I’m simply asking this question because of Lemmygrad.ml existing, and that there isn’t a far-right equivalent of it yet. If Lemmygrad has any standing for its right to exist under free speech, where is the line drawn for other extremist political ideologies? If Holodomor skepticism is allowed, then what stops Holocaust skepticism? (as it is generally accepted the Holodomor was man-made). I’m simply wondering what gives far-left politics a right to promote such extremist views in the Fediverse, when their far-right counterparts would be Defederated in minutes.
The wonder of a federated system. Is you or anyone else can set up an instance that is dedicated to open political debate.
But no one can force you to do so.
The issue is to encourage the current right wing to join, you will need to allow prejudice and hate. Because tha is what the far right has turned into. At that point no one else can or should be forced to allow your instance to be federated to them.
Most instances have no objection to fiscal right wing politics. They just ban the hate. If right wing supporters are unable or unwilling to debate in that environment. I have no desire or ability to force instance owners to accept them.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It’s quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That’s the whole point. There’s no centralized server where someone can decide “Oh, we’re just gonna prevent this person’s physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet”.
If there were, it’d be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don’t moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.
I’m brand new and figuring out this Fediverse right now and it’s more complicated than push a button I’m on. That stops a lot of the tech averse idiots who seem by and large to be conservatives from showing up. It’s too complicated for them.
The premise is that it’s up to the admins of each instance to choose. Inherently in the design, nothing is globally allowed or not. And the less-preferable ideas will appear to fewer people because they will be defederated more often.
Fwiw, lemmygrad is defederated from many instances.
Politically speaking, the lemmy/fediverse would make a great PolySci thesus. There is no practical universal governance other than sharing the ActivityPub protocol. It is an interesting experiment in how humans behave. Each instance is like a country.
Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I’d rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.
Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they’re all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.
Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.
Eh… I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
I don’t think that level of intolerance should be tolerated, regardless of whether someone is on the right or left of the spectrum.
You can’t be a fascist and not be bigoted. You can be a marxist-leninist and not as a rule hate minorities. I encourage you to go to lemmygrad yourself, see if you find any hatred of minorities being tolerated there. You just won’t.
I can coexist in a space with them, they’re not going to start calling for the genocide of minority groups. They will deny that genocides have happened, which to be clear is bad but there’s a fundamental difference between “these events didnt happen” and a fascist saying “let’s mass murder all the minorities because they’re biologically impure”. I can coexist in a space with one, with the other my murder or the murder of any other marginalized group is as a rule being outright advocated for.
No matter how hard you try tankies even at their worst are not fascists. To try and equate the two is beyond ridiculous. You can point out that some historical regimes have done a lot of horrible things, fair enough. But ideologically marxist-leninists are not comparable on any level to fascists.
I can not, and will never under any circumstances tolerate the prescience of fascism to any degree.
OP mentioned Holodomor, so I’ll just point out that ML’s generally don’t deny that there was a famine, or even that it was exacerbated by bad policy. The specific point of contention is whether it was intentional.
I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
Yeah, they’re banned from lemmygrad. Rule 5:
No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome, this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.
No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).
No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, duginists, etc).
I have too, but let’s be realistic, and accept the honest fact that in far left spaces, racism, homophobia, transphobia etc us far, far less acceptable than in far right spaces. I’ve hung out with hardcore marxists and despite not necessarily agreeing with their political takes I’ve never had to feel uncomfortable with my race or sexuality in the same way that even mildly right-leaning folks have made me feel.
Yes, I’m sure racism and homophobia exist on the far left, but it’s an extreme minority on that side compared to on the right where it’s a pretty mild take, and treating the two as remotely equivalent is very harmful in itself.
Just want to clarify, nowhere did I equate the two. I’m simply saying I personally wouldn’t tolerate intolerance regardless of the political ideology. The previous poster suggested that they didn’t see such type behaviors from far-left folks, I had a different experience.
I totally agree far-right ideologies are inherently intolerant.
