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.
Removed by mod
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)
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)
Pleb. I use Gentoo.
(Fedora, actually.)
Pleb. I use NixOS.
(Arch
btwactually)+1 for NixOS
I actually use gentoo and I love y’all
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’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
Yeah, I agree, I don’t really see a lot of “left” in the position that Imperialist ethnostates are okay for some, but not for others.
ML-tendencies have also historically been opposed to the goals of even the Marxist movements. Considering the way that the Bolsheviks removed power from the People, Soldier, and Worker’s Soviet to instead centralize into their own centralized “Soviet” organ of power. Or the reactionary, authoritarian and socially conservative policies pushed by the contemporary and often the historical CCP (though the history of Maoism is obviously complex).
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
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.
Yeah it’s not like theyre uncomfortable with socialism in general, this is like full on self identifying STALINISM. That’s something that comes with it’s own mess of human rights totalitarian crap, and pointing out that the US has also done terrible things(and oh boy has it) doesnt make that any better.
Like they arent the power to the people kind of socialists their logo is literally a tank.
I consider myself a socialist.
But Stalinists and other authoritarians have essentially reactionary politics.
I’m anarchocommunist (though I often say anarchosocialist because of loaded term stuff), and I view all authoritarian stances as truly horrific. The big great huge tragedy with capitalism is that the people with capital control the state, and therefor have authority to harm the populace. Bolshevism does not do anything to fix the tragic part. Vanguard party politics consistently devolves into authoritarian regimes, and those authoritarian regimes then harm the people.
The standard by which we should be judging any political or ethical framework is the degree of agency the most disenfranchised person in the system has.
China is also an Imperialist state, with borders and a realpolitik firmly grounded in ethnic supremacy.
Worth repeating that line I think. That China is an Imperialist ethnostate, because it is very true.
Removed by mod
I think Lemmy is too political, but still joined a long time ago. Things can improve with time. We’re seeing this happen now.
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.”
What does political even mean here? I guess the usual “Don’t be racist, don’t be homophobic, don’t be transphobic etc.” I really don’t see much real political topics in my frontpage (local and all).
Historically, Lemmy has been very political (Marxist, pro-Russia/war, etc). But as of a few days ago the userbase is now mostly reddit users, so it feels quite different now. This is especially true if your instance admins choose who to federate with.
Oh no… Well I really really hope that this is in the past with the new users. Nothing but unpleasant experiences with Tankies.
I suspect most of them sit on lemmygrad. This is the beauty of instances and federation - nuance! Some users might be assholes on some instance communities, but if they’re not maintained in a way people are happy with, they can splinter off and make a better place. For instance, Beehaw can maintain a gaming community which is set up to be safe and avoid bullshit gamergate stuff, and they can call it “Gaming” because it’s not the only instance that can host one of those.
The issue with default subs and subs with obvious names on Reddit is that they build a certain personality and approach, foster certain views or don’t moderate well, and then new people come in and amplify that because that’s how they’ve seen the interaction working before. In that case, the best you can do is make a secondary one that has more strict rules - /r/truegaming, /r/games etc etc - which are difficult to grow because they’re unlinked. Being on beehaw means it’s part of the beehaw umbrella, so has to abide by the rules of the instance. Kind of a neat system.
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.
My teenage son and I recently had a conversation about how the people complaining something is “too political” are the ones with a political agenda you have to watch out for. He pleasantly surprised me by being 2 steps ahead of me (he told me he liked the thing people were criticizing because of the political aspects).
Is there a Lemmy equivalent of r/SelfAwareWolves?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The “centrists” that all all in favor of letting the oppressor and the oppressed talk their differences in a neutral playground are great.
Requires a level of love for the status quo and lack of reflection that never ceases to amaze.
Dude, you are not in the center. You are three steps from the neonazis and a thousand kilometers from the tankies. Even if you are opposed to the “extremes” and “mu horseshoe” yo are not equidistant.
I’m not that kind of communist so I won’t likely interact with lemmygrad but for the rest of lemmy I’m not concerned with the devs being tankies unless they lean hard into silencing disssenting views from the rest of the left like anarchists and other flavors of socialists
The beauty of the system is that they really don’t have that power. It’s open source and federated, so at most they can ban people from instances they run
True, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth I suppose. Just another of the many many grey areas of life and trying to be as ethical as possible under a capitalist system
Yeah no disagreement there, as a non-auth leftist tankies really activate my almonds
Nooooo! People have different opinions to me! They better not join Lemmy!!!
I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Isn’t the point of the post is that it is a good thing that people who are intolerant of perspectives that challenge their own are avoiding Lemmy.
In general I tend to avoid people who are incapable of entertaining other viewpoints. They tend to stubbornly defend their frail counterpoints and then resort to childish antics when people don’t agree with them.
They would rather be wrong than accept that they are wrong.
I don’t think echo chambers are good for anybody. It’s the echo chambers that created many of these people.
Nah, it’s a general tolerance for the intolerant. Places like r/PCM and r/conservative and reddit as a whole are far too tolerant of bigots. It should come as no surprise that they have been invaded by fascists. If you value and enjoy tolerance, the best thing you can do to preserve it is to not tolerate intolerance.
Above all else, echo chambers are boring.
Removed by mod
Bigotry isn’t just a matter of someone having “different opinions.”
If their opinion is on weather or not saying racial slurs is good I’m not exactly keen on opening the door to them at this marketplace of ideas
