Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Well let’s find out: Free Ukraine! Fuck Russia. Fuck China!
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fuck the orcs
hate the government not the people am i right?
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and then they make movies about how genociding elven children made them sad ala orcish sniper (2014)
It is even worse in America, they rape, torture and kill and come back home as heros.
“But what about America?!”
yea
why you calling them orcs then
Probably because they act inhumanely?
The rape and torture of combatants and civilians? The bombing of critical infrastructure to leave a scorched earth on retreat? The indiscriminate targeting of civilian evacuees? The theft of Ukranian children and taking them to Russia to brainwash them at best and put them into the sex trade as one of the worse options? The attempts and calls for genocide against another group of people?
Humans have a social contract that is more or less consistent across the globe. We are social animals endowed with empathy and we don’t enjoy seeing others suffering. If you break this social contract, why would you be surprised that people treat you as though you were inhuman? Why are you bothering to turn this plight onto the Russians who are not currently being targeted by any of the above?
Friendly reminder that this method of turning the Russians into the victims of “russophobia” in any thread about Ukraine or Russias policies is russian troll posting 101. You should consider hard who you are currently coming to the defense of.
The rape and torture of combatants and civilians?
Who’s “they”? “The Russians”? The issue with generalizing and demonizing people is that not all Russians support Putin and not all Russians are genocidal maniacs who want to wipe out Ukraine…
Why are you bothering to turn this plight onto the Russians who are not currently being targeted by any of the above?
Anti-Putinist Russians are very much targeted… Why is there no place to defend both Ukrainians and the Russian people who don’t support Putin? Why do you have to dumb it down to a “Ukrainians vs Russians”?
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why are you dehumanizing the russian people? this is a tactic used by fascists.
Isn’t orc just a derogatory term for a Russian soldier? That’s what I always thought it meant, and it’s also what Wiktionary says
Well, acting as an oppressor while claiming you’re a victim is also a fascist tactic. It was literally used by the nazis to assume power.
And before you go “well so was dehumanizing the jews,” its important to note that the jews were a scapegoat and weren’t actively trying to invade Germany and eliminate their population.
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Look deeper.
Do you really need to be so disingenous about this? The entire thread is oozing with the slime of Reddit culture and you think no one can figure out that you’re calling Russians orcs? Do you know where that cute little turn of phrase comes from?
It comes from the Lord of the Rings, that’s just someone using it. I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with Muslims. They use it to dehumanise, that’s true. It mostly spread as use for Russian soldiers that were just rampaging around killing and torturing civilians, or for those shelling and killing civilians, ultimately - behaving rather inhumanly. I’ve only ever seen it referencing Russian combatants. Honestly, comparing your enemies to characters in a fantasy novel isn’t exactly the worst slur in the world.
Soldiers almost always have a slur for enemy combatants, sadly, but honestly I don’t blame them. Dehumanising your enemy is a sad reality of war.
I agree that us as bystanders should try not to use such slurs though. Ultimately, throwing slurs around doesn’t look good even if the people you’re throwing them at are committing atrocities and invading countries.
Edit: I agree it’s racist, reminds me of WW2 soldiers’s slurs like “jap”, “krout” etc. Regardless of the original source, and ultimately it being rather mild compared to many, it’s a racial slur and shouldn’t be used.
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What do you think the CCCP is?
lol i had the same question. did they make a typo and mean the CCP or was that Cyrillic for USSR?
Mao Zedong is objectively one of the worst people in all of human history, and his influence held China back for decades, and continues to harm it to this day.
You know, I agree that he shouldn’t have collaborated with America’s foreign policy following the sino-soviet split, but I don’t think that even puts him as a major candidate in the running.
Edit: He also really should have given the sparrow thing a test run, and there are other criticisms to make, but these are still lesser than the original one. There was bad theory and bad practice in the Cultural Revolution, but overwhelmingly its biggest problem was endangering the revolution that Mao led to establish the PRC in the first place, something for which he deserves credit on account of poverty reduction, drastic increase in life expectancy, land-redistribution, etc. Oh yeah, and the whole “opposing Japanese and British colonialism” thing, since the KMT rolled over for that, but hopefully that goes without saying.
Unfortunately beehaw users won’t see your reply, friend. :(
Thank you for letting me know. I always forget about that because I can see their replies. In any case, I’m more worried about what the people on lemmy.world think, since Beehaw has basically become a purpose-built engine of sectarianism, so the content of those replies would be a foregone conclusion.