What does “far-left” mean to you, then? If someone with views entirely counter to progressive ideas just calls themselves “far-left” while spewing hateful garbage, do you just accept that they are part of the left?
Politics isn’t team sports. Your political association is defined by your views, not by what side you claim to be on.
Not really. If someone says “I am a woodworker” but you never see anything they make from wood, they have no woodworking tools, they don’t know about woodworking techniques, they don’t attend a woodworking club or job or class they’re just… not a woodworker.
People who claim to be leftists without doing the required actions aren’t leftists. Liking the aesthetics isn’t enough.
I feel like this is potentially a bait post but if I steel man you for the sake of civility and learning:
I am not the most knowledgeable about the USSR, my grandparents came from occupied poland and thus had certain opinions, that’s a large part of my exposure and likely biases me. That said, the revolutionary movement and corresponding government seems to have gone through many phases, and have expressed various degrees of leftism at various times. Was assassinating lots of people, forcibly occupying people, collaborating with nazi germany, and engaging in genocide very leftist? I would say definitionally no. Even for the time there was considerable pushback from other leftist personalities and organisations.
On the other hand for many, many people there was massive increases in freedom, prosperity, and rights compared to tzarist russia. Including my grandmother, who was allowed to hold a technical office job! wow! (until she moved to Australia and was forced to work in a factory and be treated like an idiot. Not wow).
This seems like one of those situations where trying to fit something into a simplistic box will inevitably break down. I feel comfortable saying the USSR accomplished both wonderful and terrible things, that overall it was probably better than tsarist russia but it fell short of the ideals that founded it.
If I met someone who say volunteered to feed the homeless, agitated for unionism at work, volunteered to educate disadvantaged people, but also thought I should be executed as a social deviant (I’m mega queer) I would probably call them leftist even while I thought they were massively misguided and extremely dangerous. I’ll note I’ve never actually met anyone like that though.
This is like saying “No true Scotsman was born and raised in Istanbul, speaks only Turkish, and has never even visited Scotland or ever mentioned being intereted in doing so.” For example, the “National Socialists” were not actually socialists even though they used socialist-like policies exclusively on an ethnic national basis, and no one serious is arguing that they were on the left. The left wing represents social equality and progressivism, while the right wing represents tradition and hierarchy. This has been the understanding of these terms since they were invented during the French Revolution.
And the left wing politicians during the French Revolution never prosecuted minorities in the name of the republic?
Damn, what happened to the entire Occitaian culture?
Oh wait, it was deemed an enemy of progress.
The monarchy had reasons to resemble the Tower of Babel; in democracy, leaving the citizens to ignore the national language [that of Paris], unable to control the power, is betraying the motherland… For a free people, the tongue must be one and the same for everyone. -Bertrand Barère
If you want to use that definition of left right from the French Revolution, fine, are they not “left” when they literally sat on the left side of the National Assembly?
Interesting point you bring up. You are absolutely correct about the consequences of the revolution and the involvement of hierarchical thinking of the Parisians towards the other ethnic groups around them. The Parisians who went and carried out the genocides may have believed that their actions conformed to “Liberty, fraternity, and equality” of the French people, but I’m not sure it was the logical conclusion to the ideology of the revolution, or the left. Looking back from my modern perspective completely out of context I would say these actions went against the professed ideology of the revolution before reality came in and complicated everything.
What I’m saying is that the left is the idea of progressivism and social equality, while the right is the idea of hierarchy and tradition. Actors who intend for progressivism and social equality can, due to the various pressures of the real world, can end up taking right wing measures as above. If someone supports the idea of tradition and hierarchy in the first place, I would not consider them left wing regardless of how they label themselves.
I’m not saying that all leftists aren’t bigots or that bigotry never happens in leftist spaces, but bigotry is the rule in fascist ones. Fascism is bigotry, it’s a core part of the ideology itself. For that reason they’re not comparable.
It isn’t at all a no true Scotsman argument, what are you talking about?
