Following this banned content and this discussion: provide that “fascism-communism equivalence” and “horse-shoe theory” serve only to legitimize fascists, would you (@all) find clearer adding to the policy that this kind of content is not welcome on this instance?
Is it necessarily propaganda? Genuine question. I have not heard of the horseshoe theory by name before - full disclosure: I have no formal education in politics, have never read any significant political work, however I do like to discuss political ideas. I remember years ago discussing this same idea at school with friends, where we said that it seemed to be like a ring rather than a straight line, and if you go far enough in one direction, you end up in the same place as if you went far enough in the opposite direction.
Obviously we were young and naive, but there was no propaganda here, no bad faith. Rather it was merely an observation we had made independently based on the shallow treatment of the subject we had received through school.
Having just read about the horseshoe theory on rational wiki, I can see how it has been abused by right-of-centre people to dismiss left wing ideas. However that doesn’t mean that everyone who sees some kind of equivalence between extreme right and extreme left is doing so in order to push that particular agenda.
At least not consciously, surely?
(I lost my long post so I try to be concise :)
I skip the part about how horseshoe theory is used with circularity.
I just briefly add that the “circularity” of the theory is used both by centrists to eventually dismiss any difference btw. nazism and communism/anarchism/etc., and by red-brown/nazbols/querfront/third-position personalities to poison the weel
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Thanks for the feedback! Intention has never been in question because - luckily, and hopefully - is inscrutable. Hence, actions and responsibility count.
The topic is community policies and the question is: how to prevent a safe/r community environment to be disrupted, and how the policies can help this goal.
Actors can sinergically engineer this environment with harsh and tendentious communication. The ones who benefit environments with harsh and tendentious communication are the fittest, who are likely to be the privileged people plenty of time, attention, patience, awareness, studies, gab, … resources in general. The society many lives mirrors these conditions, hence one might expect with significant confidence the same ((hegemonic?)[https://lemmy.ml/post/35363/comment/8102]) dynamics of marginalization overflows the community if no one sets the margins.
If I’m understanding you right, then I think it might be better for this case to have a less specific rule. So the rule might say, “propaganda - viz the deliberate misrepresentation of facts or theories to promote your political beliefs - is not allowed here and will result in your account being banned. An example of such would be pushing the horseshoe theory to undermine socialist or communist discussion”
Additionally the policy should involve a series of warnings in all but really egregious cases.
I do understand the problem caused by these bad actors, but one of their aims is to aggravate division and prevent free and constructive discussion and I think we should take care to ensure they do not succeed in that.
I put an upvote but I do not agree.
I do not get the last paragraph since we are discussing exactly about that. Is that a rethorical repeating or am I missing something? The question is whether/how policies can help to reach that goal.
About degrees of warning: they are already in the CoC.