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Joined
4 yr. ago

  • Are you suggesting Hitler manned the gas chambers himself? As far as direct murder goes, Hitler probably never killed a socialist, Roma, Jew or homosexual. The policies under his leadership resulted in the mass extermination of millions. That's why we charge him with genocides. Likewise, Joe Biden's policies enabled and continue to enable a preventable genocide.

  • Yep, tankies will probably disagree when someone claims the country that invaded the USSR was a 'friend' due to a diplomatic treaty of non-aggression. The USSR had already tried making pacts with the UK and France first, which were rejected, as referenced in the second paragraph in the link you gave:

    The treaty was the culmination of negotiations around the 1938–1939 deal discussions, after tripartite discussions with the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France had broken down

    As pointed out in the Munich Conference section:

    The Soviet leadership believed that the West wanted to encourage German aggression in the East and to stay neutral in a war initiated by Germany in the hope that Germany and the Soviet Union would wear each other out and put an end to both regimes.

    Obviously the USSR didn't want to be friends with the most anti-communist regime in the continent who invented terms like 'Judeo-Bolshevik'. So tankies will consider it either ignorant or bad faith to bring up the Ribbentrop Pact to pretend it was anything more than realpolitik compromise resulting from the Western powers wanting the two countries to destroy each other. The alternative was being invaded sooner, which we know in hindsight was a real threat.

  • Why is a private entity significantly different from a government entity? If a coalition of private entities (say, facebook, twitter, youtube, ... ) controls most of the commons, they have the power to dictate everything beyond the fringes. We can already see this kind of collusion in mass media to the extent that it's labeled a propaganda model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

    I just don't think the private/gov dichotomy is enough to decide when censorship and moderation is valid.

  • which does a lot of censoring, even though the creators are sort of, somehow, outwardly against censoring?

    Another perspective on the Lemmy situation is that, for example, I can sincerely say I believe free speech has merits while creating a book club where political discussion isn't allowed. Some would call that censorship, but restricting a certain community doesn't mean I approve of unconditional societal censorship. "Censorship", like many abstract concepts in the liberalist worldview, doesn't make sense to think of as a universal value, but rather in contexts, like you pointed out with hate speech removal being in line with the beliefs of most people on the main Lemmy instances.

    There are some concepts, for example, that I think are fine to discuss in an academic situation but should be censored in public spaces, especially when it comes to explicitly genocidal ideologies like Nazism, or bigoted hate speech.

  • jointhefediverse.net - Why was Lemmy removed from the list of fediverse alternatives?

    Jump
  • How was it default? I've been here for years and in all that time, it was never default. It was one of the most popular, and the most widely shared, but that's not the same at all.

  • jointhefediverse.net - Why was Lemmy removed from the list of fediverse alternatives?

    Jump
  • The linked post given on the second point is a bit flimsy. It's basically saying that if you use evidence published by a person with shitty views, you must have them too. To me, that's absurd as claiming that referencing FBI statistics makes someone a federal agent.

  • jointhefediverse.net - Why was Lemmy removed from the list of fediverse alternatives?

    Jump
  • It was made very clear from the start that .ml was not meant to be a 'default instance'.

  • The fact that Lemmy doesn't calculate and show a user's total post score is proof itself that it doesn't reflect Lemmy's political leanings.

  • I don't know enough to say if it's more insular or not, I don't know how common it is to have the default sort as All, but we're definitely worldly enough for other instances to have some users pushing stereotypes on us when we comment.

    You do have some point about lemmy.ml having enough instances that you can get by with Local as default, but I assume most people would be subscribing to or exploring other instances too? I really don't know.

  • Well that's just it; it's not boring, but watching it usually is. Professional sports was a mistake.

  • Honestly, it depends on your circles and network. I only remember seeing The Picard Maneuver maybe twice, didn't know of them before this week. I've seen your username far more, for example.

  • I've only heard of bridges that are set up to enable, say, IRC and Discord channels to replicate to a Matrix channel, and vice versa. So we can have a conversation with you using Discord and me using Matrix, which appears to you as a Discord channel and appears to me as a Matrix room.

  • Good question. It's especially a tough one in the real world, where the people who have the power to censor are typically the ones who shouldn't have it.

    I personally don't think there are any hard-and-fast definitions of what should be censored and what shouldn't. It depends heavily on content and context. There's a big difference between, hypothetically, a historian discussing Nazi ideology in a research paper, and between a politician discussing it in the presidential debate. One of those has legitimate value to society, the other is anti-social, politically delusional and harmful to citizens. Same with some forms of climate denialism - there is a valid point in permitting counterviews to consensus in the scientific method, but there is also a point where mass media is outright lying for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the entire planet's population.

    who should be the one deciding

    One aspect of this is that communities often decide, to some degree, what is acceptable to say through social mores. This obviously isn't foolproof and can be manipulated, but tends to be better than having just one person at the head of a network deciding.

    It is a tough question, because everyone has biases. You shouldn't have any one person or group in control of this.

    That all said, my comment was meant more meant as a critique of the environment, where the owning class (that is, the ruling class) own and control the vast majority of the mass media and social media platforms. The worldview I've seen around which suggests their speech is comparable to the speech of you and me is naive. That's a big part of why nonsense is now common sense, because the ruling class and their propaganda can pervade society despite so much of it being either illogical misinformation or outright bullshit.

  • Worldwide, people envy you. The poorest inhabitant of the USA has rights, possibilities and duties that only the richest in any other country can only dream of.

    It's one thing to exaggerate or to fall for propaganda, but this is a ridiculous statement.

    • The richest of many, many countries have more rights and possibilities than 90+% of the USA.
    • A whole percent of the USA is incarcerated, and according to their constitution, legal slaves, many performing labor in for-profit prisons.
    • According to the UN HRC 2018 report, “5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty”. In two of the visited states, "a high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services".

    This is not a country which has had mainland wars in the last century. This is the country creating those asylum seekers on rafts through their imperial wars.

  • “Muslims rape kids” is wrong, bigoted, and a gross generalisation.

    Yes. That's why it's an example being used. It's not how you inform the general public of real atrocities, and the important kernels of truth behind that wrong, bigoted and gross generalisation don't justify making it. So I don't understand why you felt compelled to detail them.

  • We allow generalized hate speech because we believe that the appropriate counter to speech is speech.

    In the world of corporate mass media where money is a microphone, unfortunately this belief is just idealist faith. Overall, good ideas and speech alone hasn't prevailed, and harmful speech has done more than counter-speech could hope to fix.

  • USA McDonalds is one of the worst in the world AFAIK. Actually, that goes for many of their products, from the butyric acid in Hershey's to the HFCS in their world-famous drinks (which I assume is why 'mexican cola' is such a meme in the US due to their cane sugar). The Fanta in Italy actually tastes like good oranges, because they just wouldn't be able to compete with the garbage they sell in many other countries.

    Is it true German McDonald's sells beer?

  • The UN General Assembly Human Rights Council 2018 report on USA's poverty and human rights is a pretty quick and clear overview which makes it clear that parts of the USA are just undeveloped:

    http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

    "5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty"

    "69. In Alabama and West Virginia, a high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services"