Just a little thought I wanna discuss.
Unlike the more massive social media or the real world where theres not many leftists and we are gladly more united Lemmy and its left leaning tendencies with the instances providing natural cult grouping tendencies. Add to that the matrix in groups there and we all seem to be making a thing out of how to anger each other. How to troll each other or annoy x or y instance.
I hate this.
Living in an extreme right wing nation I know no other anarchist. A few left wingers. Even the libs here are right wing extremists by the standards of a western nation. I hold dear any solidarity.
I support unions here even when everyone there is a religious fundamentalist who wants sharia law bc they still qantnto improve the conditions of the working class.
Many folks here, who again I don’t have any hate for, I see intending these fights and dramas. Having the goal to be banned from x or y community or instance.
- Why!?!?
- What do you gain?
- What is the desire here??
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It’s just tribalism. This is ingrained in us. Our group good. Other group bad. It’s survival.
Doesn’t make it right. Or logical. Best we can do is check ourselves when we have these thoughts or perform these actions. And to call out others who do it.
Yeah, having instance identities really does tap into that very strongly.
Nobody hates leftists like other leftists with a slightly different flavour of leftism. This is by tradition as long as the leftist discourse has been up. Plenty of people find it unthinkable with nuances or compromises even for communal goals that would benefit everybody.
Add to this that social media is inherently toxic and anonymity brings out the absolute worst in many people to spew hate for slight differences in opinion.
It’s too bad but I’d recommend you to not get caught up in it and don’t let it get to you. People are people and the chances that they will change in any foreseeable future are small. Keep doing what you think is positive and constructive and don’t let others make you disappointed.
I just feel like the parent in the room half the time lol
It would be interesting to learn something about the demographics on Lemmy.
I usually liken the bad vibes on Lemmy to being stuck with a bunch of cynical teenagers. Nothing is ever good enough, nothing good can happen. They know this with absolute certainty.
I am also probably older than average here.
I think some of it is intentional, and some are just taken along by that.
Also it’s always easier to throw rocks from the sidelines than to actually lead. It’s so much easier to find something wrong with everything than it is to try to figure out the right thing to do.
Plus nuance is always difficult. Better to just treat everything as back and white.
Amen.
Honestly, IRL or online, once that ‘my leftism is the only good leftism’ shit starts, I leave the community. I have no time for bigots and bullies in my life. No matter the flavor of their politics.
And I go find another group where they actually do good work, rather than sitting on their asses pontificating about how noble and good they are and how they need more minorities in the group to improve their brand image.
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Might be worth looking at the behaviour of so called leftists on Lemmy.
Many of them openly support and cheer for russia’s invasion of Ukraine and support summary killing of Ukrainians (“summary executions in Bucha [and beyond] is a BIA conspiracy!!!” is not a serious statement), openly state that Ukraine does not have the right to self-determination and generally support the extermination of Ukrainian culture, language and identity.
I am from Ukraine, from Donbas (Lugansk) no less. What sort of reaction do you expect when you see alleged leftists cheers for the total occupation of Lugansk by the Russians with BS like “Lugansk is free of da Nasizzz !1!1!”.
Or what about Jeromy Corbyn fanboys denying Corbyn’s open support for russian genocidal imperialism (keep in mind these type of things get reported in Ukrainian media)? The fucker literally worked for Russia Today (which is managed by russian intel) and cheered the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
As far as I am concerned, I hope all tankies meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley.
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
Is this an unreasonable reaction to disgusting tankies? What reaction do you expect?
Yeah, the support of a blatantly fascist/imperialist state like Putin’s Russia by self-described leftists is absolutely wild to me. I’m not convinced they’re serious people. Like, yeah, there’s some silly infighting between leftists online, but from my experience, it’s usually tankies saying some smug bullshit blanket statements and defending authoritarian douchecanoes.
You should leave any instance that is federated with the Triad, imo. Lemmygrad, Hexbear, and ML are all Russia sponsored/supported instances that should be shunned by Lemmy as a whole.
I have Lemmygrad and Hexbear blocked. ML still has a few communities that need to move off ML.
FWIW, I actively mod/curate several communities that have become vibrant alternatives to the original (half dead) ML variants.
I actually joined Threadiverse via ML (did think the domain and their application was strange but didn’t think too much about it) and then I realized Dessalines also admins Lemmygrad and he is a scumbag; of course I left ML ASAP.
I am generally doing my part to move over to Piefed, which also has a lot of cool features and better devs.
Yeah, I am on .World which for some reason still federates with .ml. I’ve moved over to Piefed on Desktop, just not on mobile yet.
Ha, don’t worry, they do it for free!
