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How do we reduce toxicity on the Fediverse, and on the wider internet? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase "flame war" has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

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[–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

I like what you have to say, but I will be honest. Hate radio is what started this journey for me back in the 1980s and there was no mythical time you could have a polite conversation in the US about politics. The whole politics ruining Thanksgiving has been going on since the Vietnam War and the concept probably dates back to before the Revolutionary War in the US.

Before Vietnam the US literally purged everyone that was too left with McCarthyism. Before engagement algorithms there was constant propaganda on all TV channels, radio, and print designed to do everything from break up unions to reinforce the Christian Nationalist movement. Think adding In God We Trust to all money in 1955.

I see where you are coming from as I was once there long ago. When you unravel the propaganda/lies you begin to see the bigger picture and understand why the forces that control us work so hard to misinform and create an alternative reality where America is the good guy.

The reckoning of what the US has done and continues to do is truly insurmountable for a typical human being. Mutual understanding easily becomes a tool of oppression where we are expected to forget all of history and culture to compromise with people who are selfish and misinformed.

You can give someone who wants to destroy you all the respect in the world and it won't change that they want to destroy you and will given the chance. This is the reality we face and harkening back to an imagined time of mutual respect is not the panacea we would like to think it is.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (4 children)

    You're so right with all that you say. Except your admirable self deprecating US exceptionalism. US peeps shouldn't beat themselves up about the crimes or horrible acts their countrymen are/have done. Where and when any other country is in the same position individuals of those places act in the same ways. Cue every powerful and not so powerful civilisation in history. The rest of us it seems have to clean up their messes as best we can. It seems its a natural animal response that we as a species haven't been able to adequately address socially or civilisationally.

    I don't really know enough about the subject and how it relates. But these awful group dynamics aren't confined to humans alone, i feel like this article, Chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park wage lethal 'civil war', relates in an important way to the point you make in your comment.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    I can't really speak to other countries but from my understanding the entire world is varying degrees of fascism at this point.

    The US is exceptional, just not in the way most people think. No nation comes close to the suffering the US has caused and will cause in the future.

    You can see parallels to modern US imperialism like with Britain costing countless lives in places like India. Also, a little further in the past with the Spanish treatment of Native Americans which the US then repeated.

    We of course have the privilege of looking at this through a modern lense. What really strikes me is the level of enlightenment in Europe in regards to native rights and the practice of slavery before the US was formed.

    It is clear that people knew better at this point and this shows the malfeasance that defines America. The people that went on to found America knew better than to do what they did. This animus against humans is what makes people in the US arguably unique. A kind of modern day barbarian if you will bringing back what was supposed to be lost.

    The heart of the US is a republic founded on deception, terrorism, greed, and murder. Even our first President was a murderous land baron well on his way to becoming the world's first billionaire adjusted for inflation.

    I think your point centers around if anyone else would have done it the way these depraved manipulators did. I really don't think so. The ruling class of the US are really in a league of their own.

    Exceptionally depraved, cruel, and greedy amongst their peers around the world with near limitless resources at their finger tips. Imagine any single European country having access to the empty landmass that is the United States.

    This is the real reason behind the myth of American Exceptionalism. It is like having near limitless wealth compared to everyone else who has a fixed income. The US is the equivalent of a trust fund baby. A psychotic mass murdering nepo baby that spread its shit all over the world.

    Remember all that land, well you see it wasn't really empty. Que the first genocide which the US still carries out to this day with boarding schools. There was of course plenty of room for the Native Americans and the whites to coexist. Hell, most of the US is still pretty damned empty to this day.

    It was never even about the land. It was about a desire for systematic extermination. This ties in with your point about chimpanzees and also back to your original point that anyone else would have done the same thing.

    Have you ever heard of the bonobos? They are another Chimpanzee that doesn't fight and kill each other. If a male gets too aggressive the females hold him down and have sex with him until he chills.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Living up to your name with this comment doomsider ;). I like your bonobo example, shows theres often other ways to handle things. Theres a lot to that comment, so i'm going to try to pick the key ideas in each area and directly address them.