You can be a leftist and not be bigoted. Bigots also join the left, we can’t help that, but that’s because they personally are bigoted, not because the ideology is. In fact, most modern leftism argues that bigotry is fundamentally at odds with the core ideals, and in my experience a majority of the left, at least in English speaking countries, wants to distance these people.
You cannot be a fascist without being bigoted. Being bigoted is part of the ideology. It aims to spread and teach bigotry, that’s the purpose of it.
No true Scotsman would be “yeah but the anti Semitic leftists aren’t real leftists”, which isn’t what anyone said.
Can’t agree more. It’s amazing just how many posts I’ve seen since joining Lemmy equating the left and right, as if “workers should own the means of production” is just as bad as the literal genocide advocated by the hard right.
That said, given that lemmy.ml (and maybe latte.isnot.coffee?) is run by pro-CCP tankies, I think it’s worth taking a second to say that defending the genocide of the Uighurs is majorly fucked and the vast majority of hard leftists here on Lemmy vehimently oppose that.
But one can’t be hard-right and not be for genocide, basically. Not so on the left.
Left and right aren’t authoritarian or libertarian. The soviets were authoritarian and that’s why that happened. There’s no case to be made for equality and sharing resources to be a bad thing that could lead to something like that. It’s a problem with the implementation mainly the concentration of power that allowed authoritarianism. On the far right you have racism and suppression of “others” which clearly can lead to a nasty place very quickly.
The idea that the U.S.S.R. was socialist or communist, or that it’s controlling party was working to make it so, was propaganda that was convenient for both the U.S. (which was already deep in the throws of reaction against the left, and pretty much had been since its inception, and wanted to use it against its budding Cold-War enemy) and the U.S.S.R. (where leftist ideas were popular, so the government pretending to embody it was helpful to the state). It wasn’t. It was just a very widely-spread and useful authoritarian lie.
I guess there is nothing apart from people not wanting to hear a certain set of opinions and views. The mob speaks (as well as the instance admins), and those it speaks against gets defederated.
I really want to see a user set of instance blocking, so that I never see content from particular Instances. My common example is lemmynsfw.com should never be seen on… this… account
If you explicitly define what far-left and far-right means, you could probably have a straightforward answer. You mention holodomor skepticism and holocaust skepticism as some kind of far-left and far-right examples (unless I am misreading your comment), but I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR, but I am not at all sure. Maybe my internet experience is in some kind of enclave composed of SF literature discussions, 8-bit computers and King of the Hill clips, but I really don’t run across holodomor skepticism at all.
Of course, I know what holocaust skepticism is (the denial that millions of Jews [and a whole bunch of gays and Christians and Roma peoples) were systematically killed by the German regime during WW2, as directed by Hitler), but that’s only because the types of people who would embrace (or worse) holocaust skepticism are feeling more emboldened by the current political climate.
Personally, I define far-left and far-right as being ‘armed militants’ and/or ‘large groups of people calling for the eradication of one or more types of people.’ ‘Types of people’, in this case, means ‘people who are born with a certain characteristic that is not changeable, such as race or sexuality’
Currently, we have armed militants protesting libraries (libraries, of all places!) but I have yet to see an armed militant demanding government-funded healthcare or seizing the means of production. Therefore, you will have to forgive me if I don’t buy into the ‘both sides’ equivalence that your post requires the reader to hold.
When the far-left becomes as bad as the far-right, we can (and should!) talk. Until then, miss me with that shit.
I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine; there is some argument as to whether the intent was to kill off Ukrainians to stifle their independence movement at the time, or if the greater USSR just didn’t care about them at all.
Regardless, most of the crops grown in Ukraine at the time were shipped out to other parts of the USSR, leaving little to eat in Ukraine, and causing millions of deaths. Total death count is also iffy, but certainly rivals the Holocaust.
Compare the Irish potato famine, where Britain enforced export of potatoes from Ireland despite widespread Irish famine. Same thing, larger scale.
I’m gonna be annoying and I know it, but I really hate that people equate the far left and the far right. What does the far left want? Destroy capitalism. What does the far right want? Kill all queer people and then some. For some people, the opposite of Nazism is Communism when these barely have anything to do with each other.
