I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
If by “conservative/right wing opinions” you mean the current extremist fascist opinionated MAGA-‘my way or the highway’ brand of Republicanism, then I sure as hell hope it’s unwelcome on Lemmy instances.
If you wish to bring back reason and logic into conservative/right-wing opinions (such as limited government, which means NOT legislating their brand of morality), then I’m all for those viewpoints (not that I would agree with them wholesale, but it’s a discussion I’d be willing to take part in).
The real problem with this discourse is that current climate of conservatism is completely closed to reason and logic, completely embraces lies and conspiracy theories as factual, and basically wishes to see all liberals either dead or suffering in some way.
So yeah, keep that shit off Lemmy instances.
I think a lot of the other posts covered my thoughts on the issue but I wanted to add something less about politics and more about lemmy itself:
unwelcome on Lemmy
There is no one Lemmy, it’s a bunch of federated instances. You made this post on the beehaw instance. Some instances will have their own personality and rules, but if you don’t like them, the beauty of the lemmy and the fediverse is that you can just create another instance. I haven’t done a ton of searching yet, but I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
I imagine that conservatives and right-wing personalities will carve out their own corner eventually.
They have, and most of those instances have been defederated from the rest of the fediverse because they breed a bunch of toxicity and hatred that spills into other instances if you don’t defederate from them. I don’t know of any conservative spaces that haven’t been defederated from most others tbh. I think sh.itjust.works still federates with a lot of them though, at least last I heard.
They’re having a vote on it right now. It’s been a month since the community at large asked for defederation, and will be friday at the earliest before they defederate. In that timeframe, users of sh.itjust.works have skewed farther and farther right and gotten more and more toxic (@natori@beehaw.org can help discuss this as they originated from sh.itjust.works before moving here), and whereas sh.itjust.works started as the instance I felt more confident about refederating with someday, lemmy.world has done more to crack down on the kinds of behavior that got their instance defederated in the first place. It seems that @ruud@lemmy.world has a similar philosophy to what we do over here, but wants more permissive signups under the belief that streamlined community joins will grow the community more organically than checking beforehand that users will follow the rules of the road.
Can confirm. Sh.itjust.works has gone to shit and several of the responses I’ve received - and the areas where they (the admins and moderators that is) have remained conspicuously unresponsive - indicate to me that they are, by and large, quite sympathetic to alt-right views, hence their very slow delay. I get the impression that they come at this from an Enlightened Centrist angle, so I don’t think they consider themselves sympathetic. it’s that kind of sympathy where they think it’s fair to equally tolerate group A that just wants to exist and group B that openly calls for violence against group A. Both sides amirite?
I don’t really want to get down to it too much more than that.
I’m still learning about fediverse so I was a little ignorant when I wrote that part. There will still be a general community and a large chunk of Lemmy will choose 1 side. Whether that be left or right is what we will see in the future. It’s pretty much certain a large chunk of Lemmy will lean 1 way or the other. Same as other websites, federated or not.
Fantastic reply. Also consider the dramatic and sustained rightward slide of the Overton window over the last 40 years.
Within right-wing media spaces that window has slid in so far to the right that mentioning vaccines, public housing, or a living wage is seen as outrageous or absurd or communist, and outright white supremacy is a major plank of prominent politicians’ platforms.
So when someone says “there’s no room to talk about right-wing ideas,” they’re saying “why don’t you all accept an equivalence between radical Christian nationalism and moderate democratic conservatism as they two poles of political debate?”
And the reality is that “right-wing ideas” in America are mostly fabricated or deeply bigoted. And outside of conservative media environments, they are accurately perceived that way and so are not talked about much.
I just don’t understand what politics conservatives do other then push for laws that oppress people they don’t feel comfortable sharing a space with? I think the real political discussions are just happening within the left. Conservative party kinda needs to just go away, and the left split into socialists, democrats, and maybe independents. American politics and media have driven it’s two party system so opposed to each other, there is no mutual agreement anymore, you either take the blue side or the red side to any and all issues, and I’m sorry the red side is just so cartoonishly evil they just stand in the way of progress, or push to go backwards in history.
I’ve been a fence sitter and contrarian for most of my life. As a person that hates how both parties operate and I firmly believe that structural and systematic changes need to happen to the US system of governance. For that to happen we need those that have conservative viewpoints in order to create a balanced system in which we all can live in. It’s disconcerting to see the vitriol espoused from both sides of the (US) political spectrum. It’s feels like a pendulum swinging wider and wider threatening to throw itself off.
I’m a firm believer to the Forward Party’s thesis that a minority of voters is now dictating policy being done to the detriment of the majority. I believe that the system allows for bomb throwers like Lauren Boebert to exist because she only has to represent a vocal minority. I believe that dark money from superPACs is manipulating public discourse to the point that rational discourse is almost impossible.
I guess what I’m getting at is that there are those that believe in the old guard republicanism and conservatism, the small government and fiscally conservative ideals/planks. We should allow those voices to speak up if only for forming ideas and policy that the majority of us can accept. I don’t know, it just feels that as we grow more divided in our politics the harder it will be to create new polices and visions for a better Country. The adage from Clausewitz always comes to mind, “war is a continuation of policy by other means.”
