Please don’t put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.
I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.
What are your thoughts?
I’m sorry to see people somewhere on the Internet coming out against Lemmy. First of all, let me say that I sympathize with the China issue. I’m a Muslim and I have been concerned about the Uyghurs for a very long time. This is not some bandwagon that I am jumping on, and I have ties to the region as well. I moderate the Uyghur sub on Reddit, created #uyghur on matrix.org, and on lemmy.ml I have registered communities like c/uyghur and c/xinjiang. I did that mainly to promote the welfare of Uyghurs and guard against whitewashing of the situation in Xinjiang. Obviously I am pro-Uyghur, and I feel that the admins of lemmy.ml have been gracious enough to respect me as a user and a mod. I have also not seen them engage in censorship of opposing viewpoints on this issue, and we have at least once that I can remember disagreed on China’s Uyghur policy here on the site. This did not result in any problem.
Please don’t cancel Lemmy, because the software is amazing and the creators really are nice. I don’t have to agree with them on politics in China. As long as they’re not crazy about it, the situation is manageable. So far they’ve always been fair.
Even suppose that one day they implement a policy on lemmy.ml that says they won’t allow anyone to post pro-Uyghur things. So what? It’s their Lemmy instance, they can decide what’s on it. I can go start my own instance. I really don’t think lemmy.ml has any obligation to do what the community wants. They’ve already done enough by creating the software and making it FOSS.
Besides, you know how many people posted pro-Uyghur content on c/uyghur since I created it? None. So if you’re concerned about how the issue is being represented on this site, maybe you could come post something sometime, or argue in the comments.
Anyway, at present I’m not recommending any other Reddit alternative and probably won’t.
This kind of drama happens on Mastodon all the time, and within a few days everyone forgets about it. Apparently thats just how the platform works, so no need to get worried.
I suspect it’s by design. It’s surprisingly hard to discover past conversations on Mastodon, and the single depth comment/reply system makes it a pain to actually follow a serious discussion between multiple people.
I’m 100% sure you’re right… I don’t know why but the twitter style seems like someone’s yelling into the void, trying to start arguments, while the tree format feels like you can have principled discussions and learn from each other.
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I am among those people who think stalin wasn’t a hero, mao a genocide, and modern russia and china are oligarchies and dictatorships.
Some community members might disagree with me, but so far it’s been in a respectful way.
I believe it is a mistake selecting that particular instance for those communities.
The risk isn’t just that they shut it down, there’s a much worse thing that could happen: pinpoint elision (or even editing) of reporting on the genocide.
There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses. The difference is stark and even there, if the actor would in fact in engage in human right abuses.
An open society must tolerate the later. I.e. we must tolerate that people dispute that human right abuses occur or occurred. This is because you cannot judge someone purely due to getting the facts wrong or not knowing them.
If we wouldn’t allow this, we would de-facto argue for a totalitarian state, since we wouldn’t allow people disputing facts (which can be proven or disproven). We would have to nominate some entity that judges what is fact and what isn’t, which is the opposite to gathering evidence and engaging in an open, society wide discussion.
To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.
I don’t see anything on lemmy or in the mastodon thread that shows that human rights abuses are advocated for. What I do see is that there are some fractions that show sympathies to China which you would otherwise only see for the USA. I think its useful to compare these sympathies because they seem to express themselves in similar ways.
With all that said, I think the opinion expressed in the mastodon thread is not particularly useful. It, in many ways, minimises real human rights abuses that occur world wide, day to day, in China, USA, and many other countries in East and West.
Let’s call out the abuses, let’s discuss and present the evidence for them, let’s not alienate people and create polarity that looks like us-vs-them.
Very well said. Also, if these people disagree with the rules on lemmy.ml, they could create their own instance, with their own rules. Thats the whole point of federation.
Us: “China isn’t committing the atrocities the West accuses them of and here’s evidence.”
Anti-China people: “OMG you actively advocate for China’s atrocities and want them to keep happening!”
We politely asked this fedi account to take this discussion here, but they obstinately refused. They’ve equated even any discussion questioning the Zenz / Byler / ASPI narrative as genocide denial.
Block 'em and move on I say. It’s clear there’s no reasoning with them and there isn’t much we can do to stop them from spewing propaganda at us. In fact, engaging them will probably only exacerbate things.
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There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses.
The main difference is, that one practice gaslighting as a means to justify such acts.
They will claim “it was just joking”, or explain how in fact the abuse is something good, hence they aren’t for human right violation because they are for something that they just defined as something good.I haven’t seen this. What I’ve seen is that people say that the abuses do not occur.
show instances of lemmy.ml users saying “I was joking” or “saying that abuse is a good thing” during a discussion about any alleged genocide, abuse or disater.
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why not use something else if they have an issue with lemmy?
