Yeah. I know 100% what you mean. It is hard to maintain good humor. If it helps:

1. It’s fun to deal with the ones that are doing a really shitty job. I was happy seeing this guy come in and instantly trip over his dick trying to say “all NATO’s fault” in this obvious and incompetent manner. I don’t think it actually needed debunking really, but maybe a larger number of people laughing at him in the comments will result in a bad performance review or something along those lines.
2. Don’t feel like you need to deal point-by-point with their horseshit. You don’t need to be evasive or deceptive or anything, but they don’t deserve the courtesy of a detailed and factual counterargument. If you answer one argument, they’ll just pretend you didn’t and raise another. You’ll notice that except for the end, I basically ignored almost everything he said, because it’s not like it really needs debunking. I just took the chance to talk about some stuff that counterbalanced their narrative and I felt like talking about.
3. Don’t feel like you need to be polite. I’ve actually seen some writings that dealing straightforward-factually with this kind of stuff actually is just not effective and more or less gives them a platform, and I can completely believe it. Don’t be unhinged or hostile, but also, don’t pretend you respect them. The social contract goes both ways, and honoring it with someone who’s breaking it is just being a chump and sending the wrong message to people reading.
4. If they do decide they want to debate, I love to just ask straight questions. I recently got banned again from Hexbear because of some participation that included:

• Hey, quick question: Why did Russia swear before the invasion that they were not going to invade Ukraine, and any reports of that were just Western lies?
• Why did they change the goal from “denazification and demilitarization” to “we need to keep all this extra land on the border because it’s ours now and we’ll keep killing people until someone gives up and lets us have it”?
• Is Russia’s current set of actions more likely to produce the result: More motivation to join NATO by neighboring countries, or less motivation?

There were a couple of other ones, sort of detail questions related to what we were talking about. They really get irritable when you just ask straight questions that their framework doesn’t like the answers to. Zero of my questions got answered even when I pointed out that maybe they had overlooked the question or meant to respond to someone else and politely asked it again, and they accused me of “JAQing off” and said it was a horrible thing to do to ask them these things. (Killing people apparently is okay.)

Be sarcastic. Be insulting. After all, they are wrong, and they’re killing people. I’m not trying to be embittered about it or anything (and sometimes I am not successful in that) but it’s okay not to be nice to them.

I think this falls into the “never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake” category.

If they want to fill our channels with random malicious nonsense in service of the idea of killing a bunch of innocent people and taking away their home, and they want to do such a bad job of it that it’s transparently obvious horseshit that everyone just laughs at or dunks on… I say welcome. Come on in. Tell us all about your theories, good sir, I can’t wait to hear.

I don’t think anyone is being fooled, based on the speed and unanimity of the downvotes.

The way LLMs split up tokens means it’s 100% impossible for that to be an LLM glitch. It’s probably homegrown human imperfection coupled with The Verge not giving a shit about proofreading apparently.

Well… it’s filled with NATO arms and munitions

Fun fact: Do you know what the ratio is of money Russia’s spent on the war, as compared with Ukraine plus allies?

It’s about 2 to 1. When you factor in PPP, that means in real material terms it is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to one. Russia has mobilized basically the entirety of its economy to try to win this thing, about half their federal budget every year now. While Ukraine is surviving on occasional drips of Western aid whenever their governments can get roused from their campaign-contribution-induced torpor of corruption to be reminded that there are actual real things happening in the world.

Basically, it is a war of Russian money, Western technology / intelligence support, and Ukrainian blood. Also Ukrainian ingenuity. Necessity being the mother of invention, Ukraine is probably at the forefront of the world at this point in being able to fight a modern war (meaning a drone war) and produce and strategize based on what’s needed for one (meaning drones).

There’s also the significant factor that without Western restrictions being put on Ukraine, stopping them from fighting back in several meaningful ways even to this day, they would have mopped the floor with Russia and been bombing strategic centers deep over the border for years now. Their invasion of Kursk and Belgorod isn’t even the main thing, it is being able to blow up strategic centers inside Russia’s borders.

Having fought a country one-twentieth their size, outspending them ten to one, Russia has managed to get stuck on the border for longer than the US’s involvement in World War 2 with Ukraine fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Think on that for a minute. It is a wonder. There are reasons, of course, mostly having to do with the inherent unfeasibility of a gangster-capitalist state to operate with any significant level of success against actual real challenges. We’re about to become very familiar with that, in the US, I am sad to say.

But not once from the US invading Iraq/Afghanistan. Or England’s occupation of Ireland. Or the Israeli presence in Palestine.

