“I Ain’t Reading All That; Free Palestine”
The meme enrages Israel supporters because Israel apologia depends on mountains of verbiage to spin obvious atrocities as reasonable and appropriate. At some point the kids noticed this was happening, and started dismissing all the narratives.
…Without mountains of narrative, all you’ve got is a nonstop deluge of raw video footage depicting the blatant genocidal criminality of Israel. No narrative overlay is required atop a video of a baby beheaded by Israeli military explosives. It stands on its own. You’d only need narrative to explain why the footage of the headless baby doesn’t say bad things about the side that’s dropping the bombs.
…Manipulators understand that they can use narrative to promote material agendas if they can get people to believe those narratives, and it enrages them when people handwave away the narrative and stick solely with the raw data of material reality. If you’ve based your life around trading empty narrative fluff for real material resources and gains, having your narratives dismissed can feel like holding a huge pile of currency that suddenly got devalued to zero. Of course the manipulators would be upset about this.
Yeah, I agree with all of that and that’s all valid! And I know that it’s not their actual train of thinking, I just think that this leaves on a weak argument and that just feels kind of… defeating, you know? I’m all for blocking fact and logic-resistant people, I just really don’t want to give them the feeling that they’ve won the discussion. But I guess you’re right and with people like these you just can’t end on a high note.
If it was reddit where possibly millions of people would see a chain of comments, sure, it would matter disproving them.
But Lemmy is still small enough it doesn’t really matter, but there’s still enough people someone else can handle it. I’d rather spend my time genuinely trying to help someone understand something than waste it on people who just wants a slap fight.
Fair warning though, once they realize you never reply or down vote their comments, they usually won’t take it well. You’ll get a lot of reports and more than a few of them started tagging me in their comments so I’d still see their insults.
I’m not sure if they quit because they move on to someone else, or if reporting the harassment stops them, but I’ve never had one do it for longer than a month after blocking them.