I’m gonna say some stuff that most of the people here probably know on some level, but considering this thread, I think it needs to be explicitly said.
Very few of the people who post comments on the internet are highly educated in whatever field they’re making a claim in. Getting challenged by people who know next to nothing and receive all the upvotes anyway is an exhausting experience, so many well-educated people keep their debates private. If they are here, you probably aren’t enough of an expert to recognize them. The simple, easy to understand takes are what get upvoted, and in-depth, nuanced ideas are almost always ignored or ridiculed. Most forums are full of people who know just enough to feel confident in making calls for radical action without any knowledge of how that action could be implemented or would play out.
Look through this comment section. Lots of vague, single-sentence arguments about being “capitalist,” “communist,” or “socialist,” along with “leftist,” “liberal,” or “conservative,” but I don’t see a single one acknowledging that each of those words can individually encompass vast groups of conflicting ideas and have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world; a serious problem considering at least a few of the people posting in this thread aren’t in the US. Very little discussion of substantive ideas like “people should be given a universal basic income of $15 a day,” or “food stamps should be granted without application to anyone under a certain income threshold,” or “social media servers should receive public funding and be administrated by an elected body.” It’s almost never more specific than “universal healthcare,” or “abolish the police,” Those might be the right direction, but when was the last time you saw people discussing things like whether experimental treatments should be covered, or the number and type of professions that should replace the current myriad of roles police are expected to fill? I seriously doubt if you randomly selected two self-described communists (or whatever ideology) on Lemmy and had them start making decisions together, that they would agree with each other on exactly how society should be run even half the time.
I’m not saying these conversations shouldn’t happen, vague as they are. I certainly don’t have the energy to write out long arguments 99% of the time. We all have to make our own way to finding deeper knowledge, and building a knowledge base of buzzwords can be a useful stepping stone. But far too often people stop once they feel they have a sufficient understanding of the buzzwords and then start talking like they know the answers. it’s important to temper the depth of your convictions based on where you’re having the discussion, where you’re getting your knowledge. Are you watching youtube videos and reading unsourced comments, or are you reading research papers from institutions with a history of making accurate claims? Are you reading news articles from ad-supported papers, and if you are, are you checking whether those articles are making sources available for readers check on? Should I have bothered writing several paragraphs under a meme of a glowing red bird, and am I really qualified to tell people to be more careful with their discussions?
To be taken seriously offline I necessarily have to make well reasoned and researched arguments.
Lemmy is where I come to blow off steam and just berate my ideological opponents because they genuinely are losers.
It is not a place for nuanced debate.
It is not a place for nuanced debate.
Why not? Compared to other social media it’s way better equipped for reasoned debate, with an easy-to-read layout designed for mountains of text and ease of linking sources. Maybe c/memes isn’t the right place but considering how serious the rest of this thread is I’m pretty sure my spiel was worth it.
Maybe the people in my social circle are just a lower caliber than yours, but I can’t remember the last time I got asked to source an opinion irl. Most of my friends already agree with me. Hell, offline, most people aren’t willing to discuss politics at all. Even saying you have opinions on politics is basically a faux pas…
True. Reddit was pretty center-right oriented. Lemmy leans more left and I do enjoy seeing the Trumpers here getting dunked on pretty frequently.
Reddit was pretty center-right oriented.
lmao
Do you doubt that? What is your idea of the left? What is seen as ‘left’ or even what conservatives call ‘the radical left’ in the US would likely be seen as center or center-right globally.
Lemmy isn’t “too extreme,” a very small subset of Lemmings are just fucking insufferable.
…have these people met certain redditors? 🧐
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I mean, tankies are kinda worse.
Edit: seems this post is controversial! Let me clarify.
Tankies are definitely worse. 🥂
Meh, both extremes are as insufferable
No, they aren’t.
Tankies are mostly just delusional victims of troll farms.
Fascists are… fascists.
No, I meant exactly what I said:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insufferable
We were federated with them for a couple of days and their constant spam of insults and images makes them insufferable.
Fine, you find obnoxious dorks just as bad as genocidal fascists. I stand corrected.
From a governmental point of view, both extremes are responsible for multiple genocides so I’m not even sure which is which in your comment 🤔
And I’m talking about Lemmy’s tankies vs Reddit’s alt-right, since that’s what the conversation was about in the first place.
Fascists are… also delusional victims of Russian troll farms.
Honestly I find it kinda mindblowing how similar lemmygrad and hexbear are to /r/t_d.
They’re trying their darndest to drag the left into the mud. They’re pushing the same rhetoric as trumpers trying to brainwash young people Jordan Peterson style. The Russian government has a vested interest in destabilizing the US and trying to push people to violence and ‘revolt’ because that would take down the only threat to them. At least most of us aren’t so stupid to believe these people are in any way representing the left, the LGBT or minorities. I was looking for an LGBT friendly community and was so saddened to find out what it really was… trying to radicalize vulnerable groups. Shame on them. Fucking shame.
One is obnoxious, the other actively genocidal.
Considering them equally bad is a self report.
So we’re just pretending genocides weren’t committed by both sides?
There is a lot of political and other “adult” discourse. Not extreme, but more exhausting for a person wanting memes, gifs, and lols. I imagine the median age here is higher than that of Reddit. Can’t confirm, but it certainly conducts itself with less…“juvenility”…or some word.
I find the political discourse, at least on some topics, very juvenile on Lemmy. You know, screeching about how billionaires aren’t people but parasites and need to die, hundreds of upvotes. That’s some edgy, frustrated teenager bullshit. Or at least it should be, guess some people never got the memo about inalienable rights, equal treatment, vigilantism and how two wrongs don’t make a right.
