I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.

I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

  • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
    32·
    5 months ago

    Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.

    I don’t want to get in the merit of the comment, but unless you see the future, this statement is simply not true. Your argument is simply based on accepting certain assumptions as true.

    Coincidentally this argument is routinely used by people supporting american atrocities, who consider nuking hundreds of thousands of people the humanitarian solution to WWII.

    To be clear, I don’t agree with that line of moderation, I don’t agree with most of the views that seem to characterize .ml, but it’s a year that people make posts like this one, you can’t tell me you don’t understand the ban based on the above.

      • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
        41·
        5 months ago

        History is about what happened. “Otherwise it would” is speculation.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          And even after the nuclear bombs, there was an attempted coup to stop surrender.

          Prior to the bombs, there was no chance of surrender.

          That is history.

          • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
            31·
            5 months ago

            And where is the count of deaths in the different timeline?

            Look, my point is simple: human history is not deterministic and we simply can’t know what happens tomorrow like if we were predicting the laws of phisics. Maybe there were other 100 different course of actions leading to as many outcomes.

            You can analyze what happened, but it’s foolish to say “this was better because the alternative would have led to”. You can only analyze and discuss what happened, otherwise anything can be justified with “it wouldn’t have been worse”.

            “this genocide was good, because without it the oppressed population would have led to civil war and many more deaths”.

            • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              You think the nuclear bombs were a genocide?

              Seriously, who “taught” you this stuff?

              I am genuinely curious where people presented all of this stuff you’re saying as history.

              Like, it’s almost like the only thing you know about civilian deaths in WW2 was American dropped nukes.

              There’s sooooo much that you’re missing. But unless you dropped out of school at a very young age, I can’t be the first person that tries to explain this to you

              So where are your opinions coming from?

              Is this a thing where you learned everything you know about a subject from YouTube videos?

              If so…

              Why?

              • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
                11·
                5 months ago

                I just made an example of speculating on future occurrences to justify concrete actions that instead happened. In fact, the entire comment was about the general idea of considering history deterministic, not about the specific atomic bomb event…

                • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  Bruh, you need to not speculate on things you have no idea about

                  But clearly you don’t care about what actually happened, so I’ll stop trying to explain basic shit to you now.

                  • sudneo@lemm.eeEnglish
                    11·
                    5 months ago

                    You need to learn what abstraction is, my friend. I am not speculating. Quite the opposite. I am saying that you like to think the world works according to precise laws that you can use to predict the future. This is why you are arguing in multiple comments that “they would have…”, as if people are NPCs with 3 different behaviors and the outcomes are predetermined so it’s just a matter of choosing.

                    The reality is simple: you, me, nobody can know for sure what " would have happened" if history happened differently. This is a methodological issue, not a discussion on the merits of your speculation.

                    I don’t know if nuclear bombs caused less deaths than the millions of other potential courses of actions, and neither do you, neither does anybody else. I don’t know if Israel wiping off Gaza from the map potentially saved thousands of lives in future conflicts. You see the problem?

                    Now, before assuming that everyone else is an idiot and that you are the only smart one in the room, you might want to try a little harder to understand the point of your interlocutor, considering we are also discussing in what (I assume) is your native language but not mine. If you didn’t understand so far that my critique is in the method, not in the merits, of your claim, then I agree, there is nothing to talk about.