Many people who loudly pride themselves for tolerance, kindness, and openness toward difference drop those principles the moment someone expresses a preference or view they dislike. Disagreement itself is fine. What is not fine is the usual responses that follows: comments whose main purpose is to insult, shame, and make the other person feel small, delivered in front of an audience that can be counted on to approve.
It’s status performance. The goal is not to show why the opinion is wrong or change minds; it is to hurt the speaker and fish for applause. Feeling morally justified does not change the nature of the act; when the sole intention is to hurt they’re being evil and a bully.
The people who upvote or otherwise reward those insults are part of the same behavior. Standing by and cheering while someone is targeted is participation. It supplies the social payoff that makes the cruelty worthwhile.
This is one of the reasons large parts of the internet feel needlessly hostile. When perceived moral superiority is used as cover for meanness, and when an audience reliably encourages it, the result is environments where many people simply stop speaking. The claimed values of kindness and tolerance are revealed, in those moments, as conditional.
And no, this isn’t about being tolerant towards people with extreme views. The idea for this post was sparked by my previous post about AI music and the vicious personal attacks I received for admitting to enjoying some of it.
The world is ending due to ignorance, celebrated ignorance no less. That’s why people are touchy.
eh. It’s not just online, and not just for cruelty. Defining arbitrary moral framing in which the author appears superior to no matter how large or small group of people is what each of us does on a daily basis. That’s just how our psychology works.
That’s why i prefer to adhere to utilitarian ethics as well as judge people by the results of their actions and only then by their words.
Ngl, i have no idea about the situation you’re talking about, but the fact that you’ve created this post merely because someone hurt your feelings already speaks volumes to me. If you’d had an actual discussion that your opponent single-handedly devolved into demagogy and personal insults, you wouldn’t have been there now.
Instead of seeking moral support to soothe your hurt ego, i’d suggest you to analyse your own actions just a bit, rather than concentrating on what others did wrong. It’s simply that much more productive.
It seems to me that what’s actually happening is you tend to intentionally post things that most people would disagree with (which is the point of this community), but the things you post tend to either be based on factually incorrect foundations or are naive to the point of a troll. People then disagree with these views (which again, is what you expect them to do), but not the way you want, because they call out your naivete or untrue statements and this offends you.
Reading through your posts and supporting arguments, i genuinely assume you’re not posting in good faith. And according to one of your own posts, neither do you:
either you don’t actually understand the stance you claim to oppose or you’re not even in the business of finding truth and changing minds to begin with.
but not the way you want
Personally attacking someone with the sole purpose of hurting them isn’t just disagreeing anymore. It’s also against the community rules.
Saying “you’re wrong” or " you haven’t thought this through" or “you seem to be making inflammatory statements to get reactions out of people” isn’t a personal attack, as much as you may dislike it.
Do you really think I made this thread because I’m offended by someone telling me I’m wrong or haven’t thought something through?
C’moon now.
Yes.
That’s the exact stated reason that you made this thread.
I would largely agree, but I feel like this post is just meant to buy you some street cred after the other troll posts you’ve made recently. Yeah, sorry, doesn’t work.
I think it’s entirely possible for someone to hold abject opinions, especially this person. The things ze says are extremely consistent and specific. I feel that the illegitimization of contrarian views is part of the problem here.
I literally have you tagged as “fuckcars apologist.”
And in the thread where I tagged you as such, you used an LLM to defend your position.
Food for thought.
And in the thread where I tagged you as such, you used an LLM to defend your position.
No idea whether OP actually did so, but you’re tagged on mine as ‘crazy AI accuser’ for false AI accusations, so others might want to verify for themselves.
Edit: I tracked down the comment thread you mentioned tagging OP in and damn, that is some serious reframing of the situation you did. All OP said was he uses AI to check his grammar. You also accused another person of using AI solely because he uses em dashes.
That’s hilarious.
