Look at here and the people who complain about it being too hard to figure out are the ones complaining about “I can’t use muh slurs, this is awful.”
“The left of today is very much in favour of censorship to avoid “harm.” This makes those of us in the middle very wary of signing up to any partisan media.” /u/decidedlysticky23
/u/misshapensteed claims he isn’t far right, but explictly only posts on PoliticalCompassMemes and TheLeftCantMeme and KotakuInAction.
If they are too stupid to figure out we know they’re lying, they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy.
they’re too stupid to figure out lemmy
Please let’s not introduce elitism into Lemmy. I just got here and stumbled upon this post. The social network you use does not make you superior. As much as I agree with anti-racist censorship, there is no need to speak as if Lemmy users are superior beings. It was annoying when Redditors did it back in the day and it will continue to be now.
deleted by creator
I mean more as “if you can’t look past skin tone and gender, you can’t probably read a sign up sheet.”
Racists are idiots. The ones who learned better aren’t idiots because they applied new knowledge.
Racists just regurgitate what they were told since birth, without questioning anything and doubling down.
Is Lemmy better? Remains to be seen. But if they refuse to join because we won’t tolerate slurs, that’s a bonus.
s/stupid/lazy
Quite. Remember narwhaling bacon? Never again.
Big agree.
Exactly this.
As an analogy, I personally think the Linux desktop is better than Windows but I don’t think desktop Linux users are inherently better than Windows users.
Sure, desktop Linux users are probably more tech savvy on average but they are probably also more likely to be less socially capable imo. (like me)
“I use Arch by the way”
(I kid, I kid… I use garuda)
Pleb. I use Gentoo.
(Fedora, actually.)
I actually use gentoo and I love y’all
Pleb. I use NixOS.
(Arch
btwactually)+1 for NixOS
Praise the Arch wiki though
Oh for sure. And pacman / the AUR. It’s the reason I stated with an arch-based os even though I got a little tired of managing all the minutiae myself (I did used to use arch)
I do actually run arch btw :)
I’m glad that Beehaw doesn’t do it, but the other instances shouldn’t be federating the Tankies.
Authoritarian, genocide-denial, Stalin-praising politics have no place on the left.
That is the one thing that still makes me unsure of whether I should fully support Lemmy or not. I know how the federation works and that those communities can be easily excluded, but what is off to me is that the two main devs of Lemmy itself (and the Android app) are themselves tankies.
Personally I’m not sure I consider tankies leftists. Although communism is a leftists ideal, it’s based on the premise of people being equal and deserving of basic needs. Tankies often embrace misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and authoritarianism and deny or even support injustices against other humans. Not very leftist of them imo
I get where you’re coming from, but this feels like a no-true-scotsman kind of thing that both the left and right do to renounce and endorse their extremes as and when necessary to ensure they can always claim they were right from the beginning.
Things are what they are (including the results they produce), not what they ought to be. Whether that divergence happens because of orchestrated dog-whistles or poorly set up incentives is irrelevant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the same tendency and the above is more like a mantra rather than an ingrained belief for me. A good litmus test has always been “Can I extend this argument such that I’m never wrong?” If so, I’m probably wrong already.
The term “Left” is nothing more than a team sport since the inception of the term in the 1800s. It’s not a useful term, nor a consistent term, and we only really use it for convenience. It’s not a meaningful model of classifying politics. That’s why we should consider just saying what we mean: progressive? socialist? egalitarian?
Same with “right”, of course.
But what are the ideals of the left? Isn’t there a focus on social equality and human rights? There are circles and movements on the left that i don’t fully agree with because you’re right, it’s not a monolith, but the core value of equality amongst humans feels like a requirement. I just think excusing genocide and supporting authoritarianism or totalitarianism are incompatible with the core leftist value of equality.
“Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”.”
Where would tankies fall on that scale?
“Tankies” is basically a meaningless slur at this point, but I’ll try to answer your question.
There are two overarching branches of philosophical thought, Idealism and Materialism. Idealists believe the world is shaped by ideas. Materialists believe ideas are shaped by the world.
