This entire experience has soured me a bit on Lemmy. There were a flurry of excited posts about the massive drop that totally happened. Every article I read refrained from presenting any evidence, and all used waffling text that sounded like it was all coming from other sources that didn’t have any proof. It didn’t help that Zalenskyy seemed to explicitly say that there was a massive drop - and that sucks, because I tend to generally believe what Ukraine says. I know they’re in wartime and every government lies to some degree, but they generally seemed to be truthful for the most part.

So when I tried pointing this out in places, I got massive pushback - “No no, there’s totally been a massive drop!” Where? Where’s the drop? Where’s the numbers from someone doing actual measurements? No answers, just downvotes.

I see this time and time again - often where it’s probably less important, like people misread things and decide it means one thing when it doesn’t mean that thing - and usually, the thing is bad, so the fact that they completely misread it is probably not so bad, except that it means nobody is caring about the truth.

For example, the Vance couch thing bothers me. There’s plenty to string fascists up from trees for, but that couch thing was a joke in a book. So of all the legitimate things we can hate him for and joke about, that is a lie - a lie when it was taken as truth; originally a joke that became a lie when it was taken as truth.

We really don’t need to come up with bullshit to be angry. All it does is makes us susceptible to more lies. How much of what I believe is a lie? How much is just flatly incorrect because people keep repeating it as true and I’ve also fallen for it? I’m not immune.

It’s a serious problem everywhere, but Lemmy is small enough and generally progressive enough that it stands out because I EXPECT that fascists to lie. I would expect better from us. (And we aren’t as bad, but the amount of misinformation that is vibe-upvoted is insane)

edit: The only thing that makes me happy is that this article is getting upvotes, so there is some hope, at least.