- Mod of [email protected] posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
- Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
- Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod
Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @[email protected]
The weird thing is… if I squint my eyes up a certain way, I actually competely agree with you here.
I think that the anarchism communities on Lemmy should be free of a person coming in and posting faux-anarchism, whose post history is:
That’s the top of Mambabasa’s user page, going down as far as I really wanted to go down. Notice a pattern? There’s some general anarchism stuff, but the things they really put some energy and consistency of posting into, have often been electoral things in the recent past. They weren’t really that active until the election started coming to the fore.
They claim they’re not American, but they sure do care about the American election. They claim they’re posting about anarchism because they are an anarchist, but they sure do seem to care a whole lot about who gets to win this particular contest for US state power.
I think the anarchist community should be free of that. That’s the sense in which I agree with your statement here. I think someone who really wants to talk electoral politics, and comes into the anarchism community with a kind of “Boy that Kamala Harris, she sure is a stinker fellow anarchists, amirite” type of energy, at length and repeatedly, should maybe not be allowed to hijack the discussion away from the real anarchists.
I spent some time talking with this person this week, just discussion back and forth, which is fine, and I just now today really formed a firm opinion that they’re probably mainly trying to influence the election in favor of Trump, and not just an anarchist talking about anarchism things. Yes, I think protecting the anarchism forums against that is important.
I mentioned before that I think there are multiple valid opinions about this. My opinion is that they shouldn’t be censoring things purely because of a viewpoint. I recognize that there are other opinions on it.
In my opinion, Mambabasa is dogpiling an anti-Democrat (not anti-politician, but very specifically anti-Democrat) viewpoint into a community where it doesn’t belong, and the structure of Lemmy allows them to do that, because they are for some reason a mod. I think that’s a problem. More so than people coming in and disagreeing with them. I would never go in and say “Democrats Democrats Democrats!” as you seem to be strawmanning that I did. If I see someone in the anarchism forum already talking about Democrats, I might also say my opinion on it. I think that’s a useful check, maybe the most realistic one that can exist in a system like Lemmy, against someone doing which it looks pretty clear to me that Mambabasa is doing.
Can you find a comments section in an anarchism post, where the OP didn’t first start talking about Democrats, and some Democrats came in and started talking anything about Democrats out of nowhere? That whole thing where people are coming from the wider community and just talking trash to the minority because they’re a minority, sounds like a strawman to me. Maybe it happens on [email protected]. I know it often happens in the other direction, where some outsider comes into a minority community and all the existing members of the community dogpile on them about how the existing community viewpoint is the right one. But even then, I don’t really think it’s a problem. It’s just people talking, which is the point.
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I’d be interested to see how this happens in practice. It’ll be hard to observe, because good moderation should stop it from happening. I have my view about how it happens and how big a problem it is, but my view might not be an accurate view.
My guess is that when this does happen, it’s a problem with the wider culture. If people are empowered to be noisy idiots who are shouting their opinions, then as soon as they get exposed to a minority community, there are going to be a whole bunch of noisy idiots shouting their opinions at the minority. That’s not ideal, with escalating not-ideal-ness according to the unpopularity and vulnerability of the minority.
I think a grander and better way to address the problem would be to try to address the culture of noisy idiocy at the root. If the culture in general is that you’re not supposed to berate people, and you’re supposed to be open to learning instead of viewing the purpose of the network as of dueling broadcasts of opinion, then my guess is that a lot of that “we have to censor hostile points of view lest they overwhelm us” pragmatism will go away, irrespective of how necessary it was in the first place. I don’t really like this attitude that we need to censor the hostile viewpoints, because however necessary it might be, it’s also going to censor reasonable dissent, and it’s going to make weird little echo chambers like exist in some corners of Lemmy. I don’t think either berating the minority community or creating the echo chamber to protect them is a good solution.
Addressing the culture overall is not easy, of course.