I’ll try to remember to use my lemmy.ml account in the future for this.
Only if you really want them to read it. I appreciate it’s important to talk to the general audience. :)
Sectarianism toward what ideology, out of curiosity? I couldn’t wade through their endless text blobs enough to tell
Ha, fair question! They have plenty of people they dislike, but what I was trying to refer to was their opposition to what they call “tankies” and I call “People who believe that the US lies about its enemies, particularly its big geopolitical rivals.” Specifically, while they are conversationally annoying about it, what really bugs me is their campaign to defederate and get others to defederate from spaces they deem “tankie-friendly”. I think that really undermines the platform as a whole to pillarize things that way (i.e. closing things off into silos).
“Sectarianism” arguably isn’t the right word for that (it has intra-ideology connotations), but I didn’t think it was worth splitting hairs over.
It seems like you’ve left out the part where multiple tens of millions of people died as a result of his policies.
Exterminating the sparrows, that was a pretty big oops.
Are you still with us now?
I think Winnie the Pooh got him.
Oh bother.
He found a window and pavement
They have comments from a couple hours ago.
i mean lemmy.world server is in germany, but the guy who runs it is dutch so probably has a pretty open policy with freedom of speech i would imagine. And i mean real freedom of speech not the dog whistle for being a dick/racist/phobe
As one of the Admins of Lemmy.World we’re pretty open but if you’re a dick and unnecessarily a troll we’ll kick ya.
Does that mean that you find everything in this thread that hasn’t yet been removed to fall within those bounds? (excluding very new stuff that you might not have gotten to)
My thought process is that if you’re overtly rude and crude and lump one type of people into one group indiscriminately that’s not free speech. Also this is not the US government or run by the US government. So Free Speech doesn’t necessarily apply.
I’m the first one to say that an uncritical and crassly-applied “free speech” ideology is deleterious, but it’s the First Amendment that doesn’t apply, not the concept of Free Speech itself. Under the Constitution, you are free not to apply the concept of Free Speech yourself since the First Amendment doesn’t apply to your moderation, but that does not answer the question of whether you should or not.
Of course, my answer is that some speech is worth protecting and some is not and questions of natural rights have nothing to do with that, so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform, but that’s just my take on the matter.
Oh yeah, and the “orc” meme is clearly racist, but that’s why I worded my original question the way I did.
Thank you for your time and have a good day.
Whose definition of natural rights are you enforcing? Because your definition might not be as broad as mine, and if that’s the case I want you banned for questioning natural rights
(Obviously I’m not serious, this is an illustration of why enforcing ideology is not a good idea)
this is an illustration of why enforcing ideology is not a good idea
This reminds me of people saying the government shouldn’t “legislate morality,” i.e. be involved in or have a stance on moral issues. In both cases, it seems to me to be oblivious to the status-quo that ideology/morality are already enforced in those respective domains and there is no end in sight for that.
The admin who kindly gave me some of his time indeed already shared the basic ideological tenets of the administration policy. The deplatforming of rudeness, of crassness, and of, uh, “lumping one type of people into a group indiscriminately” are all ideological concerns unless you want to look at it merely as market concerns, as though that changes the fact.
It’s also common practice to at least nominally ban the spreading of misinformation, though our host gave no indication of doing that, and this again is also a highly ideological tenet. If misinformation drives engagement – and we know it can – why ban it? Presumably because it is also a social ill, or because you want to have a positive reputation, etc.
But these are things that are obfuscated in the “Discourse,” thanks in part to the wonderful legacy of classical liberal authors who wanted to find a way to make their ideology look like non-ideology (see Locke using faux a priori arguments to protect the property rights of monopolists).
If you want a comparison, I’ll use the Republican whipping-dog because you are probably familiar with it. Repubs talk a big game about “Small government.” “The government that governs best governs least.” “The most terrifying sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” And yet, though they are not alone in this, they are perhaps the most enthusiastic supporters of increasing the power and funding of police and the military! That doesn’t seem like “small government” to me! But that’s because when they talk about “government” in this context, that’s not what they mean, they mean a very narrow subset of laws mostly connected to austerity and corporate deregulation that they want to promote. This kind of double-talk is a rhetorically powerful tool for derailing critical thinking by essentially baiting the listener into conflating cases that are very different.
The blanket denouncement of “enforcing ideology” reminds me of that. Sure, there are bad ways to do it, and you provided an example, but that does not mean it cannot be done well and it obfuscates that it is already being done! The question is not about whether or not to enforce ideology, but what ideological lines to enforce and how. The status quo is not neutral just because we have been habituated to it!