Liberalism is an example of an idealist philosophy. If enough people believe in civil rights and democracy, then they are sure to manifest. Liberals approach politics from the standpoint of evangelizing their beliefs. They believe with the correct rhetoric and the correct positions, they can win the day and bring about their version of a just society.
Marxism is an example of a materialist philosophy. Social currents, ideology, and history are driven by the material conditions. Marxists aim to apply an empirical analysis to historical events, to identify the underlying systems and processes which are at play. To figure out where the meager resources of the oppressed and downtrodden might be applied most effectively. From this style of historical analysis, many theses have been formed, creating a very deep theoretical canon.
We can all agree that democracy is good. We can all agree that civil liberties are good. At the same time, when the United States declares it is going to bring democracy to your country, you know are going to have a bad time. Or when the Untited States, jailhouse of the world, brings up complaints about civil liberties, you know there are ulterior motives at play. This is because the United States is a world-hegemonic imperialist empire, always seeking to expand its markets, its influence, and its profits. There are other countries which exhibit imperialist tendencies. Imperialism is the inevitable endgame of capitalism, but none compare to the US Empire.
The idealistic paradigm of categorizing states as democratic or authoritarian crumbles under the past century of cold war. A state like Cuba, living under siege, facing very real threats of espionage, sabotage and infiltration, is forced to take a warlike posture. It can never let its guard down. It will take measures which seem repressive in order to defend its sovereignty. This is unfortunate, but there is an underlying material reality which drives this state of affairs. The artificially imposed scarcity. The constant threat of a coup and the imposition of western finance and privatization. And still, you can make a very strong argument that the conditions in Cuba are far more Democratic than they are in the US. You can make the same argument for China. These places are far from perfect, but when you examine them in the context of the geopolitical reality we live in, there are reasons why they are the way they are (and a giant steaming pile of sensationalism and vile slander dumped on top).
Democracy is good, but you can’t just let the NED (a known CIA front) pour millions of dollars into reactionary media organs across your country and hold a direct election so every little victory the revolution has achieved can be sold off to gangsters. We got to see exactly what this looks like in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. We got to see exactly what this looks like when the US-backed coup in Chile overthrew Allende and installed the military dictator Pinochet. Shock doctrine, privatization, mass killings, neoliberalism. It looks like the parliament getting shelled by tanks, the former citizens of a socialist country getting sold into sex trafficking, and the dreams of millions turning into ashes while the capitalist gangsters take everything for themselves. It looks like the greatest decline in life expectancy and living standards in modern history.
Antiimperialism can seem perplexing at times, and nothing makes this clearer than the war in Ukraine. The invasion and the war are clearly abhorrent, but if that is where your analysis begins and ends, that Ukraine is a wholesome smol bean democracy and Putin is punishing them because he hates democracy on principle, you are missing a whole lot of what’s going on. The Reddit response to the war was that everyone became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Even as Ukraine descended into martial law, banned opposition parties, media and labor unions, and devoted itself to full mobilization. The actions of the Ukrainian state are somewhat understandable under the circumstances, but I’m not sure how you get back to egality, fraternity, and liberty coming out of these conditions. You might just get the fraternity, but a very dark, nationalistic one.
Instead of taking sides, what most of these “tankie” / “russia apologist” leftist communities are trying to do is figure out what the hell is actually going on. They certainly aren’t on NATO’s side, which is enough for most to call them Russian stooges. There is an intense fog of war, and the only thing you will find from either side is war propaganda. Ask the Ukranians and they have killed a million Russians. Ask the Russians and they have killed a million Ukranians. The enemy is constantly on the verge of running out of munitions. Tons of “great man theory” attempting to do psychoanalysis of Zelensky or Putin, instead of examining the political and economic factors driving this war. At the end of the day, it is the working class killing each other in another war for bourgeois states, and the apologia for national chauvinism only makes excuses for it. No war but class war.