Agreed. I’m anti-authoriatiran first and a leftist second. I’ll gladly overlook disagreements on most policy for the sake of unity, but I won’t overlook authoritariansm.
openly state that Ukraine does not have the right to self-determination
It was my understanding that the USSR insisted that its constituent republics were independent. Maybe the tankies need to revisit that.
So independent that Moscow could extract all food supplies from Ukraine to create a horrific man-made famine.
The fact of the matter is that tankies don’t believe in self-determination or democracy (the few who are not shitposting and/or engaging malicious demagoguery).
Right wingers will be like, “Well he’s racist but we agree on taxes and the gays so he’s all right with me.”
Left wingers will be like, “We disagree on one of the 100 most important issues to me, therefore you are my enemy!”
“I’d rather die alone shot down by a fascist than teaming up with this pal that do not share 100% of my vision on what this dead dude did 100 years ago”
In my experience, we don’t have quite that many leftists trying to rile each other up. What often happens is that some people want to character assassinate some others due to previous dislikes or because they oppose one of their core beliefs, so they try to blow up any “impurities” they can find in order to turn people against them. You can see it with people who get short term bans from leftist places and then get into year-long grudges.
Generally I would suggest people start ignoring people who constantly post and try to stir up drama about whole instances or specific subgroups of lemmy users. For example, I dislike intensely, like threads.net, hilariouschaos and lemmygrad and yet you don’t see me constantly opening drama threads about them.There’s some caveats in this statement, but it by and large, it applies imho.
Yeah ‘my honor has been slighted and so i must now escalate’ is quite common.
Character assassinations too.
But yesterday we had 2 fellow dbzer0 folks do this very trolling/ baiting. Which they also planned in the matrix channel. I think I instantly made clear I strongly disliked that. So did the community. And there was an apology luckily.
But we both know there’s one provocateur there. Who I personally always have had lovely chats with. But someone who likes to go looking for trouble.
And thats not an isolated case. Many similar profiles I’ve seen.
I know the “provocateur” you’re talking about, and I’ve never seen them go to troll others outside their own space. I also haven’t seen many similar profiles either.
There’s a lot of .ml users that make accounts on db0 because so many instances blocked .ml and their users.
db0 also doesn’t do much to stop their instance from being abused like this.
Any examples?
Now this I haven’t seen at all
Libs claim tankies make sockpuppets in our instance, tankies claim libs make sockpuppets in our instance. It’s just inability to comprehend the anarchist perspectives
Ive never seen non anarchists capable of understanding the anarchist perspective. Its like theres some mental block preventing it.
And not just on Lemmy. Just generally, unimaginable idea for people
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What instances block .ml that I’d be upset to miss?
There’s a lot of people out there whose goal is to feel morally superior, rather than change the world in any way.
They tend to congregate at the extremes both left and right. Anywhere when they can loudly judge and exclude others.I work with this by feeling morally superior to people with un-nuanced opinions.
I wonder if I can start a movement…
I’m not a fan of the infighting either. It’s a very online kind of tribalism. I’m pretty active in anarchist organizing where I live and routinely have people from all sorts of tendencies showing up to help out without it devolving into a struggle session over factional infighting from a hundred years ago.
Just from the time I’ve spent here it seems like it’s specifically the people occupying the centrist liberal positions who are most invested in fostering a culture of leftist infighting
Talking of the tribalism. How come an anarchist is on .ml
Is the experience there OK?
It was the first lemmy account I set up and I haven’t bothered to change it! I had figured the developer instance would get updates the fastest. I like that it can access hexbear db0 and blahaj and I haven’t run into any issues beyond the occasional sectarian post.
I have tried to talk to anarchists here, as I feel there is potentially something to it, but it always ends up with “read this and shut up libtard”-like posts. A shame, we should welcome different opinions and angles seing things, not always try to “convert” everyone to some very specific thing. IMO.
you have been pretty anti-communist every time we’ve intracted, on top of calling me a tankie. not surprised you’re having trouble with people welcoming your different opinion
You are a tankie though.
In what substantive manner (real world issues) are you different from a stereotypical tankie?
In this very thread you bring up “approved narrative” in context of russian genocidal imperialism. This is comically stupid (and very ironic) for anyone that knows russian and has lived there.
You even bring up “workers dictatorship” in a seemingly serious manner. There have never been any worker’s dictatorships, just some thugs dominating everyone else with some communist styled marketing and PR.
PS. If you’re not a pro authoritarian please accept my apologies.
If you want to find out if they’re an actual tankie, just look for anything related to Russia or China. They out themselves pretty quick, usually.
