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?
I think there are three different discussions in this thread that are mixed:
I guess whoever read his/her posts in the whole thread, agrees that this is a clear “yes”.
I guess that there is a danger of making the CoC too long in the long run such that nobody will read it anymore, but I personally don’t have any strong opinion on that.
I think that this should be answered with a “no” and I’ll elaborate why I think so. While the horse-shoe theory is often used by anti-leftists whose only aim is to de-legitimize the left, I believe that it is also often used by people who simply heard this theory and never particularly reflected about it. While there were without any doubt cruel actions done in the name of communism/anarchism, some people simply disregard that this cruelty is at the heart of the far right while it might just occur in some left “scenarios” (completely disregarding the cruelty of the “center” that we for example currently see in the mediterranean). If you are not “well educated” (whatever that should mean in this context) about political theories, you might make this mistake and hopefully you change your mind when someone calls you out on this mistake. If people, after having been called out on it, still continue to raise the horse-shoe theory, then this anyway falls under trolling in my opinion and there is enough reason left to ban them. So I don’t see why banning people just because of naming the horse-shore theory is necessary in the first place. In short, I believe that facists will anyway show their face in another way than just using the horse-shoe theory (like saying that the nazis were leftist, because they were “socialist”), thus people should be called out on it but not banned.
To clarify: there is no mixing, the topic is the third point.
If one has a selective political illiteracy - mainly their responsibility tbh - and reads no horse-shoe theory in the CoC, they may start questioning why the theory is so stigmatized and it is grouped with “antifa=fa” equivalence (hot topic in the US) or “nazis=commies” (hot topic in the EU).
I give some suggestion here about the propagandistic purpose of the theory, and how nazis/alt-right/bigot scum uses it as a crowbar in online communities. I’d wish Lemmy flagship instance will not attract this kind of people to reap the confused (=lazy, to me) ones.
Thanks for clarifying. I wanted to make sure that we are actually focusing on the same question here.
I very much disagree with the view that this is a selective political illiteracy and I also don’t think it’s constructive to blame people for not knowing something, even less calling them lazy. The question is, how do people react after being confronted with a clear refutation of their view.
In my experience the horse-shoe theory is mostly brought up by center-right and not far right people. Especially, people who bring up this theory (again, in my experience) often consider themselves to be against facism. I believe that banning these people will have the opposite effect of what you want to have.
My experience regarding this topic is almost exclusively non-internet related; so, that might be the point why we disagree, as we draw our experience from different places where a different group of people raise this theory.
Anyone has own on-line and off-line experiences. Analogies btw. on-line and off-line are hard to draw too.
Selective political illiteracy is an observation, not a slur. Yes, I agree with you about avoiding the use since it is counter-productive.
Yet, writing comes with responsibility. I do not blame people being ignorant, I blame people when they expose the community to harmful content and community hijacking. When ones insist and they are in good faith, I am quite confident that laziness is the main reason.
If we add “no horse-shoe theory” on the CoC does not mean instant ban, as it holds for other contents.
I agree with everything except that “laziness is the main reason”. There’s just a lot of things to learn and do in life and it’s difficult to prioritize.
Anyway, I’m glad that we constructively made our points clear. :)
After insisting on the same concept? What could be instead? Fear of contradiction? I disagree. :)