I mean… I don’t get what they’re lamenting, lemmy.ml, even if created by comrades, is a pretty liberal instance, comrades like yoghots (shout out to him) get censored and banned unjustly all the time, they just can’t stand the fact that people have ideologies differing from the democratic party.
[accidentally tagged NSFW, please mods remove tag, I cant from app]
People not getting what Lemmy is.
Like there’s even someone comparing it to what Reddit does with your data. I mean, Reddit sells your data lol. On Lemmygrad we don’t even have tracking software. You could add it if you want to on your instance, but it doesn’t come with a Lemmy installation.
Or the people complaining that your vote history is exposed if you use kbin, which is not affiliated with Lemmy… like what more do you want lol. Voting is not anonymous on Lemmy due to how federation works, but it’s not exposed, it stays in the database.
The original thread they linked from lemmy.ml is someone complaining that you can get banned from lemmy.ml for orientalism. Good?
Lemmy as a software is the most advanced alternative anyone has to make a reddit-like website easily. It just is, nothing else comes close. They will either realise it soon enough, or they will go back to Reddit.
The original thread they linked from lemmy.ml is someone complaining that you can get banned from lemmy.ml for orientalism. Good?
The problem is that many of the users complaining about ‘being banned for criticizing China’ can’t understand that it has more to do with their inappropriate socialization than it has to do with saying something unkind about the People’s Rep. of China. For example:
Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are all Colonies of China, which it treats as Colonial Territories, by - Forcibly destroying the local culture. Forcefully extracting to harm of the locals. Genocide, abuse, kidnapping, rape. But there is no point in engaging to you. You are a liar. You know you are. When you deny genocides, you put yourself on the same side as the fascists and reactionaries of the past.
If I were younger I might have expected sympathy after being banned for spewing a deluge of serious accusations and deliberate antagonizations at somebody, but I know better now.
Admittedly it helps that I’m already a respected user here, but a more appropriate way of approaching the situation would going to https://lemmygrad.ml/c/communism101 and asking, for example, ‘How do you respond to accusations that China has colonized Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet?’ (Notice how I don’t beg the question by saying ‘What do you think about China colonizing…’, and it’s more specific than ‘How do you respond to accusations that China is genociding, abusing, kidnapping, and raping people?’ — which for anticommunists could refer to almost anything.)
We don’t bury our heads in the sand. We do respond to accusations that the PRC and the other people’s republics are incessantly committing atrocities. However, what does tend to get on our nerves are the users who uncritically and unquestioningly share one of the many slanderous rumors already polluting the capitalist media, and then get belligerent or persistent when we don’t immediately accept them as factual. In which case, it’s best not to bother.
Reddit when someone is not automatically hateful towards the countries media tells me to hate.
That’s pretty much it, so far as I can tell. I have a real life friend who likes to call himself socialist. We were talking about The Ukraine War one day though, and he just got really upset that I could dare defend those baby killing Russians. Even today, if the subject comes up, he just seethes at me and mutters something about me being brainwashed by Russian propaganda under his breath. It’s completely unthinkable to him that I wouldn’t be calling for the death of every Russian. To do otherwise is profoundly immoral.
I honestly don’t know what to do about this. He sees it as being a completely black and white situation without any sort of nuance. Anything contrary is just Russian propaganda, and everything in support of the black and white situation is true and just. History begins at 2020.
This seems to be exactly the mindset that Reddit is in.
EDIT: I think the most horrifying thing he said to me though was when I brought up Afghanistan. The US just spent an entire generation invading it. I asked where the sanctions were on the US, and why that was supposed to justify destroying Russia, but not the USA? The answer I got? “They had it coming, and they got what they wanted, so fuck them.”
Western propaganda is really well funded. Unfortunately lots of well meant left leaning folks are caught up in it and are never exposed to facts that don’t fit the narrative.