Yeah I never heard any of those things. It’s a wonder. You can look the length and breadth of American political thought, and never find even a single person who thought the Iraq War or the Israeli occupation was anything bad. You would think there would be some kind of dissenting voices somewhere to be found. Hell, you can’t even talk about such things on Lemmy, you’ll be banned for it.

I mean that is one among a few different things that’s wrong with his mental model lol

I thought that guy was talking about organized shilling for corporate interests? Not geopolitical ones? I mean I’m sure the tactics are the same (actually I’m sure they are orders of magnitude more sophisticated now when done by state actors), just wanted to correct the record about that particular person.

Yeah. Human greed and corruption destroys the planet. It infests capitalism just as it does communism or anarchism or whatever else.

Not to say that capitalism doesn’t inflame and amplify some of its failings in specific ways that we urgently need to do something about or else be destroyed… but again, so does everything else as far as I can tell. Getting rid of capitalism won’t do a damn thing to solve the actual problem, I don’t think.

Hey that’s a good one.

at least seven senior officials had resigned since the 20204 election concluded, for reasons not immediately made clear to the staff

Because they didn’t need to be

Preach

And profits down 71 percent, and beyond Tesla, the obliteration of his personal brand which is basically the source of his wealth. And a number of details about the changing landscape of EVs which make it unlikely that Tesla can continue on anywhere near the near-magic trajectory they used to be able to travel on.

Even better, we can come in disguised as prostitutes and then take over their bunker.

“Do you own a hat like this? You don’t? Well. Obviously I’m in charge now.”

Honestly it’s not a bad idea. Playboy Magazine did that with Vermont in the 70s, just recommended that all the sensible people who were alarmed and disgusted with the Nixon stuff all move to the same state and try to take it over, and to this day, Vermont is kind of a nice place to live because enough sensible people moved there to have a big influence.

I vote for New Zealand. IDK how the locals would feel about a whole bunch of smelly Americans all migrating there at the same time but if they let us in, it definitely looks like a pretty sweet location.

I was looking for a Cowbee quote that I thought I remembered that it was impossible for Russia to be imperialist, by definition, because it was opposed to the US and that means it can’t be imperialist. Clearly. I found this, though, and got distracted from the original mission:

Like I said, why not try to get some people elected in the next cycle?

Because electoralism cannot establish Socialism. The Squad are not Socialists, they are Social Democrats. The only Socialist you can vote for is Claudia De La Crúz, and she cannot win because she cannot get 270 votes.

I am not “proving your point,” it is physically impossible to do what you’re suggesting.

Physically impossible for a socialist to win an election. Clearly. Which is why we need to vote for socialists.

That was my plan all along 😈

Maybe it’s me. I just have noticed this very particular type of self-important cluelessness that tends to concentrate itself in some specific communities. I’ve definitely had people who are 100% wrong who will get in extended arguments with me about how this wrong thing that they think is obviously right, and spend a bunch of time “debunking” some wild strawman that I never said. Like “How can you say Linux printing is bad, you must be one of those Window fanboys, Windows sucks, don’t you understand open source is better you twatface how dare you.” Something like that.

In fairness, now that I think about it I think that is just a lot of Linux / programming related communities on Lemmy in general. Maybe it’s not fair to blame it on programming.dev just because they concentrate on that type of content and so will necessarily tend to attract that type of user.

Most of the big-name communities on lemmy.world are political in some way, and they all have pretty severe varieties of moderation fuckery. Mods will make safe spaces for troll users posting streams of propaganda, make rules against calling out the propaganda, do totally bizarre things (MBFC bot) which they then blame on the admins saying that the admins are forcing them to do it, and then the admins will say that’s not true and how could they ever get that impression. It’s just a weird, noisy, and dishonest place.

And, also, because it’s the biggest instance it has the biggest population of aggressively clueless or offensive users. The mods seem pretty overwhelmed being able to deal with it all. I’m not sure you can really blame that on the instance itself, since it’s just what happens on a big instance, but in my opinion the low quality of the conversation might be related to the fact that the mods are apparently spending a lot of their finite amount of time apparently actively trying to make things worse.

It happens sometimes that I’ll click on a post, look at the comments and get this “WTF, is it St. Patrick’s Day and everyone’s angry and drunk and no one told me, what is this” reaction and then notice that I somehow stumbled into a big lemmy.world political community, and so the quality of the conversation is immediately going to have a negative 200 percent penalty.

Don’t go there. It is a bad place. The PugJesus historical art communities are nice though.