement, and those tend to be dumb and toxic. Amitheasshole, twohottakes etc. are the most obvious ones.
• customized, highly selective reddit with as much crap from the frontpage as possible unsubscribed from is not significantly worse than a year ago, but then again, it was already pretty bad a year ago. Since the API changes I've had 3 people block me to get the last word in an argument, for simply disagreeing with them, without me being an asshole. This is quite annoying in a small subreddit where such a person posts regularly, but it may have just been bad luck.
• Lemmy... Well, 3 things that I probably dislike about reddit the most, not because they're the worst things that happen there, but because they're so damn prevalent, are overmoderation (heavy handed deletions of posts and comment trees, unnecessarily locking threads that are even mildly controversial, things like banning people for ever posting in a controversial community etc.), strong american partisanship where if people realize you don't agree with them on everything with regards to society/politics/culture wars, they immediately assume you're from the opposite american camp and that you must have bad intentions, and finally simply people not being very smart on average.

Well, all three of those problems seem to be just as prevalent on large Lemmy instances, the first two even more in some places. And whereas on reddit many people understood that you're probably not realistically going to be able to create an alternative subreddit to some huge default with hundreds of thousands of users, so the "go make your own subreddit" copout is not very practical, here "go make your own instance" seems to be one of the default reactions to any criticisms.

That said, Tildes seems to be doing okay. It's even smaller and it doesn't really try to be a reddit alternative, but it's considerably smarter and more sane on average than both Reddit and Lemmy.

I don't think this is an argument against the usefulness of IQ. Firstly not all countries use standardized tests with such an influence (I'm from Czechia and we don't, there's a standardized high school leaving examination, but it's only necessary to pass, the score is generally unimportant for university admission). Secondly all you're saying is that the tests correlate with IQ. That does not make them or IQ invalid, it may just as well simply mean that they test how well a student does in school, and having a higher IQ tends to make studying easier.

But mostly, again, psychometrics is the one field of psychology that has relatively rigorous and reliable methodology. The idea that you disprove decades of research, from large scale statistic studies made with cooperation of state institutions to expensive and rare research like various twin studies, simply by saying "actually IQ doesn't matter" is naive at best. There really isn't a lot of reasons to say that apart from ideological ones.

So if that’s your argument do you just believe that israel has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter palestine? Genuine question.

I don't believe my comment indicated that. I simply don't believe that Palestine has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter Israel either.

There are things that Israel did that I strongly disagree with, in recent history most of them are connected to West bank settlements. There are more things that I disagree with that Palestine did. I think that the 1948 UN proposed 2-state solution would have been more than reasonable, and it would have likely put Palestine into a much better position than it's in now, but one can't change the past. We'll see if Israel government becomes more reasonable and thinks of a more current lasting solution, but I'm not holding my breath.

So for you, a millennia of history, distinct cultures, and dialect are meaningless.

Why do you think so? Jews also lived in the area, and the ones who came later afaik generally migrated and purchased their land legally, with the exception of migration during WW2, which was not legal, but imo pretty understandable since it was literally done by refugees running from the holocaust. People argue that it wasn't kosher since the region was under British control, but before that it was under the control of Osmans and before that the region was afaik under control of someone who conquered it for most of its history. It has never been a country.

Obviously this doesn't give Israel a claim over the whole region, but I don't think they have any less of a right for existence than Palestine.

IQ isn't even a good metric of intelligence, just of the ability to do well at IQ tests.

I've seen this repeated ad nauseam on reddit in any slightly relevant threads, but it seems completely unfounded. Psychometrics is one of the subfields of psychology that doesn't suffer from an apocalyptic replication crysis, like for example social psychology, and there's decades of research on IQ. Please note that I'm not saying that IQ is the most important measure of a person or anything like that, but it's a pretty good metric that demonstrably correlates to/predicts a lot of things with reasonable confidence.

The point of the movie is to show how stupid people are everywhere, and it's their fault that the world is going to shit. Which is an elitist, shitty argument. It completely ignores the direct involvement of those with a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of the world around them.

In my experience, in real life it's more common that people just don't care about wellbeing of others who are worse off/more ignorant, than it being malice, but otherwise I agree.

Sure, you can make an argument that a certain level of intelligence is inheritable... but not to such a degree that is implied by the movie, or by how people interpret it.

I agree with this as well, and with other critics you write below. I don't think it's a very good movie.

Sure, you may not have quite the same ability to quickly consume and interpret information... but most everyone has the ability to do it eventually. It's just a matter of how much you want to.

