I have seen that the lemmy.ml mods will openly ban discussion about the CCP. I am wondering if the sh.itjust.works team allows criticism of government bodies, while still banning racism.
Any government or governing body should be open to criticism. They are suppose to be working for the people they serve. How is anyone going to know better if no one tells them what they are doing wrong? @wriggly3171@sh.itjust.works you have my support
👆my dude this is yet another reason why I like it here
The dude abides.
Right on! So I have a question, if I posted something that got me banned from lemmy.ml (such as an article criticizing the CCP for example) I would just not have access to the communities on that instance right? Like it won’t affect my experience in other instances right?
That’s correct.
Interesting to know, thanks!
Yeah, it’s not about levying criticism. It’s about having an outsized agenda, arguing in bad faith, spamming the critiques where they don’t below, trying to co-op a shared space to create an echo chamber, etc…
Let’s find out: The CCP is committing genocide against the Uighur people
Mao Zedong was a little piss baby who hid in the mountains while the KMT fought the Japanese.
The KMT was also bad and also definitely killed innocent people, in China and in Taiwan, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident
The KMT were brutal fascists and the communist parties around the world sacrificed more than canadians during world war 2 wtf is wrong with you… revisionist history to own who? If the kmt were powerful they wouldnt have gotten insta bozo’d by the CCP. Modern china is nothing to defend but youre weird, posting pro fash propaganda
If I get banned, it wasn’t worth being here in the first place.
totally agree, the ccp are evil
Agreed.
Adding the people of occupied Tibet to this.
Edited
*Occupied Tibet
https://sh.itjust.works/c/fucktheccp hasn’t been banned yet, so I guess yes.
Also lemmygrad is blocked here. As a person born in eastern block, fuck communism and tankies.
just came over here after poking around some of the other instances and the quality increase from not having tankies brigading shit is truly amazing
Yeah old eastern block ex-pat here too. Lived through two communist regimes (Ukraine via the USSR and Poland). Don’t want to go for a third.
I am staunchly Socialist though.
What do you think of this video on Eastern Europe from my favourite Hungarian YouTuber?
We’ll it’s all true but there are some smaller differences, I live in ex Yugoslav country which was in eastern block but more liberal than Soviet puppet states.
Most people aren’t racist or xenophobic (except Balkan rule: hate thy neighbor). We are just an extremely introverted and paranoid society, that’s why many empires fell around our people. We never had any colonies because our people were used as labour for other empires, so we never developed a superiority complex to other races.
We’re just anarchy that’s preserved through community.
We’re just anarchy that’s preserved through community.
I like that.
That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing your perspective. As a paranoid and anxious person I can empathize with a whole society with this issues.
I hope so, although it’s not something I personally care too much about.
What have you brought upon this thread…
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wait, what?? you just typed that or was your comment removed???
LMAO sexy communist Winnie the pooh was not on my itinerary today. And no I’m not aroused I’m just interested in the content.
Sexy?
Surely I’m not the only one wondering what kinda unit he’s packing down there. My man looks awfully proud
I mean he’s not wearing any trousers, unless he has some kind of prehensile penis that he can retract at will? Like a foot long yellow elephants trunk snuffling around for honey.
unless he has some kind of prehensile penis that he can retract at will? Like a foot long yellow elephants trunk snuffling around for honey.
And now I’ve found my new kink.
Then I think you’re going to love John Dillermand.
And you can watch them all here (in Danish, but I don’t think that matters in this case).
Find Jesus 🙏 😦
Hey man don’t infringe on my ability to be degenerate in one instance and self-righteous in the next. Besides everyone has wondered about Winnie the pooh’s genitals at some point. Right guys? Right?
Kowtowing to the shitty chinese government is cowardice.
Why would they delete discussion like that? Are they waiting to IPO their Lemmy instance?
Ooof the admins are weighing in on that linked thread at lemmy.ml and it’s not a good look if you are in favor of human rights
Which admins? Lemmy.ml ones?
Huh?
The Lemmy project openly describes itself in its public documentation as anti-US, and was apparently founded around the idea that Reddit is fundamentally anti-China and pro-US: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
The doc starts off talking about open source, but it quickly becomes clear that the Lemmy project is primarily political in nature.
To me this is concerning – what happens when largely pro-US Reddit refugees swarm a community (community in the general sense, not the Lemmy sense) which was intended by the founders to combat those peoples views? Sure, instances and people can choose to ignore the lemmy.ml instance, but the founders control the project at a much deeper level than that.
