Exactly. I’d say this is currently the best everyday example of the phenomenon.

IMO you’re doing it the right way.

If there’s a single indicator to pay attention to, it’s the source of funding. Where does the media outlet get its money from?

Next is professional ethics: does it employ real journalists? Journalism is like medicine, it’s a profession with a code of conduct. In this case, a commitment to factual accuracy, a good-faith search for the truth, fairness in choices about what to cover, transparency about sources, etc.

And if you feel the journalists are doing a bad job, then go back to point 1 and ask: Who is paying them? Are you? The reason for today’s crisis in journalism is not that journalists are lazy or evil, it’s that the internet cratered their business model. More of us need to step up and pay. It’s that simple.

I have a couple of paid subscriptions. If that’s the cost of living in a properly informed society, it’s a great deal.

OK. Not sure how far that recipe gets us in practice, but it’s a respectable argument.

You’re not my audience,

That’s a good point and I work to this principle myself. So my observation was pretty redundant, yes.

I already know you’re anchored in your convictions

To the extent you know anything about me, I also “know” that your own convictions are just as unmovable.

Looked at another way, it’s a good thing to have convictions.

Not reasonable because you’re making a broad generalization

Generalizations are broad by nature, that does not mean they have no value.

But in reality the majority of people who oppose immigration also oppose LGBT+ and freedom of religion so it’s unlikely they’ll use this argument.

Can’t speak for the USA but that is absolutely not the case in Europe.

Otherwise you make some decent points. In any case, IMO discussions like this would benefit if we accepted from the outset that nobody is going to be convincing others to change their opinions. The best that can be hoped for is to understand the opposing side better. That would be an achievement in itself.

These sources don’t prove anything. This is about values. If you want to convince people who are not already on your side then you need to begin there.

That’s a specific case that doesn’t falsify my claim that most people in this discussion, here, are inflating away the meaning of the word Nazi so that it equates to, roughly, “somebody I don’t like who is to the right of me politically”.

This precise argument can also be made to justify a tightening on immigration from countries where religious intolerance is the cultural norm, on the grounds that “if you allow [them] to spread their ideology eventually there will be enough [of them] to be able to take the power by force, and when they do they’ll setback all of the tolerance that was advanced”. Reasonable?

My thoughts are that most people in this discussion have little idea what the word Nazi actually means and that therefore this silly question is a bit of an insult to the victims of Nazism.

Would be interested in an intelligent rebuttal to this seemingly decent argument, if anyone has one.

Amusing. This conundrum, exactly as described, has also been bothering me, on and off, for years. Having tried a bunch of solutions, I have recently settled on one that I’m quite pleased with.

A bumbag. AKA waist pack. (AKA another name which sounds both comical and vulgar to British ears.)

You’re not gonna look cool but it works.

battle between Ubuntu and Fedora with their derivative

Agreed in general. Except that Ubuntu is itself a derivative, of Debian. Technically it’s Debian that’s the peer of Fedora.

Indeed. The moral purity issue has always been the Achilles heel of progressive politics. It makes compromise hard and it drives heretics - i.e. the people whose votes you need - crazy.

Great question. Democracy is all about compromise. I am bothered by how few people seem to grasp this fact. Personally, when I hear the phrase “squabbling politicians”, I roll my eyes - to squabble is their job! They’re doing it on our behalf because people have different interests and different values and so we don’t all agree, and that is a good thing. A polity where everybody agrees - well, there are names for that kind of political system and none of them are democracy.

Over here in Europe, I just wish the progressive parties (for whom I vote) would do the obvious deal and sacrifice their dilatory approach to immigration and in particular border security. This issue is undermining all their other policy goals. The obvious allergy of voters to porous borders is not just a result of disinformation, and taking a tougher line on it does not necessarily mean infringing human rights.

The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.

This rings true and it may come from the wider world. Seems to me that we have entered an era of fear and pessimism. Partly as a result of that, today’s younger generation had protected childhoods and now, given the state of the world, they themselves are afraid for their futures (with some justification). All this is creating an atmosphere of hypersensitivity, aversion to causing offense, a general lack of openness to new ideas and contradiction.

Nothing I say there is particularly original and I can’t offer data to support it. But my anecdotal experience on this forum and elsewhere backs up the hypothesis completely. Something has changed.

E.T. is a funny one. It was the first movie I saw in a theater, as a smallish child on a school outing. And I was traumatized by it. That weird alien skin and eyes, those creepy bony fingers. As I remember, it literally gave me nightmares. But to this day I have never met anyone who didn’t find E.T. “cute” as a child. Possibly I was just too young.

Well, this is certainly one way to goose the participation on Lemmy.

My email provider kept blocking my DeltaChat-created messages, and indeed locking me out of my account for them. Presumably because the encrypted gobbledygook looks likes spam. The open nature of email really is its Achilles heel, unfortunately.

I wish I could wall myself off from

Well this is at least honest!

Perhaps it’s a personality thing. Perhaps generational. Technically I’m a member of a minority community but I’ve never defined myself by that, and “hate” in the contemporary sense (I think its meaning has drifted unhelpfully) is not something that especially bothers me. My experience is that most people are well-meaning, so I tend to be intrigued by the question of why they think the things they do.

Anyway, this is not a debate with a single correct answer. It is of course your right to shut out whoever you want, I won’t question that.

Intriguing, thanks.