Edit: Total aside, but I don’t believe in natural rights (I think human welfare is better advanced by other frameworks), I was just speaking in terms of the ideology of the Constitution, which does support that idea.
Well said tbh
Difference between enforcing democratically accepted ideology and enforcing that which is not. You mentioned that you thought speech that questions natural rights should not be given a platform. I pointed out that you’re applying an ill-defined and subjective term, and so it’s just not wise
You say “thoroughly debunked” but this is what your article says:
It’s true that, building on earlier initiatives, China’s State Council published a road map in 2014 to establish a far-reaching “social credit” system by 2020. The concept of social credit (shehui xinyong) is not defined in the increasing array of national documents governing the system, but its essence is compliance with legally prescribed social and economic obligations and performing contractual commitments. Composed of a patchwork of diverse information collection and publicity systems established by various state authorities at different levels of government, the system’s main goal is to improve governance and market order in a country still beset by rampant fraud and counterfeiting.
Under the system, government agencies compile and share across departments, regions, and sectors, and with the public, data on compliance with specified industry or sectoral laws, regulations, and agreements by individuals, companies, social organizations, government departments, and the judiciary. Serious offenders may be placed on blacklists published on an integrated national platform called Credit China and subjected to a range of government-imposed inconveniences and exclusions. These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.
These punishments are intended to incentivize legal and regulatory compliance under the often-repeated slogan of “whoever violates the rules somewhere shall be restricted everywhere.” Conversely, “red lists” of the trustworthy are also published and accessed nationally through Credit China.
In other words, there isn’t literally a singular social credit score for everyone in China, but the government does indeed collect vast amounts of surveillance information about your compliance with its draconian laws and obligations from a wide range of agencies and compile that into a list of services you should be blocked from and so on. So it “doesn’t exist” in a very narrow literal sense, but definitely does practically speaking. This is hairsplitting technicalities to get away from reality.
It’s also an article by Foreign Policy because I didn’t want to get into a spat about sourcing. Mostly it applies to businesses, not people, and unsubstantiated words like “draconian” are doing a lot of heavy lifting. FP likes to obfuscate that fact, but you can see even in what you quoted that they tip their hand on the rhetorical contortions they are doing when they list:
These are often enforced by multiple agencies pursuant to joint punishment agreements covering such sectors as taxation, the environment, transportation, e-commerce, food safety, and foreign economic cooperation, as well as failing to carry out court judgments.
hmm, what do these things all have in common? They all apply overwhelmingly or virtually-exclusively to businesses! E-commerce can, without further elaboration, apply to peer-to-peer interactions like on ebay, and “court judgement” is a similarly vague term, but you don’t get some normal private citizen on charges related to “food safety,” “foreign economic cooperation,” or – based on it not being titled “traffic law” or whatever – “transportation”, and the overwhelming majority of both tax payment and tax fraud is done by the rich.
There is a social credit system for businesses, and their should be. Reddit memes about “-20 billion social credit score” for posting a meme with lego tanks has no place in reality.
I still feel like I need a new term for this. Yet another word co-opted by idiots.
Freedom of speech with consequences?
Nah. I want to defederate from people sharing racial slurs, because I cba with them. If they don’t consider that a ‘consequence’ then I don’t really care.
I definitely don’t want consequences for people sharing negative opinions about governments.
So I guess I just want freedom of speech + personal curation.
I think the crucial thing that’s missing from traditional social media is actual freedom of association, and I think thats the underlying thing that causes all these issues around “free speech.” Freedom of association is the natural counterbalancing mechanism for “freedom of speech” in any form, and without the former the latter must either become incredibly toxic and damaging or be suppressed.
One of the interesting things we’ve lost (up till now) compared to physical, offline communities is that if someone was being a never-ending dick or a sealion, the rest of the community could just start naturally avoiding them and not inviting them of their own individual accord, and over time that would lead to the person being excised from the group — unless there was a reasonably sized contingent of the group that disagreed with that, at which point the two groups would just split, all without totally banishing anyone.
Or you could yourself choose to leave the group and find another one, if they consistently refused to deal with or helped bad actors, while still maintaining access and contact with some people from that group, and the common social setting and contacts you and the group exist in.
In other words, you’d have a natural, gradiated, and horizontal system of social self-policing that could take care of these kinds of things in a distributed manner. There’s a natural outlet besides just trying to shut someone down entirely by removing their access to any community in the area at all or trying to shout over them.