I have to say that I had a really rough whiplash when I saw what kind of communities the admins of lemmy have created and are maintaining (I guess that is what you mean by tankies). Absolutely shocked that this is the credo of people making this “open/free/not controlled by company” software. A company might be preferable at this point >.>
These 2 people are the ones we’re supposed to put the faith into to maintain and develop the framework and architecture for all these potential sites? If we fund lemmy we fund them, if they give up then nobody else is probably going to take over, it sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.
And okay, nice to hear that beehaw is blocking those communities but we’re still federated with everything else there, if I’m understanding it correctly, and it’s the same users that can easily cross between the instances? That’s not very reassuring either.
Considering that Reddit’s capitalist shenanigans is what brought redditors here, having socialist devs is not necessarily a bad thing.
You’d probably also be shocked at how many communists are strongly involved in FOSS development, and just how nice and great people they are on average.
In any case, don’t worry too much about it, their software is open source so if they suddenly turn evil, a fork is enough to fix it.
Socialism is not the same as what’s going on here. Socialism means you believe in good for the common citizen, not denying reality and wishing death and destruction on peaceful people.
Minor correction, socialism has one definition and one definition only: worker ownership of the means of production
While I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated by the tankies during my short stay on lemmy.ml, I don’t think that’s a fair representation of their views.
Most I believe seem frustrated by a western world that seem entirely too content in accepting a narrative heavily biased in favor of laissez-faire capitalism and right wing narratives, to the extent that it has blinded them to the cruelty of regimes in China and Russia.
I think that in order to foster a fruitful discussion here and avoid the trenches that often form between differing political views on the web, trying first to understand and empathise with an opposing view is crucial. It’s been a good heuristic for me at least, except in those cases where there is zero intention of even trying to understand each other (where just ignoring works well).
The beauty of it is that we don’t necessarily have to use lemmy.ml at all. Beehaw and Sopuli.xyz, two of the largest instances outside of lemmy.ml and the tankies, don’t federate with the tankies. It some ways it’s a good thing, as it encourages people to branch out instead of clustering around a “main” instance.
Do you know if the lemmy.ml owners run join-lemmy?
As far as I’m aware, yes.
So considering that those individuals are supportive of genocide- not even denying, but supportive- That is a fairly big problem for the ecosystem.
Presumably, with their extremist and toxic views, they will be acting to keep criticism of their favorite Imperial states (say, China) from being too prominent.
They’ve actually been quite tolerant of all of us, to be honest. I don’t think they have any desire to be exclusive to tankies.
claims he isn’t far right
Right-wing extremists do this to make it seem like their position is widely held and “normal.” The worst extreme right-wing party we have here in Finland (Valta kuuluu kansalle or “Power Belongs to the People”, aka Valta kuuluu Kremlille or “Power Belongs to the Kremlin”) claims to be center right. The head of the party is a pro-Russia flat earther who doesn’t believe in climate change, and the party is staunchly anti-immigration
Performative Overton acrobatics.
I wish the fediverse is able to contain all the ideas, all the political positions and that disconnecting/blocking an instance is only used for behaviors like spamming. Not giving every political stance the opportunity to be a part of the same world fuels extremists.
Beehaw and other instances can kick all the users with far-right beliefs. That’s fair. But Lemmy users shouldn’t be blocked to listen to or even interact with them, in their own instances, if they wanted. Don’t help creating political ghettos.
I’m not super over how the fediverse works mechanically; I was under the impression that users could create their own instances and interact with who they choose to?
How would I be blocked from “listening to” (that’s never what’s going on) psedo-Nazis in my own instance?
Sorry, I didn’t understood what you meant. Especially the parenthesis part.
That’s the unimportant part.
Let me be clear. I’m asking, “How would I be blocked from listening to and interacting with anyone in my own instance?”
Oh no no no. Sorry, it was probably my fault since english is not my native language. I was referring to theirs instances! in your example, the neo-nazis instances.
In other words, I was trying to say that I agree with instances (like beehaw) being able to block what they consider to be toxic instances, but I’m against removing instances from the lemmy fediverse if that’s even possible. Like, removing them from the network.