The far left can be annoying, sure. But in the end, the vast majority of them are not actively trying to justify mass murder. That’s a key difference. Also, one has dramatically more influence then the other. So the question should be:
Should the far right be an allowed part of Lemmy’s fediverse?
Which is a misunderstanding of the fediverse I think. We can’t forbid them to be anywhere on an open source and defedrated platform. We can however, ask if they should be tolerated? And that’s up to the various servers to decide.
Beehaw already has a stance on it, though: No. Hence the recent defederation. And I agree. Fuck Nazis.
This is my stance on it too. People like to treat today’s political environment as two sides of a coin diametrically opposed, but that’s not how political ideology works, it’s more nuance than that, like a sphere. I get why American’s do it with a two-party system, but that doesn’t mean you’re all in on one or another, people are more nuance than that too. People who run with this mentality that there are only two sides to politics often fall into the mistake of equating to two as equal sides as you said. It makes it hard to acknowledge the difference of the extremes and their intentions.
Though I think the biggest reason people are less tolerant the alt right is because there are more reasons outside of politics to be against the alt right. Outside of politics, alt lefties usually get into arguments with economist and capitalist because extreme leftist have intensions to change the economic landscape. Whether for better or worse is precisely what they’re arguing about. There’s also the more fringe alt left (tankies I believe) who will get in a tussle with historians and survivors alike, but their conversations chill out once they realize no one’s condoning anything (usually, idk all you tankies).
Meanwhile the alt right targets specific freedoms enshrined by the US constitution and the Human Bill of Rights. The alt right wants a say in who you marry, whether or not you should adopt, religious rule you should abide by, who should/shouldn’t get to vote, whether the vote should be decided by the people or legislator (you now Democracy and all), your identity, your medical decisions, your family planning, your education, and the very books you read. There’s a desire to snub out individuality if it doesn’t abide by the alt rights idea of “normal.” All of these stances directly invade individual rights of many people and their ability to pursue their respective happiness. While there’s political reasons to speak out against these stances, there’s also moral obligation and the simple instinct of survival pushing back on these perspectives. This creates a large group of people who not only disagree, but whose existence is literally threaten, there’s no room for tolerance when lives and freedom are on the line. The reason alt right has a tough time is because most Americans still hold age-old American values of liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
I mean, how scary is the far left? They want to feed too many hungry kids? Make healthcare affordable? Respect basic human rights? It seems disingenuous to compare the left to the right, I mean one side is too nice and the other wants to tear down democracy.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !politics@beehaw.org
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it’s a political happening, you can post it here.
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Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
The wonder of a federated system. Is you or anyone else can set up an instance that is dedicated to open political debate.
But no one can force you to do so.
The issue is to encourage the current right wing to join, you will need to allow prejudice and hate. Because tha is what the far right has turned into. At that point no one else can or should be forced to allow your instance to be federated to them.
Most instances have no objection to fiscal right wing politics. They just ban the hate. If right wing supporters are unable or unwilling to debate in that environment. I have no desire or ability to force instance owners to accept them.
The problem isn’t political extremism in either of those cases, the problem is authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism is just bad, no matter who does it. As others have stated, there is indeed no king of the fediverse.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally is. It’s quite literally impossible, by design to keep anyone out globally. That’s the whole point. There’s no centralized server where someone can decide “Oh, we’re just gonna prevent this person’s physical hardware from spinning up a Lemmy server and connecting it to the internet”.
If there were, it’d be like Twitter, or Reddit, or all of the other centralized sites where moderation seems cool until you disagree with their choices in what they do or don’t moderate. Beehaw can moderate things how they please. You could moderate things however you please by spinning up your own little instance and just using it as an account hosting instance. Once again, by design.
I’m brand new and figuring out this Fediverse right now and it’s more complicated than push a button I’m on. That stops a lot of the tech averse idiots who seem by and large to be conservatives from showing up. It’s too complicated for them.