During the first gulf war where the US blew the shit out of retreating Iraqi forces, only 1 in 20 Americans opposed the war. I was against it and protested, did civil disobedience etc, and got a ton of hate from my fellow ‘patriotic’ Americans.
Same during gulf war two. I knew there were no WMDs because of independent media interviews with Hanz von Sponich (sp?) who was a weapons inspector there etc. Everyone called me a traitor and Saddam apologist for opposing that war. 20 years later are there any mea culpas? Anybody apologize to the antiwar left?
It’s the same thing with Ukraine. And China. And the war machine rolls on…
I was too young for the first Iraq war. In the second one, my country wasn’t heavily involved, so I just tried to ignore the whole thing. I didn’t become politically aware until midway through the Afghanistan war. My friend should be old enough to remember ALL of this though, and is an American. I asked him about WMDs once after our talk, and he just shut me down with the usual disdain. I just really don’t understand how the propaganda works so well, regardless of funding. It was revealed to great fanfare afterward that the whole Iraq War 2 was bullshit. Why didn’t anyone listen?
Because it’s part of an entire worldview, an entrenched information system (I.e. framework for narrative, how the story is being told), with fully intertwined rationale and philosophies of justification. In there are woven many positive emotions as well, and rhetorics hitting the right emotionally resonating notes—patriotism, belief that the west is the light in the darkness, that you’re the good guys, doing the right things, etc. Behind it is also a foundational belief that US is powerful enough to crush anything it doesn’t like, so who really cares about nuance—sometimes, not even conscious.
To give up this worldview, one has to give up a lot of deeply held assumptions about one’s life, one’s self identification, one’s “tribe”, etc. It’s unlikely to happen just with some debate here or there, or reading some news stories from far away.
The ‘patriotic’ ones are just the worst. This 4th is my first as an ML and I’m gonna see everything differently. Never loved it before, but now I’m already over this shit and it hasn’t even started yet.
It’s a pretty liberal space, there are some extremely liberal communities/users around. I would honestly almost understand the arguments if people were advocating they come to lemmygrad or something.
Maybe (let’s be honest, definitely) they are just upset they can’t be overtly racist towards Chinese people and get celebrated for it.
Reddit loves hating communists. Don’t tell them where Bernie gets his ideas from!
considering half of them flipped from Bernie to Trump during the election, i don’t think they actually cared that much about his politics.
Half might be a bit much, IIRC from a SandersForPresident strawpoll it was like 11%
Someone even pulled out the privacy concern troll copypasta lol
I’ve seen far too many people pasting those raddle links as “proof” that lemmy is bad and to fear the scary tankies, yet they never compare anything to how reddit operates or the fact that lemmy is FOSS.
…what do they think the .ml stands for?
Mali, presumably?
Wait till they hear about the dialectic.
money lovers?
Mali domain name which coincidentally is free like the .tk domain and funnily enough can be understood as shorthand for Marxist Leninist?
Nah I think I’m guessing.
machine learning! The creators of Lemmy are farming our data!
Are allegations even real or could be held against him?
Also, the privacy aspect is actually a good point there. Would’ve enjoyed if it was more private focused.
Those accusations come from raddle, anarchist space which admin is an absolutely insufferable moron who have tons of sockpuppet accounts which pretend anyone come there.
About what Dessalines really post, you can check his list:
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md
That FAQ looks pretty great. You can tell they didn’t read it because they don’t have more hysterical accusations.
Real “A vote for Bart is a vote for Anarchy!” vibes every time that link gets shared. I love it.
Are allegations even real or could be held against him?
Of removing baseless conspiracy theories and racist dog-whistles? I sure hope so.
The other one about being banned from r/socialism seems pretty tame, an useful article trying to debunk the Xinjiang camp conspiracy, but apparently written by a conspiracy theorist himself. Broken clock and all.
Either way, anybody can build their own instances, and we already have many lib ones so there’s no need to worry that one space is managed by somebody who doesn’t want the place to become Reddit’s “freedom for Hong Kong” second spam zone.