Yes, I indeed use an LLM to check the grammar on my writing. That is no secret.
So you’re saying OP is morally inferior because he… uses AI and… wait, does he defend cars or does he defend the position of fuckcars?
all ze did was reply and say “LLMs can be used for grammar and orthography corrections” when Foggy said I am AI because I emdash (and I’m guessing because I used a “We all … , but when … , we …” rhetoric).
well actually there’s two comments ze made in the “fuckcars is the worst” thread Foggy is probably referring to, and in the other comment ze actually agrees with @foggy@lemmy.world that fuckcars is bad as “built around the mutual hatred of something” which is extremely similar to the point of being a summary to half of Foggy’s argument there.
Thanks for the links I hadn’t seen this. Foggy is actually making an interesting argument about the sociological and propaganda mechanisms of the modern hate train, then gets in his truck and drives over someone he suspects uses AI and backs up a few times.
It’s the very “when in doubt, even the tiniest evidence shall count for the absolute moral guilt of the accused”.
Probably none of us can really escape this mechanism where we have some kind of trigger.
It’s remains unclear to me as well whether a “fuckcars apologist” is a pro- or anti-car stance.
Just the AI part is enough to be inferior. Can’t come up with your own thoughts to defend a point you’re making? Yes, you’re on a lower rung of the ladder.
A complete stranger claiming without evidence that an AI has been used in the past is all it takes to be labeled inferior.
And in a thread about getting unfairly personally attacked/insulted for petty things.
Nice.
What does any of this have to do with anything I just said?
“moral superiority”
It shows that you’re an obvious troll
reddit alternatives will have those, reddit has those, 4chan thrives on them.
It’s the internet get over it.
k, valued insight
In another post here, you literally said:
“I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me. You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.”
A user responded saying this:
“Hey, I get it, you just have zero respect for the effort, creativity, imagination, or sacrifice that an artist has to put in to create a work thats any good. To you, art is merely a product. Who cares who made it, how it was made, or what it even means, or if there was any meaning at all. I totally understand. I went to the store yesterday and they had this hand crafted chair made of high quality wood for sale for like $300. Fuck that! I’ll just go buy a cheap plastic piece of garbage chair pumped out by the thousands in a Chinese factory. I mean it’s just a chair, right? It has one job, who cares what it’s made of. “Quality, Shmality!” I say. I just wish more people would understand this, like I entered this fighting game tournament last month. But I’m really ass at Street Fighter, so instead I wrote this bot that would play the game for me so I’d win with double perfect every time. Can you belive they kicked me out for cheating? CHEATING! What kind of shit is that? I just used a helpful tool to totally do all the work for me as my only contribution was giving broad parameters while the computer program makes literally every other decision. The audacity of these people! Don’t they understand this makes me a champion gamer?”
To that, you replied like you mostly do:
“That’s an interesting cartoon caricature you crafted there. I just don’t have any clue what it has to do with the topic at hand. Or is it “BOOO!” that you’re just trying to say here?”
Every time someone says something more logical, convincing, and fair, you attack them with that. You act like a victim and say they just made up a caricature of yourself and whatnot. You share so many patterns of speech and behavior with types of people that suck, like MAGA. Reactionary, too emotional, too irrational.
You are petty. That’s all there is to it. You are also morally inferior and abhorrent for supporting AI judging the state of the world. No matter what you reply with or say about it, it is indefensible. You are causing the deaths of so many artists who are committing suicide or giving up to a conformist boring mediocre life working for the Jeffrey Epstein Class because they cannot compete with a computer and a market filled with uneducated morons that prefer their plastic slop over organic real art. I already know your response to that is “that ain’t my fault. I am just a customer, consuming what I like, having fun! The customer is always right” but no, it goes beyond that. You genuinely have blood in your hands and it is so easy to convince people of that now.
