I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it’s going to, but… Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It’s a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others’ needs.
Reality is left leaning
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It’s truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
Reality is left leaning…
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
The political vibe on Lemmy isn’t really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It’s been part of the “golden age” of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
The super rich are usually highly educated but they live in such a homogenous bubble that they’re opinions on the majority of society should be entirely discounted. They usually have a total lack of empathy for people and vote for politicians with the same attitude. I have met some super rich people who try very hard to go against the grain and not fall into that mindset, but something about the need for protecting your money and lifestyle usually promotes an untrustworthy and skeptical view of everyone in their lives including their own family.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
What’s a tankie? I keep seeing it.
I had to look it up too. Apparently it’s an authoritarian leftist. Thinks state-socialism was a good thing. As while most leftists are more of the democratic, market, and anarchist varieties.
State socialism is a good thing, what tankies promote is something else, they’re fascist that can’t accept that fact because it would mean having something in common with the fascists in the USA, a country that they hate so much that they’re ready to deny reality to have an anti USA opinion.
They’re authoritarian. Not fascist. There is a difference. Even if both groups are more dedicated to authoritarianism than anything else. I would not be caught dead voluntarily anywhere with a fascist. While I disagree heavily with ML communist I might associate with them a little bit. But just never give them power.
I’m confused, and you seem to be a lot more familiar with the term. I read the wiki link that explains tankies. I don’t personally know any left leaning people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes. Maybe because of my America-centric viewpoint and where things are today, but typically people who are economically left are also socially and politically left (equal opportunity is more important than individual freedoms), which is very anti-fascist. I’ve heard people say how great a true communism could be if it were possible, but no one’s ever made it past a dictatorship to get there.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right, and think someone has achieved a communist utopia without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it. Tankies promote authoritarian views similar to fascists but with a different economics view (not even that different some times), hence they prefer the dictatorships like USSR (in these days even Putin, which is idiotic), North Korea, China; over what they perceive as imperialist, the USA (I agree on calling it imperialistic and disliking it, but not on considering it worse than dictatorships).
I’m a communist which likes state socialism, but what is and was present in those dictatorship (ignoring the authoritarian side which I despise) is state capitalism.
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it
The communist utopia needs authoritarianism to work
The confusion comes from so much mass media that equates socialism with communism. They’re orthogonal concepts! Saying socialism is the same as communism is like saying beer-making is exactly the same as cheese-making. Anyone who understands what beer and cheese are would be like, “I’m sorry, what‽”
The best way to think of socialism is that’s it’s a governance strategy that can be used wherever you want. Want everyone to pay taxes in order to fund and deliver government-run firefighting services? That’s socialism. Want to do the same with the military? Socialism. Whenever the government is delivering some good or service by way of taxpayer dollars that’s socialism.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems. You can have socialist government constructs under either capitalism or communism. It’s just that communism doesn’t really have the flexibility to provide goods or services in any other way than via the government.
Then there’s countries like China that claim to be communist (and the Right loves to call them that) but really, they’re more capitalist than communist. What they do have that most communists and fascist governments have is authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is what fascists and “tankies” have in common: Fascists support an authoritarian, pseudo-capitalist government while “tankies” support an authoritarian, pseudo-communist government.
Thanks for not leaving out the anarchists
I don’t think you understand how small of a global majority white European men are.
People who cheer when others point out flaws in USA but start screaming when flaws in Russia or China are pointed out.
progression tends not to be conservative
There’s been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.
Lemmy was the first one that I’m aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.
They just have their own instance and are defederated by some but not all, which is the best solution as it means they stick to their part of the fediverse instead of hijacking subs that weren’t right leaning in the first place.
Yeah, right-wingers flock to “safe-spaces” as much as the far-left does. Lemmy doesn’t have the tools to make a single community isolated like they could on Reddit, so they have to go to their own instances and end up defederated.
The main differences between left-wing and right-wing communities is that the right-wing ones quickly deteriorate towards a lot of hate related things. This leads them to being isolated from the rest. The left wingers are mostly tolerable and are just over zealous in preaching things like forcing everyone to use pronouns, lmao.
Yup it is. There are a lot of communist techie people I guess. I still generally state my political opinions here though. Let them be downvoted.
Left and right are two stupid categories built up by propaganda, get them out of your head and start to think on your own terms
I’m not gonna start using niche political terms on a daily basis. Yes, I know that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same but nobody outside a small group of people cares. See that I put both in quotation marks as well.
to be fair, you wouldn’t say that Democrats or republicans are the same if you happen to be part of the groups the Republicans are currently advocating death for. There is a difference between NeoLiberal shill and “America should be a white ethnostate”
Wait, is “advocating death for” the evolution of “right to exist”? That sure escalated quickly.
I mean, sure one could argue that the Rights attacks on trans and LGBTQ people, calling them all pedophiles that need to be exterminated can be seen as a “right to exist” argument, in the same way that “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” can be seen as a “right to exist” statement…
Very nuanced take, I like it.
