Unlike previous attempts at trying reddit alternatives (like Voat), kbin and much of the lemmyverse doesn’t seem to be plagued with extreme far right buffoonery.
It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit.
I am also glad that I’m getting away from reddit’s general political shitposting, which was more left leaning. You couldn’t have any proper discourse on there, and even I with my generally more left leaning views recognized that.
Through constant vigilance, anyways. Every time you see some little fuck dogwhistling about FREE SPEECH or CENSORSHIP, you gotta make sure they aren't welcome in these parts.
"Far right buffoonery" starts with people batching about how they're being """censored""" for saying slurs or trying to have "honest conversations about race" or whatever.
Nip 'em in the bud and voila, no Nazis on your kbin.
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."
And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."
And i was like, ohok and he continues.
"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.
One of my good friends does tattoos, and he doesn't do them for pretty much this exact reason. Like on one hand, fuck Nazis and he doesn't want to do it. On the other hand, money is money. They're gonna get it done, so might as well be the one that gets paid.
But ultimately he doesn't want to make anyone else who comes in uncomfortable, and he doesn't want to slowly become known as the guy who does all the Nazi tattoos. It makes him look bad and means he will get fewer people. So it's best to just tell them no.
I remember concrete dog whistle accusation generally falling into two categories:
Checking their comment history revealed either actual Nazi apologia or a general destructive behaviour if you looked deep enough.
Checking their comment history revealed that the accuser was a pro-censorship and didn’t like dissenting opinions.
My conclusion: dog whistles are a reason to look deeper. Keep an eye on those people. However, don’t just condemn them.
The very point of dog whistles is to appear innocuous and even invisible to "normal people". False positives are inevitable, and after seeing a dozen actual dog whistles, pareidolia will make you see their shapes everywhere.
fascism doesnt play fair in the marketplace of ideas, if you invite a nazi to sit at your table you've made it a nazi table. free speech is necessary and important, but we still draw lines for things like defamation and hate speech. another line is not offering a platform to fascists, they arent entitled to a seat at the table to spread fud.
you're like "but i'm not a nazi" , great, let's keep it that way.
Importantly, "free speech" is about government, not privately owned spaces.
We believe the government should not be given the power to censor speech, because people are born into it without a choice. Governments could use this power nefariously, and their citizens would have no meaningful recourse.
Nobody is born into Reddit or kbin or Lemmy. If someone doesn't like the rules of a given instance, they are welcome to leave and free themselves of this burden.
It certainly doesn't. It's just that alt rtght absolutely abuses good will and rules to the extreme and systematically hijacks certain phrases.
See Elon Musk's Twitter as a light example (giving in to authoritarian censorship, and skewing content visibility, while constantly touting himself a "Free speech absolutist"), or the_donald from Reddit, which was mostly made of bots, conspiracy theorists and some sane, but malicious people, banning anyone who's even slightly misaligned.
Some people like the previous commenter are then incorrectly shortcutting hijacked slogans to the alt right. Which was their goal to start with - increasing the friction, uncertainty and division.
To elaborate about free speech we want to mantain sensible environment. So we need to give a boot to astroturfing bots and far, far right neonazis. Though as with most things, moderation is the key.
Elon's acquisition of Twitter serves as an insightful case study of how a corporate CEO can turn what used to be a diverse, tolerant, and bountiful community of netizens with no home for hate speech and misinformation into a sad capitalist bloodbath.
Please take note, Huffman. And please take note, the internet in general.
Yes, but the "censorship" and "freedoms" they talk about isn't about malicious censorship (I.e. Spez going around quietly editing dissenting comments) or freedom about how our content is used (I.e. Reddit refusing to let people delete their comments).
Their version is about spreading misinformation and hate speech of all kinds, alongside racist and facist ideologies unfiltered and unimpeded. They're malicious actors acting like victims.
We don't want any of that, we want all folks to feel welcome, which is why we have to shoot that down. To maintain a tolerant society, we must only be intolerant of the intolerant.
That's another thing they'll tell you, to add to your point. They'll say general society, or lefties, are unwelcoming hypocrits for expressing the need for inclusion while not including fascists.
They'll word the same opinions in a million ways until they find the way that gets you to allow them to continue blabbering intolerant bull crap.
It's true, those types will use your own rules against you to wipe you out if you let them. It's one of the oldest tricks in the playbook of bad faith arguments.
I bet you we'll see a version of that very argument with the Fediverse when Meta brings "Threads" onto the scene. They'll preach inclusion then use the old EEE tactic to kill us off.
That's the Paradox, they use tolerance to fill the space with intolerance.
I said it in a comment below and I'll write it out again because it is a great point (that I have seen several times on Mastodon, not that I thought up on my own) that the only way to resolve the Paradox of Tolerance is to understand tolerance as a social contract.
Nazis start from not adhering to the contract, because they refuse to tolerate certain identities. TERFS refuse to tolerate trans identities. Neither the Nazi nor the TERF viewpoint is entitled to tolerance. Compare to Furries, who have no problem with non-furry identities but are often not welcomed because they are so very very strange. Tolerance is for furries, not nazis.
Going to bring it up again, the Paradox of Tolerance disappears when you consider tolerance a social contract rather than a moral standard.
Nazis base their identity and politics around not tolerating the presence of various minorities, and therefore aren't entitled to tolerance themselves.
TERFs base their identity and politics areound not tolerating trans people, and therefore aren't entitled to tolerance themselves.