I think Lemmy is too political, but still joined a long time ago. Things can improve with time. We’re seeing this happen now.
Yes. This is a different platform, I’d rather we don’t just transplant all the reddit problems here.
Lemmy is inherently political. It was and is a revolt against reddit’s staff, their business model and the influence of US politics, media and corporations on their platform due to their advertising model. This place wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t political differences.
We’re not here to impress people who were banned for spreading Nazism. Go to all the reddit-clones that started in the early 2010s when reddit got called out for hosting toxic racist-or-fascist hate communities and communities sexualizing minors (e.g. /r/jailbait).
Exactly. I’m not exactly hiding my politics.
If anything, I’m glad being open about it means that a lot of bigots aren’t going to use lemmy in the first place. A natural filter to keep the transphobes and McCarthyites elsewhere.
Yes, exactly. If we can have the equivalent of Reddit without the bigots, it’s a big plus. Tired as a trans woman to go on r/Gaming and see transphobic comments
Everything is inherently political. If anyone thinks it isn’t, it’s just because the politics favour them.
This is true, politics is not something distinct which can be considered separate from or optionally added to society, culture or economics, although Lemmy is also explicitly political. That might be more what I intended to say.
(The real kicker is realizing that abstaining is not politically neutral.)
Yeah, I think 2020 made a lot of “neutral” people realize that not taking a stand on certain things is picking a side, so to speak, on certain issues.
Very true. A good phrase is “the personal is political”. Politics refers to organization, power, and decision-making, and so much of our lives is determined by decisions outside our control.
It’s like when Voat started. It was spawned out of Reddit’s hammer coming down. Admittedly, some decent communities popped up over there, and I stuck around for a bit, but it was also the dumping ground for all the degenerate behavior Reddit was cracking down on. I ultimately ended up on Reddit again after the decent communities lost steam and the only stuff that seemed active were the things I didn’t agree with or wasn’t interested in, legally or otherwise.
Voat was a school project that blew up in popularity and became infamous after the Nazis decided to use it as an easy platform to fester. It was not created as a response to anything reddit may have been doing at the time. It was just another link aggregator with comments that had user overlap with reddit.
I’m a software engineer and even I find the UI of the apps confusing and mediocre at best, actively terrible at worst. Once you figure out the quirks it’s relatively straightforward, but it’s honestly just a bad user experience.
What’s funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.
Because they can’t make people who don’t agree with them miserable if they’re all relegated to their own bubbles.
One of the funny events on Mastodon was that someone set up an instance that was far right and almost within a few hours, all the other instances had de-federated from it and blocked it
No-one was stopping them setting up their own instance but they all said “you don’t play well with others so go play on your own!”
I believe defederation is one of the best things about the Fediverse. People who say objectionable things have the right to free speech too (within reason), but I just don’t want to see it or interact with them. Defederation enables peaceful coexistence in a way which could never work on a centralized social media platform.
That’s how a healthy society should be. Bigotry is always a minority of society. The media has been inflating its perceived reality to attract more people away from criticizing the current economical system. Fashism 2.0.
As Buenaventura Durruti said:
“No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.”
Yeah, I told a guy today his hate of communism was totally his own prerogative, but he might want to put it aside to make a unified front against the impending Reddit changes. He flipped out on me and called me some choice words. Just another day on Reddit I guess.