Just as the Jeffrey Class intended: replace the poor with robots. You are helping them cull creative talent, because they hate artists, they hate how influential they are. They know AI will always follow a set of rules they themselves wrote, so. You are helping them, because you probably want them to continue abusing children, or what? Why do you support AI this much?
Did you even read the comment you’re using as an example? It’s pure smug sarcastic ridicule with no substance whatsoever. They started with bad faith strawmanning and personal insults since the very beginning. When called out on it they just doubled down. I’ve engaged everyone in good faith in that thread who did so towards me. Everyone else I’m calling out for indecency and this is one of those people.
No, he did not insult you. He literally said this:
He is proving why your entire pro-AI mindset is problematic as hell. With sarcasm? Sure. You’re a troll and a child after all, your entire profile is all about provoking people. You don’t value art, therefor, you don’t value Humanity. You are no different from a Jeffrey Epstein Class supporter. You are causing so much damage to people.
what good comes out of the time you spend to write all these insults?
Catharsis.
Nothing feels better than insulting evil. Supporting AI over people, valuing money over people, showing loyalty to a country more than Humanity, all that is evil. It’s getting so many innocent people killed, innocent people you never hear anything about, because they are poor. They just become a number you never pay attention to.
Suicide rates vary by country but occurs in all regions of the world. In a 2024 WHO report, 73% of reported suicides were in low and middle-income countries. Mental illness and suicide are linked, though many suicides are impulsive and occur due to crisis. Groups subject to discrimination, including refugees, indigenous populations, and LGBTQ people, experience high suicide rates. Societal and cultural taboos around the discussion of topics of suicide and lack of quality suicide data are impeding factors in suicide prevention. Suicide prevention includes such measures as restricting access to methods, responsible media reporting, and treatment and assessment of suicidal people.
The suicide rate of the United States is currently 15.6. About 15 people commit suicide per every 100,000 people in the USA. All because they have to constantly witness injustice, racism, discrimination, xenophobia, greed, and assholes who want to replace them, their work and their art, the only purposes in life they have, their only way of expressing themselves, with AI and robots.
That was in 2021. It’s probably much higher now, with Trump leaving so many people in poverty. Scamming them with crypto, the Epstein files, people like OP who doesn’t mind replacing human artists with AI… All that easily depressed so many people to the point of suicide. It’s just very easy for the government and media to cover all that up. They just don’t talk about it, that’s it.
The fact that you are not angry enough yet, not insulting the people building that environment that is causing so many suicides, is pretty gross. I don’t ever want to be like that. That’s what my family became, and they are insufferable and evil. They don’t care about poor people dying, being paid the minimum wage, ending in crime, losing their children, even supporting Trump (and we are Mexicans living in Mexico) because he promised them money with crypto. Fuck that.
What good comes out of the time you tolerate or ignore all that evil? It keeps growing, unchecked.
instead of alchemizing insults i work to bring that attention. you can be aware and care without yelling to the choir and scaring the curious away
Voting doesn’t really do anything on Lemmy though.
Also, one of the greatest shortcomings of the ego is to view ourselves by what we consider to be our greatest virtue, but to judge others by what we perceive to be their greatest mistake. It’s built-in bullshit superiority and condescension. The way you beat it is by both realising that we all have faults, and that we all mean well.
Well, I mean well. I’m not sure about you.
I mean idk if this is serious but most people don’t go like “OH YESS, I AM SO EVIL SO I WILL NOW DO EVILLLLL STUFF WAHAHHAA” Or something like that.
Very much tongue-in-cheek, intended as a commentary on perspective.
Ah, seemed like it, sorry.
Tolerance. My way.
eh. It’s not just online, and not just for cruelty. Defining arbitrary moral framing in which the author appears superior to no matter how large or small group of people is what each of us does on a daily basis. That’s just how our psychology works.
Ngl, i have no idea about the situation you’re talking about, but the fact that you’ve created this post merely because someone hurt your feelings already speaks volumes to me. If you’d had an actual discussion that your opponent single-handedly devolved into demagogy and personal insults, you wouldn’t have been there now.