Furries don't base their identity on excluding, invalidating or persecuting someone else, so furries are entitled to tolerance.
So, the furry boards stay but we need to defederate Nazis and TERFs.
There's always going to be some fuzzy edge cases, unfortunately. When tolerance becomes such an important and powerful thing it will become easily weaponized and subject to misinterpretation, deliberate or otherwise.
Oh yeah, but honestly if we can just keep the big troublemakers out and set a line in the sand we can put up with the fuzzy edge cases. It would also be necessary to consider tolerance a concept that goes beyond interpersonal interaction. Like, okay, this guy is civil but what he's saying is that genocide is okay. Or, okay, this guy is rubbing me the wrong way but at its core "Archer is a better Captain than Sisko"* is not fundamentally about race, it could honestly be he just prefers Archer.
*Sisko is a better Captain than Archer, this is fact. But sometimes people are just wrong and that's okay.
Archer's problem is that he's weak, kind of cowardly, and a bully. I watched the whole series, but you only need watch Cogenitor to see it. Even Lorca would've kept a promise to one of his crew.
Sisko did some stuff we can argue about, but he has the courage to make the choice according to his principles. I can't put Archer in Sisko's situations and see him coming out better.
Also, Sisko punched Q. Knowing FULLY who Q was. Nothing can detract from punching Q.
I always say that there is no paradox of tolerance, because tolerance doesn't work that way.
It's not a wide open door. No tolerance is a compact. It's a peace treaty. A social contract that can be violated, and those who violate it can then be excluded from it until they stop being hateful idiots.
Reddit was filled with a special brand of retards always trying to police language always acting smug about taking about some weird moral high road it is exhausting to deal with. People irl dont have such tight asses about speech. And permabanning someone for having an opinion you dont agree with is an abuse of power (not like it matters much to people who are so zealous about policing public morality). Obviously dont be a shitter and start spouting off trump supporters special brand of koolaid but if you feel like trans women should not compete with biological women in professional womens sports then you are free to think that way.
Using the word "retard" as a derogatory term is pretty offensive to those born with developmental defects. It's similar to how we used to use "gay" in a similar way a few decades ago. It's pretty shitty.
you are free to feel that way but the mods are not free to ban me for my shitty vocab. they can just call me an asshole and move on like every other website
You are entirely in control of what you say.. but it sounds like what you meant is not in line with what you're saying.
Do you deliberately want to belittle people with developmental issues? It doesn't sound like it. I think what @Dr_Cog is trying to say is that you should consider lining up the words you use with the message you're actually trying to convey.
Do you deliberately want to belittle people with developmental issues
no one is attacking people with developmental disabilities by calling something retarded if you want to take it that way your are free to do so its your opinion not mine and even if you try to twist my words to suit your fucked up narrative i know what i mean and thats what matters to me
I’m honestly sure you don’t mean “retarded” as a personal attack against people with developmental disabilities.
There’s also a very long history of people using that exact same word to attack them. Many people who make arguments like yours, that they should still get to use the word, tend to also be prejudiced against these people and treat them poorly. Maybe you’re not like that, but using that word does make you look a lot more like these people.
You making an argument to try to keep using the word, even though it hurts people, essentially tells them “I will not change one word in my vocabulary to accommodate your feelings and history of being hurt by this word.” Your choice on if you want to change your words to in an effort to get people to interpret you in a way that better matches your intent, or if you’d like to stick to your guns even if it means lots of people will get hurt. After all, people are free to interpret words however they wish, including in ways that you don’t intend them to and ways you don’t mean. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people affected by this word to not want you in their communities if you want to keep using that word, at least if they didn’t promise you absolute freedom of speech.
Hey if the mods want to remove folks like me so be it. Do i make extensive use of such slurs in my day to day vocabulary? (Not really) i mainly want to test the waters and see how hard the mods and the community comes down on me for it. Can i speak like normal or will i have to sing song dance around subjects like on reddit.
If we're to start declaring how people speak, can all you word nazis please start cracking down on those people who use the Q slur to refer to LGBT people? it's a literal slur, has been used to attack and harm large portions of the community, yet people will happily broadcast it.
I feel that's a better use of time than pushing offense over the word "retard" which ultimately doesn't hurt anyone and hasn't been used to hurt anyone.
Technically depends on the instance. The Fediverse supports free expression in the sense that you can spin up your own instance and say whatever you want. Flip side, any other instance can de-federate with your instance if they don't want to listen to your BS^1.
For instance, my instance^2 would probably police my ability to use slurs. Which is fine. I certainly am a member of some groups for which slurs exist, and if some asshole started spewing that BS in my house, I would express myself by kicking them the f*ck out. Likewise I chose an instance where I can be comfortable, and not have to deal with being harassed for who I just happen to be. My choice of an instance is largely founded on its Code of Conduct. In exchange, I extend the same courtesy to others on my instance.
It's almost like a social contract...
Anyway, point being, as a consequence of different instances having different Codes of Conduct (even if just minor changes), you will technically be bound by both the CoC of your home instance and the home instance of the community/magazine.
In my experience, the people ranting about "free speech" the loudest are the most flagrant violators of the "my right to move my arms ends at your nose" maxim.
ehhhh..... I think it says a lot about a person if they don't care about free speech, or the encroaching censorship from the rich 1%ers. That's literally the entire appeal of stuff like the fediverse.
If you want a strong crackdown on speech, then go back to reddit?