The premise is that it’s up to the admins of each instance to choose. Inherently in the design, nothing is globally allowed or not. And the less-preferable ideas will appear to fewer people because they will be defederated more often.
Fwiw, lemmygrad is defederated from many instances.
Politically speaking, the lemmy/fediverse would make a great PolySci thesus. There is no practical universal governance other than sharing the ActivityPub protocol. It is an interesting experiment in how humans behave. Each instance is like a country.
Yes, but no one is obligated to federate their shit, or host their shit.
Because the people who run the majority of instances are leftists. And despite my many grievances with marxist-leninist ideology and particularly with stalinism, I’d rather talk with tankies who at least claim to respect me as a minority than nazis who actively wish death upon me.
Leftism should be tolerated because leftism advocates for the rights of the workers. Leftism is the way the world can and should be. Whichever flavor of it, they’re all better than fascism. And wherever fascists will gather their sole purpose is to propagate hatred against minorities. Leftists are overwhelming welcoming and accepting of minorities. They are no threat to the acceptance of marginalized peoples.
My philosophy has been that If you hate people you’re never met, I hate you. Otherwise, let’s have a drink and talk out whatever the differences are.
The people who made abortion illegal in most of the United States have harmed millions of innocent people without meeting them.
Yeah, the concept behind the fediverse nests pretty well with leftist ideals, so it’s no surprise that leftism has thrived here. An open-source site that anyone can host, with no centralized power structure, and that openly promotes opening and administrating your own server? The idea behind it is inherently anti-fascist, because fascism relies on consolidating power so only an elite landed gentry are allowed to make decisions.
Eh… I have met enough far-left authoritarians who are openly racist, anti-lgbtq, and who advocated for violence against people solely based on their family background that I don’t think the extreme right has a monopoly on hate.
I don’t think that level of intolerance should be tolerated, regardless of whether someone is on the right or left of the spectrum.
You can’t be a fascist and not be bigoted. You can be a marxist-leninist and not as a rule hate minorities. I encourage you to go to lemmygrad yourself, see if you find any hatred of minorities being tolerated there. You just won’t.
I can coexist in a space with them, they’re not going to start calling for the genocide of minority groups. They will deny that genocides have happened, which to be clear is bad but there’s a fundamental difference between “these events didnt happen” and a fascist saying “let’s mass murder all the minorities because they’re biologically impure”. I can coexist in a space with one, with the other my murder or the murder of any other marginalized group is as a rule being outright advocated for.
No matter how hard you try tankies even at their worst are not fascists. To try and equate the two is beyond ridiculous. You can point out that some historical regimes have done a lot of horrible things, fair enough. But ideologically marxist-leninists are not comparable on any level to fascists.
I can not, and will never under any circumstances tolerate the prescience of fascism to any degree.
OP mentioned Holodomor, so I’ll just point out that ML’s generally don’t deny that there was a famine, or even that it was exacerbated by bad policy. The specific point of contention is whether it was intentional.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question
Even historians debate this, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to characterize it as “genocide denial”.
Yeah, they’re banned from lemmygrad. Rule 5:
Denying the Uyghur genocide is an act of bigotry, no different from denying the Holocaust of German Jews, yet such content is openly tolerated there.
I have too, but let’s be realistic, and accept the honest fact that in far left spaces, racism, homophobia, transphobia etc us far, far less acceptable than in far right spaces. I’ve hung out with hardcore marxists and despite not necessarily agreeing with their political takes I’ve never had to feel uncomfortable with my race or sexuality in the same way that even mildly right-leaning folks have made me feel.
Yes, I’m sure racism and homophobia exist on the far left, but it’s an extreme minority on that side compared to on the right where it’s a pretty mild take, and treating the two as remotely equivalent is very harmful in itself.
Try being an Uyghur in China, then, or a Ukrainian among Stalinists. You will not feel accepted.
Unless it’s racism against Asians, that’s rampant on the left.
I’d love to see any evidence of this
You’re not arguing in good faith at all. You don’t have any evidence, you just have wild accusations.