Personally I hope that alternative implementations that are compatible with Lemmy arise, totally outside of the influence of the original founders. Yes there is kbin, but I actually prefer the Lemmy model (from what I’ve seen so far), and I think there would only be benefits of having another high quality implementation which is totally separate yet totally compatible with the original Lemmy. It would make the whole thing more resilient, and could be fertile ground for future improvements to flourish.
Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.
Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?
I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.
Is that post really anti us and pro china though? To me it looks like anti pro us, and anti anti china.
I had already formed conclusions after reading through one of the founder’s comment histories (which I’d encourage), so my reading of it may have been biased. Either way it’s clear that the motivation driving them is, or at least was, largely political in nature.
Also, how do you see the founders controlling the project more? Especially at the “much deeper level”?
They own the github repo, they control what code gets committed, they control whether the project lives or dies really. They have the power to lose interest or decide to abandon the project, at which point the best hope the community has is that others pick it up. It’s not normally something I worry too much about with open source projects but again, strong geopolitical associations makes it feel precarious to me – if they don’t like where things are going, maybe they’d feel motivated to actively shut it down and discourage any peaceful transition of (code) ownership. Obviously this is all conjecture.
I’m a New Zealander living in The Netherlands, whether you choose to believe that or not.
I’m not sure why you think I’d have trouble believing that!
Couldn’t someone just fork it and update current servers with that fork and still keep all of the data though? It should still just work the same but just not be from a codebase controlled by the founders
That’s right. It’s a legitimate solution if the lead dev drives it into the ground. I don’t think lack of developers to fork or maintain it would be an issue. The only barrier I see is adoption of yet another platform. So in my mind, there’s always an option to just separate if Lemmy turns into one big tankie brigade. But forking is still a PITA and not ideal.
I don’t think using a fork would separate it into another platform. It would still be Lemmy. They would only need to separate of their code bases change so drastically between the two that going to other instances from the forked one starts breaking things. And even then workarounds could then be put in the former version so everything still plays nice.
Even better!
I’d think if they would resist a “global citizen” approach in favour of the now de-facto “hegemonic nations” approach, that would be a good reason for offering such a fork. … It could quickly supersede the “old Lemmy” when people start to realise that the new system allows migration and resilience against domain-takedowns. :-)
@CowsLookLikeMaps@sh.itjust.works
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Criticising pro-US doesn’t necessarily mean anti-US, you can be in the middle. Similarly, criticising anti-China doesn’t necessarily mean pro-China. Praising when something good was really done and criticising when something bad was really done, you can achieve at least some level of unbiased, rational and reasonable opinion.
The great thing about Lemmy is that it’s all decentralized. Lemmy.ml mods and admins can’t do anything about other instances
Technically correct, much like you can’t do anything about what your neighbour does in their own home.
However, what sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml can do is block ‘bad server’ communication.
They can also enforce rules on their own ‘home’ as it were.
Like Beehaw? Well, it mostly inconveniences their own users…
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The Lemmy devs cannot unfed a server. They can only block it from the lemmy.ml instance
Would users in the unfederated instance still be able to access other content and instances in the fediverse?
If a server becomes blocked by some other server(s), then neither can communicate or access the resources of the other, but they can still access resources from the other parts of the fediverse. If a server is unfederated from every other, then they operate as their own separate little island by themselves.
Users from the banned instance would not see the communities or content from the instance that blocked them. (As I understand this all thing ^^)
what if they browse All at another instance. That instance could have pulled lemmy.ml data.
There’s some talk about “a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately” in https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html, which struck me as odd.
Criticism of any governments should be allowed, especially authoritarian ones.
Yeah. This is kinda gaslighting:
We’ve also seen a rise in anti-China posts that have hit Reddit lately, and along with that comes anti-chinese racism,
No. Anti-china posts are not racist. We all hate Hitler Germany. Does that mean we are racist against Germans?
This sentence is fundamentaly flawed and shouldn’t exist in the documentation.
To push back on this a little: there’s definitely historical precedent for anti-regime sentiment bleeding over into anti-populace sentiment. To use your example of WWII, a lot of the anti-Japan sentiment bled over to anti-Japanese sentiment in the US in the form of internment camps.
Of course this was in the 1940s and I like to think that we’ve become a little bit less racist now. But I’ve noticed a lot more racist “jokes” on Reddit as anti-China sentiment has risen. Don’t get me wrong, we should still criticize China for its many human rights abuses and imperialistic practices as well as their violations of personal freedoms in their citizens etc. etc. but we should also be aware that these criticisms will be used by racists to justify their views and their actions, and call it out when it starts becoming more about the people than the government.
I think it’s because people nowadays are brought up to to ***follow ***what they read.