Can you elaborate? has tankie been reduced to pejorative shorthand for ‘isn’t repeating the approved narrative’
Just read these 14 books from 1930 if you want to have an opinion. No, I can’t summarize anything from them. They can only be understood in their entirety.
All hail Putin, Xi.
Seems like a caricature rather than someone that’s actually around.
I really don’t see anyone of consequence on lemmy being like ‘no Putin is good actually.’
One example, I was reading a hexbear (allegedly tankie central) thread a while back where they were shitting on the CPRF for receiving praise from Putin for their support of the SMO. (ie saying that they were losers that lenin would have had shot, and that they’re not communist)
Oh I see, it is I who have to “welcome a different option”.
Most of “communism” here on lemmy is either hardcore stalin/lenin/mao authoritarian ruling or it is some sort of workers dictatorship. What’s not to criticise? And when you try to discuss you get downvoted and people act aggressively, or so I feel.
I also does not know what that has to do with anarchism?
Oh I see, it is I who have to “welcome a different option”.
reread my comment, not what I said. Maybe if you’re less quick to call people tankies you might not get called a liberal in response.
I consider a workers dictatorship to be a lesser evil compared to the dictatorship of capital we live in currently.
I also does not know what that has to do with anarchism?
To put it simply, anarchists want to abolish hierarchy, communists want to abolish private property. They overlap when you want both. Liberals tend to oppose dismantling both of those things.
Okay, like I’d love everyone getting together well, but I know it won’t happen, but I can still try, and maybe make the world a little better.
Your ideas are absolutists, there is no possible gradation, and even taken one by one they are insane idea that has never worked, and you want both? How is that even going to work? No property, no rulers, I mean good luck with that.
It’s just not possible to have a serious conversation here, so I wish you luck!
Cheers
Edit: well look at all that civilised discussion right here! Ah no? Only anonymous downvotes without any reason? Who would have thought…
you: “It’s impossible to have a serious conversation here, so I wish you luck!”
me: okay, I won’t bother responding
you: “woe is me, nobody responded, only downvotes”
idk what you expected tbh
Well I did hope for an answer, but all I got was victim blaming.
If you can’t say, respectfully, what you think, how do you think there could be a meaningful excange of ideas?
For what I have understood: you roughly think all actual existing government are bad, police is bad, banks are bad, enforcing rules are bad, having your own things are bad.
If that’s so, how is your society suppose to do anything productive or useful?
Lemmy attracts personalities that don’t get along with IRL communities.
Hey, I don’t speak for anyone here, but this isn’t a problem. Decentralization is a means to an end, not a desirable state in and of itself. Federated networks being separate from each other is fine. I feel this has been a critical misunderstanding among advocates of open source social media.
Honestly, best experiences I have had on ActivityPub were replacements for a group chat of 40-200 persons, not an attempted replacement for Twitter. (Also crucially not on a Mastodon fork but stuff like Akkoma.)
Since this app is clearly for some people a replacement for the general mechanics of websites like Stack Overflow, HN, and Reddit, and for other people meant to be a direct fork of specific Reddit communities, it makes sense to me that the networks would diverge completely, though it seems it hasn’t happened yet.
What really kept me from using Lemmy is the poor integration with Mastodon. It’s not a UI thing. Mbin and Kbin were a step in the wrong direction by furthrt splitting the UI between two types of posts that are the same under the hood
Tribalism. Humankind haven’t progress beyond the instincts of having in-groups and out-groups.
Until that happens, there will be discrimination. People would see things in black and white instead of understanding there are shades of gray between.
Reminds me of ‘Why I hate being left’ https://youtu.be/O-qcXpapsoY
I’m kind of surprised to not see this answer, so I’ll throw it in: it seems to me that there are a lot of people from various countries who have built-in language for politics that they believe is shared across the world - but it isn’t.
As a dumb American, I’ve always been a liberal because that was the inclusive, progressive, luxury-gay-space-communism option as opposed to the conservative, regressive, racist, ignorant violent option. People from other countries don’t seem to appreciate that at all, because their “liberal” is what we’d call neoliberal or corporate Democrat, and they apparently don’t have a FPTP / Slaver’s College fix on their elections and they just don’t grok the two party thing.
As you can imagine on here there’s a lot of hate from both conservatives and leftists for “liberals”. I think that’s ridiculous but it’s usually easier to try and adopt their definitions than to explain why the other 379,999,999 of us don’t use it that way. (Well - 350M, say. Parts of the PNW use it that way too.). It’s just kind of exhausting in threads about American politics.
If someone calls me a “liberal” (or libtard, libcuck, etc) I naturally assume they’re racist, fascist, AM radio fuckwits. But then they want to jump into some world where H4A, UBI, No Oil is what they’re all about and once again I’m like - well, yeah we agree, again. So.
