Ah, that sucks to hear about.

I was initially siding with Israel as they were hit first, but their response has made me rethink things.

To generalize this out to other wars and conflicts, even regular old arguments, there are almost always pre-existing conditions and tensions leading up to the first major attack. Even things like WWI, where the catalyst was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But there is quite obviously more to the atmosphere, national ambitions, etc. etc. that make it so that the separatists wanted to assassinate him, and make it so that Austria-Hungary wanted to invade Serbia and used this as an excuse. A war would have happened anyway, no matter who attacked first.

Is it even safe to start from the Ottomans?

I had decided to abstain from commenting on this subject further. Pretty much every reply I have received is a variation of ‘fake news’ or ‘racist cunt’.

Yeah, kneejerk reactions get tiring. I tend not to use reddit-like or twitter-like forums much because of how low-effort and unempathetic most posts are. ‘Read the news title, get angry’, might as well be the motto. I’m glad you appreciated it.

Affirmative action based on […] economic prosperity would help the most people in need and capture many more who would otherwise fall through the gaps.

This absolutely is and should be fought for, alongside other movements. The concentration of wealth at the top has just accelerated after the main COVID crisis. Our whole economic system funnels wealth to those with capital, and their influence on our political system and mass media is the root cause of most issues in our society. My caveat is that affirmative action re: economic prosperity won’t solve this, the problem runs so deep that affirmative action will ultimately be inadequate, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. We need a systematic overhaul… far far far far easier said than done.

That said, economic equity doesn’t cover everything, as many Indigenous people have other priorities that aren’t strictly economic, a major one being land rights. A somewhat-known recent example of the issue is mining companies destroying sacred land or historical artifacts, another is traditional use of the land to live off of. I admittedly don’t know enough about land right to explain in proper detail, but it’s one of the main demands that protesters have demanded for decades and decades.

I would argue that abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, and anti-discrimination laws have done far more to solve systemic racism than racial affirmative action.

I agree, and I would say that this doesn’t mean affirmative action isn’t still important. To take a metaphor from the Civil Rights struggle, that anti-discrimination is taking the knife out, there is still a need to heal the wound before we can say things are fine. We’ve abolished the most blatant aggression like non-suffrage, but done very little to make amends on things like colonisation and centuries of repression and land possession.

Generations of loss and disadvantage evidently still exist, and will remain without positive interference. Disadvantage is cyclical, it doesn’t heal by itself, poverty is an self-evident example of the cyclic nature of powerlessness. And to re-emphasise, this applies generally to disadvantage, not just disadvantage caused by colonisation or racial disadvantage.

As a side note, I’m not sure if it’s even correct to frame this as about race, Indigenous classification just inherently matches up with race since the historical inhabitants of Australian land were all, to use a racial term, Black indigenous Australians, and we’ve historically just grouped them all together when it comes to the social concept of race because they’re not White or Asian. The ill-advised and quite frankly worthless Voice proposal was about them being the native peoples, not about them being a certain race or having been racially discriminated.

Given this definition of racism, it creates an interesting problem: how can one solve systemic racism, without doing actions which take race into account? If someone needs help, is it unfair to treat them the same as someone else who doesn’t need help? Or would it be more unfair to treat them the same as someone who doesn’t need help, and therefore keeping things the same, leading to them still needing help? And, regardless of whether it’s fair or not (subjective morality), is it more beneficial to society (material outcome)?

Do you mean ‘concern trolling’ or ‘sealioning’?

‘Concern trolling’ is falsely pretending to agree with an idea but raising concerns, in order to sew discontent. Something like, "I agree with giving them a Voice, but I’m concerned that … ", an insincere astroturfing attempt.

‘Sealioning’ is when someone relentlessly stalks a person asking them for evidence or arguments, in order to ‘just try and have a debate’ when the other person doesn’t want to. The term comes from from this comic, which describes it well. It’s personal harassment pretending to be civil debate.

Their argument is that the Voice isn’t even something good. It doesn’t give Indigenous people any powers they didn’t already have, and the Voice can be ignored just as easily as the advice of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recently was. Interview with the Black Peoples Union describes in better detail.

But even if that weren’t the case and they did think it wasn’t worthless symbolism, successful collective bargaining doesn’t just settle for every first offer. So I don’t know why you’re claiming it’s a bad strategy, it’s how unions have won important gains for workers. It’s a strategy that has been historically shown to work when applied correctly.

A beautiful slick theme, and Xonotic in the launchpad. This desktop looks like a good time!

I would personally try and make the window panels darker to match all the parts seen in the first image.

Horseshoe theory is not a useful method of political analysis, nor is the left-right spectrum it is founded on.

