• @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    Its probably because extremists don’t feel comfortable expressing their views in their everyday life, so they do it online instead, where they have some anonymity or at least don’t face the same backlash as they would if they were to voice their opinions at work or at a bar or something.

    Also, controversial takes get more engagement, which means more ad revenue.

  • Queen HawlSera
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    41 year ago

    I don’t know, by the way, can we stop demonizing the Confederate flag? K thnx

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      No, it does deserve the vitriol. The South is not inherently bad and needs a better thing to rally around. The battle flag of a treasonous rebellion fighting to continue to exploit and harm an entire race of people for monetary gain shouldn’t be it.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Stating a fact isn’t the same thing as demonizing.

      The Confederate flag represents a group of proud racists.

      The cornerstone address literally contains “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

      Read it for yourself:
      https://www.owleyes.org/text/the-cornerstone-speech/read/text-of-stephenss-speech

      You should know better.

  • @[email protected]
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    201 year ago

    We’re here…we just don’t shout as much the others. We’re probably reading a book quietly in the other room.

  • @[email protected]
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    191 year ago

    I pictured literal sheep in Halloween masks at first. I thought it was just insane person Facebook.

    If I did see a whole flock of sheep in Halloween masks, I would have something to say…

    • @[email protected]
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      61 year ago

      I may have come here to say that last thing isn’t political at all, then realized I’m an idiot.

  • Seraph
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    461 year ago

    The media has tried very hard to normalize extremism.

    Funny key then

    Ducking autocorrect I meant: Don’t let them.

  • Ænima
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    1 year ago

    Discourse evaporated when the rightwing and Faux “News” declared “compromise” as blasphemy. That’s why so many moderate Republicans will still vote along party lines, despite knowing the candidate is batshit crazy. To vote Democrat is to commit suicide to those people.

    Edit: was trying to get this comment done before kid woke up from nap and barely made it. Fixed the faux pa.

    • MacN'Cheezus
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      1 year ago

      Yes, I agree! It’s the OTHER guys who are to blame this!

      Like, share and retweet BTW if you want them prosecuted for their crimes.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        …prosecuted for their crimes.

        It’d be nice but unfortunately there’s too many batshit republicans in office to pass any laws for that to happen.

        • MacN'Cheezus
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          1 year ago

          Like I said, it’s the OTHER guys who are at fault for this.

          Therefore, we need more prosecutions and also guillotines. There can be no peace on earth until the other guys are all dead.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            Can’t wait for you to start using them. Or are you going to keep posting sarcasm to hide the fact that right wingers are terrible people?

            • MacN'Cheezus
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              21 year ago

              Yes, the OTHER guys are terrible people. If WE did something terrible, it’s only because THEY forced our hands by being terrible people first. But they started it!

              Seriously dude, there are 5-year-olds out there who are more mature than you.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        THIS… Literally, god forbid we try to have reasonable debate and actually listen to the other side. All this “my way or the hogh-way” BS is fucking annoying…

        • MacN'Cheezus
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          1 year ago

          What, you don’t agree with the FACT that the other guys are a bunch of despicable low lives and criminal child abusers for whom death would be too merciful of a punishment? Fuck outta here with those conspiracy theories, you just want to enable them.

          • @[email protected]
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            211 year ago

            All of those things did happen, but they are worlds apart from Jan 6.

            Your first link is clearly a peaceful demonstration; they didn’t even damage any property as far as I can tell. The article calls it “civil disobedience,” and apparently the vast majority were arrested for “demonstrating in the Capitol”. I shouldn’t have to remind you that the Jan 6 insurrectionists destroyed property and murdered people with the express intent of taking over government.

            Your second link is again a peaceful demonstration. People were again arrested for “unlawfully demonstrating”. There is no mention of any destruction of property or injury. And again, they were not trying to seize the government.

            Your third link is closest. There was obviously destruction of property and while no one got hurt, someone absolutely might have[1]. But even then, this was not an insurrection by and for the Democrats; it was from a fringe left group. Democrats immediately and to this day condemn the attack. Jan 6 was orchestrated by the leadership of the Republican party, and still receives support from said leadership.

            Anyway, this is you:

            [1]: The bombers did make an effort to not hurt people: they gave 30 minutes notice, and the explosion happened in the early hours of the morning. But something could still have gone wrong.

            • MacN'Cheezus
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              51 year ago

              Ah, yes, but the point is that we went from “Democrats would never…” to “Democrats actually did (but it’s different)”.

              As for January 6th, none of the protestors had actually planned to enter the Capitol, and neither did Trump tell them to. He only told them to march towards the Capitol building to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.

              The deaths that occurred that day have all been ruled as accidents, i.e. nobody was deliberately murdered.

              The damage, which was initially reported as likely exceeding $30 million was later quietly corrected down to only about $1.5 million.

