Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Well let’s find out: Free Ukraine! Fuck Russia. Fuck China!
Mao Zedong is objectively one of the worst people in all of human history, and his influence held China back for decades, and continues to harm it to this day.
You know, I agree that he shouldn’t have collaborated with America’s foreign policy following the sino-soviet split, but I don’t think that even puts him as a major candidate in the running.
Edit: He also really should have given the sparrow thing a test run, and there are other criticisms to make, but these are still lesser than the original one. There was bad theory and bad practice in the Cultural Revolution, but overwhelmingly its biggest problem was endangering the revolution that Mao led to establish the PRC in the first place, something for which he deserves credit on account of poverty reduction, drastic increase in life expectancy, land-redistribution, etc. Oh yeah, and the whole “opposing Japanese and British colonialism” thing, since the KMT rolled over for that, but hopefully that goes without saying.
It seems like you’ve left out the part where multiple tens of millions of people died as a result of his policies.
Exterminating the sparrows, that was a pretty big oops.
Unfortunately beehaw users won’t see your reply, friend. :(
Thank you for letting me know. I always forget about that because I can see their replies. In any case, I’m more worried about what the people on lemmy.world think, since Beehaw has basically become a purpose-built engine of sectarianism, so the content of those replies would be a foregone conclusion.
I’ll try to remember to use my lemmy.ml account in the future for this.
Only if you really want them to read it. I appreciate it’s important to talk to the general audience. :)
Sectarianism toward what ideology, out of curiosity? I couldn’t wade through their endless text blobs enough to tell
Ha, fair question! They have plenty of people they dislike, but what I was trying to refer to was their opposition to what they call “tankies” and I call “People who believe that the US lies about its enemies, particularly its big geopolitical rivals.” Specifically, while they are conversationally annoying about it, what really bugs me is their campaign to defederate and get others to defederate from spaces they deem “tankie-friendly”. I think that really undermines the platform as a whole to pillarize things that way (i.e. closing things off into silos).
“Sectarianism” arguably isn’t the right word for that (it has intra-ideology connotations), but I didn’t think it was worth splitting hairs over.
fuck the orcs. fuck the CCCP. Winne the Pooh shouldn’t run a country
hate the government not the people am i right?
Nah. Fuck the people who supports the Russian aggression. Fuck the people who allow Russian soldiers to perform war crimes on a massive scale.
How they are behaving and advancing is like the orcs. Not the fun and widely crazy orks from GW, but the dirty bastard’s from Lord of the rings movie
Fuck the orcs
and then they make movies about how genociding elven children made them sad ala orcish sniper (2014)
It is even worse in America, they rape, torture and kill and come back home as heros.
“But what about America?!”
yea
why you calling them orcs then
Probably because they act inhumanely?
The rape and torture of combatants and civilians? The bombing of critical infrastructure to leave a scorched earth on retreat? The indiscriminate targeting of civilian evacuees? The theft of Ukranian children and taking them to Russia to brainwash them at best and put them into the sex trade as one of the worse options? The attempts and calls for genocide against another group of people?
Humans have a social contract that is more or less consistent across the globe. We are social animals endowed with empathy and we don’t enjoy seeing others suffering. If you break this social contract, why would you be surprised that people treat you as though you were inhuman? Why are you bothering to turn this plight onto the Russians who are not currently being targeted by any of the above?
Friendly reminder that this method of turning the Russians into the victims of “russophobia” in any thread about Ukraine or Russias policies is russian troll posting 101. You should consider hard who you are currently coming to the defense of.
“The theft of Ukrainian children” Opinion discarded
Who’s “they”? “The Russians”? The issue with generalizing and demonizing people is that not all Russians support Putin and not all Russians are genocidal maniacs who want to wipe out Ukraine…
Anti-Putinist Russians are very much targeted… Why is there no place to defend both Ukrainians and the Russian people who don’t support Putin? Why do you have to dumb it down to a “Ukrainians vs Russians”?
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why are you dehumanizing the russian people? this is a tactic used by fascists.
Isn’t orc just a derogatory term for a Russian soldier? That’s what I always thought it meant, and it’s also what Wiktionary says
As far as I know that is correct. I personally don’t like because it’s dehumanizing them when we don’t have to.
