Just been reading all your thoughtful posts in this discussion. Very interesting and edifying. Thanks.

I’ll swap my “Spock-like communication” for your “douchevoting” any day.

Sometimes rights can be zero-sum. For one person to gain them, somebody else has to lose them. That’s the issue in female sports. As for youth gender medicine, it is clearly an ethical minefield where nothing is automatically right or wrong. To paint these things as black and white is a form of religious thinking. Only the US progressive left is sticking to the absolutist line you’re selling. It’s been abandoned everywhere else. Presumably this is a consequence of America’s extreme political polarization.

Anyway, I find this subject incredibly boring so that’s all I have to say on the matter.

It’s comments like these that stop me from leaving. Thanks.

Low effort, low quality, empty, boring, vulgar. This comment has it all.

The irony is definitely there. Here we are patting each other on the back for being in the elite tribe of those who understand the dynamics of social media and are able to rise above it all. You could now post a bad joke and I’d have to try hard not to upvote it.

That was probably the single post I’ve written on Lemmy that I would have deleted if the mod hadn’t done it. But only because the language was confusing. I said something like “it’s not at all certain that”, which I meant literally, but obviously it reads like “I don’t believe that”, which is absolutely not what I meant.

Anyway, you don’t care about any of that, or listening to anything that anyone would say if you feel they’re not on your team (let alone assuming their good faith), what you care about is scoring points with your tribe, and being righteous, and dunking, and all the rest of the boring litany of social-media ills.

But I’m putting this correction out there anyway.

This whole argument (neatly summarized in the final line) is based on the premise that whenever someone gets pushback it’s because they’re wrong. I beg to differ. Anyway: sterile debate, I hear your points. Let’s call this a day.

Indeed. That includes those that are so popular around here.

found a thread about immigration with some fairly centrist takes

Indeed. !europe@feddit.org seems relatively uncaptured by ideology, but still, I basically got banned for wrongthink rather than for breaking any actual rules. Last time I checked, the particular mod seemed to have gone away, but I can’t be bothered begging to let back in.

I doubt they’d be as strict with someone who posted in disagreement with me, but that’s hard to know

That’s very diplomatic and generous.

Your thumb-typing ordeal was not (totally) in vain because I read it!

I posit it’s not only the fact that you can’t read body language or have to give your whole argument in mini essay form instead of conversational chunks, but the fact that the “dinner table” is actually composed of a flow of people with different motivations, dispositions and attention spans.

Probably the most interesting thing that’s been written in this thread.

Actually, I tend to ignore the low-effort bird-flipping posts. The comments that bother me are the ones that take the form of angry lectures dripping in sanctimony. That’s because they suggest that their author is so deeply ensconced in their bubble that they’re unused to seeing my opinion expressed openly. Given that my views are anything but extreme by the standards of the electorate, I find this situation pretty worrying.

They should indeed, if they care that much. I stand by everything I wrote, namely a bunch of banal viewpoints that are completely middle-of-the-road anywhere outside the bubble of Lemmy.

People classified as “progressive” make up 9-15% of the US population by one count (I believe another pollster put it at 7%). Americans here who are arguing with me are in fact arguing with the overwhelming majority of their compatriots.

What a low point we’ve sunk to. As I’ve said elsewhere, my opinions are totally mainstream and moderate - not by your standards, I’m sure, but by the standards of society. I’m not at all rightwing. I have voted mostly green for 20 years. You appear to be living in a bubble where you never cross paths with anyone who doesn’t share all your opinions right down the line. This is a totally unhealthy state of affairs.

The second. Anything that is technically unfalsifiable can be “proven” beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, I understand that. Anyway, I find this subject stultifyingly boring, I don’t have anything else to say on it.

Sure, I understood your point. My point was that you are inadvertently making the same claim as the flat-earthers: “Don’t worry about that boring scientific consensus, this specific issue is different”. In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist”) when one does not have expertise.

But again, my positions were not scientific but political. Here everyone can have their opinion about what’s “reasonable” or not.

I’d argue that this empathy is selective. Were you as exercised by the horrors that were inflicted by the other side in this particular conflict? What about the handful of conflicts in the world, for example Darfur, where the scale of suffering and atrocity is unarguably worse than anything happening in the Middle East? People seem to know inside-out the situation in Gaza and who’s responsible and how terrible they are. Much less interest in, say, Myanmar, or even Iran, where the government seems to have inflicted years worth of Gaza’s suffering in the space of just a few days six months ago. It’s revealing.

This comment makes my point. I’m arguing that federated social media would be a more pleasant place, with more interesting contributions, and definitely a wider demographic profile, if less of the comments were aggressive and profanity-laden like this one.

Sure, I get that. On this particular question, it seems clear to me that no such “beyond reasonable doubt” exists.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say? Before they shower you with factoids (“the merits of the situation”) that “prove” their point? On the contrary, I think that affiliation can be very important in such cases, because science works on the basis of consensus. If you disagree with the herd, then you should expect to have an uphill struggle.

In any case, here we’re talking pure politics, i.e. questions where the responses are conditioned by people’s personal values, and which (theoretically) are open to debate.

I have never written anything “hateful”.