It’s pretty meaningfully different when one side wants to fix the climate and create social and economic policy that benefits the majority, while the other wants to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few at the expense of everyone else, and the climate, and is creating propaganda aimed at the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ and perceived-non-Americans (even when they’re citizens).
Any party that label themself as left or right is applying the same politics that benefits those in power and lie about it to the public.
This. There an infinite number of ideologies that you could have, but our first past the post voting system (in the US) only allows for two candidates, so an infinite spectrum gets funneled into two camps.
Left/right isn’t an exclusively American concept, it is used all over the world regardless of the political system of the country.
I see just as much if not more complaining about “tankies” as on subs like subredditdrama, it’s not that leftist
I literally saw a guy earlier today in that one large memes thread trying to convince people that Eastern European countries yearn for the USSR days.
Only tankies try to do that lol.
A lot of people there do yearn for the return of the USSR. You can argue about why, but the polling is quite clear that many people miss socialism
“Why don’t you ask people from Socialist countries what they thought”?
“Wait, not those people”.
Where can I see that polling?
https://lemmy.world/comment/1618443
Here’s a link to a comment with some polling
So really not a lot of people, mostly Russians and countries that have strong ties to Russia.
That’s what the first source says and as someone already pointed to a more recent polling showing that it’s no longer the case for eastern European countries.
Hungary source is an old article and the same recent polling shows otherwise.
Romania source link doesn’t even work.
Eastern Germany is a pretty complex and nuanced topic, one that I won’t get into so I’ll give that one the benefit of the doubt that they actually want soviet socialism back.
Czech source link also doesn’t work.
Serbia source literally has the article saying “the Serbian citizens primarily refer to better economic situation and standard of living, but the majority of them would not go back to that period.”
And then there’s the Russian part, which is completely understandable considering the USSR was just a form of Russian imperialism.
Tankies are a tiny subset of extreme far leftists which even far leftists have a right to despise, though.
if they truly are a “tiny subset” then why even spend the time to complain about them?
Because they’re very vocal online, are annoying, and also give actual leftists bad rep. If you’re promoting egalitarianism and distributing social power among everyone, you wouldn’t like people who support authoritarism to share a label with you.
every state in the world is authortarian
Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that’s pretty rich.
The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.
To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that “since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok”: any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they’re too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren’t drown in liturgy.
https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/
ML states are the only successful socialist states in history to hold out for a significant amount of time against the United States empire. I’m not super attached to the vanguard model myself, but can you show me a single other successful model? I think this quote is quite relevant here:
"This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated." - Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.
Because some of the founders of Lemmy are the worst examples.
do you mean the devs or people using it? because the only 2 main devs are ML, not “some”
(also I’m a lemmygrad user, I’m a spooky scary tankie btw
)You’re a homophobic authoritarian?
cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, try again next time
Well, there’s a self-proclaimed Left which, though probably having started out with good intentions, is all about “lets classify people on visible things they were born with and then presume things about them purelly on their “classification” and treat them differently”.
If this sounds strangelly like the far-right thinking that’s because it is kinda derivative: the same architecture of deeming individuals as worthy/unworthy likely-good/likely-bad because they were born with certain characteristics as the far-right is used, and then the categories are swapped and the whole thing is called “being progressive” as if it was only unfair to judge and treat people because of their genetic makeup if done in one direction but not in a different one.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made. Because these people follow the recipes without examining the against the principles and ideals and in contexts which are very different of the ones for which those rules were created, you went up with ridiculous ideas directly opposed to “the greatest good for the greatest number” principle like supporting Putin’s invasion.
The followers of such “Lefts” hate it when their faith-like beliefs are examined against the actual Principles of Equality and “the greatest good for the greatest numbers” and found often to be directly opposing them, just like when you grab some religious book or other and point out the inconsistencies in it: there is no greater hate than that of the faithfull who sees the basis of their Identity be examined under the cruel light of logic and found to be mainly bollocks.
Or in other words, I think the Left here is a lot more the product of thinking things through and concluding that it would be a lot better to live in a World with less poverty, more equality and were a few did not amass more power than whole countries thanks to their wealth, and continuing to actually continue to think things through when face with slogans from the tribalist flag waving slogan parroting and social-circle-jerk groups which call themselves “Left” and which are the leftovers from Marxism in the XXI Century and the Neoliberal-inspired “in the greed is good context, lets pursue personal-upside maximization as an ‘Identity’ group instead of individually so that we can claim we’re lefties”.
PS: If it sounds I’m raging against the Left here, that just because I find the pettyness and self-serving sociopathy of the modern Right to be self-evident. I actually don’t think you can be a true leftwinger genuinelly fighting for the greater good if you just blindly follow slogans and tribes. Funilly enough it also means I can actually respect a genuine old-style conservative, even whilst wholly disagreeing with him or her.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made.
The “tankies” are absolutely not utopian. There was a great big schism about this very question more than a century ago, with Marxists roundly rejecting the utopianism of the libertarian socialists (Anarchists). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels is a good starting point.
