I was wondering how the pre-reddit lemmy members feel about the influx of ex-reddit. Have things got worst or better? Is there any lemmy etiquette that we are missing?
Conspiracy? One of the devs has a website where he literally openly denies the Uyghur genocide, Tiananmen square massacre, “Mao did nothing wrong”, “Ukrainians are Nazis”, denies every single critique of USSR and China, and a whole lot of other vile shit. Read for yourself: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
This is the real test of the fediverse. Can software written by a piece of shit like that exist without being influenced by their garbage political views?
I think it’s possible and I like Lemmy to thrive but it’s important to keep an eye out for tankies and to not close your eyes to the reality of who started this.
Can software written by a piece of shit like that
someone isn’t a piece of shit because they hold different opinions than your own. it’s OK to post articles even if you don’t believe everything in them. I glanced through one of the articles about the death tolls under Mao - https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.
Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don’t think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone’s right to be a holocaust denier. It’s as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you’re a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.
Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.
The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.
This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.
Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.
“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing
I’m sure he would say this. But in this specific case it’s more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there’s a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that’s what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He’s a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I’ve read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn’t whether the researcher was wrong or right. It’s just that we can’t set the precedent that certain topics are “finished” and can’t be modified anymore. Because at that point we’re not doing science or research - we’re falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing “wrongthink” is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren’t good guys and there aren’t bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone’s a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
Regardless, I appreciate your comment.
I wish someone could explain to me how this wumao BS has gained any traction at all.