This vid explains in more detail

You have hurt the feelings of 448 million Europeans.

Honestly, brigading is still a valid thing that can exist here, but yes, people don’t realize that if a post gets popular on a popular federated instance, people who appear like ‘foreigners’ (for lack of better word) will jump in and flood it. It looks as if a brigade, but it’s entirely organic, non-malicious, unorganized and unprompted.

I’m not sure how to classify things like ‘dunk tank’ posts, where someone on an instance will say ‘lol look how dumb this post over there is’… it’s not really calling a raid but many people will go to the source comment and dogpile them. And sure, that’s just part of being a public website, but it’s a bit easier with federation to go over and interact, just like it is moving between subreddits on reddit.

In reality, it would be more like a series of lines on different topics weighted differently by an individuals priorities so no singular generic representation will ever be truly good enough.

In reality, there are no lines. And that’s exactly why I say, it’s not a step forward to add another vague idealist axis on top of a vague undefined idealist axis. Politics is not geometrical, there isn’t a concept of ordered values. The entire method of thinking is wrong, and that video helps explain what a more appropriate alternative model based on human history is like.

Adding an axis is just walking forward down a wrong path; a move in the wrong direction by suggesting the issue is about how much fidelity we have.

I believe that most of the things people do, or try to do, on reddit (and therefore reddit alternatives) just aren’t appropriate for how the site is structured. Reddit is a ‘link aggregator’, that’s what it was designed for. People post links to content.

So it’s no surprise that forums are a better option, structurally, for a ton of communities.

Politics is such a complex topic and any simple representation of it will lead to what would appear to be contradictions in a person’s beliefs.

Absolutely. And certainly with this kind of geometric modelling, with a spectrum or plane where these broad and complex concepts are ordered more-than or less-than others.

The political compass is a better representation

I disagree with even this. It’s not better, it’s equally inappropriate.

The political compass is adding an extra idealist axis to an undefined axis (the linked video explains this in more proper detail). It’s just digging further into a hole in an attempt to make it work, when the whole paradigm is wrong. And this is bad, because the compass model has rationalized that undefined, subjective linear spectrum. It helps delude people.

The unfortunate thing is that these show up as small emotes on hexbear.net, so the users generally don’t realize they’re huge disruptive images to others.

If one can get past the 20 most invasive, tactless, eternally-online members of Hexbear and Lemmygrad, they’re generally great places. Unfortunately, those people are the main ones getting attention and alienating people on other instances.

It’s disheartening whenever I see a legitimate chance to teach someone something and a Hex account just makes an absolute malicious shitpost that isn’t even worth calling a dunk. That, and a couple of highly-active users in particular who will consistently take the worst possible interpretation of a post and insist anyone who disagrees is a bad actor. Sankara would roll in his grave if he could see those post histories.

Me too. COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS, COME OUT AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN.

I want it to succeed and become what reddit used to be.

I want it to exceed what reddit ever was. It’s tempting to look back at those days and want to remake it, but really, we can and should go further in making good communities. And with federation, in theory, it’s so much easier to have a small town booted up without it constantly feeling an inch from death, the death-struggle of almost all comfy communities that haven’t become popular.

eh, reddit leans left

The left-right spectrum isn’t a helpful model (Piped link) on an international forum. As you’ve seen in all the replies, people have very different ideas on what is left and what isn’t… there is actually no true definition. Many people will, for example, argue that liberalism is the status quo and therefore centrist since the advent of socialism/anti-capitalism and fascism. This is especially true outside of the Five Eyes countries (US, UK, AUS, etc.) where the political atmosphere is clearly different for historical and cultural reasons. On top of that, reddit is so huge that different communities have noticeably different leanings, so naturally someone will object when any generalization is made.

they both trend towards extreme levels of authoritarian dick sucking

Congratulations, you just pissed off all the anarchists lol

Like some of the top-ranking comments here are saying, that place has a very large proportion of people who were coming from the banned subreddits like The Donald, various straight-up hate communities, and typical alt-right groups. So naturally, alternatives that were founded by anarchists and socialists (raddle, lemmy.ml) were almost always disregarded there, possibly with the exception of the Wolfballs admin (I can’t remember too well if they got much attention with the ‘they’re not all like that’ line)

It’s always funny to me to see newer users complain about a lot of political (incl. FOSS) users in an inherently political project, which was picked by many precisely because its political values prevent the for-profit shittery that reddit.com has been doing for 15 years, and that alt-right social media alternatives frequently do whenever they get enough users. Yes, we’re going to voice our concerns when people show up at the door and want this to be just like reddit was, or bring over the uncritical mainstream ignorance we came over here to avoid.