              Basically, almost every single thing you likely believe about that event has been blown wildly out of proportion, but you probably never heard about any of this because outrage is what sells clicks and ad impressions, the truth doesn’t.

              Well, anyways… I guess this means I’m not quite as enlightened and morally superior as the guy in your meme.

              • @[email protected]
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                31 year ago

                Yes, Trump and the GOP party leadership spent months plotting to overthrow a legitimate election, but when it came time to do so, one line in a speech sounded nice. Then the protest started getting violent and destructive. To be clear, they were doing this for him (in the sense that they wanted him to continue to be president). He could have shown up and told them to stop and they would have. But he didn’t. He made no meaningful attempt to stop it at all. He did, however, say something nice earlier in the day. That’s true.

                Yes, I said murdered when I should have said manslaughtered. Sorry. The protest was still violent. I’ve seen the footage; they managed to make me feel sorry for a cop.

                I did never make a claim as to the level of damage. I’ve never really thought about the dollar amount; it’s more about the fact that they broke in. If someone broke into my house, I wouldn’t be worried about the dollar amount of the damage. I’d be worried about what that means about their intent.

                You are being obtuse. None of the differences you’ve pointed out are salient. None of the similarities you have implied are. The post you replied to never said “Democrats would never…”, nor did I. And I disagree that Democrats actually did. The examples you gave are nothing like January 6th, except in facile similarities like the location of the events. I will say though, I agree that you aren’t enlightened or morally superior.

                • MacN'Cheezus
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                  11 year ago

                  The examples you gave are nothing like January 6th

                  My point was mainly proving that the idea that “Democrats would never storm the capitol” was wrong. Yes, January 6th was perhaps still more violent than Democrats’ previous attempts to do so, but if it’s about the amount of violence each party is guilty of, all we have to do is look at riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death that happened a mere 6 months later in many cities across the US, and continued for a very long time. Those protests caused far more death, injury, and property damage than January 6th, and while you could claim that they weren’t political in nature, it is a fact that it was overwhelmingly Democrat politicians who supported them, and Democrat voters who attended them.

                  I’m not really keen to get into an argument about which party is responsible for more violence, since counting up dead bodies seems rather sordid and probably won’t help much anyways to convince either of us to change our opinion on anything, so I propose we call this one a draw and simply say “both parties are perfectly willing to use violence in pursuit of their political goals and have clearly demonstrated this in the past”.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                This site is SO much better than reddit. On reddit your downvotes would have hidden the truth that people over there don’t want to see, but here we can just see the truth and how many people were pissed off that you tried to get their heads out of the sand.

                • MacN'Cheezus
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                  11 year ago

                  Uh… okay? Not sure what you’re getting at, the only thing that tells me is that you’ve never actually taken a look at the modlog or you would know that banning and censorship are alive and well on here as well, but in Lemmy’s defense, I will say that at the least they ARE more transparent about it. On Reddit, you can’t even see what was removed without third party hacks, and those never catch everything.

              • @[email protected]
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                81 year ago

                Still, some people called conservatives criticizing the display hypocritical, as similar effigies were made of President Barack Obama during his time in the White House.

                • MacN'Cheezus
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                  21 year ago

                  Which conservatives would likely in turn point out as being hypocritical, since Democrats used to literally lynch black people up until the Civil Rights era.

                  At some point you gotta realize that 95% of politics is literally just the “Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man” meme.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      I’ve only ever heard left wingers claim that compromise is ‘blasphemy’ or that “center politics” is just for people who are too afraid to admit they are right wing.

      Fuck, there’s even memes abotu being centrist is being OK with half the holocaust or the KKK.

      Your comment is exactly the insane shrill partisan hackery that is the problem.

      BAM - just immediately guns blazing accusing the other side of what your side is guilty of.

      • @[email protected]
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        241 year ago

        I was raised in a particularly right wing environment, grew up with those values, and have shifted dramatically leftward in my adulthood, and I can say with absolute certainty that you’re either lying or willfully ignorant. Are parts of the online left prone to litmus tests? Yes, but most often in the sense of “hey, I’d appreciate it if people who claim to be in my corner don’t join hands and sing Kumbaya with people who want to eradicate my particular minority from the face of the Earth, please.” They’re a reaction to intolerant right wing fanaticism, rather than a statement of intolerance themselves. You have to go all the way around to the extreme fringe of tankies way out on the left arm of the political-alignment horseshoe to find a level of ideological fervor equivalent to what is now mainstream in right wing politics. The right pioneered single issue voters with the Moral Majority way back in the Eighties, and have led the charge on (sometimes literally) demonizing their opponents since the early days of talk radio. I know, because I was there.

        If the modern left doesn’t really want to try and find common ground with a right wing that views them as something between subhuman scum and actual literal hell spawn, I’d argue that’s entirely the right wing’s fault.

