this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Generally positive, with caveats. Lemmy's early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.
The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.
Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alumnus heading their content moderation policy.
As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I've seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.
I think time will heal most of them.
Conspiracy? One of the devs has a website where he literally openly denies the Uyghur genocide, Tiananmen square massacre, "Mao did nothing wrong", "Ukrainians are Nazis", denies every single critique of USSR and China, and a whole lot of other vile shit. Read for yourself: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
This is the real test of the fediverse. Can software written by a piece of shit like that exist without being influenced by their garbage political views?
I think it's possible and I like Lemmy to thrive but it's important to keep an eye out for tankies and to not close your eyes to the reality of who started this.
someone isn't a piece of shit because they hold different opinions than your own. it's OK to post articles even if you don't believe everything in them. I glanced through one of the articles about the death tolls under Mao - https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.
Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don't think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone's right to be a holocaust denier. It's as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you're a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.
Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU "Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech" thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.
The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.
This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the "Black Book of Communism," which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.
Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn't the person I care to talk to about it.
I'm sure he would say this. But in this specific case it's more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there's a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that's what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He's a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because "the issue has been resolved". What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I've read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn't whether the researcher was wrong or right. It's just that we can't set the precedent that certain topics are "finished" and can't be modified anymore. Because at that point we're not doing science or research - we're falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn't read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a "genocide denier" and a "CCP tankie"?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing "wrongthink" is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren't good guys and there aren't bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone's a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
Regardless, I appreciate your comment.
I'll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don't take it like I'm trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.
Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.
In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we're still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.
As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.
To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I'd be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.
In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you'd get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.
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In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.
don't worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I'm glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here
so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You're absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn't mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).
I agree that I'm not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don't think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky's beliefs. I'm a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.
Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky.. there's a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
Here's what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier
I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended
If we give up the principle, we lose everything.
This is worse than sycophants making excuses for Huffman. Dessalines compiled this list to make an argument, how are you sweet talking this reality? This isn't some exercise in political science, this is a dude making the point that the Uyghur genocide is not happening. There is no discussion with such an entity. There are many subtleties to be discussed about any of these topics, but once you're in that level of conspiracy, there's no subtlety, this has nothing to do with critical thinking or questioning authority. This is blatant arrogant vile brainwashed shit, and nothing else. The result you will find in Lemmygrad.ml. Study this instance closely and strive to not become that. Free speech does NOT mean hatespeech should be tolerated. By being neutral you are supporting the wrong side. Inaction is action. Let me put it this way: when two Nazis sit down on a table with eight other people and these people say nothing, there are ten Nazis sitting on that table.
I wish someone could explain to me how this wumao BS has gained any traction at all.
My point exactly. Nobody can possibly disagree with US State Department line unless they are getting paid. Typical Reddit conspiracy thinking.
I have seen the conspiracies posts as well but assumed they were just reddit shill accounts spreading disinformation, no one I know has taken them seriously. It is interesting to see this point of view, especially the "this day would come" bit, for me I sort of knew something was wrong , but it is like your local pub slowly being taken over, you do not want it to be true so you ignore stuff you should not.
Read for yourself what he writes on his website. It's pretty grim shit. https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
Those do not appear to be written by him, but will do some more digging. However open exchange of views is wise in my opinion even if they are those I personally do not agree with. Edit Rightly ho, although I clearly have not read all the material on display (openly public btw) it is obviously the repository of someone who is willing to explore the far left politically , but the essays that might be by him(some are not accredited) are not on the subjects you mentioned, those are accredited to others. Now this dev might or might not agree with this stuff, they might be a politics student I can not say but I doubt anyone has asked. I am not sure it is particularly relevant in this thread anyway.
See my response to the other person.
I have read the responces , and I applaud the general tone of both sides of the discussion. I have to just say that without view exchange , and expressly with view suppression , those who feel suppressed become even more intrenched. I for one learned from the debate.
I've seen them too, but I was pleased to see those posts being mostly downvoted and counteracted (by reddit refugees as well).
It means people realize it's just propaganda to try and make lemmy look bad, I hope devs know we truly appreciate what they're doing, regardless of a few reddit shills spitting nonsense.
I mean, the devs haven't made it a secret about how they fully believe Chinese nationalist propaganda.
Not that it really matters though, since if any issues did come up, Lemmy itself would be forked with new devs "in charge" even if the original devs still continued most of the work. The lemmy.ml instance itself would be a different issue, though.