this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Hot take: none. Let information flow free. Take it with the good and the bad. Don't lock yourself in an echo chamber.
i never understood this take. echo chambers aren't inherently bad; forced debates are never good. communities are supposed to be places you go to feel comfortable not where you'd forced to debate or turn anything into an argument.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good. No need to debate. And if you’re on a large instance, you’ll see that. Not everyone thinks alike, there are shades of gray. Discussion is allowed to happen but intolerance isn’t tolerated.
The tankie instances ban anyone for even asking questions politely that they don’t agree with. It’s a total monoculture and I assume they’re mostly still kids, because everything is black and white and can be solved without any nuance at all.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good yes, but is it good when that exposure only ever gets you insults hurled your way from the people you’re trying to have a discussion with?
exactly. everywhere irl all i see is people debating my existence. i just want one place where i don't have to think about that. x.x
Nope, definitely not - which is why I’m not a free speech absolutist. Let those instances sit on an island by themselves.
Is exposure to other viewpoints good when those viewpoints are half-baked straw man hot-takes that the users are just parroting because they heard their favorite YouTuber say it?
I don’t need to be exposed to yet another dipshit who insists the holodomor never happened. That’s not me avoiding other viewpoints, that’s me avoiding fucking morons.
Block those individuals then?
This is very close to the Nazi point of "just asking questions" or when they say it's just free speech. Not saying you're arguing it, but it is a very thin line.
What's the line then? Why do people ban Nazis and not tankies? Tankies are authoritarian, they defend the massacre of Ukrainians, the Uyghur genocide, and other historic "socialist" atrocities. Why do we give them leeway? Are they skirting the line just enough? Are they intentionally using the optics of socialism to do so? Etc.
Keep in mind, just because someone blocks someone or an instance it doesn't necessarily make the space an echo chamber. We don't know if they live in a state or work in a place that is blasting Fox News 24/7. They may be very active on Twitter exposed to that sewage. Heck, the liberal point of view is quite a lot as is with the way they are defending Israel.
I think I’m arguing the exact opposite. We should ban/defederate nazis and tankies. But we shouldn’t ban people with different views that aren’t beyond the pale.
You can have a nuanced opinion of Israel/Palestine without being labeled as a genocide denier since it’s still in the fog of war.
It’s much harder to have a nuanced opinion about Rohingya, the Holocaust, Uyghur, Darfur.
I like your response. I don't have much else to add.
This is SO important. Remember that the "Dirtbag Left" a la Chapo et al. was created when the Alt Right was running rampant in high schools. Their goal was to attract young people to the left. Which is great! There's a place for cringe edgy teens to feel like they can fight for a better world. But I'm really not looking to hang out with arrogant teenagers right now, and definitely not with their emotionally immature adult chaperones.
The fact that they are mostly kids is a big part of the reason why I feel the need to add context to their bad political science.
Sometimes questions have answers.
Exposure over and over won't be novel, or helpful, just grating. We do not need to endlessly rehash every possible argument, over and over and over and over and over.
90% of the time it's bigots who are upset that they're getting deplatformed. The other 10% of the time it's the incredibly idealistic or naive. Either way it's a crap argument. You are under no obligation to endure verbal diarrhea, nor is it your responsibility to change the minds of the people spewing it. They shit the bed, they can lie in it.
Normal interactions with normal communities will be plenty of diversity, there's absolutely no reason to engage with or listen to nazis. Right wing politics has mastered brainwashing, it's dangerous to read that shit too often.
They've mastered brainwashing to conservative religious nutjobs and incels. Maybe young and naive teenage boys, on top of that. If you aren't an idiot or a teen, you should be immune for the most part.
Not that I'm saying you should go out of your way to interact with Nazis. Unless the interaction involves punching.
Yes but the problem is between idiots and teens you’ve covered about 70% of the population.
Hot take indeed.
If the dog shits on the floor you don't just start walking around it, you clean the floor.
Not a good analogy because then blocking the instance is like killing the dog.
