I’ve only been outside of Hexbear (where there also are no downvotes) for a week and I hate having downvotes. Instead of people replying to something they disagree with with evidence and counterarguments, people just downvote and move on. They really shouldn’t be used to downvote comments people disagree with (because that just promotes groupthink), ideally they’d just be used to downvote spam and low effort stuff; but moderators can take care of that, so what’s the point?
… says the one week old account that only exists to pick fights and do nothing other than argue ideology.
My main account is @[email protected], it’s not my fault the biggest Lemmy instance defederated us pre-emptively as a last resort.
Is anyone actually saying those things or are you exaggerating the positions of leftists who wouldn’t want Western imperialist powers to be able to topple foreign governments?
Yeah because you’re demonstrably incorrect on both counts. If you don’t wanna talk about it, don’t bring it up.
… but, a lot of .ml powermods do things like declare the Xi Poohbear meme to be inherently racist, even though it was literally created by Chinese netizens.
That’s not a valid reason to think it’s not racist for Westerners to use it, especially when the OG meme was specifically about one picture where Xi and Obama were walking together and looked a little bit like Winnie and Tigger. For one, Chinese people are just as capable of saying racist stuff as anyone else, but also language and memes transform when transported to different cultures. Xi Jinping bears little resemblance to Winnie the Pooh; the fact that online anticommunists really want to die on the hill that they should be allowed to compare the president of China to a yellow bear reflects poorly on them.
Or, god help you if you attempt to discuss the Holodomor.
Yeah, if you say the typical line among online anticommunists that the USSR committed a genocide via famine in Eastern Europe you’ll get a similar reaction to the one you’d get if you went and said as such in a history department at any university. That is, outside of the Baltic states, Ukraine, and particularly reactionary parts of North America. From the way you directly wrote “Holodomor/Holocaust numbers” in this comment it appears that you subscribe to the double genocide theory and think that those 2 events are comparable.
Huh well I wonder why making your space inhospitable for leftists would attract astroturfers and shills?
Yeah for sure, but I think it’s a bit misleading to make it sound like only owners of capital (be it corrupt haute bourgeoisie or human trafficking capitalists) get executed. I don’t know the numbers but I’d assume since murder and drug trafficking are also punishable by death, that means most of the people executed are workers, not capitalists.
but in the case of China it’s largely for corrupt CEOs and sexual assaulters.
Isn’t drug trafficking and murder also punishable by death?
Just my own perspective, but I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that latinos of mixed descent always stop being settlers. Some are indigenous as you say, but I think most of us still count as settlers. We definitely aren’t indigenous (except in the context of the colonial relationship between our countries and the imperial core) in the strict political sense, and we live in (predominantly) unceded territory. I don’t know if there’s a single country in LatAm that isn’t a settler colony as a result of these facts, I’d probably hazard to say no but there’s a few I’m pretty ignorant about.
It’s interesting, in Puerto Rico I’ve often heard the term “North Americans” used to refer to inhabitants of the 50 states, even though North America is a region that includes other countries and even PR itself.
The whole thing where you gotta copy a sentence from Principles of Communism to join makes it pretty clear, but yeah maybe it ought to be signposted more. It seems like lemmy.ml isn’t really the “default” lemmy instance anymore, so IMHO it would come at little cost to be transparent about its ideological tilt.
Disclaimer: this is my alt account and I’m not really a .ml user, I don’t want to come across as an authority on this matter
anti-Western dictatorships are actually the good guys and all working together (somehow, despite visibly hating each other a lot of the time).
I’m from Hexbear which is generally more extreme than .ml and this idea seems absurd to me. Who is saying that e.g. Russia is a close ally of Ansarallah?
There’s another side to this. I’m originally from Hexbear and only started checking out what the experience of someone on an instance that isn’t massively defederated looks like. Lemmy.ml’s meme comms are full of tankie ragebait, but then there’s multiple .world communities that are the same, but they’re liberal ragebait. The difference is that .world’s ideology is hegemonic while .ml’s is fringe. But to someone who isn’t a liberal, looking at a Lemmy front page when .world is on that front page also has a lot of propagandistic content with little news or entertainment value; you probably just don’t realize it.
Edit: A period of time where the proletariat organizes power to eliminate the bourgeoisie in order to get rid of those previous class divides, is not authoritarianism.
Ok, so how can this be done in such a way that it is not? Were the Soviets, Cubans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Venezuelans, Laotians, Grenadians, Nicaraguans, Tanzanians, Angolans, Zimbabweans, and Burkinabes just not quite smart enough to figure it out?
what is the difference between socialism and communism?
I remain at the same place, yet to understand how one can be a communist and not authoritarian. And I feel like you’re failing to interrogate whether your concept of authoritarianism is being used with any amount of consistency or if it’s just a club you wield against people who have positions you disagree with for other reasons.
Anarchists are cool, but they’re really only a minority of communists worldwide. Whatever you think “authoritarianism” is (as far as I’m concerned if you believe in having a state at all, then that state will exercise a monopoly on violence and will be repressive) it describes almost every single communist on planet earth. The game of splitting hairs on what does and doesn’t count as a “tankie” achieves nothing but divide a movement that has common cause.
If I’m being forthright, I’ll just go ahead and ask: if anarchists are the only communists, why even have the concept of “tankies” at all? Why not just say you’re pro-anarchist and anti-communist? From my perspective, all that the whole thing of saying that there supposedly are communists who aren’t “tankies” achieves is create two categories:
Then because you can find real examples of the first category, you can find the flaws they have, and compare them to the ideal people in the second category. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there really are a ton of Marxists out there that figured out the secret to having a perfectly consistent anti-authoritarian ideology that is still distinct from anarchism. If you could let me know who they are, that’d be awesome.
If you disagree that .ml are communist and insist that they’re “tankies” instead, it seems to imply that not all communists are “tankies.” However, every single communist I’m aware of is called a tankie. What does a communist who isn’t a tankie look like? Are there examples of such a thing?
Osama Bin Laden and I happen to have the same position that the end of the USA as a political entity would be a positive thing. I probably also agree with him that breathing and having meals is necessary for survival.
Are either of those propositions made less true by virtue of Osama also believing them?
People also just downvote stuff they disagree with. If you use the downvotes on a post or comment as the indicator of whether it’s correct or not you’ll just end up believing only the things the majority of the users believe are true, instead of using evidence or any kind of facts.