Does lemmy.world allow criticism of the CCP?
Apparently there's an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Well let’s find out: Free Ukraine! Fuck Russia. Fuck China!
Mao Zedong is objectively one of the worst people in all of human history, and his influence held China back for decades, and continues to harm it to this day.
You know, I agree that he shouldn't have collaborated with America's foreign policy following the sino-soviet split, but I don't think that even puts him as a major candidate in the running.
Edit: He also really should have given the sparrow thing a test run, and there are other criticisms to make, but these are still lesser than the original one. There was bad theory and bad practice in the Cultural Revolution, but overwhelmingly its biggest problem was endangering the revolution that Mao led to establish the PRC in the first place, something for which he deserves credit on account of poverty reduction, drastic increase in life expectancy, land-redistribution, etc. Oh yeah, and the whole "opposing Japanese and British colonialism" thing, since the KMT rolled over for that, but hopefully that goes without saying.
i mean lemmy.world server is in germany, but the guy who runs it is dutch so probably has a pretty open policy with freedom of speech i would imagine. And i mean real freedom of speech not the dog whistle for being a dick/racist/phobe
Doesn't Germany have laws against certain hate speech? Would those laws apply to lemmy.world and it's hosted content?
[IANAL] In Germany only specific types of hate speech are criminal. These are:
Other forms of hate speech might be cause for civil suits or may oblige the platform provider to remove your speech, but do not rise to a criminal offence.
Again: I am not a lawyer.
All governments should be able to be criticized if we're going to be honest about having genuinely open discussions.
Seeing as having the ability to criticize gov'ts is a fundamental part of democracy I fail to see why any social media site would think banning it should be best-practice.
That said I do take issue with some posters who seem to rant on a specific target without any sort of evidentiary data. The slide into "I don't need proof to back my opinion" is a prolific and dangerous thing these days.
There are a few assumptions here. One: Criticism (in the context you mention) implies a desire to see the object of discussion improved rather than destroyed. Two: Criticism of "governments in general" rather than specifically one's own government is vital to democracy. Three: That moderation is being done based around whether something is criticism or not rather than it being backed by evidence or not.
As applied to our situation, all of these are overwhelmingly false and one need only look at this thread to understand that.
Its always difficult separating held beliefs from personal or social identity. Evidence for or against something is rarely enough to get someone who has an identity tied to a belief to change thier opinions or not react out of a fight or flight response.
I think setting and enforcing boundaries regularly while not ostracizing or demonizing people is a better way to approach it. Its hard, takes time, and isn't guaranteed to work; but it comes from a place of tolerance and acceptance rather than condemnation.
I agree wholeheartedly that letting rants go on unchallenged is a big issue, it provides a rallying point for others with similar beliefs and pushes the boundary back away from accountability and discussion and towards emotional and fear based outbursts. Do you think there is room for healthy discussion here on the fediverse and specifically in this instance?
Let's find out.
Fuck the CCP.
Hey there. This instance currently follows the code of conduct and rules for mastodon.world: https://mastodon.world/about
Discussion and civil criticism of these subjects is allowed, but name calling, ad hominem attacks, and other uncivil behaviour breaks the rules.
Also remember that specific communities here may have additional rules.
It looks like we can't pin comments yet, so apologies if this reply gets buried. For now I'm going to lock this post, as the discussion has degraded and is full of rule-breaking.
Have you ever actually watched the video? Really makes you think 🤔
Just a couple of days I got over 800k views for posting ⚠ A MAN HAS BEEN SPOTTED PROTESTING IN LEGO CITY ⚠. Now deleted, or maybe on privat.
Just imagine how much interesting and actually usefull information will be gone just because of a selfish CEO..
Really makes me think why you'd spend time defending a government massacre of 1500-4000 protesters, with 10,000 injured.
Haven’t had any problems so far! Taiwan numbah one! Fuck Putin!
Lemmy.World and Lemmy. Ml are two different places. Lemmy ML was created as a safehaven for people from subreddits that were banned like ChapoTrapHouse. Lemmy. World is designed to be the general Lemmy Community. Lemmy. Ml was the biggest until the reddit issues but I am pretty sure Lemmy World is after overtaking them. Lemmy.ML is trying to steer traffic here because they know that their community wasn't going to be palatable to the vast majority of people. There's a wide variety here so it's very hard to pinpoint where this place's userbase stands politically.
Lemmy. ML and Lemmy.world are different places and it's for the best if we just leave each be and have our own communities in peace.