    Fascism used so broadly becomes woolly. Certainly you could describe MBS' Saudi Arabia as a fascist regime by following definitions. But it doesn't get at the whole picture of that Authoritarian Monarchy. For example because there is no organised 'opposition' as such to suppress. Be it trade unions, opposing political parties. So calling everything fascist hides useful differences that helps understand how people across the world have freedoms or are oppressed in different ways.

    The suffering the US has caused? Its a lot, but USAID saved millions as well, always weigh in good things done by a people, it may amount to nothing, but its intellectually dishonest to ignore. The key is were the US actions that caused suffering more or even with Mao's Great Leap forward, the Bengal Famine, many more examples abound. The only unique suffering the US has ever caused is the nuclear attacks on Japan, and that was chosen in part due to the perceived larger loss caused by a US and allies ground invasion. What could have happened to the East Asia region if Stalin's Russia were more involved? I think more suffering.

    Europe is an interesting case from the 1700's, and certainly earlier than that, to compare to. Because its there that you have the most well known to the Wsstern mind progenitor to the Nation State model we live in today. Its not really the enlightenment that changed attitudes, plenty of people couldn't give a fig about a lot of the enlightenment ideas, and went on their merry way suppressing, murdering and extracting the wealth of other parts of the world. Every European country is guilty of this througout that time, just like the US. The key point though, is they didn't do it in Europe. Because there was a rules based society between those peoples, war was ongoing but organised, this is why the European Aristocracy completely freaked out when the French Revolution then Napolean happened, because it threatened to flip that rules based system the contolinent worked on.

    Systematic extermination has happened in many societies, the sack of the city of Troy might be a famous old example, the Rwandan Genocide is a new example. So systematic extermination of a population isn't unique to the US.

    So hopefully the violence and greed of humanity can be put to rest as a uniquely US trait.

    The real reasons for uniqueness though, you are right, come from the scale and abundance of the US.

    But its not ideological, its what I touched on with the French Revolution. The worst of crimes happen when the rules guiding the society are somehow suspended. And this is what happened with the US over and over again in different contexts.

    Below are some examples of the worst crimes where the rules guiding a society have for some reason been suspended, in this vacuum of instability is the most dangerous moment.

    • Bengal Famine 1943, in the course of the British total war effort (suspension) Churchill directs the required food supplies out of India.

    • Rwandan Genocide 1994, assassination of the President and resulting power vaccum and disarray (suspension) led to militias hunting down the Tutsi minority.

    • French Revolution, Estates General (suspension), storming of the Bastille (suspension) ,King Louis flight to Varennes (suspension), Thermidorean Reaction (suspension), Coup of 18th Brumaire introducing Napoleon (suspension), the White terror (suspension). The whole period from 1789 to the restoration is littered with suspensions of varying degrees, and like with all historic comparisons France makes an excellent comparison to the US.

    The suspension of the guiding societal rules is why canny commentators looking at the US are so intent upon the court system. If that breaks, then all bets are actually off. But the Orange Babboon's regime has been knocked back significantly more than they've won, so its hard to argue the courts are pliant, even with the Supreme Court's favourable ideological bias.

    Conclusion:

    Its not a barbaric ideological group of elites, although they may be there and present, its the moments in time and place where a suspension in the guiding rules of people are suspended.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Fascism comes in many flavors and in varying degrees and the US has lead the way evolving corporatism into its logical conclusion the corportocracy. Think the military industrial complex itself lobbying for military action or proliferation. A sick partnership ensuring future death.

    The fact that I can be critical does not mean I don't recognize some of the good things. The US did help prevent spreading of disease in countries despite overthrowing 70 plus countries and killing uncounted millions of civilians.

    China has raised close to a billion people out of abject poverty even if its policies killed millions of its own citizens.