I don’t agree with presenting the Chinese or Korean goverment in a good light and manipulating facts to reach that, but I do firmly believe that everyone deserves a space to say it.
Lemmy is a good thing, albeit I may not agree with developers/admins on many point. That thread on Mastodon come off pretty obtuse in most of those comments.
Keep up the good work!
if we were talking about lemmygrad, I would agree, but personally lemmy.ml is a place for me that I enjoy browsing and posting to. anyway I think it’s the best opportunity for anyone interested in making a centrist or apolitical instance and get the label of “flagship instance” on joinlemmy to help it grow and become as big as lemmy.ml, it will also make it easier for people who don’t like the politics of lemmy.ml to choose an instance knowing that it has no strong political affiliation.
but I agree the folks on lemmygrad can be a little bit … let’s say annoying.
also interesting that their only problem seems to be about the “genocide”.
haters… Everywhere
They have problems with the word filter? The word filter keeps the bigoted reactionaries away, did they not notice that? If they would rather talk to bigots than to us, then they shouldn’t join us.
I’ve been struggling the whole day about how to respond to this.
My first reaction was disgust, as the thing going on with Uyghurs in China pretty much looks like a genocide, regardless of semantics. “If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck”.
When it comes to discussion about the subject, I however have to agree with @jazzfes@lemmy.ml.
To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.
No promotion of oppression or bigotry has in this case happened. I’d rather allow people have these discussions as long as they can behave like in a furnished space.
I’m fine with the developers’ political views, as the Lemmy software is more important.
Of course Lemmy has now a certain kind of PR problem as this FediTips fella is making big accusations and wanting people to stop using Lemmy altogether.
Lemmy always had a PR “problem”, but so far it has probably been a net positive as it kept away some very annoying people and Lemmy the software isn’t quite ready for mainstream adoption anyways (mainly due to lacking moderation options and integration with the “normal” Fediverse).
But it’s not that easy. Having a “discussion around whether abuses occur” implies allowing being apologetic towards those acts which might be abusive.
I’m sure fascists don’t think of fascism as abusive, even if it is. Would you allow discussing that?
At some point you need to set a clear dogmatic/axiomatic definition of what’s not allowed (with examples from different geopolitical positions) and don’t allow anyone to put that in doubt, abiding by that definition should be part of the rules.
Of course this makes it much harder to discuss things openly, but that’s the price to pay if you want to have a rule that claims zero tolerance.
Good points!
Highly recommend reading this recent report from Italy regarding Xinjiang.
It’s ironic that the “OMG CHINA IS GENOCIDING” crowd accuses us of lying and ignoring evidence when we tend to be the only ones providing sources for our claims. It’s evident in this very thread.
It’s not a good look for admins to get involved in politics this directly, makes the whole place look like a hugbox
Let’s not fool ourselves, denying Uyghur abuse puts you in the same territory as holocaust deniers.
Would you deny white genocide? You should. The reasoned denial of a supposed genocide is not equivalent to the ideological denial (or fabrication) of the same. Holocaust denial is not the same as scepticism of the genocide which is supposed to be taking place in Xinjiang. To equate any genocide with the Holocaust is an ideological tool used to avoid analysis of the subject.
If someone doesn’t want to use this software because they disagree with the developers’ politics, it’s their loss. I wish them luck in finding ideologically pure projects in the future.
I strongly suspect that the main devs are not only active on Lemmygrad, but in fact run it. When lemmy.ml went down for technical reasons, so did Lemmygrad.
That said, I am happy that some of the really stupid people that frequent Lemmygrad are not posting here directly on lemmy.ml too much, so I guess it was a good decision to officially split off that community early.
A DNS check indicates that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml are hosted on the same IP address, so I think your hunch is right:
https://dnschecker.org/all-dns-records-of-domain.php?query=lemmy.ml&rtype=ALL&dns=google
https://dnschecker.org/all-dns-records-of-domain.php?query=lemmygrad.ml&rtype=ALL&dns=google
@nutomic@lemmy.ml Could you confirm this?
agreed, I don’t like linking online identities of a single person together, but just checking the posting history of a lemmygrad admin and one of lemmy develper’s reddit account clearly shows that they are the same person.
Hmm, I didn’t noticed any of this behaviour. But Lemmy is still a “great” software. We need to be mature enough to separate the “pice/product” from the author. So if the instance gets toxic or what ever, we could easily move to another and just that
FediTips and the commenters in that thread make some good points. The fact that this Lemmy instance federates with Lemmygrad (which, if you look at the front page, is full of denialism about the Uyghur genocide) is an atrocity.
