does sh.itjust.works allow criticism of CCP?
I have seen that the lemmy.ml mods will openly ban discussion about the CCP. I am wondering if the sh.itjust.works team allows criticism of government bodies, while still banning racism.
Any government or governing body should be open to criticism. They are suppose to be working for the people they serve. How is anyone going to know better if no one tells them what they are doing wrong? @wriggly3171@sh.itjust.works you have my support
👆my dude this is yet another reason why I like it here
The dude abides.
Right on! So I have a question, if I posted something that got me banned from lemmy.ml (such as an article criticizing the CCP for example) I would just not have access to the communities on that instance right? Like it won't affect my experience in other instances right?
Yeah, it's not about levying criticism. It's about having an outsized agenda, arguing in bad faith, spamming the critiques where they don't below, trying to co-op a shared space to create an echo chamber, etc...
Let's find out: The CCP is committing genocide against the Uighur people
If I get banned, it wasn't worth being here in the first place.
Agreed.
totally agree, the ccp are evil
Adding the people of occupied Tibet to this.
Edited
*Occupied Tibet
Mao Zedong was a little piss baby who hid in the mountains while the KMT fought the Japanese.
The KMT was also bad and also definitely killed innocent people, in China and in Taiwan, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident
The KMT were brutal fascists and the communist parties around the world sacrificed more than canadians during world war 2 wtf is wrong with you... revisionist history to own who? If the kmt were powerful they wouldnt have gotten insta bozo'd by the CCP. Modern china is nothing to defend but youre weird, posting pro fash propaganda
I hope so, although it's not something I personally care too much about.
You've been banned from /c/memes 😎
farnsworth voice Oh my!
There's some talk about "a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately" in https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html, which struck me as odd.
Criticism of any governments should be allowed, especially authoritarian ones.
Yeah. This is kinda gaslighting:
We’ve also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism,
No. Anti-china posts are not racist. We all hate Hitler Germany. Does that mean we are racist against Germans?
This sentence is fundamentaly flawed and shouldn't exist in the documentation.
To push back on this a little: there's definitely historical precedent for anti-regime sentiment bleeding over into anti-populace sentiment. To use your example of WWII, a lot of the anti-Japan sentiment bled over to anti-Japanese sentiment in the US in the form of internment camps.
Of course this was in the 1940s and I like to think that we've become a little bit less racist now. But I've noticed a lot more racist "jokes" on Reddit as anti-China sentiment has risen. Don't get me wrong, we should still criticize China for its many human rights abuses and imperialistic practices as well as their violations of personal freedoms in their citizens etc. etc. but we should also be aware that these criticisms will be used by racists to justify their views and their actions, and call it out when it starts becoming more about the people than the government.
It's an absolute gaslight. He doesn't mention that the subs closed down supported authoritarian regimes and were a safe space for violence and extremism where members regularly advocated for it.
But yeah it's typical authoritarian/fascist gaslighting.
Anti-China posts can be racist. If someone is yelling about the Chinese government oppressing people, great.
But it sure does seem like people are out there fomenting FUD about China as China, not really in reference to particular policies or practices that need to change.
For example, in The New York Times's coverage of that time the US decided to try and ban people anywhere selling good GPUs and semiconductor stuff to people in China, it's all about "how effective will this be at preventing China from having things" and "how much will this cost Americans". Not "is this the right thing to do to best stop people in China from being oppressed" or "why should the US be in charge of who can make microchips".
You could say "we think China's government is going to use GPUs to abuse human rights" or "we think if China ever develops a halfway decent semiconductor industry they will immediately invade Taiwan", but often that kind of context seems to have been deemed irrelevant. People are just taking it as read that it is right and proper for the US to decide what industries Chinese people may or may not do, and how good at them they are allowed to be.
And I don't think they'd do that in the absence of racism.
It's from the people developing Lemmy the software, not the creators of independent instances like this one or lemmy.world and many others. I think there's not much to worry about since the software is open source and if they start to "leak" their ideologies/politics into the software (no idea how 😆), people will fork it quickly.
However I worry that this is so off-putting to some people that they stop doing anything to help Lemmy grow when they learn about the developers' politics. A good example is Lemmur, an Android app for Lemmy, whose author stopped further development on it, due to "lack of interest and political differences", which is sad.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/fucktheccp hasn't been banned yet, so I guess yes.
Also lemmygrad is blocked here. As a person born in eastern block, fuck communism and tankies.
just came over here after poking around some of the other instances and the quality increase from not having tankies brigading shit is truly amazing
What do you think of this video on Eastern Europe from my favourite Hungarian YouTuber?
I mean they are commiting a genocide so that's probably not great.
Yo, fuck the CCP!!!!!!! If sh.itjust.works doesn't like it I'm out
#fucktheccp
The great thing about Lemmy is that it's all decentralized. Lemmy.ml mods and admins can't do anything about other instances
Technically correct, much like you can't do anything about what your neighbour does in their own home.
However, what sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml can do is block 'bad server' communication.
They can also enforce rules on their own 'home' as it were.
Like Beehaw? Well, it mostly inconveniences their own users..
This is why I didn't make an account on lemmy.ml. I check to make sure instances I join have banned lemmygrad.
If I make an American instance would that help? I mean anyone can make an instance.
Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml are the two only instances where I encountered such criticism, so I assume that sh.itjust.works would allow it
Host is from Canada and the rules don't mention anything, so I would assume it's fine. Anyone know the host's account name to ask them?
Not sure yet how to ping an account, but his handle is TheDude. I'd really like to know his stance on this too.
Maybe try @TheDude?
The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism, but I always found the China obsession on reddit to be odd. While I don't think it should be banned outright, I think y'all ought to consider what is motivating such a weird fetish (because frankly that is) for a specific government.
I'm not a tankie and have no love for the government of China (or any government) but there is an extent to which criticism of China is deployed by xenophobes and nazis as a kind of socially acceptable rallying call or dog whistle. So, I'm all for criticizing China, but remember the allegory of the crustpunk bar
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522
I've always loved this allegory, but it can be applied to redfash as much as it can to xenophobes.
Thank you for posting that link, it was a good story.
To me the key is, is the person upset about other imperialist powers in the world?
If they hate the CCP but never seem to criticize the US or Russia*, I have my doubts about their motivations.
*the russia one is less effective a gauge since the war started though. It's now much more vogue to be anti-russia.
There are plenty of awful regimes around the world, but China is unique in how powerful and dangerous it is.
In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, which it has a stated intention of doing, then the TSMC chip fabs—the only place on Earth capable of mass-producing modern electronic circuits—will almost certainly be destroyed in the fighting, and that will cause a global economic depression that'll make 2008 look like a minor inconvenience. That's a huge global threat.
There's a crazy amount of sinophobia on Reddit, but let's be clear, the people who fervently defend the Chinese government are being just as disingenuous.
Yeah idk what could possibly be the motivator for that, I mean it's not like they're currently in the middle of any genocides right? Or posturing about invading a certain island neighbour? Nah no way, they'd never do that!
As i stated: "The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism"
There is a point at which the criticism becomes a weird fetish though, and that is something that was a common occurrence on reddit. Likely moreso tied to nationalist politics and rabble rousing foreign policy that I personally have a disdain for.
Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the cult nice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.
Shit's complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn't the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.
It really isn't that complicated. If Chinese politics is to be taken seriously, then there is a ton of low hanging liberal fruit for the picking. There is no reason for the Chinese legal system to not have public trial, for starters. There is no reason for China to censor the internet or speech or free association the way it does. And most importantly, there is no reason for China to not confront the very real sins of Mao and Deng in public.
I agree there is complexity which exists beyond this kind of stuff. But these are first principles for free society, and political agency, and should be taken seriously.
Exactly. Chinese capitalism is currently threatening American capitalism, so American media and american society more generally demonizes it. China is willing to offer cheaper loans to 3rd world countries than any western countries and banks like the IMF. Of course, this is still exploitative imperialism, but it is slightly less bad than the west. China. Of course, China treats its workers terribly, but it at least tries to reinvest the surplus it takes from those workers into domestic production and infrastructure. Tankies love to depict China as ontologically good because it opposes american hegemony and has a rapidly growing economy. They ignore its imperialism and domestic exploitation. Redditors, American exceptionalists, and their ilk depict China as ontologically evil, a threat to world peace, the most totalitarian country imaginable. They of course ignore the comparably bad conditions of America's puppet states and its domestic prison system. The reality is much more boring. Two capitalist nation states are fighting over their shares of the world market.
Why would they delete discussion like that? Are they waiting to IPO their Lemmy instance?
Kowtowing to the shitty chinese government is cowardice.
The Lemmy project openly describes itself in its public documentation as anti-US, and was apparently founded around the idea that Reddit is fundamentally anti-China and pro-US: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
The doc starts off talking about open source, but it quickly becomes clear that the Lemmy project is primarily political in nature.
To me this is concerning -- what happens when largely pro-US Reddit refugees swarm a community (community in the general sense, not the Lemmy sense) which was intended by the founders to combat those peoples views? Sure, instances and people can choose to ignore the lemmy.ml instance, but the founders control the project at a much deeper level than that.
Personally I hope that alternative implementations that are compatible with Lemmy arise, totally outside of the influence of the original founders. Yes there is kbin, but I actually prefer the Lemmy model (from what I've seen so far), and I think there would only be benefits of having another high quality implementation which is totally separate yet totally compatible with the original Lemmy. It would make the whole thing more resilient, and could be fertile ground for future improvements to flourish.
Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.
Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the "much deeper level"?
I'm a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.
Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.
I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder's comment histories (which I'd encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it's clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.
Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?
They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It's not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me -- if they don't like where things are going, maybe they'd feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.
I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.
I'm not sure why you think I'd have trouble believing that!
Criticising pro-US doesn't necessarily mean anti-US, you can be in the middle. Similarly, criticising anti-China doesn't necessarily mean pro-China. Praising when something good was really done and criticising when something bad was really done, you can achieve at least some level of unbiased, rational and reasonable opinion.
Censoring unfavourable speech is really common on all the big instances, always check that modlog to see what sort of content the mods are censoring. That's why I like burggit.
Let's see if this works: Adrian Zenz is a fascist.
Who is that? It's a cool sci-fi name.
Founder of the shill think thank "Victims of Communism" and close collaborator of the Falun Gong cult who is behind the vast majority of the reports on the Uygur situation. You make of that what you will.
Hey, tankie!