Almost like “tankies” don’t have some religious reverence for “authority” but in fact specifically believe it should be directed in a certain way . . .
There’s just no point. Literally no one among the communists I’ve seen cheers on killing dissidents just because. Fascist collaborators, sure, but not mere dissidents. You’re just inventing people to disparage.
You’re failing to understand that the interest of “tankies” is in democracy being enforced by a proletarian control of the state. The copypastas you were getting were poor communication but they had a point.
The fact that you’re comfortably arguing in parallel with blatant neoliberals should give you pause, or are you going to tell me they are less of a concern because they are not “authoritarian,” because when people are richer than God and control immense swaths of production and politicians themselves while skirting regulation to fuck over the workers their class made desperate by enclosing the commons, that is not “authoritarian”? This whole thing seems kind of bankrupt to me as far as political theory goes. The mechanisms of control are diffused by various means into the economy and divided among the public/private sector, but if the private sector owns the public sector (and it does) you’ve got a class of kings who only half-pretend they aren’t (Zuck deliberately getting that Caesar haircut is a tell).
Cited NYT article here for those who have access and would like more details: An Inside Job https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/16/world/europe/ukraine-kakhovka-dam-collapse.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
This is an obnoxious bait-and-switch. They make a false dichotomy out of "Either Russia did it or it was an accident" and then correctly disprove it being an accident while not establishing any particular reason beyond Russia also having the plans for the dam to establish it was Russia who did it in their own held territory and not Ukraine. It's exactly as miserable a level of journalism as one has come to expect of the NYT.
Incidentally, here's an article from a few months ago about the Ukrainian military's contingency to blow up the dam and seemingly already inflicting a little bit of damage to test being able to destroy it more completely. Does this prove that Ukraine did it? Of course not, but there is a burden of proof to establishing one side probably did it and OP's article does not even conceive of reaching that burden of proof in the case of Russia being the culprit.
I've been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it's always met with resistance citing "the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies." Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage....
I have some memory of you being reasonable when actually presented with arguments. I would strongly encourage you to try to actual talk to these people that you speak about in such strong pejoratives, perhaps by asking them non-presumptuous questions. I think you will find that they have more to say than you give them credit for.
The people running beehaw are extremely dishonest about this issue, citing "hate speech" as a reason for defederation with platforms that aggressively ban and remove hate speech, including the only instance I know of that actually displays pronouns with the username (Hexbear.net , which they preemptively banned).
If people chose a ‘red’ government, and they are chosen through continued fair elections with no disingenuous means or force, all the power to them.
What would that look like? Specifically, let us imagine a world where it is true that Cuba or the DPRK or wherever does indeed hold free and fair elections on a regular basis, but that everything else about the world was exactly as you, I assume, admit it is (such as the vicious sanctioning and libel by western powers). From where you are sitting, what would the difference be? What sort of information would you be aware of, would you receive from where you are in the world and the media you consume, that was in any way different?
Apparently there's an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, aside from that violence does still exist outside of states as you say, it was to explain my earlier comment about all states being violent, since their role is to mediate class antagonisms, which has historically manifested as the owning classes keeping the bulk of the working classes in a state of desperation for the sake of manipulating bartering power.
It always frustrates me a little when people look at a problem and say "that's just how things are." Here it's the thing about humans being violent. In a trivial sense, that is true, but I think that obfuscates that in most situations violence has a set of politically-meaningful sources, even if it's personal violence. Being beaten as a child, being forced into crime, being taught that violence is appropriate to protect your "pride", the Other being dehumanized, the list goes on.
Why is lemmy.world defederating from hexbear.net? (lemmy.world)
What is lemmy.world doing defederating before hexbear even federates? lemmy.world/instances...
a community for anti-authoritarian leftist firearms enthusiasts (lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.world/c/jbrc...
Evidence suggests Russia blew Kakhovka dam in Ukraine - New York Times (www.reuters.com)
Cited NYT article here for those who have access and would like more details: An Inside Job https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/06/16/world/europe/ukraine-kakhovka-dam-collapse.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
"Tanky" and the perception of Lemmy.
I've been trying to make people aware of Lemmy on discord and Mastodon, but it's always met with resistance citing "the devs are pro authoritarianism tankies." Kbin seems to be picking up steam because of the developer baggage....
Does lemmy.world allow criticism of the CCP?
Apparently there's an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
China tightens access to Tiananmen Square while 32 are detained in Hong Kong (www.npr.org)