And yes, https://lemmy.ml/modlog does indeed have some questionable entries, such as:
- Removed Community conservatives reason: No conservative communities
- Removed Community Libertarian, in the pursuit of a free society reason: No conservative communities allowed
- Removed Community Conservatism reason: No conservative subs allowed
I created the Conservatism community, not knowing that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) became a leftist instance. (Lemmy was not explicitly leftist when I made my account in July 2020. Look at this archive of the front page from November 2020, which does not include the word leftist in the sidebar.) Fine, whatever. But, removing the Libertarian community with the rationale “No conservative communities allowed”? I don’t understand that. That’s not even politically accurate.
I understand that is is partially done to prevent the main instance from growing too big. Have you thought about making a libertarian Lemmy instance?
P.S.: I hope you mean true libertarian, not just the more recent attempted appropriation of the term by the Alt-right.
Frankly, I’m just not accustomed to what Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. When you look at most of the services in the fediverse, the “main” instance (usually the biggest one maintained by the developers) is not explicitly political in the way that Lemmy (lemmy.ml) is. For example, in Mastodon, that would be mastodon.social and its successor mastodon.online.
mastodon.online has rules restricting the discussion of egregious topics such as discrimination of protected classes, Nazi symbolism, holocaust denial, etc., but does not declare a broad political position for its entire community. In general, it tries to be a “big tent” and only limits what is necessary to keep the environment non-toxic.
I or someone else could create a libertarian instance of Lemmy, but what I’d really love to see is a “big tent” instance of Lemmy that doesn’t restrict political discussion reasonably close to the center of the Overton window.
(And to clarify, I understand that alt-right groups have tried to appropriate the term libertarian and misuse it to describe things that are not libertarian at all. I strongly disagree with them. The alt-right is not libertarian, but very much the opposite in most cases.)
I think a lot of Fediverse developers agree that it was a (early & forgivable) mistake to let the main mastodon instance grow so big. Having a “big tent” instance is directly detrimental to the very idea of the Fediverse.
I totally agree that it’s healthier for the fediverse to stay decentralized. But instances don’t have to restrict participation to a certain section of the political spectrum to achieve that. I think there’s space for multiple general-interest instances in the fediverse without needing any one of them to dominate the community.
Sure, but the Lemmy developers decided that they would not run such an instance themselves. I can’t read their minds, but I personally would have done the same to keep sane. A non-political instance has to by definition be relatively open to the alt-right, but those are trying to actively infiltrate a lot of online communities to spread their hate. So far the only moderation policy that seem to work against them is to pull out the ban-hammer early and quickly, which would not be possible on a non-political instance.
Having no moderation is definitely a non-starter, since the community would eventually devolve to something like 4chan. I’m just wishing for a Lemmy instance where center-left and center-right folks could interact and discuss general topics, some of which may be political. Politics intersects with so many areas, so having strong political restrictions would really limit the type of discussions that the instance could have.
The Lemmy developers have no obligation to create such a space, you’re right about that. But the Lemmy software is pretty great, and it would be nice to be able to point interested newcomers to an active Lemmy instance where they can talk about a variety of common topics, without alienating a large chunk of these people.
I’m just wishing for a Lemmy instance where center-left and center-right folks could interact and discuss general topics, some of which may be political.
What is stopping people to interact cross instance? That is the very idea of the Fediverse to allow to interact with people from other instances.
I understand that the current opt-in federation model of Lemmy somewhat limits this, but I think a reasonably well moderated libertarian instance would be allowed to federate with lemmy.ml.
But making separate instances is very helpful in moderation and “pruning” the network to prevent an alt-right take-over as has happened with so many other non-mainstream social media.
In addition to what @poVoq@lemmy.ml said, also read the thread What is Lemmy.ml which discusses this topic.
Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate this paragraph:
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
One of the concerns that FediTips raised was that they weren’t sure whether Lemmy developers/admins would condone a “mainstream” Lemmy instance. This is a relief to read.
Even US state department denies the Uyghur genocide. Give it a rest already.
You are aware that this is just about semantics? It’s not about if those crimes against humanity that some call genocide are happening, it is if those crimes against humanity should be called genocide or differently. Stop gaslighing.
“The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide,…”
Some more quote from the article:
“Secretary Blinken and I have made clear that genocide has been committed against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang,”
“I have determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups,”
“For example, the torture, rape and sexual violence committed against Uyghurs likely constitute genocide ‘by causing serious bodily and mental harm’—the second type of genocide recognized by the Convention,
“More than 1 million Uighurs have been detained in reeducation camps, and many have reportedly been subjected to forced labor and sterilization. China has committed numerous crimes listed in the convention as acts of genocide, including the prevention of births and infliction of bodily or mental harm on members of a group and the compulsory separation of children from their communities, according to human rights groups.”
What I’m aware of is that there is no credible evidence of any sort of genocide happening in Xinjiang. The millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”. CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from logistics perspective. You’d need a detention city the size of San Francisco to detain one million Uighurs.
Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.
Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”
Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.
Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.
Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.
The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.