But I don't think this is the case. Firstly I don't like the "it's a matter of how much you want to", because that's very close to blaming a person for not being born smart enough. Secondly, even if what you say is true - it's a matter of time and effort - the reality is that at some point the time and effort needed would be so huge that it's the same as "not able to do it at all", because an information that was acquired/way to solve a problem that was found was only relevant ten years ago and is completely useless now. Most people simply don't have it in them to seriously work on a unified theory of physics, but most people (though a considerably smaller "most") also don't have it in them to be a good strategic leader of a company, who does nothing as complicated as theoretical physicists, but needs to solve problems in a smart way fast to be good for anything.

Palestine as a country has never existed and Jews have as much of a historical claim to the regions as Palestinians do.

This is a bit of a controversial topic that's surely bigger than this thread, but I'm going to leave it here anyway for other people reading this.

You talk about trailer parks/low income families vs rich families, but I think that Idiocracy is not about income, it's about being dumb. Part of which is just cultural (ignorance), but part of it seems to be intelligence. And as far as I know, there's no evidence that any kid can become as intelligent as anyone else with proper raising and education. Research seems to pretty clearly show that IQ is heritable to a significant degree, and while it can be needlessly lowered in many ways (like malnutrition or high stress in critical development phases), in the absence of these issues no enrichment is able to raise it.

Despite how controversial it is in some circles, the Wikipedia article on the topic seems to be pretty good.

However, since the movie really is not deep, it's possible that its whole point was just that the idiocy is cultural, and in that case the above obviously doesn't apply. I'm just saying what it seemed like to me.

Israel has killed thousands and displaced millions…because they think it’s their god given right to conquer the land. most of the country agrees that arabic people should not have the right to live in land that was palestine a few years back.

The goal of palestinian nationalists is literally the same thing with the roles reversed. I fail to see a difference apart from the fact that Israel is stronger and we're more critical towards it since it's a democracy and should know better.

One of the issues is that there are no leaders apart from Hamas in Gaza. It is possible that the majority of the population would want different ones (there is not much evidence of that, but it's difficult to get that information), but Hamas made sure that there are none.

This is the video

The source is supposedly Al Jazeera. It certainly looks real, but I'm not going to call it "confirmed" like the dude sharing it just based on that. We'll see in the following days hopefully.

I linked sources in a comment below the one you're replying to. It is possible that all 3 are mistaken, but since 2 of them are non-israeli and as I know not particularly biased, and you're still accusing me of being a propagandist, kindly take a walk and stop posting.

The counterclaim is that it was a failed rocket launch. You don't exactly need a motive for that.

Our ambassador said this in an interview (machine translated, I'm too lazy):

There is even talk of beheading children.
Unfortunately, this is confirmed information, the Israeli government and military have pictures of this, which are really horrible, really horrible.
Have you seen them yourself?
Yes, I have seen the pictures.

The same was said by Jerusalem Post.

And Here is a tweet by Margot Haddad, a french journalist, editor of La Chaîne Info TV station, who also claims to have seen and cross-checked the photos.

For me personally this is enough to say "confirmed".

I know nothing about the "40 babies" claim, but our ambassador, who to me is a completely trustworthy person, explicitly said that she was shown photos of beheaded babies by Israeli officials.

Calling other people idiots and then continuing with the rest of that message is not a good look.

That was already confirmed, including photos. Only, at least some of the photos were originally only shown to selected politicians, diplomats and journalists. Our (czech) ambassador confirmed seeing them, and seeing photos of burned babies as well.

Some people claimed that these photos were later (officially) made public, but I sure as hell am not going to go looking for them.

edit: actual sources in a message below

Personally I'd wait for a while, because at this moment Hamas claims Israel attacked a hospital and Israel claims Hamas had a failed rocket launch that destroyed a hospital. Both are plausible, and I haven't seen any confirmation of either variant from a 3rd party so far (might have missed something though).

If it is Israel, it's a huge fuck up.

edit: A video supposedly taken from Al Jazeera Arabic livestream seems to most clearly show the supposed rocket misfiring, and it looks pretty damning. If that's real, I hope the media who immediately called it Israel's fault based on just the word of Hamas get called out, but I'm not holding my breath yet - the situation is a clusterfuck and there is definitely a lot of disinformation being spread.

I think that's willfully distorting the situation. Punching down should refer to jokes that seem to be or obviously are made with malicious intent, it's not about certain groups being protected from humor altogether, that's infantilizing. From what OP said and posted somewhere in this thread I don't think their jokes were in any way malicious.

In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically "reddit-left" people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they're actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don't seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.

Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.

What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally.

in most of the western world and pretty much nowhere else.

This is especially true for lemmy.ml. Political arguments and circlejerking sometimes start in completely unrelated topics and comments literally saying that every right winger is a fascist get lots of upvotes. It's like a distilled version of some far left subreddits.