Not at all, it's just making it so the dog has to shit outside in a particular spot you never have to walk through
What? No it's not. If I block an instance it's still up and running, I just don't see any of it. It's like if I put on a selective blindfold.
Also a valid solution to the poop on the carpet problem.
Just saying
yes I need to see the fascists masquerading as leftists otherwise I would be living in an echo chamber....
They'll certainly bring up an actual good point from time to time, unlike actual fascists.
Mostly though you can negate the majority of their most obnoxious shit takes by blocking users.
But my instance isn't federated with Lemmygrad and Hexbear as is so I can get away with that, and I don't see "Genocide is okay if" takes in my feed.
and a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day doesn't mean it's useful to have it taking up space on the wall.
also they are actual fascists. in the chapo trap house community I literally got the reply "ukraine should be destroyed at all costs"
Well, as long as we judge entire communities by the actions of individuals.
Thanks for the nuance. While I agree that tankies can be annoying, I think it's stupid to compare them to fascists with the whole "red fash" thing. Just because they have some terrible takes of their own, it doesn't make them fascist.
The worst of them do deny genocides, which is terrible, but they do it out of a habit of denying anything western powers claim actually happened. I imagine many of their members are trolls and contrarians, as well. Despite this, like you said, some of them have decent takes and not all of them are off the deep end, yet
People who say this are generally fine being a part of every other instance that is full of liberals who repeat fascist propaganda verbatim. Seen rather clearly in response to the recent escalations in Gaza.
Not so hot take: My time is finite, why force myself to see shitty facebook memes, dog pictures, crusty "battlestations", etc.?
Hexbear kind of pissed me off for a week. But I kind of like how nakedly transparent they are. Now, whenever I come across one of those threads, I see where its coming from and I relax. They're just pro-russia regardless of if it makes sense. I don't know what the Murica equivalent of Russia is, but they're that
What fucking kills me is they're like 80% American teenagers who have never even been to Europe or Asia, but simp hard for Russia and China
They're anti US, not necessarily pro Russia. They support Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war because they think Ukraine is a US puppet state because the country wants to align with Western nations, and of course no nation on earth has its own agency and everything is the US's fault. They're pro anything that challenges the US and other liberal countries.
They remind me of a bunch of teenagers trying to be edgy.
They are campists. It's been the bane of leftist parties forever. That's why socialism really got a foothold in Europe via third-way social democracy, because it doesn't feel the need to make tyrants into folk heroes in order to relitigate the cold war
Vatnik.
Do they support Russia or Putin? If they support one, they hate another.
Would you say the same when someone is harassing you? Or how about if they were Nazis? Because keep in mind OP is just blocking them and not removing them from all of lemmy.
OP is asking which ones to block because he currently is not being harassed. If he was being harassed, he would know which ones to block.
That'd be fine if the tankie takes had any value to them. The only value they've added to me is showing me why real world communism has always ended up the way it has. And now I've learned that lesson, so theres no further value
I can't read German or french
You are missing out on all the sturgeon jokes!
Same here, but every now and then an English source comes through so I keep them available.
Oh mein Gott er kann kein Deutsch lesen grundgütiger wie kann man das nicht können c'est incroyable, non c'est impossible je voudrait penser mais non
I like getting exposed to languages that I'm not fluent in. Sometimes I pick something up or get curious and learn something new from translation. A multilingual internet is a colorful and beautiful place.
I have no need for those weird anime fan clubs. Like that chainsaw shit. Or holo-whatever
I disagree, I would love to block NSFW instances, and I'm grateful to the users that voluntarily post in there. For me Lemmy is too searchable for me to get into those luxuries.
My hot take is: Depending on the individual, this may be a healthy and responsible thing to do. The outrage cycle that was established in commercial social media to "drive engagement" is very bad for our meat computers (shown in multiple studies). It is much healthier and more productive, at times, to block users, communities, and potentially instances (removing this ability, and forcing me to use their algorithm for sorting, is why I left Reddit, in addition to the harm caused to disabled communities).
This was the attitude I admired on reddit, until it got overrun by Nazis.
I was wrong.