These mechanisms are very hard to implement on centralized social media because it is essentially one gigantic social group that you are either fully a part of or fully separated from. Thus any decisions made about who is and isn’t part of this social group are made unilaterally for everyone, and there is no room for diversity in norms and expected behavior, because everything is technically this one giant group, so there has to be this centralized compromise set of one size fits all rules. And because of the unilateral and centralized nature of everything, you need a unilateral and centralized decisionmaking procedure, which in practice and up just being faceless top-down moderation either descending to band someone or ignoring people’s pleas.
So it ends up being very difficult for social media communities to self-police in a coherent way, because the platforms operate at two coarse-grained a resolution to see those communities, and it’s difficult for people to disengage from toxic stuff they don’t want to interact with.
This has created all of the problems we see with speech on social media now, where people who want to be dickheads perceive themselves as being oppressed, victims of authoritarian censorship, because community policing has to come centrally from above, instead of happening naturally and horizontally by a bunch of people either telling someone to leave or leaving themselves; meanwhile people who just want to live in peace and share their joy and interests online find themselves with a very little recourse to reliably avoid such dickheads and find places that feel right for them.
Reddit has this problem to less of a degree because it lets you create different smaller subunities of the social network that all have different moderators and different rules, but it’s imperfect.
I think the solution to this is partly decentralization and federation, because they allow people to naturally associate and disassociate with one another on a very individual level that more naturally mirrors how communities and social groups work in real life. Communities can form their own rules, norms, and cultures, and push people out in a meanongful way without having to totally banish them from the entire social world, and people can also naturally move between them until they find one that aligns with what they need and their values, with the right degree of openness and closedness to the rest of the Fediverse, without losing contact with everything else and thus avoiding network effects and isolation effects. The fact that instances can de-federate or mute other instances creates this really interesting ability to partially fragment the network without fully fragmenting it so that you can get truly different experiences on different instances.
You’ve got real points here, but there’s also an issue with sectarians deliberately pillarizing the lemmy fediverse, which can only end up producing other sorts of garbage seen on social media with siloed interaction.
you continue to use freedom of speech and dont give them the satisfaction of coopting it
We keep free speech, they get freeze peach
Doesn’t Germany have laws against certain hate speech? Would those laws apply to lemmy.world and it’s hosted content?
[IANAL] In Germany only specific types of hate speech are criminal. These are:
- Use of Nazi symbols and slogans for other than artistic or educational purposes (things like the Swastika, the SS logo, or the Nazi salute, but not more modern versions like the “white power” guesture and similar)
- Direct calls for violence against groups or individuals
- Denying that the Holocaust happened or trivializing it’s extend
Other forms of hate speech might be cause for civil suits or may oblige the platform provider to remove your speech, but do not rise to a criminal offence.
Again: I am not a lawyer.
Also this only really applies to German citizens. We saw a recent study in this when a Ukrainian diplomat went on a German podcast and denied part of the Holocaust, and no criminal proceeding followed (consistent with established law). I think the platform itself was fine because the host firmly pushed back on it with historical evidence instead of idly platforming him, though he was still allowed to express his views to his content.
You can’t cite a diplomat not being punished as an example of a law only applying to German citizens.
Diplomats almost always have extra protections compared to regular residents.
All governments should be able to be criticized if we’re going to be honest about having genuinely open discussions.
Seeing as having the ability to criticize gov’ts is a fundamental part of democracy I fail to see why any social media site would think banning it should be best-practice.
That said I do take issue with some posters who seem to rant on a specific target without any sort of evidentiary data. The slide into “I don’t need proof to back my opinion” is a prolific and dangerous thing these days.
There are a few assumptions here. One: Criticism (in the context you mention) implies a desire to see the object of discussion improved rather than destroyed. Two: Criticism of “governments in general” rather than specifically one’s own government is vital to democracy. Three: That moderation is being done based around whether something is criticism or not rather than it being backed by evidence or not.
As applied to our situation, all of these are overwhelmingly false and one need only look at this thread to understand that.
Its always difficult separating held beliefs from personal or social identity. Evidence for or against something is rarely enough to get someone who has an identity tied to a belief to change thier opinions or not react out of a fight or flight response.
I think setting and enforcing boundaries regularly while not ostracizing or demonizing people is a better way to approach it. Its hard, takes time, and isn’t guaranteed to work; but it comes from a place of tolerance and acceptance rather than condemnation.