(Usually the retort is, “well then why are you a liberal?!” Which. Goes back to the exhausting thing.)
The most important point of unity for the left is the economics. Political identity must be defined by being the proletariat first and foremost.
When you have people who break that, well their place is questioned.
Mmm hmmm. Yeah. Yes.
So an American proletariat is . . . Anyone who is limited by health insurance, student loans, and mortgage rates? Or is it something else?
We don’t really use the word proletariat, uh, at all. Ever.
In a very basic sense (and this may very well be debated but to explain it simply I’ll say): anyone who doesn’t own their own labour, as in you work for someone else.
That’s pretty much every liberal I know, yeah.
Well. I know some house painters I guess. They don’t work for someone else, per se.
Yeah being part of smth and identifying as smth are two separate things.
I’m a man, straight, brown, proletariat etc. The question is what part of that do I see as the most fundamental part of my identity or politics.
Hm. Well, that’s interesting.
This is also where the concept of alienation in the Marxist sense comes in. He took Hegel’s framework, which Feuerbach and Bauer had used to analyse religion and he applied that to law and economics.
So this Marxist alienation which is in the Hegelian tradition is worth reading.
Now alienation can interestingly also be a desired outcome in leftist movements as the French existentialists talked about.
We also have a third brand of alienation in Buddhism etc.
Some want it some hate it.
I’m with Marx on this one.
If you are interested I can find some introductory article for you to take a look at.
To me as a European, posts and comments about US politics can be very confusing. There’s the different interpretation on the word liberal you mentioned. There’s also the fact that the colours are reversed: here red is for the left - socialists and communists - while blue is the liberal right (not so much conservative right, though there are conservative subgroups of the “blues”). And there’s the fact that they often assume familiarity with political events and people unknown to me.
Somewhat related: posts and comments from the far and extreme left are often even more incomprehensible. They seem to have their own language entirely.
Lemmy has been enlightening in teaching me these things but yes - different!
Liberalism has an actual definition. Neoliberalism is a subset of liberalism. Either way, neither position is socialist and both are capitalist. That’s the distinction. That’s always been the distinction. Leftist politics is distinctly anti capitalist.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism’s contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources. And most of the social stuff was being advocated by leftist groups in the west for years before they became popular enough for the mainstream, liberal parties to embrace.
I’m an American. Conflating liberalism with leftism is a media game that has successfully ensured the Overton window does not shift left. It reveals the mass political ignorance here. Of the policies you’ve listed, only H4A is arguably socialist.
You can understand the two party system and make decisions to support certain candidates/policies in an election without identifying as a liberal.
To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism’s contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources.To leftists, liberalism, even progressive liberalism, can never address the material concerns for workers, inequal accumulation, and capitalism’s contradictions because it cannot attack the central tenet of its ideology: the private ownership of land and resources.
Well put, and yes I’d agree. Where I seem to draw the ire of leftists is when I point to the clock and say we have one year before we have to vote, and all things being equal we’re going to vote for the Democrats because attacking the central tenet of this country’s dominant ideology is not going to happen in this election cycle.
The 2024 Presidential election threads were a depressing reminder that some leftists can’t get out of their heads, or ivory towers, or whatever to make incremental progress because the glorious revolution is at hand. Or something. So I get to be the evil liberal who wants healthcare for all, student loan forgiveness, and a Green New Deal. And all of those things go down the shitter because republiQans vote as a single juggernaut bloc and we don’t.
I can say so much fked up shit on tiktok and it gets appealed, anything leftest/liberal gets auto removed with no appeal
I wonder how James Rehwald and Lady Izdihar manage to survive on TikTok then.
most other SOCIAL media, astroturfs left leaning communities with right wingers. its very hard to find them. and likely most of them were banned on other SC media.
I’d like to share my offline perspective here. All online spaces are kind of heightened versions of the discourse, Lemmy less so than other places but it’s still there.
In the real world leftists are generally kind and empathetic people who genuinely want to do good. It’s nice when you find another leftist, I have friends who are various flavours of anarchist and socialist and even some real life, genuine, aging commune hippies now living in town. There is no animosity and we would basically all agree on local direct action or local politics. In my experience even most liberals are just naive rather than genuinely holding counterproductive political beliefs.
It can feel very lonely but you’re not alone.
I agree it can get extremist. I’m left in some areas, right in others so I just keep my opinions to myself. I’ve found generally when I say anything that isn’t extreme left I get some nasty comments. It’s a shame cos I love balanced and reasonable conversations with people.