Instead of seeking moral support to soothe your hurt ego, i’d suggest you to analyse your own actions just a bit, rather than concentrating on what others did wrong. It’s simply that much more productive.
I ain’t reading all that. Im happy for you. Or sorry that happened
You’d think someone calling themselves ‘Iconoclast’ would have thicker skin.
That’s your solution to bullying and insults? Tell the victim to grow a thicker skin?
It’s genuinely baffling that asking for common decency is unpopular to begin with.
Welcome to the internet. Have a look around.
I like to dream of a better world. If this post makes one person to re-consider how they treat others online I consider it worthwhile.
In that case, you’rereally gonna need that thicker skin. Good luck!
Adam Curtis in the docu Hypernormalization makes an interesting point about the moralization of politics, how since 9/11 politicians have increasingly used “deceptive myths of good vs evil”. And I think that has become a large part of online discourse.
Polarization is profitable because it drives engagement. You have one meme mocking the position of the other side and the other side has a counter meme, and together they boost each other, slowly mutate into more extreme forms. So people increasingly see each other as extreme versions. But it also makes your own side more extreme and unyielding.
And the rise of trolls with climate denial and ending in Trump being cheered for his psychological terror campaign shows where we are today. I suspect it evolved naturally as a response to the unrelenting stupidity by the fascist MAGA trolls. But it’s not just maga that is fine denying reality, denying logical arguments and resorts to demonizing the ideological enemy. It is good vs evil all the way down now.
Meanwhile the true evil, the class warfare of the plutocrats against us, is largely ignored. Instead “tankies” and the more extremist communist who actually offer an alternative ideology that could provide a different perspective and a way out of our current situation have been defederated and banned from the largest group of lemmy instances. And that was only possible through this extremification of the ideological opponent as evil.
The same absolutely applies to fuckai. You still get comments that LLMs only copy and randomly rearrange text in their database and cannot reason at all. Which is objectively false. And you get the avalanche of hate.
Same with pointing out that the absolute evidence the CIA funded and trained the organizer of the maidan protests in the Ukraine and the evidence of the massacre being a false flag by far right nazi sympathizers, therefor rendering the question of fault and diplomatic solutions more nuanced than what is allowed in public discourse.
Meanwhile on topics like banning hate speech, where there shouldn’t be any tolerance, there is.
So I do think you’re mostly right, but it’s not so much done out of cruelty, but because we’ve all been trained like dogs by social media to behave like this and enjoy the bliss of group approval. Kinda like The Orville episode about the base democratic society they encounter. Reality and truth is what the majority decides it is.
You made some good points. This comment would have been a lot more palatable if you didn’t then proceed to bring .ml propaganda into it.
That was the point since I’m interested in the social and psychological phenomenon. There is evidence to prove what I said in western newspapers and Ukrainian academic sources, although it’s not easy to find.
But my point is that as soon as something contradicts on someone’s worldview these days, people loose their reason and hurl accusations. The possibility of being wrong is just immediately rejected. The enemy must be lying and evil or deluded and inferior.
That is why I brought that point into it, to show this is not limited to AI. There are also topics like “are pitbulls a more dangerous breed?” that was trending yesterday, with subreddits dedicated to hating Pitbulls, while studies and statistics say they are are not.
From where I stand it seems that dehumanization is the tool used there and nowadays people are increasingly quick to dismiss the entire person based on a single bit of information about them (which often isn’t even true). And now that they’re not even considered a human anymore anything goes. That’s how you get otherwise normal people acting in horrific ways and history is filled with examples of that.
there is not definition of hate speech that everyone can agee on, this is part of why hate speech is protected by the first amendment in the US.
Paradox of tolerance
yes, and the first ammendment to the US constitution solves it by not giving a shit about what individuals do.
Only if you consider sticking its head in the sand to be solving the issue.