I agree wholeheartedly that letting rants go on unchallenged is a big issue, it provides a rallying point for others with similar beliefs and pushes the boundary back away from accountability and discussion and towards emotional and fear based outbursts. Do you think there is room for healthy discussion here on the fediverse and specifically in this instance?
Do you think there is room for healthy discussion here on the fediverse and specifically in this instance?
Yes. But even just looking through this thread it seems the problems follow the same patterns anyway.
I am an ally of all persecuted groups and I ask for evidence from those who choose to state their opinions. If none is willingly provided I block them. This, to me, is the only way social media can be fairly run. Anything more than that becomes what twatter, f b and reditt have become.
Exceptions to the above will always have to be made tho, ie: direct threats, doxxing, etc. … what mods are for.
That is definitely one of the issues with any social platform or outlet. There is always the push to form in and out groups based on unifying characteristics, behaviors, social status, etc. I do think a major thing that is missed is calling out behaviors and beliefs that are not supported by facts; e.g. giving the same weight of truth or spotlight to outlandish conspiracy theories vs. scientifically backed data (climate change is a good example)
Hopefully this place can find a happy medium that invites good faith discussion instead of bad faith actors.
they will ban my account and still come to my instance to read about the AI research.
owning china with a minstrel show
Now this is what I am here for.
why was this removed?
Lots of racism in this thread
how was it racist?
So, the latest thing that I’ve seen is that supporters of the CCP will label anything critical of the CCP as “racism against asians”. Not sure if that’s the case here, but there have been a lot of posts about the CCP, so… maybe?
Its the first move in the foreign troll farm playbook. Use the enemies own morality against them. You see this in threads discussing the Uigher genocide. To the 50 cent poster it is both morally wrong for you to criticize it because you are just a sinophobe, but on the other hand the CCP actions are justified because they are protecting Chinese cultural identity. Its just typical fascist hypocrisy logic.
It was removed, and I was marked as a bot.
I am not a bot!
One joke
lol social credit Winnie the Pooh!! Updoots for this brave r*dditor, please.
Fuck the CCP.
Hey there. This instance currently follows the code of conduct and rules for mastodon.world: https://mastodon.world/about
Discussion and civil criticism of these subjects is allowed, but name calling, ad hominem attacks, and other uncivil behaviour breaks the rules.
Also remember that specific communities here may have additional rules.
It looks like we can’t pin comments yet, so apologies if this reply gets buried. For now I’m going to lock this post, as the discussion has degraded and is full of rule-breaking.
I just hope people do not spam it to farm karma like on reddit.
Reads the brave, totally not circle-jerked comments in this thread
What would be the point. There is no points system in the federation.
It’s already too late for that. Without assessing why it happened on Reddit and how it should be stopped, there is no reason to believe it would not be reproduced here. It was not assessed, let alone stopped, and thereby has been reproduced.
I was always under the assumption it was some weird alt right thing where they just pretend criticism of China gets censored.
It’s funny how anticommunists and rightists seem to overlap so much, even when the anticommunist claims to be progressive.
that happens when you put the overton window on shopping cart wheels
I mean what was lemmy supposed to do? It already removed karma. People just like approval and attention
I mean this more on an instance moderation level. It’s not just “monke brain neuron activation”, it is a culture of ignorant chauvinism and low-effort engagement-farming
can you elaborate on the ignorant chauvinism
Have you ever actually watched the video? Really makes you think 🤔
Just a couple of days I got over 800k views for posting ⚠ A MAN HAS BEEN SPOTTED PROTESTING IN LEGO CITY ⚠. Now deleted, or maybe on privat.
Just imagine how much interesting and actually usefull information will be gone just because of a selfish CEO…
You know that a lot of subreddits blacked out or went private, right? Your epistemology is bad here.
Also, it doesn’t really qualify as “useful information,” both because Reddit is already well-saturated with misinformation about 10k dead and such, and all you posted was a tired meme that has been posted dozens of times before by similar “activists” and karma-farmers.
Really makes me think why you’d spend time defending a government massacre of 1500-4000 protesters, with 10,000 injured.
Unfortunately I also saw the videos and pictures of tanks grinding bodies into pulp and washing them down drains shortly after this… That one certainly made me think.
Unfortunately I also saw the videos and pictures of tanks grinding bodies into pulp and washing them down drains shortly after this… That one certainly made me think.