If you check out the instance sidebar, we're basically running on the same rules as mastodon.world (presumably until such time as we need something more Lemmy-specific)
It's difficult for people to have discussions on the internet that involve disagreement without it becoming uncivilized. I don't think being critical of the CCP is a particularly divisive viewpoint everywhere outside of China. I can't imagine the conversation devolving to such a state that it has to be completely banned from being discussed.
What do you suppose Cubans think of China?
I like China :)
Indeed, many Chinese people are very nice. Interesting language, culture, and cuisine.
But fuck the CCP.
The Romans are great! They build these seriously sturdy roads and aqueducts, promote trade, and they have some literature and stuff. It's too bad that they're in the habit of enslaving people and occasionally mass crucifixions.
Huh, I didn't expect this to be controversial.
My point was, a civilization can do a lot of awesome things and a lot of shitty things. Pointing out that the Romans mass-crucified enslaved people following the Spartacus revolt isn't anti-Italian bigotry. Correctly stating that the US state where I was born was founded as a white-separatist colony is not anti-Oregon bias; it's simply true.
The government of China does some massively awful & unjust things; but Chinese people are still ~1/6 of the humans and probably ~1/6 of the awesome humans too.
I love China, and have a generally positive opinion about their government. I'd say 70% positive and the other 30% is because I hate oppression and censorship.
Edit: Deng was the GOAT
You can actually use https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ to get an idea of how free a particular lemmy instance is thanks to the option to show blocks. Lemmy.world seems to be the only large instance that has not been blocked by or blocked any other instances
Slightly tangential question, is lemmy.ml a Marxist/Leninist instance? I had seen some users insinuate that but I have no fucking clue if they were just saying shit.
A lot of those insinuations come from neoliberals who are mad that neoliberalism isn't given privileged treatment there like it is on Reddit.
So, the creators of Lemmy itself (and it's "home" instance lemmy.ml) are Marxist/Leninists (otherwise known as "tankies").
However, they have been smart enough to contain the most virulent tankie bullshit over in LemmyGrad.ml, which most big instances have specifically disconnected themselves from.
They also seem to be pretty hands-off in terms of censorship/banning/belittling "libs" on lemmy.ml and have kept it pretty open. For instance, I created a LeftistInfighting community and have been allowed to express anarchist views there. (I created it because I was immediately banned from LemmyGrad, which had its own LeftistInfighting community that I had the audacity to engage in and link to wikipedia in a comment)
I don't know of any as long as it is in the correct community.
Yes it does and is
CCP makes ice cream right?
banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments
Please stop trying to smear other instances and their operators with these lies, leave the behavior that contributed to ruining Reddit there or just go back if you insist on doing it.
They were banned for orientalism which breaks rule 1 of the instance as explained here, there's plenty of criticism of China on lemmy.ml that you can find on c/politics and c/worldnews
I think it's pretty obvious this user was asking this question because they genuinely don't know. Maybe stop jumping on people's asses and having assumptions about their intentions. You could have just said the last part of your sentence and that would have answered their question.
some of these orientalism claims seem less than genuine
Keep it in the politics subs.
But I hope there is less censorship, it was a shame that lemmy.ml removed this well-sourced comment (and banned the user) -
You couldn't have cherry-picked a more inflammatory comment to defend. Truly such a shame that people who misrepresent data for the sake of their anti-trans stances have their obvious rage-bait posts removed.
Wow, that's insane. How is the discourse going to be going forward if high effort replies like that one get removed and gets the user banned
It isn't high effort. It's a bunch of canned "gender critical" arguments that we've all seen a thousand times before combined with arbitrarily dismissing all of the evidence in favor of gender affirming care for kids using specious reasoning and then citing long debunked studies like the "80% desistance rate" one.
Their bias is even more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the first study they cite isn't hosted on any legitimate source of medical science, but on "transgendertrend." That demonstrates that they didn't find their data via PubMed or Google Scholar or anything, they found it by looking for cherry picked medical studies from people with an anti-trans agenda.
It's transphobia and perpetuation of misinformation disguised as a polite conversation. It's the same level of "discourse" as "blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the crime."
Edit: not only is it arbitrary and awfully convenient for cherry-picking purposes to leave out longitudinal studies of mental health, since mental health is what's at stake here, and "objective" measures are susceptible to many confounding variables and often not relevant, and standardized tests of mental health are regularly used to ascertain the efficacy of many procedures related to psychology, there are also studies that use "objective" measures such as the ones he wanted, where applicable. Here's one that's somewhat infamous due to one of the young adults getting a fatal complication from a surgery, but such surgeries are not performed on minors, and are not particularly dangerous, so it's largely irrelevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25201798/. Here's a list of 16 studies on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/political-minds/202201/the-evidence-trans-youth-gender-affirming-medical-care.