It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:
Throughout the 1990s, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerilla warfare by the mujahideen. When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Catli’s expert direction. Graham Fuller, CIA superspy, offered this explanation for radicalizing the Chinese Muslims:
The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan and against the Red Army. The doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter Chinese influence in Central Asia.
Furthermore, a recent joint research report on Xinjiang from multiple academic institutions in Italy states that U.S. is exploiting this issue seeking geopolitical benefits in the name of human rights.
Anybody who still peddles Xinjiang genocide narrative at this point is either utterly ignorant or is willfully spreading misinformation.
What I’m aware of is that there is no credible evidence of any sort of genocide happening in Xinjiang.
Why is it always the same rhetorical methods you (are you ML?) people use?
Telling someone they are wrong, and they just need to read a bit more into it. Then they read a bit more into it, from the source you linked and notice that your entire argument is nothing but manipulative but they anyway use the arguments from the very source you linked as a means to show you how pointless your comment was…and then, like nearly always, people like you will then argue: no, no, all false: read this very long thread.
I did read some threads on that subject from some MLs already. They all had one thing in common:
forced labor is actually something good in this case. But look this is an ideological debate. You think it’s good, I think it’s bad. There’s no point debating that I should change my value system.
You haven’t addressed a single point that I made, and now you’ve shifted from talking about genocide to forced labor which nobody here is defending. You’re clearly not interested in having a good faith discussion here.
Have a good day.
You haven’t addressed a single point that I made
I did. I addressed your original point. Then you wanted to talk about something else and I said, no, I’m not going to follow you into this rabbit hole, let’s first stick to the original point. If anytime someone makes an argument that makes your argument become logical inconsistent, you start to distract with something else, no point following you into the rabbit hole. Because all you want is to win, but I don’t gonna join your rules.
here just so you don’t miss it out, here’s how I respond to your original point: https://lemmy.ml/post/78808/comment/74761
No, you literally didn’t address any of my points. I explained that the source for your claims is not credible. I provided the context of what’s terrorism in Xinjiang and US involvement. I’ve also provided an independent report from Italy stating that US claims are politically motivated. You addressed none of that, and then shifted your argument. You are a troll.
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xD. I get the Joke @TheAnonymouseJoker. Hope you wont get to much downovtes by those not understanding the actual joke. xD Because this might not be obvious to others reading here I give a short explanation:
It’s a common practice by tankies and of those who come at their defense, to make some claim/question about “shit lib” or CIA, and it doesn’t matter if it fits the current argument or not. Usually some conspiracy follow after that.
The joke here is to make a pun out of that behavior, by injecting that “CIA” claim at a moment it just doesn’t servers well.
And here’s why: Someone tried to gaslight an political opponent by linking to an article that they claim to be about “Even US state department denies the Uyghur genocide”. So all I did is to quote some parts of the text, as a means to break the gaslighting spell. And now, the source that was original used to prove that that genocide did not happen, if used by a non-tankie it is CIA propaganda shit libs believe in. And because this art of debate is so absurd, it creates some laughter for some. On the other hand it is also very anoying, because you can’t have any serious logical consistent debate with anyone who argues like that.
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You’re just playing word games here. Insufficient evidence means there is no ground to claim that there is a genocide happening. This is coming from the lawyers of a country that’s actively pushing the genocide narrative. If you bothered looking at my follow up comment, I provide a lot more evidence to support what I’m saying.
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Nobody is changing any meanings here or gaslighting you. Insufficient evidence literally means that they do not have evidence. You’re the one changing definitions here while accusing others of lying. There has to be a positive proof of something happening, otherwise you’re just asking to prove a negative. It’s quite obvious that you do in fact want to play word games here.
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You just keep repeating the same thing over and over here. You’re also conveniently ignoring my follow up comment that provides a lot more context and sources other than US such as the recent report from Italy stating that the narrative is politically motivated.
Yeah, okay, I’ll just say it: the admins can’t care less if a bunch of reactionaries don’t use this platform. None of us are getting ad revenue or any sort of money from more users, and we have no incentive to, nor want to, cater to a bunch of US propaganda spewing haters.
As for the devs being communists, yes. Dessalines and Nutomic are ML. I’m at least Marxist myself. We have not, and are not going to hide this fact to placate the haters and we honestly don’t care if that makes people leave or boycott this project.
Me personally, I’ve realized how much my perception of socialist countries has been warped by capitalist propaganda and I’m reluctant about believing anything that western media says about these countries.
I was in the same boat before I joined Lemmy and talked to actual socialists and communists. I was staunchly anticommunist and anti-China without even knowing all the facts.
There are lot of lies about communism but not every thing that comes anti-communist along is actually anti-communist.
It is most often directed at the authoritarian and totalitarian communists and gives a really bad image to any other communist, because unfortunate it often lumps it all together.
Everyone should get a platform to spread their views/propaganda :)