There is so much importance of memorising facts one is informed like a computer, then alongside this, are informed by media and abrihamic based religions repeatedly, that life is binary good and bad.
And as such, when an average reader attempts to criticise China, or Israel, UK or US present governmental practices for instance, they struggle to not generalise and lump government, people, race, and more all into one.
To educate massess of people into being able to criticise policy is a surefire way to get the masses to be critical of the practices of a present government, and get you out of power.
Binary identity politics however, will keep you there, in power, forever.
Anti-China posts can be racist. If someone is yelling about the Chinese government oppressing people, great.
But it sure does seem like people are out there fomenting FUD about China as China, not really in reference to particular policies or practices that need to change.
For example, in The New York Times’s coverage of that time the US decided to try and ban people anywhere selling good GPUs and semiconductor stuff to people in China, it’s all about “how effective will this be at preventing China from having things” and “how much will this cost Americans”. Not “is this the right thing to do to best stop people in China from being oppressed” or “why should the US be in charge of who can make microchips”.
You could say “we think China’s government is going to use GPUs to abuse human rights” or “we think if China ever develops a halfway decent semiconductor industry they will immediately invade Taiwan”, but often that kind of context seems to have been deemed irrelevant. People are just taking it as read that it is right and proper for the US to decide what industries Chinese people may or may not do, and how good at them they are allowed to be.
And I don’t think they’d do that in the absence of racism.
It’s an absolute gaslight. He doesn’t mention that the subs closed down supported authoritarian regimes and were a safe space for violence and extremism where members regularly advocated for it.
But yeah it’s typical authoritarian/fascist gaslighting.
It’s from the people developing Lemmy the software, not the creators of independent instances like this one or lemmy.world and many others. I think there’s not much to worry about since the software is open source and if they start to “leak” their ideologies/politics into the software (no idea how 😆), people will fork it quickly.
However I worry that this is so off-putting to some people that they stop doing anything to help Lemmy grow when they learn about the developers’ politics. A good example is Lemmur, an Android app for Lemmy, whose author stopped further development on it, due to “lack of interest and political differences”, which is sad.
Yo, fuck the CCP!!! If sh.itjust.works doesn’t like it I’m out
#fucktheccp
This is why I didn’t make an account on lemmy.ml. I check to make sure instances I join have banned lemmygrad.
How do you check this? And is it banned via the instance “sh.itjust.works” for example, or is it banned via the “subreddit” equivalent, for want of the accurate name?
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘instances’
Wow, there are so many instances. One day there’ll need to be some method of recording various biases within it.
I’m glad that’s not my responsibility!Some of those are Mastodon instances where someone has subscribed to a community on your server
I understand some of those words. But together, that means little.
If only I could figure out how dinasaurs were related to this…
Hate to see tankies running the software and big parts of the platform.
The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism, but I always found the China obsession on reddit to be odd. While I don’t think it should be banned outright, I think y’all ought to consider what is motivating such a weird fetish (because frankly that is) for a specific government.
I’m not a tankie and have no love for the government of China (or any government) but there is an extent to which criticism of China is deployed by xenophobes and nazis as a kind of socially acceptable rallying call or dog whistle. So, I’m all for criticizing China, but remember the allegory of the crustpunk bar
https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522
Thank you for posting that link, it was a good story.
Exactly. Chinese capitalism is currently threatening American capitalism, so American media and american society more generally demonizes it. China is willing to offer cheaper loans to 3rd world countries than any western countries and banks like the IMF. Of course, this is still exploitative imperialism, but it is slightly less bad than the west. China. Of course, China treats its workers terribly, but it at least tries to reinvest the surplus it takes from those workers into domestic production and infrastructure. Tankies love to depict China as ontologically good because it opposes american hegemony and has a rapidly growing economy. They ignore its imperialism and domestic exploitation. Redditors, American exceptionalists, and their ilk depict China as ontologically evil, a threat to world peace, the most totalitarian country imaginable. They of course ignore the comparably bad conditions of America’s puppet states and its domestic prison system. The reality is much more boring. Two capitalist nation states are fighting over their shares of the world market.
I’m not an American but it’s hard to equate these two countries. While I don’t love the US, you can’t deny that the CCP literally runs concentration camps…
Guantánamo…
We do too. I’m sorry, but just because ours are callous and depressingly bureaucratic instead of passionate and angry, not having the intention of reeducating anyone, it doesn’t excuse the fact that even though Trump is no longer president we have refugee children dying in cramped cages, women and children being violated by ICE agents, and other human rights violations constantly and ongoing.