Just want to clarify, nowhere did I equate the two. I’m simply saying I personally wouldn’t tolerate intolerance regardless of the political ideology. The previous poster suggested that they didn’t see such type behaviors from far-left folks, I had a different experience.
I totally agree far-right ideologies are inherently intolerant.
I love “i know all right spaces are intolerant but ive know some bad leftists so they are exactly the same” 😩
What does “far-left” mean to you, then? If someone with views entirely counter to progressive ideas just calls themselves “far-left” while spewing hateful garbage, do you just accept that they are part of the left?
Politics isn’t team sports. Your political association is defined by your views, not by what side you claim to be on.
Then it’s just a “no true Scotsman” argument.
There are plenty of examples of leftist governments who were openly hostile to minorities.
Not really. If someone says “I am a woodworker” but you never see anything they make from wood, they have no woodworking tools, they don’t know about woodworking techniques, they don’t attend a woodworking club or job or class they’re just… not a woodworker.
People who claim to be leftists without doing the required actions aren’t leftists. Liking the aesthetics isn’t enough.
So was the USSR not a leftist government?
I feel like we’re going into the semantics of who is a “true” leftist.
Let us know when the ussr is doing anything modern. You just keep moving the goalposts.
It was not.
Sorry I missed this.
I feel like this is potentially a bait post but if I steel man you for the sake of civility and learning:
I am not the most knowledgeable about the USSR, my grandparents came from occupied poland and thus had certain opinions, that’s a large part of my exposure and likely biases me. That said, the revolutionary movement and corresponding government seems to have gone through many phases, and have expressed various degrees of leftism at various times. Was assassinating lots of people, forcibly occupying people, collaborating with nazi germany, and engaging in genocide very leftist? I would say definitionally no. Even for the time there was considerable pushback from other leftist personalities and organisations.
On the other hand for many, many people there was massive increases in freedom, prosperity, and rights compared to tzarist russia. Including my grandmother, who was allowed to hold a technical office job! wow! (until she moved to Australia and was forced to work in a factory and be treated like an idiot. Not wow).
This seems like one of those situations where trying to fit something into a simplistic box will inevitably break down. I feel comfortable saying the USSR accomplished both wonderful and terrible things, that overall it was probably better than tsarist russia but it fell short of the ideals that founded it.
If I met someone who say volunteered to feed the homeless, agitated for unionism at work, volunteered to educate disadvantaged people, but also thought I should be executed as a social deviant (I’m mega queer) I would probably call them leftist even while I thought they were massively misguided and extremely dangerous. I’ll note I’ve never actually met anyone like that though.
This is like saying “No true Scotsman was born and raised in Istanbul, speaks only Turkish, and has never even visited Scotland or ever mentioned being intereted in doing so.” For example, the “National Socialists” were not actually socialists even though they used socialist-like policies exclusively on an ethnic national basis, and no one serious is arguing that they were on the left. The left wing represents social equality and progressivism, while the right wing represents tradition and hierarchy. This has been the understanding of these terms since they were invented during the French Revolution.
And the left wing politicians during the French Revolution never prosecuted minorities in the name of the republic?
Damn, what happened to the entire Occitaian culture?
Oh wait, it was deemed an enemy of progress.
If you want to use that definition of left right from the French Revolution, fine, are they not “left” when they literally sat on the left side of the National Assembly?
Interesting point you bring up. You are absolutely correct about the consequences of the revolution and the involvement of hierarchical thinking of the Parisians towards the other ethnic groups around them. The Parisians who went and carried out the genocides may have believed that their actions conformed to “Liberty, fraternity, and equality” of the French people, but I’m not sure it was the logical conclusion to the ideology of the revolution, or the left. Looking back from my modern perspective completely out of context I would say these actions went against the professed ideology of the revolution before reality came in and complicated everything.
