There are so many things you can talk about here with no one commenting. Then there are the trigger topics which cause the robots to come alive, and the trolls to spew.their bile.
But there are topics which are never posted...never come up, and never seem to get attention.
A random link maybe gets through....but then nothing...usually silence. Not even mockery.
I wonder....why these lines in the sand? Why are there some topics that this place is scared to talk about?
You have to sort of flip it around and look at it from the perspective of someone with certain resources who wishes to influence public opinion through this medium.
That is, would you just hire a bunch of sweaty emotionally-unstable neckbeard incels, pay them an hourly wage, and set them loose here? Maybe as a base case, but you could do a lot better.
You'd probably scrape the site by machine looking for certain flags. When found, you would assign the posts to one or more trolls then pay them per post, more for higher quality and less for simple "FU"s, although those are helpful too,
The point is, because there aren't any real, coherent personalities behind any of it, you get the sort of anomalous results you describe. Once you have this type of concept in mind, you start seeing the little pieces of it appearing in their places.
Lol, it's military man. It's run by classified programs...these are 'patriots' in the very loose sense....they care about the flag and their job...not the values