I kept an eye on it because it’s cool to know what the buzz is with the more mainstream memes about wars and whatever. Weapons systems I haven’t heard of, military secrets being leaked on gaming forums, I wouldn’t post or comment there but monitoring it isn’t stupid if I’m browsing All. A little crass about people dying but I thought it’s all an in-joke.
When things started escalating here in Lebanon I was absolutely baffled how the average poster there had zero nuance or interest in questioning whatever they considered to be the status quo. I saw people arguing and getting banned in the comments over “supporting terrorism” while I was out dealing with the very civilian damage we are experiencing. You can check my post history for more on that, my comments detailing the situation feel like screams into the void and I’m less and less motivated to write about my experience.
I never posted or commented anything in NCD because how could I possibly say “Whether you consider this person a terrorist leader or not, their tactics were more pragmatic than potential successors and this will likely lead to prolonged conflict” on a page like that. A message that ostensibly should be very clear on a conflict discussion board.
I think it’s mostly Europeans and Americans fetishizing their fancy weapons, never having been on the receiving end of them. But I have, and therefore my opinion doesn’t matter, because I must be a terrorist.
The ‘no politics’ rule works against NCD insofar as it ignores that all defence policy is politics, and thus it leads to the mods enforcing a pro-status-quo viewpoint, intentionally or unintentionally.
Also, the mod team here on Lemmy seems to be of… lower quality. Not that I doubt that Reddit NCD has had a rightward and pro-Israel lurch since the exodus.
I’ve also been a lurker there. The pager memes were pretty fucking disgusting. There’s definitely a sizable “rah rah Israel” contingent there, despite the community leaning more leftward than one would expect given the subject matter.
That was precisely the turning point honestly. It’s been a bit hit or miss on Palestine (like most English-language anything online), but I remember commenters defending that attack as “pinpoint precision” or whatever they’ve convinced themselves.
Doctors have had to pull damaged eyes out of children. People with compromised devices were out on the roads, a few blew up in public buses. Imagine driving down the road and driver in the car in front of you loses half his skull and smashes into a shop. Not so cute huh
Still what happened that day, terrorizing as it was, was easier to live with than what’s happening now.
The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?
Just to be clear, these groups are (politically) in the way of a lot of internal progress. I’ve been personally threatened and intimidated by them for some political stuff I’ve done in the past. And even I feel compelled to explain how the situation is more complicated than it looks. Fighting for the right thing often involves putting aside differences, even major differences, for the greater good, so that we may live to fight another day. Yes their internal, extremely regressive politics are very dangerous. The diplomatic quagmire they worsen is also a massive problem. But these conversations are complicated and they require a lot of preamble, and they’re for us to have.
The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?
I’m pretty sure that that’s something that the average person just does not understand. As both an anarchist and a proponent of civilian firearm ownership, I’ve seen and participated in many discussions with people saying that “there’s no way you can fight the government, they have tanks/bombers/nukes/etc”. Like they think the government is just going to do precision drone strikes on all the insurgents and then it’ll be over. The inevitability of “collateral damage” doesn’t occur to them, and they have no idea how insurgencies work.
People on NCD probably do know better, but some have picked a side, and confirmation bias takes over from there.
The pager attack was, from a technical point of view, an incredible feat. I do see how you’d find some of the jokes in poor taste though.
From a totally amoral perspective, sure. War is interesting, that’s what drew me to NCD in the first place. The pager memes in particular felt like a throwback to 00s-era neocon bullshit, though.