What I’m saying is that the left is the idea of progressivism and social equality, while the right is the idea of hierarchy and tradition. Actors who intend for progressivism and social equality can, due to the various pressures of the real world, can end up taking right wing measures as above. If someone supports the idea of tradition and hierarchy in the first place, I would not consider them left wing regardless of how they label themselves.
I can respect that.
Unless you’re Jewish, the far left has had a huge blind spot for anti-Semitism over the last few years.
You might be mistaking denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestininians as somehow anti-Semitic.
I’m not saying that all leftists aren’t bigots or that bigotry never happens in leftist spaces, but bigotry is the rule in fascist ones. Fascism is bigotry, it’s a core part of the ideology itself. For that reason they’re not comparable.
That sounds a little bit like the no true Scotsman argument
It isn’t at all a no true Scotsman argument, what are you talking about?
You can be a leftist and not be bigoted. Bigots also join the left, we can’t help that, but that’s because they personally are bigoted, not because the ideology is. In fact, most modern leftism argues that bigotry is fundamentally at odds with the core ideals, and in my experience a majority of the left, at least in English speaking countries, wants to distance these people.
You cannot be a fascist without being bigoted. Being bigoted is part of the ideology. It aims to spread and teach bigotry, that’s the purpose of it.
No true Scotsman would be “yeah but the anti Semitic leftists aren’t real leftists”, which isn’t what anyone said.
I disagree, but if we argue, it’ll go nowhere.
There’s not really anything to disagree with. What you’re calling a No True Scotsman isn’t a No True Scotsman argument in the slightest.
Can’t agree more. It’s amazing just how many posts I’ve seen since joining Lemmy equating the left and right, as if “workers should own the means of production” is just as bad as the literal genocide advocated by the hard right.
That said, given that lemmy.ml (and maybe latte.isnot.coffee?) is run by pro-CCP tankies, I think it’s worth taking a second to say that defending the genocide of the Uighurs is majorly fucked and the vast majority of hard leftists here on Lemmy vehimently oppose that.
But one can’t be hard-right and not be for genocide, basically. Not so on the left.
I always laugh at the term “far left” or “left extremism.” Like oh no stop it with all the equality and rights. No no anything but those.
The victims of the Holodomor were not treated as equals by their killers.
Left and right aren’t authoritarian or libertarian. The soviets were authoritarian and that’s why that happened. There’s no case to be made for equality and sharing resources to be a bad thing that could lead to something like that. It’s a problem with the implementation mainly the concentration of power that allowed authoritarianism. On the far right you have racism and suppression of “others” which clearly can lead to a nasty place very quickly.
The idea that the U.S.S.R. was socialist or communist, or that it’s controlling party was working to make it so, was propaganda that was convenient for both the U.S. (which was already deep in the throws of reaction against the left, and pretty much had been since its inception, and wanted to use it against its budding Cold-War enemy) and the U.S.S.R. (where leftist ideas were popular, so the government pretending to embody it was helpful to the state). It wasn’t. It was just a very widely-spread and useful authoritarian lie.
Fuck the far right in all venues and platforms.
But lemmygrad is already defederated by most instances
I guess there is nothing apart from people not wanting to hear a certain set of opinions and views. The mob speaks (as well as the instance admins), and those it speaks against gets defederated.
I really want to see a user set of instance blocking, so that I never see content from particular Instances. My common example is lemmynsfw.com should never be seen on… this… account
If you explicitly define what far-left and far-right means, you could probably have a straightforward answer. You mention holodomor skepticism and holocaust skepticism as some kind of far-left and far-right examples (unless I am misreading your comment), but I personally am not sure exactly what the holodomor was. I assume it was some genocide-level event perpetuated by the USSR, but I am not at all sure. Maybe my internet experience is in some kind of enclave composed of SF literature discussions, 8-bit computers and King of the Hill clips, but I really don’t run across holodomor skepticism at all.
Of course, I know what holocaust skepticism is (the denial that millions of Jews [and a whole bunch of gays and Christians and Roma peoples) were systematically killed by the German regime during WW2, as directed by Hitler), but that’s only because the types of people who would embrace (or worse) holocaust skepticism are feeling more emboldened by the current political climate.
