It’s spurned by liberal admins and mods usually. They can’t actually argue against us so they put their cognitive dissonance into an unhealthy place of self-soothing.

This actually isn’t unique to Lemmy at all it is the default reaction of committed liberals and liberals with thin skin. But when someone feels ownership of a place and like they’re losing legitimacy and control they can lash out.

It’s also important to understand that most people online discussing politics in these forums know basically nothing. They don’t read. They can’t critically engage with media. They don’t question their own biases when presented with people from other cultures. They certainly don’t actually do anything irl that would teach them visceral lessons. Trying to build an organization (not a career in a non-profit), a party, or even just feeding people. They might as well be 10 year olds for all the information contained in their political opinions. But they feel extremely entitled to their positions and wrap it up in their identities. If they are contradicted they feel personally attacked. If they think something despite having never investigated it, they announce it proudly with confidence and bully those who disagree. In short, humility runs counter to their socialization.

Finally, they’re used to punching right, or at least most of them are, and their rhetoric breaks down when they are instead forced to punch left. So they just start namecalling instead, banning, or just trolling, as it allows their egos to escape without much damage.

Luckily, we are looking at an echo chamber of people who automatically self-isolate and can’t organize anything. In the real world conversations are faster and more productive and building things and teaching is much easier, even with an audience that isn’t entirely friendly. Irl people usually can’t get away with acting like such babies.

Tankie is a thought-terminating cliché by liberals that can’t handle losing an argument and don’t know how else to punch left.

Actually I was never this insufferable.

Funny how they all talk like 4chan chuds

Of course. The primary difference being oppressor vs. oppressed. Same as how in the US white supremacy just isn’t the same as a black person that’s sick of white people.

Though I do want to emphasize that it’s a trope by and for the oppressor to speculate about how they have to keep oppressing or else the oppressed will get revenge. There’s a very limited rhetorical toolbox for liberal ethnic supremacists and it hasn’t changed much in 400 years.

For Euros whiteness wasn’t and isn’t a consistent and sufficient category for white supremacists, they still drew and draw racialized dividing lines on ethnic and nationalist grounds, generally as a false consciousness that scapegoats race for social challenges created by their political and economic systems. Hating an ethnic German was and is not incompatible with being a white supremacist and having nothing against Swedes, for example. Racial categories are not scientific or even consistent, they just need to serve a purpose for the dominant social powers, and that purpose is usually either (1) the creation of an external enemy that must be dominated or dispossessed (justifying war and occupation) or (2) to create a “deserving” underclass that can be mistreated, underpaid, and kept precarious, and blamed for the ills faced by other oppressed (but less oppressed) people, particularly workers. The development of capitalism over 500-700 years is rife with the creation of these categories in order to slowly proletarianize the male population and (mostly) enslave the census population, plus justify racialized slavery in colonies.

It would not make much sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to simply hate white people. This is because they were also white per racial categories in those parts of Europe. But whiteness was a lesser category than ethnonational categories at the time. Polish Jew, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, German, these were categories in use. These categories were often relatively new and created through the emergence of nation states, serving a purpose for the now dominant economic and political system.

It would not even fully make sense for a Jewish person to simply hate Germans. Many were German, considered themselves such. It was the Jewish-excluding Germans that excluded Jews, not the other way around. Same for Polish Jews, etc. This is prevailing opinion as well, because Jews were and are not monolithic, they had differing cultures, languages, norms across Europe. It is Israeli ethnonationalism that has attempted to crush these differences and basically invent a language (modem Israeli Hebrew) to kill off the variety of languages spoken by Ashkenazi Jews (and other Jews), trying to make Judaism into a monolith whose sole representative is a genocidal settler colonial ethnostate.

But even if it did make some level of sense for Jewish Holocaust survivors to blame a single racial category (that of their oppressors), historically it is unlikely that they would have. The oppressed do not have as much need for ethnic hatred. Ethnic hatred is a tool for the oppressor to justify their crimes. The oppressed, experiencing a form of liberation, tend to just seek basic justice and equity.

Both people in the interview are ethnic supremacists and they exclusively frame the genocide of Palestinians in terms of entirely hypothetical impacts on Jewish people.

The interview ends with this line from the other person in the discussion, with whom Cohen had no disagreements:

And you know, it’s the first time speaking to you now, to both of you here, where I find that tiny bit of compassion for these absolutely insufferable kids who are protesting Israel. Because these kids are not going to be Jewish in a generation, but they might be carrying the Abrahamic tradition, in a way, because they’re trying so hard to be a blessing to the nations. It’s very strange. It’s abnormal, to the bone.

Just to be clear and simple: both interviewed are ethnic supremacists.

You should learn that the oppressed are rarely as cruel as their oppressors and have less need for a racialized understanding of them - and this reflects the reality of Palestine. The ethnic hatred of Palestinians, dehumanizing them, treating them as a threat with purely hypothetical logic serves an actual function for Israel, who are killing and removing Palestinians from their land. It makes their own citizens accept and even celebrate the genocide, ensuring the project can continue internally. It also builds and externally-facing PR line for Westerners to gobble up, as Western governments are the primary sponsor of this genocide.

It is purely a projection, an attempt to get ahead of the obvious guilt, and that is why Cohen ties the two together. “Massacred Palestinians? Let’s make this about Jewish people and how they’re under threat.”

Yes, it is wrong.

The pretense that it’s Israelis, not Palestinians, who face an existential threat of ethnic hatred in Palestine, is a false Zionist talking point to distract you from the reality and in fact works to make genocide more palatable to those who internalize it. Precisely as Joshua Cohen has internalized it. It is a mirror image of fascist ethnic cleansing rhetoric: the people being oppressed must be characterized as a threat, whereas the oppressors are characterized as valiant or victims or both. Throughout this “article” you can see many cases of this implicit impetus and a theme of Jewish supremacy. Cohen himself even sympathizes with Netanyahu. https://web.archive.org/web/20260115002425/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/01/joshua-cohen-ruby-namdar-israel-october-7/677126/

It further includes the actually antisemitic trope that Israel and Judaism are interchangeable. To conflate a genocidal settler colonist project with Jewishness itself - because of course the oppressed will hate their oppressors, and they even use their oppressors’ own language, but Palestinians hate Israelis for killing their families and stealing their homes and keeping them sick and poor in Bantustans. It is Europeans who perfected and maintained antisemitism and its litany of tropes and conspiracy theories, its race hatred. Palestinians do not follow those tropes, nor entertain race hatred in their resistance. That is something virtually exclusively pedaled by Zionists themselves, particularly Israeli Zionists, for a naive and eager Western audience. So you’ll think, “oh but is he wrong?” when a genocide apologist tells you how the untermensch are a pitiable threat.

Generative LLM and so on is just pattern recognition and generation. It may do this several levels deep, but it doesn’t break free of this fundamental limitation.

You are noticing that it is just doing patterns and noticing them yourself. Lines flow a bit oddly. Real objects have recognizable textures but are missing parts of the coherent whole. Comic panels that would be copy + paste for an artist are actually “redrawn” by the generative algorithms and that feels odd. Context changes oddly - e.g. the backgrounds.

It’s mostly just parlor tricks. Entertaining but rarely actually that useful.

FOSS has always been political. And usually fairly reactionary.