Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
YSK: There are countless posts by “concerned” users shrieking about tankies. What is the point of these “informational” posts? Looking to stamp out opinions you don’t like so you can turn the fediverse into astroturfed-to-hell-and-back reddit 2.0?
Okay but this isn’t “oh no, there are tankies around”, it’s the admin of one of the largest Lemmy instances systematically suppressing information about massacres and genocide.
There’s quite a big gap between banning “opinions you don’t like” and defederating from a systemically auth-left instance, in the same way that defederating from an auth-right instance would be a no-brainer.
There is a big gap between auth-left and auth-right thought. Auth-right thought imposes violence as an inherent part of the ideology because it promotes the idea of racial supremacy, they have to actively commit violence to achieve their goals. Auth-left uses violence on perceived threats to their order, not based on features people are born with. I do not agree with China’s actions on Tiananmen Square or their treatment of Uyghurs, but these two things are definitely used by the US as a fulcrum to attack China.
Do you not find it odd how much importance is placed on Tiananmen Square after all these decades? Do you not find it odd how hard the US hammers the point of the Uyghur genocide while at the same time fully funding and supporting the genocide of Palestinians? The tactic is to flood communication channels with propaganda to achieve domination over the narrative and this is the sort of thing we’re seeing here with countless posts about tankies. Why are we supposed to take American narratives as gospel to shut down opposing narratives?
Bold to go with the pro-auth-left take
I’m just going to ignore the long responses to stuff I didn’t claim in the first place
And? I’m not a tankie and not a marxist. Hell, I’m not even a socialist. Hell, I identify as a leftist, but I bet lots of folks would tell me I’m nothing of the sort. But I’d rather be on an instance with folks to the left of me than to the right (to the very, very minimal degree that I care about who else is on my instance). I don’t remember why I didn’t sign up for .world, but at the end of the day does it really matter?
The only impact I’ve seen are smear posts like this one, and folks who dismiss opinions if they see a user is from .ml. shrug If that’s as far as folks can look, I’m not interested in talking with them anyway.
I have hexbear blocked in my own settings; if folks want to block .ml that’s no skin off my nose. Ain’t respecting user freedoms great?
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev,
So I see you are on a Lemmy instance. If we’re going to smear instances based on the politics of their devs, I’d think you wouldn’t want to use ANY Lemmy instance.
Nothing wrong with holding a political stance, but they routinely ban people for specious reasons. With some of the biggest communities on .ml this is a problem for the growth of Lemmy.
Nothing wrong with holding a political stance, but they routinely ban people for specious reasons.
OP should have left the politics and personal smears out of it then and opened a discussion about moderation practices. And as OP points out, the person he’s primarily smearing is the main Lemmy dev. What’s the endgame there? Trying to get the main dev thrown off his own project?
OP should have left the politics and personal smears out of it then and opened a discussion about moderation practices
That’s… exactly what OP did, though. Did you even read the post?
To brand the lemmy.ml as the censorship hell that it is.
Please don’t conflate tankies with leftist thought. They are not leftists. They are fascists with strong ties toward fascist regimes that are “known” to actively usurp elections around the globe.
A good metric is: a very hardline Communist might have an argument for why effectively slavery is ethical because social and economic planning requires people to engage in jobs they actively do not want to do. I personally consider that the reason that Communism can never work at scale but that is a discussion that needs to be had.
A tankie will just justify anything that China or Russia do. Usually with an attempt to deflect by pointing out something the US or, increasingly, certain EU countries did.
But, regardless: There is another issue with your “just let everyone taolk it out” nonsense. Because the ml moderation team(s) and admin staff have increasingly been using mass bans and false claims of xenophiobia to shut down anything that is not tankie bullshit. So there is no discussion. Just one sided propaganda in some of the largest communities on lemmy.
To expand on the moderation strategy a bit. A LOT of people who aren’t increasingly of one nationality and ethnicity have a lot of problems with ResetEra’s moderation strategy. The mods and admins are known for using a heavy hand and outright mockery against anyone who they disagree with and the remaining community stumble over each other to be part of the “cool crowd”.
