GarbageShootAlt2

Interestingly, it says there are 19 comments but I can only see 10 (will be 11 after I send this). I logged out (thinking it was just defederated users or something) and still only saw the same ones. Is there another mechanic that I am missing?

Censoring literal, open Nazis and pedos is perfectly fine by me, thank you very much. I don't think there's any "slippery slope" involved other than the risks of allowing such people free rein in open spaces.

Like I said, I didn't know how to actually check, which is why I asked as I did. Thanks for letting me know that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad don't have the other one blocked, I will dm their admins about that. If you're a user in good standing, I'd suggest asking your own instance admins about not blocking these two.

I DM'd a lemmygrad admin, next I'll do so for lemmy.ml now that I can access the site again.

I reposted it above

Another user, holygon, posted from an instance that lemmy.ca blocks and someone else requested a lemmy.ml account repost it. If you want my own opinions, ask and I'll discuss it, but on this comment everything forward is from that user:

Alright since there is a claim here that you are cool with political opinions being voiced, I’m gonna assume that you mean this, and you’re not just saying so.

Now since you say that you are pro-left/socialist, I’m gonna assume that you are aware that the west/The US has lied in the past about other countries, and their atrocities? (Iraq, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.) Please follow me here, read, and then judge afterwards. I’m not asking you to believe me fully after a single post, I’m just gonna give you some articles from providers that you probably trust, and I’m going to let you form your own opinion afterward.

Tiananmen Square:

1. The Telegraph reports on WikiLeaks source, that there was no actual bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square. Read the entire thing, there is of course nuance. Link is through 12ft to get around paywall

2. The BBC admits to being wrong about a lot of their reporting. Quote: “There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.”

3. Interview with one of the protest leaders of the Student Protest movement. He is still critical of the Chinese government. He says that there was no tanks in Tiananmen Square, and that it is dangerous to lie just to try to win.

Now these are just the sources that explain this. If you look far enough you will also find pictures of dead Chinese soldiers burned to a crisp, strung up by the neck. These pictures are hard to look at. But maybe you think that the protest was just. Okay. But please understand that even western media does not actually think there was a massacre in the Square.

"No brigading" rules on Reddit don't apply here, least of all to identifying Reddit users, posts, etc.

There are certain factions constantly agitating for defederation, which is a nuisance for several reasons -- not the least of which being it sort of defeats the point of the format!

Meanwhile anarchist organizing doesn't have cops, it has Agents of Community Defense who definitely aren't cops!

I have nothing against anarchists, but you need to see past slogans to be anything but a useful idiot to neoliberals.

I've been reading a shit ton of neoliberalism on sibling instances and it leaks in here, so I wouldn't be too confident. Obviously the second item is not relevant at the moment.

The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world "polarization" obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of "correct beliefs" and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one's views. It's entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it's quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic -- though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President ("Two Corinthians").

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I'm sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and "radical" (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn't need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he's "less liberal in a lot of ways" than Richard Nixon, that wasn't his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and -- god forbid -- a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, "If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5."

If I was writing it, I'd probably say that the camps in America are "4+4 is 44" and "4+4 is 64", with "4+4 is 54" being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

ty for articulating this so well o7

Neoliberalism and collaboration with various State Department agents.