This. I was watching the BBC Archive the other day, where it interviewed people’s thoughts on the mutual disarm movement back in the 80s, and you had two people sitting down at a table expressing their views, but not getting more than a little riled up or resorting to character attacks.

https://youtu.be/6yfE9Ihr8F0?t=661

I wish TV was still like this. The most vocal guy in the room is putting forward the view that UK paid for the nukes, and so it should keep them, and ultimately make ourselves more independent of the US and not subservient to them. He’s also a chauvinist pig, but it is only one aspect of his personality and the others seem to understand that and keep the discussion grounded.

One thing I have noticed from watching these old videos is that people ultimately haven’t changed: the exact same gripes (cost of living, buying houses), and the exact same fears (russian interference, loss of jobs to china). They just smoke and drank more.

That last sentence might sound like a joke, but I do think there really is something to having a beer and sharing a cigarette with someone you’re violently in disagreement with. It normalizes the air somehow. Reminds me of the “slightly less than two drinks” rule from Mitchell&Web.

So many resources are deployed with the aim of making Americans afraid of each other and the world. This polarizes people, who get very heated and expend huge amounts of energy spitting vitriol at each other to no effect, which has the very intentional side effect of making politics so uncomfortable (and seemingly unproductive) to think or talk about that many people who can afford to do so just tune it out, which allows politicians to get away with even more heinous shit because it’s what’s expected of politicians anyway. It’s a pretty elegant, if dismal, system :/

Newfie too. I’m the best of the best. So definitely aware of how centric the rest of Canada can be, trust me.

Unfortunately, that community is also moderated by an American (JordanLund) who has refused to acknowledge or accept terms from other countries outside of the United states, has banned Canadians for ‘misinformation’ when they were merely using Canadian political terms he didn’t understand, and has argued with the admins of lemmy.world that he did nothing wrong. The admins warned him about the situation and publicly he refuses to back down.

That community can’t be trusted. It’s not impartial and not remotely trustworthy. It is seen through an aggressively American lens.

This is a breakdown of some of the shit that he’s done. It’s a repost of something I made that got deleted when I left LW. This is that original post if you want to see the comments of him “defending” himself by making it a thousand times worse. This was the last straw for me and why I left Lemmy.world, deleting all my content and setting up on dbzer0 instead with new communities to boot.

I am fucking done accepting an American being the be-all and end-all of reality when they’re not even plugged into it themselves.