But you can also very easily see why the vast majority of leftists and PC gamers and… Asian people left. Because they have a policy to only edit user posts when they contain actively dangerous/illegal statements. So you can see when someone catches a permaban because they dsiagreed with an admin or joked about the corporate interests behind brexit. And you can see the discussion of the remaining users on why that was so fucked… up until the thread gets permanently locked.
With the model ml (and certain other more "world"ly instances…) use… you don’t. You just see comment branches disappear the moment anyone pushes back on some propaganda. And if a user pisses off the admins, they get banned straight up. Often with some comment about how they are racist or xenophobic in the modlog with all of their comments removed but NOT in the modlog. And that is a problem because, unless you were actively following along with that discussion, you never see anything other than MAYBE “wow, a lot of really racist people disagree with this very smart discussion on why Chinese Taipei was always a part of China and is totally not a sovereign-ish nation called Taiwan”
I’m more of a libertarian communist, communist economic theory I think is excellent. That doesn’t mean that communist regimes of the past make any sense, because of their authoritarian bend.
Turns out political opinions arent black and white.
It sounds like you are a Democratic Socialist from this tidbit.
I kind of feel the same way. I think the economic theory behind communism/socialism sounds much more beneficial towards our progress as a species and towards a more sustainable existence. I just don’t agree with the authoritarian methods of implementation. I think that if socialism is going to succeed, it will need to come about in a gradual democratic way.
Yeah this is the origin of Lemmy. Reddit banned some far left subreddits years ago and so some Communists went and made Lemmy.
Just block the instance if it bothers you. Jeez.
Who cares. This is pointless drama.
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Really loving the “What does it matter if they support genocide???” commenters in here. Really showing where their priorities are.
Who gives a fuck
To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.
So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.
that’s because they’re deleting posts. you don’t see it until you are subjected to it
yeah, I’m pretty radically left as it is but I’ve seen a few tankie posts and boy are those threads to stay away from.
FYI, the second main dev, Nutomic, although he doesn’t write as much, is in the same ideology, his avatar is Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.
During their AMA, 10 months ago, I directly asked them:
Since you’re very upfront with your political preferences, how much did it play a role in motivating you to create Lemmy? Was it a tech experiment first and a political project second?
Do you have some kind of core principle to not let your political preferences excessively interfere with your role as founders, main developers and moderators of Lemmy?Thanks for your work, it’s projects like that keep the ideal of the open internets alive. https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188/2385128
They intentionally ignored my questions and answered to other later questions with fewer points.
Eventually, 10 months later, my personal observation is that it seems that they keep their ideology tendencies to their home instance, which is fair enough since people are free to leave and block. And they don’t seem to be developing some centralized International political oppression feature into Lemmy, like their role models may have, so far.
Don’t forget that you can block an instance personally now.
Here I am… Joined Lemmy.ml because it was supposed to be a security, privacy and FOSS focused community. Now people are probably going to block seeing my comments.
Joined Lemmy.ml because it was supposed to be a security, privacy and FOSS focused community
Yep that’s the line the developers put up there to lure people in. It’s mildly disingenuous at best. Having to copy a line from a document titled “The Principles of Communism” just to sign up should’ve tipped you off that something was a bit weird.
Join an instance that has more lax federation standards and subscribe to the ml communities you care about, or get comfortable with defederation and people from other instances discarding your opinions. It’s a choice you need to make.
Having to copy a line from a document titled “The Principles of Communism” just to sign up should’ve tipped you off that something was a bit weird.
Uh what? How is it weird to have a mild anti-bot task in a registration process? That’s pretty normal.
If you’re objecting to the content in the text, well that’s just silly. A communist instance referencing communist writings is not “weird”, that’d be entirely within the realm of reasonable expectation.
If you feel so threatened by the mere presence of communism in your bubble, maybe don’t try to join an instance by and for them? How dare the dastardly communists be so happy and welcoming to everyone!
I was trying to point out the hypocrisy of branding your instance to be about privacy and security when tankie-glorified regimes don’t respect that at all, and they’re instead mildly pushing people in that direction. Why not use something from the EFF pages on those topics? Nice strawman, though.
I don’t know why the lemmy.ml admins don’t just defederate from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear. It’s clear that only their extreme views are allowed and they must spend a lot of time banning “libs”.
It would do everyone a favour really. We’d have less instance politics and hopefully more content, and make it the fediverse more attractive to the average person.
