It’s good practice to link the pamphlet or at least name it

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?

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).

The other person was calling them a supporter of fascism, no sense whining about them being “combative” when that’s a serious accusation

No I never implied that at all

Emphasis mine

It originally was used to describe Leftists supporting authoritarianism while claiming to be leftist.

Get out of here with that bad faith nonsense

The users from certain other instances are talking about it nonstop and trying to make it a wedge issue, so it’s not surprising

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.

I appreciate you magnanimity :)

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.

Please read what someone writes a little more carefully before trying to do gotchas. I said:

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,

i.e. natural rights are not relevant to useful questions about moderation. I only use the term to call the concept irrelevant. Then I said:

so the chauvinistic redditors posting social credit score memes that were tired years ago and thoroughly debunked don’t need a platform

My complaint is letting people post low-effort* memes and misinformation isn’t worthwhile, and if your concept of “Free Speech” conflicts with that, then that concept should be replaced by something better because you’re just caping for garbage.

*please don’t get debate club about this term, it’s a waste of time. Shit that is just a jpeg copied and reproduced endlessly so you can get updoots to the left because winnie the pooh is evil is low-effort. If someone does their own bespoke photoshop of the bear copulating with a tank, it is not low-effort, though you should ban that person for other reasons (obscenity, etc.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

A lot of those insinuations come from neoliberals who are mad that neoliberalism isn’t given privileged treatment there like it is on Reddit.

It comes from the Lord of the Rings, that’s just someone using it.

Obfuscatory. The reason people rallied around that specific term can clearly be traced back to Azovites using it.

I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with Muslims.

With the Azovites, it certainly did. Obviously most Russians are not Muslim (nor are they Chechen), so Reddit’s reinterpretation of the term is not identical.

It mostly spread as use for Russian soldiers that were just rampaging around

People tend not to qualify it as “just for soldiers” except when doing apologetics

comparing your enemies to characters in a fantasy novel isn’t exactly the worst slur in the world.

I’ve seen them called Death Eaters and, aside from “read another book” and some other ancillary issues, I think your statement applies well to giving the Russian military such a label.

That’s because the Death Eaters are an organization, not a race. You opt-in to being a Death Eater, you can’t opt-in or -out of being an orc. Flattening it to “comparing them to characters” is completely flattening the issue of racism.

Of course, the Azovites are viciously racist and Redditors are no stranger to basically every type of xenophobia imaginable, so I think the burden of proof here would be on you to demonstrate that this is an exception to the general trend of racism both Reddit and the Ukrainian military/paramilitary, who can only be dissuaded through great effort from dropping even a fragment of their Nazi iconography.

Edit: I should say that I’m speaking in terms of epistemology and counterargument. I’d much rather you just acknowledge the obvious truth and move on rather than try further to contort the evidence to make Redditors not racist. Some arguments are fun, but this one is tedious.