that’s stupid, then, why would you bother to make a comment like that. Who gives a shit?

first, the US engaged in a war of aggression and probably not specifically a genocide in Iraq. This is a real difference of kind.

The other difference is that one actually happened and the other did not.

Also, if we were about to go to war with China, I bet it would suddenly become obvious to a lot of people that the US has been making shit up since the trade war started.

pretty obvious

iirc around 76% of Americans supported the Iraq war.

hexbears are abrasive because we expect most liberals to be venomous and dismissive toward us and not listen to anything we say, even if we operate in good faith. so instead of wasting a lot of energy on a response that will be thrown back at us like dogshit, we’re flippant and cursory. for my part, I actually still respond in good faith most of the time, but I pick my battles.

what the fuck does that even mean, “left wing version of /r/TheDonald”

like the donald but believing the exact opposite things?

I have a different answer than blakeus12

the two factors are

1. An ambient sense of how unreceptive the instance is toward us. If the distribution of responses we get is skewed too far toward “I don’t give a fuck what you have to say, I’m not reading that, fuck you you disgusting tankie,” that’s a reason to not federate. And I mean… I’ll be the first one to admit hexbears can be annoying and too eager to dunk on people, but on the flip side I also think our views are often misrepresented and demonized, and it’s frustrating when people won’t even bother to understand what we actually think or why.

2. If any of our users feel harrassed or unsafe, even if the culprits are a small minority of the instance, we are liable to defederate. And this shouldn’t be taken personally! We all know lemmy still has limited mod tools. But we prioritize each other over federation, we’re a close-knit community who have been together for years.

no one gives a shit where you want us to post, goat.

this guy seems exhausting and narcissistic

similarly, there are people now, calling bullshit on the xinjiang organ harvesting narratives

first of all, props for organizing.

denying genocide

This is way too swift and easy a dismissal. Things are bad in Xinjiang, but there is undeniably also a lot of bullshit floating around on the topic. Even the UN concedes there is no mass killing or organ harvesting. A lot of claims come from known bullshitters like Adrien Zens, the folks at Radio Free Asia, the NED, and other sources connected to the US state department. Xinjiang is a complex topic and should be discussed in a complex way, not just “anyone who disputes any aspect of the prevailing western narrative is a genocide denying monster.”

A million Iraqis died because Americans believed a fake story in 2003. More died in the 90s because Americans believed the Nayirah testimony. But if you had gone on an internet forum in 2003 and tried to debunk the Iraqi WMD reports, you would have looked like Charlie from IASIP with the red strings all over the wall.

There were forged documents showing Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. There was testimony from a fake Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza. There were accounts of stockpiles of chemical weapons in glass capsules. There were diagrams of mobile chemical weapons manufacturing systems. There were the aluminum tubes, alleged to be parts for uranium enrichment equipment. There were names and dates and purchasing records, interviews, witnesses, I mean the list goes on, I’m scratching the surface. And the politicians and the media for both parties all vouched for the information and relentlessly pushed the case.

It seems trivial now, but the story was persuasive at the time, and debunking it was no easy task. If America didn’t drag multiple countries into an expensive war based on that story, the details never would have been scrutinized to such an extent, and we would probably still believe it.

post in support of genocide

what the fuck? show me one comment or post fucking anywhere on hexbear that supports genocide

is it supporting Saddam nuking people to dispute that he ever had nuclear weapons?

when a majority white community mocks a chinese man by comparing his appearance to a yellow bear, it’s a little weird

I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.

Removed by mod

• 70% of Americans want singlepayer healthcare
• 90% want universal background checks for firearm purchases
• 75% want Citizen’s United repealed

and yet these and other popular policies remain politically impossible

Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

From the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

further down:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?

“the Ukrainians” are not a monolith. You may be aware that a civil war raged for 8 years before Russia invaded?

Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

From the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

further down:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?

I mean Reddit’s director of policy, Jessica Ashooh, is former Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force — she’s literally a state department plant.

You ever notice how America seems unable to meaningfully damage China’s economy?

This is because China’s economy is integral to everyone else’s. You can’t really hurt China without hurting yourself. Their annual trade volume is in the trillions of dollars.

China paid a price for this leverage. The price was allowing capitalists to operate within China. That is how you do business with the rest of the capitalist world.

They crossed the median line

idk dog, the wording in the article leaves some weird wiggle room.

Of those aircraft, the ministry said 10 had either crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which previously served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides, or entered the southwestern part of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, or ADIZ.