Personally, I define far-left and far-right as being ‘armed militants’ and/or ‘large groups of people calling for the eradication of one or more types of people.’ ‘Types of people’, in this case, means ‘people who are born with a certain characteristic that is not changeable, such as race or sexuality’ Currently, we have armed militants protesting libraries (libraries, of all places!) but I have yet to see an armed militant demanding government-funded healthcare or seizing the means of production. Therefore, you will have to forgive me if I don’t buy into the ‘both sides’ equivalence that your post requires the reader to hold.
When the far-left becomes as bad as the far-right, we can (and should!) talk. Until then, miss me with that shit.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine; there is some argument as to whether the intent was to kill off Ukrainians to stifle their independence movement at the time, or if the greater USSR just didn’t care about them at all.
Regardless, most of the crops grown in Ukraine at the time were shipped out to other parts of the USSR, leaving little to eat in Ukraine, and causing millions of deaths. Total death count is also iffy, but certainly rivals the Holocaust.
Compare the Irish potato famine, where Britain enforced export of potatoes from Ireland despite widespread Irish famine. Same thing, larger scale.
I’m gonna be annoying and I know it, but I really hate that people equate the far left and the far right. What does the far left want? Destroy capitalism. What does the far right want? Kill all queer people and then some. For some people, the opposite of Nazism is Communism when these barely have anything to do with each other.
The far left can be annoying, sure. But in the end, the vast majority of them are not actively trying to justify mass murder. That’s a key difference. Also, one has dramatically more influence then the other. So the question should be:
Should the far right be an allowed part of Lemmy’s fediverse?
Which is a misunderstanding of the fediverse I think. We can’t forbid them to be anywhere on an open source and defedrated platform. We can however, ask if they should be tolerated? And that’s up to the various servers to decide.
Beehaw already has a stance on it, though: No. Hence the recent defederation. And I agree. Fuck Nazis.
This is my stance on it too. People like to treat today’s political environment as two sides of a coin diametrically opposed, but that’s not how political ideology works, it’s more nuance than that, like a sphere. I get why American’s do it with a two-party system, but that doesn’t mean you’re all in on one or another, people are more nuance than that too. People who run with this mentality that there are only two sides to politics often fall into the mistake of equating to two as equal sides as you said. It makes it hard to acknowledge the difference of the extremes and their intentions.
Though I think the biggest reason people are less tolerant the alt right is because there are more reasons outside of politics to be against the alt right. Outside of politics, alt lefties usually get into arguments with economist and capitalist because extreme leftist have intensions to change the economic landscape. Whether for better or worse is precisely what they’re arguing about. There’s also the more fringe alt left (tankies I believe) who will get in a tussle with historians and survivors alike, but their conversations chill out once they realize no one’s condoning anything (usually, idk all you tankies).
Meanwhile the alt right targets specific freedoms enshrined by the US constitution and the Human Bill of Rights. The alt right wants a say in who you marry, whether or not you should adopt, religious rule you should abide by, who should/shouldn’t get to vote, whether the vote should be decided by the people or legislator (you now Democracy and all), your identity, your medical decisions, your family planning, your education, and the very books you read. There’s a desire to snub out individuality if it doesn’t abide by the alt rights idea of “normal.” All of these stances directly invade individual rights of many people and their ability to pursue their respective happiness. While there’s political reasons to speak out against these stances, there’s also moral obligation and the simple instinct of survival pushing back on these perspectives. This creates a large group of people who not only disagree, but whose existence is literally threaten, there’s no room for tolerance when lives and freedom are on the line. The reason alt right has a tough time is because most Americans still hold age-old American values of liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
I mean, how scary is the far left? They want to feed too many hungry kids? Make healthcare affordable? Respect basic human rights? It seems disingenuous to compare the left to the right, I mean one side is too nice and the other wants to tear down democracy.
Damned communists wanting everybody to (checks notes) live in reasonable comfort, without fear of destitution and homelessness