I feel like calling him simply a “conspiracy theorist” is underselling LaRouchille by a LONG SHOT. That man is a deranged, evil, most definitely a Neo-Nazi, that only has some left wing adjacent takes because they are conveniently anti-west, and anti-government which he views as run by Jews and seeking to bring about a Zionist New World Order.
He has had many many disgusting and fascistic ideas throughout the years. I especially love his classic one where he declares that Germany will be able to finally rise from the ashes of the Treaties of Versailles and Yalta, and take its place as the rightful commander of the world by purging the Zionist plague.
Yikes.
Quoting or using the material of that man is a terrible idea. Even if it’s unintentional that’s a horrific blunder.
Yeah, but the article is not from La Rouche, but from a guy associated with his movement. And most of what is in that article about Xinjiang is already common knowledge nowadays. I don’t think posting one specific article about a thing is a blunder or endorsement of the person’s ideology elsewhere, we all read news from the USA every once in a while. Should we not link the NY Post if it accidentally makes a good point? This is the typical “guilty by association” gotcha libs like to do retroactively with anything outside their comfort zone, where
“Lemmy must be bad; lemmy is made by a dev <- the dev linked an article once <- the article is written by Engdhal <- Engdhal is a LaRouchite <- La Rouche is a fascist. Lemmy is fascist. QED”
None of that has to do with the main allegation of removing orientalist conspiracy theories, which I think is good, actually. If you actually want a glimpse into Dessalines’s ideological positions and thoughts rather than working from tenuous proxies, another user here linked his GitHub essay webpage. Apparently he also made audiobook versions of some classic books too.
Besides, the context of that allegation is very vague and coming from a guy called “lemmyisfacist” so I’d be more critical of it. For all we know the ban might have been for pushing back against the “concentration camps” conspiracy theory as even “leftist” Reddit was struggling with that at the time. Even the post about it goes on to complain that on the appeal Dessalines “denied the Uyghur genocide”, so is it really because of La Rouche?
But even if it was such a blunder, I don’t see any LaRouchites in lemmy.ml or lemmygrad. That isn’t tolerated here at all. One mistake from 5 years ago without any follow up in that direction is hardly what I would call “relevant” today, specially if you focus on the community and the software, rather than Dessalines as an individual.
The Rev left episode on LaRouche is pretty fascinating. Dropping the link here if anyone is interested.
I’ll be listening to it shortly thank you!
I don’t know why you’re trying to convince me, I never said I agreed with the original claim that Dessalines was a fascist.
I’m just saying that using that article was a major blunder.
Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. Leaving it there in case somebody does think that though.
That’s perfectly alright! Sorry if I was a bit confusing! You did a really good write up, and I would definitely leave it up!
If you want delete comments with all federated instances just edit them to something like “deleted” or whatever, the edit will spread and makes your comment literarily empty / useless / deleted.
Bit tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of messages. Honestly that is a bit of an oversight and hopefully gets patched out at some point.
I think that works even if you delete a comment, federation only seems to stop if you delete the account itself
from what i could gather from the conversation, stuff you delete is kept UNTIL you delete your account, after then, its deleted forever.
could’nt find anything on the other allegations
edit: formattation.
I decided to dig a bit on the “creator of Lemmy banned from r/socialism for posting neo nazi literature” claim just to see what was up with that, and the closest thing I could find to an explanation of what happened was this thread where one of the creators of Lemmy (as far as I can tell) claims they were banned for making posts denying that China was committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims.
I don’t want to comment on the politics of that (other people are of course free to have that argument if they want to) and naturally that’s just one person’s side of the story, but nonetheless that’s as far as I managed to get with it.
i honestly didn’t know it was so liberal until the shitlibs showed up and destroyed all conversation that didn’t agree with them
then i remembered i had an account here and i just don’t go back there anymore