Yeah that’s a whole lot of words for “both sides”. Maybe you’d be happier on Reddit.com/r/conservative
Lemmy is exactly as left leaning as Reddit was before the wave of propaganda and bots emboldened the right wing crazies to think they were the majority or welcome. I remember the falsely inflated upvotes that made those morons think they were the “silent majority”.
"I’ve noticed that lemmy as a whole has much more moral, empathetic individuals than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
21st century politics in a nutshell, lmao
Anti-corporate platforms don’t generally appeal to people that built and uphold the existing corporate status quo.
The first wave here were anticapitalists, anarchists or communists. The second wave are the most anti-corporate “liberals”.
The second wave are the most anti-corporate “liberals”.
Prime for conversion. We just have to teach them what a liberal is so that they stop calling themselves that.
I absolutely agree. I also think the irritating environment created by the current digital red scare trend will eventually subside once they move onto some new scare words because the existing ones are losing their edge.
Removed by mod
This. I hate the whole left/right tribalism.
Like I know that it can be used to get a rough idea of what political motivations someone might have and I know that where my own ideologies would mostly fall in that inaccurate one-dimensional linear spectrum but ultimately it is too inaccurate to use it to classify everyone’s political motivation.
Worse it creates a whole us-vs-them divide. “Oh you aren’t right, when then you must be a commie”. “Oh you aren’t left, then you must be a fascist”. So you might consider yourself in a different position on a political spectrum and just see the differences to someone on the other end of a political spectrum even though you might have more in common then you think. Heck, if you are on complete opposite ends you might even have more in common then you think.
Ultimately, the focus should be less on left/right and more on individual policies. Like should healthcare be public or privatized, should be build another road or another train track here, etc
Why does political debate always have to turn into this tribalistic mud fight instead of proper discussion on how to best address the needs of citizens?
Whenever I see a political thread here, it seems like the comment section is dominated by the most extreme of the left, with takes like “All right wingers are part of the MAGA crowd and advocating genocide” and “The right wing is weak, stupid, evil, and dangerous so we need to shut it down.”
As a centrist (not a rightist,) I don’t like this. We need rational discourse, not extremism and hate. Actually talk with reasonable people from outside your political circle please. (Reasonable people, not the right wing extremists that seem to be the only right-wingers y’all hear about.) Remember when we actually had a class struggle that made the people in power nervous instead of identity politics that get the working class fighting each other?
But then, most of the places I talk in are pretty politically left-leaning, so I guess being a centrist does make me look right-wing to a lot of people. I’m rarely seen pushing back against right-wing ideas, but that’s because I rarely see right-wing ideas being presented (outside of leftists pointing at rightist ridiculousness) to push back against. That probably has to do with the internet as a whole leaning more left than right.
deleted by creator
Reality has a well known left leaning bias.
Conservatives and their politics do not have equal status. In this climate, “both sides” is toxic and suggest each is equally supported and viable. They are not. The right is an incredibly hateful minority end should be treated as such.
I’d say it’s mainstream media-type liberal bias. Inclusive aesthetically, and occasionally sincerely too, but mostly shit.
“It’s not my fault if reality is Marxist” -Che Guevara
Wow. Way to paint everyone with a different thought process the same. Very human of you.
Now you’ve convinced me! I really ought to have been the bigger man when my mom called me in the middle of the night to tell me that Trump’s a martyr like Jesus and that the Democrats are performing demonic baby-eating rituals inside underground tunnels, and just let her keep screaming about me being a brainwashed woke communist because we just have little differences and we all need to get along.
Haha, nope. I want scorched earth on every one of those conspiracy nut fuckers holding right-wing parties around the balls, since they went after my family with their brainrot. I don’t give a shit that a handful of people exist who don’t explicitly support Jewish Space Laser Marge or Venmo Bribes Clarence, because y’all still vote lock step to keep these crazy loons around because Roe v. Wade is worth killing for $300 extra on next year’s tax return.
Is it miserable?
Having your entire identity based on a political team?
Constantly being angry and thinking the worst about your peers?
Because it SOUNDS miserable.
Probably not as miserable as it is to have to spend all your energy pretending to not see how your political ideas have fully doomed humanity to drive itself extinct
my mom called me in the middle of the night to tell me that Trump’s a martyr
Gonna have to take any political and moral position you have with a grain of salt, since crazy runs in the family
That doesn’t make sense and you know it. It’s stupid and vindictive.
Lemmy is more centrist than Reddit
(other than the usual issues) Reddit was hated by the general populace because it was too right wing and it was hated by right-wingers for not being right wing enough
Lemmy is still new and hasn’t gained a large population as of yet, but it’s already still far more representative than Reddit ever was
More centrist???
Lemmy is like a boiling pot of full-on tankie authoritarians. Reddit is only slightly less left than that but you still get autobanned from major subs for simply commenting somewhere deemed right-wing.
This reads like you never even visited Reddit.
This reads like you never visited any instance other than lemmygrad.ml.
They literally can’t shitjustworks blocks lemmygrad