      • @[email protected]
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        101 year ago

        It was right wingers and centrists who allowed the holocaust to happen… source: rise and fall of the third reich

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          True. But it was left wingers who killed millions of Russians in gulags, who committed the Cambodian genocides, the long marches and purges of Maoist communism.

          So maybe there’s something to be said for moderation eh?

      • @[email protected]
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        221 year ago

        The reason people say that is because a lot of the time these centrist people just vote Republican every time. They’re not really independent and as much as they say they don’t fully agree with people like Trump they keep voting for him despite everything he’s done.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          I’ve always been curious to when people will realize that voting Republican or Democrat is really the same thing. They both grow government, one side just happens to want to take away a particular set of liberties while the other side wishes to take a different set. In the end nothing changes because we’re too scared to vote for a candidate who actually cares because they have “no chance of winning.”

          This was obvious ten years ago, I thought the internet would have caught on by now. Perhaps not though, because since they’re so similar they HATE one another because they really dislike that they have many of the same views so the ones they differ on are so extremely upgraded in importance.

          Note: I know I’m not the first or only one to figure this out, plenty of people realize this, so no offense to you. I’m just surprised the truth is such a niche category online, in-person, in the media, etc…

          • @[email protected]
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            61 year ago

            This “truth” hasn’t caught on because it’s complete bullshit. What set of liberties does left want to take?

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          It doesn’t even matter. Hard right and hard left are all just fucking nut job low IQ idiots with different flavours of asshole populism.

          Horseshoe theory is as clear as day to anyone not on the extremes.

          • @[email protected]
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            81 year ago

            It looks like you have expressed an opinion. Unfortunately, it makes you inherently skewed, therefore you’re objectively wrong because something something both sides. Now, only I remain perfectly correct at the exact center of everything, and you go down the slide of shame.

          • @[email protected]
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            181 year ago

            One side wants to kill black people and ban non binary and trans folk from the public square

            One wants people to see doctors and not starve.

            BuT bOtH sIdEs

              • @[email protected]
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                1 year ago

                One side is cartoonishly evil, openly calling for eradication of their enemies and those they dislike with language drawn directly from Hitler. One side is the relic of a busted status quo. ObViOuSlY tHeYrE tHe SaMe.

                Nobody cares, dude. The quiet part is out loud, you don’t have to vote or like dems, but running this purposefully disengenuous BoTh SiDeS defense for the right just shows you’re batting for the fascists.

            • MacN'Cheezus
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              1 year ago

              Death penalty for a meme? Or what are you saying? I’m not really sure how that relates to my comment.

              But Belarus is adjacent to Russia so I’m sure they’re probably terrible, backwards-ass people who should be bombed off the face of the earth or something. /s

  • @[email protected]
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    741 year ago

    People with extreme views are also more vocal, so that’s what you see. That’s why social media is bad for you. If gives you a very distorted view of the world. Most people are able to look at politics with nuance.

    • @[email protected]
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      361 year ago

      This, plus everyone is concerned with engagement. If I say a perfectly normal statement on Facebook or X or whatever, no one will care so no one will comment or interact with it. If I say that Jesus wants us to make America white again, even the people who disagree with me will only be boosting my message by commenting.

    • @[email protected]
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      81 year ago

      This is so true, I had a phase in my life where basically all my political social interactions were reading other people’s takes on reddit. After a while I found a job and after getting to know people there I realized how insane the takes on political stuff in internet are.

  • ddh
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    1051 year ago

    It’s the algorithms. Except 4chan where that’s just how it do.

    • RQG
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      4chan was simply where everyone banned for extreme views everywhere else went because there were no rules or close to none.

      Now as algorithms of social media sites have been chosen to dictate our daily news cycle, discussion topics and visibility of culture by engagement metrics alone, as are dominated by flashy, extremist content that appeals to our lowest instincts. Before humans curated content by trying to use human reasoning instead of relying on instinct alone. I think we have taken a step backwards in evolution culturally.

        • RQG
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          61 year ago

          I don’t think it’s the internet. I remember 90s internet because I’m old apparently. Forums, mailing lists, blogs were the dominant form of internet media. And while trolls and bad people existed it wasn’t nearly as bad. People found together in interest groups and things mostly went fine. It was really when algorithm based browsing of content became the norm that things changed.

          In my opinion the reason is that it is engagement driven instead of topic or content or interest group driven. And the strongest and most reliable form of engagement is anger and rage and overexaggeration. So we see a lot of that and people who are good at that become the loudest and most popular. It also incites anger towards others and thus splits societies. Fashists and populist thrive. We need to regulate social media ASAP.

  • darq
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    61 year ago

    I mean I get that it’s a meme, and exaggerated for comic effect… But yeah that’s what the world looks like if one semi-willfully misinterprets other people’s views into weird caricatures of what they actually believe. And it’s sadly a really common thing to do.