Ah, perhaps you needed a translator to put things in terms this particular individual could understand. Let me help:
Woke woke WOKE wOke, woke wOKe WOKE!!! 😡
It is funny how the only viable Reddit alternative I’ve found so far (here) isnt led by weird libertarian tech bros but communists lol
The fact that guys like that dont feel welcome on Lemmy is a testament to Lemmy getting it right. I think it differentiates itself from the awful social media clones of the past like Voat or Vidme. I’ll leave it at that because we should probably shy away from outrage bait. As much as I’d like to i cant do anything about him and he is driving his buddies away from us
As this is a post on Beehaw, I’m going to abide by the rule and omit any unsavory words I was originally going to include 🙂
Whether intentional or not, the slur filter was one of the most genius things the Lemmy developers have ever done. No one was under any false pretenses that it was the absolute best way of moderating a space. In fact, everyone knew from the get-go that it had its fair share of problems! But it did one thing splendidly: it acted as a barrier against people obsessed with free speech who claim a slur filter is a tool used by some nebulous participants in the current culture war. I’ll refer to this comment made by user
uabstractionon Hacker News 2 years ago.Even to this day you see those people using the slur filter as a talking point against the devs, the software, the wider community, etc. even though it hasn’t been hard-coded or required for over a year at this point!
Meanwhile, as they continue to avoid Lemmy and prophesize its downfall, the people actually participating on Lemmy are growing a community and just generally vibing! No one is fainting at the thought that they can’t say a slur.
I’m conflicted about the slur filter episode. Sure, a clever way to moderate a brand of toxic community participants. If I’m not mistaken, moderation tools were far from mature at that stage and lemmy.ml was an active community dealing with community issues. I wasn’t involved in the community outside of keeping an eye on the project development and perhaps the community needed a heavy handed solution - not for me to say. But the implementation left some questions and from my memory, dev response to pushback was not positive. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to remove.
That was the first exposure many, many people had to the Lemmy project - it probably resulted in a lasting erosion of trust in the software among people who had/have no interest in using the blocked slurs, and formed an impression that will continue to echo for many years despite the filter being removed. The impact goes far beyond people who would use or defend the use of the excluded language.
Not just the slur filter, the whole strong leftist flavor, hard moderation, and no stupid ideals of free speech lemmy had basically sent all the right wing extremists running.
Online commies are the absolute worst. They made me realize I was an anarchist all along. It’s incredible how much time they spend being angry about pointless shit that no one cares about, like people using slurs online. They can’t help it but act like tiny dictators whenever they get the chance, by ganging up on anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their specific flavor of groupthink. And the thing that irks me the most is that it’s not even about left or right. It’s not about the poor or the rich, or the means of production, or people being exploited, or anything tangentially related to the economy. It’s all social justice. American identity politics. Issues that become less and less tangible the further you get from the anglosphere.
And they live in their echo chambers, and whenever their worldview is challenged they start posting insane takes like “Lemmy being functionally dead is actually good because I can’t get offended on behalf of someone else if no one is posting anything”
Not speaking for anyone but me, but sometimes when people say they something is too political it really means too much “extreme” political views. Personally I don’t want to interact with extreme auth-left or auth-right content. I think politely discussing why access to housing should be guaranteed by government, or arguing for lower corporate taxes or whatever, isn’t what bothers most people.
Fortunately Fedi allows instances who are fine with it host those users, and I don’t have to see it. And Lemmy -the project- isn’t political, it’s just software for which I’m grateful to the devs.
I was almost gonna agree until the end but unfortunately, I really can’t agree with the notion that technology is not political.
The project is political. The license they chose for the software, what they’re using to develop it, how they fund the development of the project are all very political things.
How can someone honestly claim to be “in the middle” when one side openly embraces Nazis, sexism, and other forms of bigotry? What’s the middle ground there?
There’s a difference between needing a safe space and not wanting to hang out with the KKK.
I think the answer is the words we use, which are incredibly myopic, literally two-dimensional with LEFT and RIGHT.
This reduction to the binary is exhausting, and probably forces people to think in bad faith. It is all bad faith. The middle ground is meaningless. Bigots don’t like to be called out as bigots, and many people are too afraid to call bigots out.
I think the step forward is to be significantly more precise with our language, avoid the temptation to simplify, and to stop using tired labels that are easily hijacked by bad actors.
They only want to murder half of all trans people, not all?
I guess the other option is only half-murder all the trans people, but yeah; these compromise-always people need to take a second and actually THINK about what they’re asking us to compromise on. They sound incredibly foolish and disconnected.
They know what they’re asking for. They’re aiming for plausible deniability.