    The British Empire did bring modern technology to the colonies they brutally oppressed. Always look on the bright side of life?

    I have to disagree with hand waving away what the US has done. Certainly you might compare it to history, but this isn't ancient history with the Mongols or the Romans.

    These are modern times and intent matters in culpability. The propaganda used to draw people to the Americas is another great example of the knowledge of what is right. The founding fathers of America loved to write about their virtues.

    Is it fair to hold them to a higher standard? As I said we get to look at all this from a modern lense. The answer in unequivocally yes. We debated and decided on genocide. It was not a happenstance or an unfortunate externality.

    Hitler was inspired by the genocide of the Native Americans and modeled his eventual extermination of the Jews after it. Ford and other wealthy US industrialists helped bankroll the Nazi Empire.

    When Hitler approached other nations to take the Jews in the US refused and these wealthy lobbyists made sure to stroke anti-jew sentiment throughout Europe to ensure no one else would.

    Nowhere to go the Jews were sent to the ghettos only the Nazi didn't have a way to track them effectively. None other than IBM comes to the rescue and develops a census system that was used for those cool looking WWII arm tattoos.

    IBM then helped with the computing power to figure out just how many Jews to load onto the trains per day so the deaths camps wouldn't back up. You know, just typical logistical stuff.

    That is another genocide the US participated in. That is what makes all the pro US WWII propaganda so ridiculous. Fascism was never defeated, a chapter was just closed for the moment.

    As I stated the ruling class that calls the shots for the US are unlike anything before and they are not just what anyone would do. I am sure some people would describe it as evil and I think it was and is criminal in nature.

    Playing both sides of conflicts and eventually turning this apparatus against US citizens in a third genocide known as The War on Drugs. Resulting in no less a third of all US citizens having some sort of criminal conviction, millions of families destroyed and millions of lives lost and still going strong to this day.

    Almost everyone in America has lost a loved one to addiction. Crazy amounts of people overdose because the government tries to criminalize them in its genocidal efforts.

    Out of control gun violence. I know several people in my lifetime that have been shot and killed. Being shot and killed is the number one child killer in America. It really does boggle the mind to realize there are more guns than people in the US.

    It is not normal, I am trying to explain this to you. US technology has been unbelievably devastating to the world and has ushered in our AI apocalypse of mismanaged dysfunction.

    US is responsible for so much suffering just through their technology alone. From the extremes like the Nuclear technology to the environmentally devastating like leaded gasoline. Just leaded gasoline alone has killed hundreds of millions of people and was estimated to still kill five million per year.a couple of years ago.

    I don't think anyone can truly comprehend the destruction that the the US has brought. Insane things like poisoning every human on the planet with both forever chemicals and plastics.

    Back in the 1950s petroleum scientist knew about global warming. The US have fought tooth and nail to discredit the information they knew from the start. This purposeful campaign to deny or minimize reality will lead to the inaction that will displace a billion people with no plan which will likely become the greatest loss of life from a man made event in history.

    It will be in the billions of dead before it is all said and done and that is if we don't face total annihilation with the possibility of a nuclear winter.

    This is not the future that humanity deserves. The list goes on and on and no matter what horrors you learn about, there are several more afoot. More research reveals more atrocities that would all take a lifetime to truly research.

    I really wasn't looking for a counterpoint to everything I said. Thanks for the effort though.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    We won't agree of course. Everything you've said other people in other countries do as well. The point about the monkeys and history is to show that these are underlying social factors, not something unique to US people alone.

    For a better future the US should see themselves in and of the people of rest of the world. Recognising aspects of themselves in others, then seeing how things are done differently is a primary way to making a better world, exceptionalism, even if virtuous, threatens to get in the way of that. I don't believe for a second you don't already know this though our conclusions are just different.

    Anyway, you've an interesting perspective. In your sharp critiscism of the US leadership I feel like theres also a demand for things to be done differently, and a genuine outrage that these people committing the atrocities we've been referring to in your homes name.

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