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.
Lemmy is a federated platform run by instance owners. Owners have full power regarding moderating their servers including delegating that power to others. The owners can decide which other owners are censored through defederation. Lemmy, by design, is not free from political struggle. Lemmy handles power better than platforms like Reddit where server ownership is centralized.
Denying crimes against humanity is foul. Owners decide which ideas are promoted and which are denying history through federation with owners. Spaces for denying crimes against humanity will continue to exist. I would like to be in those spaces as a thorn to remind others of their awful ideas and possibly present better ideas.
Under present conditions someone must own the hardware to run the server. The owner cannot reasonably allow all content. Constituents of an instance place trust in the owner to censor in a transparent and responsible manner. Those same constituents can leave an instance for violating trust with regard to censorship. Freedom of association is an important component of Lemmy.
Far right and far left are a spectrum. I describe myself as an anarchist which is considered far left. As an anarchist, I see the fediverse as a possibility space for democratic control and power distribution over horizontally aligned hierarchies. I am excited for the possibilities to end domination heirarchies. My political alignment is tangent to the systems for power established by Lemmy.
Well said, all of it.
There’s nothing the Fediverse as a whole can do to prevent extremism, by design; what we can do is choose not to interact with it, or to interact antagonistically with it
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.
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 keep seeing these posts about whether something should be “allowed”, and keep asking myself how people could so fundamentally misunderstand the fediverse when I’ve only been here a month and can see this is a silly question.
How are you going to stop an open source, federated community from having instances where far right or far left stuff happens? You can’t. All you can do is decide who you federate with on the instance you own. So join an instance who is careful about its membership and defererates instances that have far right or left activity. That’s all you can do.
There is no “king of the fediverse” making decrees about what is/is not allowed.
Are you actually wondering out loud whether we should allow Holocaust denial here? You might be in the wrong place.
Just asking a question, huh? Second one of these threads I’ve seen in my feed today.
Neocons testing the waters, to see how far their hatespeech will get them.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t Truth Social (Trump’s thing) technically part of the fediverse, since it runs on Mastodon? I don’t know if they’re a far-right equivalent of lemmygrad since I haven’t spent time on either but it seems like a fair parallel.
Personally I’m not a fan of eager defederation. I’m skeptical of the benefits of deplatforming and I think that casual use of the banhammer, even if the subjects deserve it, is corrosive to our own ability to think clearly.
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.
Good to define terms for this. Does extreme left mean people who think that a living wage should be a thing? To fox news it does.
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.