If we were in combat and actually needed to shoot at them and needed to dehhumanize them for our own psychological health that would be one thing. But we are all probably safe sitting on the toilet, so we probably shouldn’t need to resort to it.
I think it also implies guilt of all Russian soldiers. They are deserving of all protections under international law, mainly getting shot at on the battlefield and a dignified confinement when they surrender or are incapacitated, until proven otherwise. And if they did something horrifying enough to be called an orc, they should probably be hanged, after trial, and not even dignified with discussion.
It is. Its important to remember that pro russian posters and other posters from authoritarian countries are already here to muddy the waters. Propaganda is the name of the game and these sorts of talking points are their main techniques to derail a conversation.
See, the problem isn’t the authoritarian government, its racist westerners who just hate anyone. This way they expect you to be tolerant of their actions, while their actions are totally intolerant of others. Its their ide of a moral gotcha.
Well, acting as an oppressor while claiming you’re a victim is also a fascist tactic. It was literally used by the nazis to assume power.
And before you go “well so was dehumanizing the jews,” its important to note that the jews were a scapegoat and weren’t actively trying to invade Germany and eliminate their population.
Yeah, it’s also important to note that “the Russian people” as a whole aren’t trying to invade Ukraine and eliminate Ukrainians either…
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Look deeper.
I am looking deeper and… I see that I am talking to a fascist 😔
Do you really need to be so disingenous about this? The entire thread is oozing with the slime of Reddit culture and you think no one can figure out that you’re calling Russians orcs? Do you know where that cute little turn of phrase comes from?
It comes from the Lord of the Rings, that’s just someone using it. I don’t think it has anything specifically to do with Muslims. They use it to dehumanise, that’s true. It mostly spread as use for Russian soldiers that were just rampaging around killing and torturing civilians, or for those shelling and killing civilians, ultimately - behaving rather inhumanly. I’ve only ever seen it referencing Russian combatants. Honestly, comparing your enemies to characters in a fantasy novel isn’t exactly the worst slur in the world.
Soldiers almost always have a slur for enemy combatants, sadly, but honestly I don’t blame them. Dehumanising your enemy is a sad reality of war.
I agree that us as bystanders should try not to use such slurs though. Ultimately, throwing slurs around doesn’t look good even if the people you’re throwing them at are committing atrocities and invading countries.
Edit: I agree it’s racist, reminds me of WW2 soldiers’s slurs like “jap”, “krout” etc. Regardless of the original source, and ultimately it being rather mild compared to many, it’s a racial slur and shouldn’t be used.
Obfuscatory. The reason people rallied around that specific term can clearly be traced back to Azovites using it.
With the Azovites, it certainly did. Obviously most Russians are not Muslim (nor are they Chechen), so Reddit’s reinterpretation of the term is not identical.
People tend not to qualify it as “just for soldiers” except when doing apologetics
I’ve seen them called Death Eaters and, aside from “read another book” and some other ancillary issues, I think your statement applies well to giving the Russian military such a label.
That’s because the Death Eaters are an organization, not a race. You opt-in to being a Death Eater, you can’t opt-in or -out of being an orc. Flattening it to “comparing them to characters” is completely flattening the issue of racism.
Of course, the Azovites are viciously racist and Redditors are no stranger to basically every type of xenophobia imaginable, so I think the burden of proof here would be on you to demonstrate that this is an exception to the general trend of racism both Reddit and the Ukrainian military/paramilitary, who can only be dissuaded through great effort from dropping even a fragment of their Nazi iconography.
Edit: I should say that I’m speaking in terms of epistemology and counterargument. I’d much rather you just acknowledge the obvious truth and move on rather than try further to contort the evidence to make Redditors not racist. Some arguments are fun, but this one is tedious.
im not sure you can call krout racist
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I’m sure you adore the US military then. You know, since the military is the people and you just hate the government.
What do you think the CCCP is?
lol i had the same question. did they make a typo and mean the CCP or was that Cyrillic for USSR?
Are you still with us now?
I think Winnie the Pooh got him.
Oh bother.
He found a window and pavement
They have comments from a couple hours ago.