None.

I think that the exact measure of whether or not a war is justified is whether or not people are willing to fight it.

It’s very rare for a war to be a direct threat to the people. That’s generally only the case in a situation like Gaza, in which the invaders explicitly intend to not only take control of the land, but to kill or drive off the current inhabitants.

As a general rule, the goal is simply to assume control over the government, as is the case in Ukraine.

So the war is generally not fought to protect and/or serve the interests of the people directly, but to protect and/or serve the interests of the ruling class. And rather obviously, the ruling class has a vested interest in the people fighting to protect them and/or serve their interests. But the thing is that the people do not necessarily share that interest.

And that, IMO, is exactly why conscription is always wrong. If the people do not feel a need to protect and/or serve the interests of the rulers, then that’s just the way it is. That choice rightly belongs to the people - not to the rulers.

I would say that it depends on how the other person feels about the thing in question.

If the person you say it to is sincerely lauding something, then yeah - I’d say it’s necessarily insulting, since you’re implying not only that they have no taste, but that they’ve been indoctrinated into mindlessly singing the thing’s (nonexistent) praises.

But if the other person is simply asking about the thing, or better yet, has already signaled their own disdain for it, then it’s just a potentially appropriate potential witticism.

I’m sold.

Certainly.

I saw in another post that AMA is apparently copyrighted (which is ridiculous, but I guess rent-seeking fuckwads are gonna do what they’re gonna do). At worst, what that means though is that if the fuckwads at Reddit care enough, they can arrange for a DMCA takedown if someone uses it.

And unless they’re even more stupid than I cynically presume, Reddit isn’t even going to do that, since the last thing they should want to do is try to establish a precedent of criminal sanctions against forums that host copyrighted material.

I say use whatever the fuck words you want to use.

IMO the only relevant issue is whether or not they accomplish the task of communicating the thing you wanted to communicate in the way you wanted to communicate it. If so, then they’re as right as they need to be, and any objection anyone else might have is only your problem to the extent that you allow it to be. If you care what they think then it matters, but if you don’t then it doesn’t.

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

It’s more that it looks like an appropriately anguished portrait of Mark Everett

This song might be a good example, though it’s not as dark as some of them.

That could be an Eels album cover.

No - anarchism, by definition, is the complete absence of institutionalized authority.

Those around here who are calling for the destruction of institutions have no intention of creating a society free from the hierarchy of authority - they want to destroy the current authority merely so that they can replace it with their own.

Again, they’re about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists. They’re as authoritarian as fascists - they just have a different set of norms they want to forcibly impose, and a different set of people they’re eager to oppress and murder along the way.

I haven’t seen a single anarchist on Lemmy. Not even one.

The most obvious group, and the one this thread is about, is about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists.

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

My favorite of those…

It was 20 or so years ago, on the old IMDb forums (IMDb used to have some general interest forums).

It wasn’t actually that it was going well until it flipped - the poster was actually already notorious for arguing in bad faith. But even with that, it was so remarkable that I’ve never forgotten it.

Essentially what happened was, I was arguing “A” and he was arguing “B”. We had gone back and forth for a while, and he had backed himself into a corner, and I moved in for the kill. I wrote a response - a near-perfect bit of argumentation that directly quoted and directly and entirely refuted him, and there was no possible way he could wriggle out of it - then I posted it and sat back, knowing that even someone as dishonest as he was couldn’t get out if it.

Then after a bit, he responded and said essentially, “Then you admit that A is right, as I’ve been claiming all along!”

Yes - he actually, when faced with an argument he couldn’t refute, spontaneously switched sides and claimed that he’d been arguing my position all along, and therefore I had just proven that he was correct and therefore, somehow, that I was wrong.

That’s when I blocked him.

Yes and no.

My parents are thankfully at the age at which they just don’t give much of a shit. They think that there was a lot of shady political shenanigans surrounding the whole thing (and I’d say they’re objectively correct about that), but they cynically expect that and mostly ignore it. They talked to their doctors and came to understand that covid is real, and dangerous, and that the vaccines do have some risks, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and that was enough for them to take it seriously and take proper precautions.

My brothers on the other hand…

I’m the oldest of three, and they’re both… well… angry, spiteful, delusional, Fox News and talk radio consuming, gun-toting, Trump-voting, road-raging reactionaries. So they both lined right up and marched in lockstep with the expected dogma, to my complete lack of surprise.

So yes - our relations have been strained over it, but really it’s not quite accurate to say that it’s because of that, since that’s just one of the many, many MANY things on which we disagree.