I’ve added it to my blocked instances and I’d recommend others who have an issue with the way the communities on that instance are moderated and the way it’s managed to do the same.
Fortunately there are alternative instances and communities that are less authoritarian with their moderation.
Sure, that’s the beauty of federation and defederation.
We’d have less instance politics
How is “defederat[ing] from everyone but lemmygrad and hexbear” not instance politics? Politics, at its core, is the way we distribute political goods, such as physical goods, access to information (including instance posts), and legitimacy, to name a few of the options. What is your definition of politics?
Maybe politics was the wrong word, what I mean is drama.
I’m glad to have devs with principals. Go back to reddit lib.
Imagine trying to insult someone by calling them a liberal lmfao.
Who remembers when China was doing live organ farming on people?
Pepperidge farm fucking remembers.
Just FYI, the organ farming thing comes from Falun Gong, who are a weird cult that have been (perhaps overly) oppressed by the Chinese government. They have quite a strong media presence and some weird beliefs about organs.
Really? Because I remember reading from the UN that this was taking place in the uyghur camps?
Edit: actually it’s both. So…
I think it’s worth considering that your evidence comes directly from a country that considers China an adversary, and they seem to take the Falun Gong organ harvesting as fact.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
The UN also did work on this, as did Canada and some investigative reporters in Europe.
China has lots of adversaries. Mainly anybody in the west, and they dominate any of their other Allies which makes them a de facto leader and would make criticism from anyone else pretty tough.
Edit: oh and in 2015 China announced that they wouldn’t do forced organ transplants on prisoners anymore - so they were most definitely participating in this disgusting practice.
True, however that doesn’t necessarily constitute falsehood in what they’re claiming.
I appreciate that, I just think it was worth pointing out that its worth being sceptical about a source like that, as you would be about one coming from the Chinese government.
100%
I’m critical of every ruling body, regardless of where I reside. There’s something to be said about having power over millions of people and how humans deal with that.
I’m especially critical of governments that are known to run PsyOps, disinformation campaigns, and known histories of abuse (US, China, Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea, etc). Ultimately, the devil you know is better than the others, but we’re still working with devils
If by “principals” you mean “banning anybody who falls outside of the groupthink”, then sure, more power to ya.
You say that like world or others instances don’t do that
1, that’s whataboutism, form a better argument. 2, that’s still a weak “principal” to have and defending it as though it’s a good thing is pretty cringe.
.world is a zionist and CIA-affiliated shillstorm. It’s just the US version of .ml
Both are equally bad because the US and China are equally bad. Don’t believe me? Check out the death toll of Native American genocide, transatlantic slavery, Latin american imperialism, CIA coups during the Cold War, police repression today, and current prison populations.
Given that I have no idea why anyone would defend the United States. Unless you’re brainwashed or working for the CIA
i’m open to the possibility that you’re right, but my experience is that criticism of the cia or zionism is tolerated to a much greater degree on .world than criticism of china or soviet russia is tolerated on .ml.
can you point to specific instance-wide bannings for talking shit on us foreign policy or zionism?
It’s tolerated in different ways. Ostracization and orchestrated mass downvotes are used rather than bans. .world utilizes methods of control that are more subtle than .ml. Which is consistent with how the CIA/West exerts control compared to China.
Our propaganda techniques and mechanisms of control are more multifaceted and less brutish and obvious - which isn’t a good thing. It means that we create a veil and drape it over the eyes of our people so that they don’t even realize that they are being controlled. This is the ideological state apparatus of the West that is drastically more effective than anything a socialist state has managed to create. Of course, we both have repressive state apparatuses as well, and our police are arguably more brutal than theirs (especially if you aren’t white and female), but there is less need to use that when you are able to brainwash your public so effectively with subtle acts of ideological correction. And convincing them that hundreds of strangers are mad at them is a good way to minimize dissent from being articulated in the first place, as well as distractions such as typical liberal rage bait and “red team bad” distractions
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that topics like this made the rounds in several subs at the same time.
Block the instance if you’ve got a problem.
Somebody noticed a disturbing fact and wants to distribute the knowledge on multiple channels? I think I’ll allow this.
Other than that, yes, let’s lift&shift the good communities away from lemmy.ml and block it.
