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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • Main benefit of a megathread is it helps prevent engagement from being splintered. So instead of having a dozen separate threads about an issue, with each one only having a few people participating, the issue could have one single megathread where everyone can go and all the interaction can get concentrated in a single location. This improves the experience for everyone discussing the topic, and also improves the experience of everyone who is uninterested in the topic since they won’t be seeing large numbers of threads about it.

    I think topics that are fairly specific, with a short chronological window and would include a lot of people wanting to talk about them make good megathreads. Major sporting events, major singular political events, big product releases, revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, long-awaited press releases or disclosures, major court cases, big concerts/public gatherings, etc.

    There is a line where you don’t want things to be too big, though, otherwise they become a slog to wade through. In these cases it can be broken into several megathreads, or you can even just make a community for the topic. Like, the Olympics would be a good example of too big for a single megathread.


  • I’m not sure we can call Peronism fascist. While it was populist and nationalistic, it’s missing that hallmark blood-and-soil (this land for our bloodline) aspect that really marks out fascist ideologies.

    You can’t really call yourself fascist if you’re trying to say all your people are equal, you need to be trying to establish some sort of hierarchical order where these citizens are always better than those citizens.


  • That’s true. We should not necessarily be taking the most extreme measures to simply render the tactic fully ineffective, though. At a certain level it has to be allowed to work, because its leveraging against our humanity, which we should not be discarding too completely. Beyond even the ethical concerns, disregarding them too much creates future strategic problems by instilling more hatred in future generations.

    It’s a question of where to draw the line. It’s been particularly egregious in Gaza, where unlike Lebanon, there was nowhere really safe to flee to.



  • Putting 100% of the blame on either of the sides in this one is not a terribly good idea. Sometimes a conflict has a clear historical oppressed and oppressor, but this particular one has each of the two sides doing quite a bit of foul play for over a century. The Arabs more in the earlier days, the Israelis more in the recent days.

    Dealing specifically with the use of human shields, while yes they do get used, at a certain point you shouldn’t just be shooting through them just because you can. Israel is also not sufficiently meeting its obligation to help distribute the food and care for the innocent people displaced by this war. If they were to do so, perhaps they could leave the next generation with less hatred in their hearts.