No you didn’t, because no such video exists. No such video exists because that story – of pulping bodies and “washing them down drains” – is ridiculous, impractical nonsense made up by someone who wasn’t even there (I forget if it was student leader Chai Ling or one of the reporters sitting in their Beijing Hotel room who is responsible for that specific gem, but both lied about witnessing things they weren’t there for).
Why do you need to lie about what you have seen in order to defend your thesis? Aren’t these real and serious events that deserve to be treated with gravity? I don’t feel particularly inclined to speak so flippantly about the people who actually did die on June 4th – incidentally the day before the Tank Man video, which is of him obstructing tanks leaving the square.
You may be right, that I am misremembering and it was just a stream of photos. But that doesn’t mean I intentionally lied or that the photos were any less gruesome.
I doubt amy such photos exist either. If they did, surely Le Redditors would post those on the front page rather than those of wrecked bicycles or a man unharmed by a tank. Let me know if you find these photos instead of just reveling in fond memories of them.
They were posted on Reddit. Years back. Sure, the narrative of tank drivers running over civilians may have been exaggerated. I don’t know. But the pictures of maimed and burnt bodies definitely exist. If you want to see them so bad go search for them yourself. I have no desire to view those again.
I tried but I couldn’t find them. Since you were so sure you hadn’t dreamt them up and are not perpetuating folklores in the age of informarion I asked for your help. But if you are not willing to substantiate your very serious claims I understand.
There are definitely photos of maimed and burned soldiers
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Haven’t had any problems so far! Taiwan numbah one! Fuck Putin!
Lemmy.World and Lemmy. Ml are two different places. Lemmy ML was created as a safehaven for people from subreddits that were banned like ChapoTrapHouse. Lemmy. World is designed to be the general Lemmy Community. Lemmy. Ml was the biggest until the reddit issues but I am pretty sure Lemmy World is after overtaking them. Lemmy.ML is trying to steer traffic here because they know that their community wasn’t going to be palatable to the vast majority of people. There’s a wide variety here so it’s very hard to pinpoint where this place’s userbase stands politically.
Lemmy. ML and Lemmy.world are different places and it’s for the best if we just leave each be and have our own communities in peace.
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ohh, does the .ml stand for Marxist-Leninist? I always wondered why they chose th at domain name
Probably not,
.mlis free (provided by the same registrar as.tk) on a year-by-year basis and was much more popular around the time lemmy started.could also be Markup Language
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There is a mod log on Lemmy so you can see why people get banned.
If you check out the instance sidebar, we’re basically running on the same rules as mastodon.world (presumably until such time as we need something more Lemmy-specific)
I like China :)
Indeed, many Chinese people are very nice. Interesting language, culture, and cuisine.
But fuck the CCP.
The Romans are great! They build these seriously sturdy roads and aqueducts, promote trade, and they have some literature and stuff. It’s too bad that they’re in the habit of enslaving people and occasionally mass crucifixions.
My man out here living a peaceful life in 100 B.C.
I have friends from China who are very good humans.
Very normal thing to say.
He’s just paraphrasing a beloved former president. “And some, I assume, are good people”.
My personal view is very similar to @Jaded5450@beehaw.org, i just didn’t say the second part.
they’re not chinese, they’re ‘good people’!
I love China, and have a generally positive opinion about their government. I’d say 70% positive and the other 30% is because I hate oppression and censorship.
Edit: Deng was the GOAT
Slightly tangential question, is lemmy.ml a Marxist/Leninist instance? I had seen some users insinuate that but I have no fucking clue if they were just saying shit.
No, it’s run by the devs but there’s no preferential treatment for communists, anarchists, or liberals.
Thanks. I had a feeling someone was talking out of their ass, but I didn’t have a way to confirm.
It was true. The ML part split off to lemmygrad.ml. it’s a pun on Leningrad. Get it?
A lot of those insinuations come from neoliberals who are mad that neoliberalism isn’t given privileged treatment there like it is on Reddit.
So, the creators of Lemmy itself (and it’s “home” instance lemmy.ml) are Marxist/Leninists (otherwise known as “tankies”).
However, they have been smart enough to contain the most virulent tankie bullshit over in LemmyGrad.ml, which most big instances have specifically disconnected themselves from.
They also seem to be pretty hands-off in terms of censorship/banning/belittling “libs” on lemmy.ml and have kept it pretty open. For instance, I created a LeftistInfighting community and have been allowed to express anarchist views there. (I created it because I was immediately banned from LemmyGrad, which had its own LeftistInfighting community that I had the audacity to engage in and link to wikipedia in a comment)
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