Seriously, this thirst for blood is disturbing and if it isn’t just venting then, well, look how the French Revolution turned on people. That wasn’t very poggers.
There’s also this idea that everybody who isn’t 100% on board needs to be defooed and marked, preferably as a fascist. Which plays into the hands of the actual fascists because the non-fascists hate each other too much to collectively tell them to fuck off, despite their differences.
There, that’s my venting done for today.
I wouldn’t say it’s leftist, though there’s a lot of leftists here. Lemmy is more like how internet discussion boards used to be. There’s a lot of people with weird opinions on things, and there’s no Reddit Karma pushing people to conform to the consensus. So people are going to have weird takes on things, and there’s not 1000 comments upvoted above the weird ones, so you’re going to see comments like that. So reply to with you your weird opinions on those weird comments.
Welcome to the version internet that’s not pre-packaged and filtered to be bland!
Exactly. It’s not “Leftist”, it’s just NOT fully of Nazis, and that’s how far our standards have slipped.
Lemmy isnt leftist. The group calling itself leftist the most here is at the same time cheering on ultranationalist governments who are in the middle of genocides.
This is a .ml instance. Of course it’s going to have pro-authoritian, genocide denying bias.
Why does everything need to be politicized? No one gives a flying fuck if you’re a leftist, unless you’re a Leftist and no one gives a fuck if you’re a right winger unless you’re a right winger. Jesus christ the US Politics are absolute fucking cancer.
This is the only answer
I just saw a post about eco-terrorism and people mostly agreed. Lemmy is 100% extreme.
I was downvoted because I said that barbie is not feminism, a statement which is bare minimum of center left feminist ideology.
Lemmy is definitely not all leftist.
It might be seen leftist by US standard, but overall, with the exception of few well known instances, it is not really “extreme left”, probably not even overwhelming left
Platforms have no political alignment, users have
You cannot tell me TruthSocial has no political alignment.
Did the platform just blink into existence or was it created and advanced by someone’s hand? To what end?
I don’t agree. The simple fact that Lemmy is decentralised is a political thing. It’s about who has power over the platform, and that is inherently a political issue. The status-quo of other platforms, that being under the control of a corporation, is also a political stance.
PS: everything is politics, that’s not a good or bad thing, it’s neutral. If you don’t think of something as political, that just means it’s oriented towards the status-quo you are used to.
Also why would you want to be in an echo chamber? I’m more of a libertarian but I like surrounding myself with people that challenge my views.
I like not having the right of my existence challenged but to each their own
Giving full economic power to the state does not make you less fascist. It actually makes it much worse.
Just a reminder to the true leftists who think they can force through their better society by giving society more power over the individual without changing the culture in the first place.
That’s not what fascist means. Fascism is specific a right wing ideology, because it involves close cooperation between the government and capitalist monopolies. Mussolini praised “capitalist production, captains of industries, modern entrepreneurs”. You seem to mean authoritarian.
I understand the definition of fascism. You are missing the portion by which corporations are not allowed to exist if they do not further the efforts of the state. Basically exactly the same as Marx advised towards the end of his writings. Nothing is allowed to exist in a socialist system if it is perceived to work against the needs of the people (state)
There is functionally no difference between corporations that do not control the means of production even if they are charged with running it and a state fully owning the means. It’s just middle management.
Okay, but that doesn’t make a leftist system fascist. That’s what authoritarian means in an economic sense. There are many other aspects of fascism.
If there is functionally no difference between the systems, it it’s fascism. Call a duck a duck. Oppressed people don’t care that the flag is red.
Fascism includes various types of oppression not present in other ideologies, such as sexism and manipulation/fear about minority groups as ‘the enemy’.
That is a result of the perception that those groups work against the state, not a requirement for fascism. Communist systems have just as bad if not worse a track record in regards to minority oppression as fascist ones.
A socialist system doesn’t have to be state-based. Socialism can encompass anarchism, anarcho-communism and many other left ideologies besides state-communism.
For context: OP is on lemmy.world which blocks the tankie instances if I’m not mistaken. So they seem to refer to based leftist stuff I assume and isn’t a redfash.
The true marxist based left is not woke. It never was. There’s a reason that the western left turned liberal in the 50s and 60s and focused on reform. The CCP killed any thought that decentralized communes could be self-sufficient and centralization killed any concept of liberalism and a responsive command economy. If the majority can vote their way into resources, minorities suffer. With no opposition checking the ruling party, corruption sets in.
If you are referring to the American Democratic party, they are liberal and not left.
In the marketplace of ideas, rightwing thoughts will be mocked, as they always should been…
Honestly, this place is full of communists. I’m not the biggest fan of communists, to be frank. There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist. Particularly revisionist history statist. If a communist party said it, you gotta defend it kinda thing.
Define ‘full of communists’… cause it sounds like such an american phrase and perspective. To me, it’s just a more leftwing centered space. The real communists are a minority. At least on the biggest Lemmy servers.
Go for a walk in Hexbear and Lemmygrad communities, these are Lemmy’s communists…
Yeah but those instances are not nearly as big as lemmyworld and the others. I also didn’t say that there were no communists at all. There are just not as many as OP made it out to be.
I just checked and you’re instance isn’t federated with Hexbear so you don’t see their users’ comments, my instance was federated with them for a couple of days and it made the Lemmy experience a mess.
I have more than one account, none of them get many communist posts. Maybe there’s one in there in a few rare occasions but it’s not significant.
Have you seen those colorful people on hexbear? Quite the echo chamber.