The US also runs concentration campus, has slave labor, forced sterilization, torture, genocide, violently repressive police, persecution of religious minorities, etc. etc. etc. Hence why it’s a red flag (no pun intended) when people in the west have A Lot To Say about China and just China.
::slaps top of any country:: you can fit so many human rights violations in this bad boy
(I have a lot more complaints about the US than China, but that’s because I live in the US, not because I think other imperial powers are exempt from criticism.)
What would you call the places where the US detains immigrants? What would you call the enhanced interrogation techniques the US uses in guantanamo bay and CIA blacksites? What would you call the prisons where the US forces people to work without pay?
The US has used heavily militarized police and even tanks to crush civil unrest. The US doesn’t just threaten to invade a neighboring island (like china threatens to invade taiwan), the US actually has invaded neighboring islands such as Cuba, Haiti (multiple times), the Dominican Republic, etc. None of this justifies any of China’s actions, but it is important to know that nominally democratic nations can also act authoritarian.
I tentatively agree. The key to avoiding whataboutism is to make clear that you’re willing to call out abuses and human rights violations for both sides.
Yup, the flip side of the coin is that reddit really has a hate boner for China. The anti-CCP side has its own collection of nutty people, with a lot of the talking points tracing back to the
cultnice people that send out all those Shen Yun flyers.Shit’s complicated. That said, banning all criticism of the Chinese government isn’t the answer. We need to be smarter about the information that we digest.
It really isn’t that complicated. If Chinese politics is to be taken seriously, then there is a ton of low hanging liberal fruit for the picking. There is no reason for the Chinese legal system to not have public trial, for starters. There is no reason for China to censor the internet or speech or free association the way it does. And most importantly, there is no reason for China to not confront the very real sins of Mao and Deng in public.
I agree there is complexity which exists beyond this kind of stuff. But these are first principles for free society, and political agency, and should be taken seriously.
I’m sympathetic to what you listed, and it would be nice to see those things come to pass. I’m just cynical about anything that starts to sound like “regime change” after watching the US campaigns in the middle east these past couple decades.
Even though Tiananmen was a long time ago, there have been more recent cracks in the facade like the unrest over lingering COVID zero policies. It’s encouraging to know that people do have limits, but I don’t know how popular those sentiments are across the broader population.
It’s always nice to hear from someone else that recognizes how similar all this saber rattling is to the buildup to the first iraq war. All of a sudden after years of radio silence, everyone seems to care really deeply about the situation in another country.
it’s also possible China censored the internet as a form of protectionism. social networks tend to form monopolies because people go wherever everyone else is. whichever state that network is based in then gets a boost to its tech industry
You’re somehow implying that being an anti-ccp “fanatic” is basically crazy, and that people should reconsider their position… because… ? hate boner for china? what does disliking the CCP have to do with “hating china”?
I think he’s talking about the people who don’t do anything but look for hateable things about the CCP
why should we look for likeable things about the ccp when they’re committing genocide? lmao. and why should we spend effort looking for likeable things about the ccp when they have millions of genzedongers around the world (example: lemmygrad.ml) to do it for them?
I think instead we should balance it with posts appreciating Chinese culture. They have a long artistic and cultural history that goes way beyond the current gov.
Thing is, I’m not talking about China or the Chinese people. If I say “CCP is committing genocide” am I talking in any way about “The Chinese People”?? I’m not. Talking shit about basically Hitler2.0 has absolutely nothing to do with The Chinese People. Why should I go around randomly yelling good stories about the Chinese culture any time I wanna talk shit about Xi Jinping or his posse of evil? Makes no sense right?
You can dislike the CCP without hating China, or being fanatical about it. There are people that have trouble with it, though. As an example you could say that the CCP sponsors campaigns of corporate espionage on a large scale to steal technology from other countries. That one is pretty uncontroversial. But some people have trouble preventing themselves from taking it further and making generalizations about how creative the country’s citizens are, as an example.
I haven’t seen that. First time I see a suggestion such as that you’re mentioning, that the Chinese could be uncreative. I read lots of Chinese books all the time and if anything I’d say they’re more creative than western authors in many respects.
Glad to hear, I’ve been meaning to pick up some Chinese sci-fi myself now that more of that stuff is getting translated.
Honestly, you’ve got some recommendations? I’m actually more into non-fiction, but I really gotta start practicing my Chinese more. I wish more books adhered to the traditional character set and the top to bottom format though.
There are a couple xianxia novels. Reverend Insanity (incomplete banned by the ccp but has some of the best word building and intelligent writting), Lord of Mysteries (more western fantasy lovecraftian mystery) and Forty Millennium of Cultivation (has 40k elements in it). Non fiction isn’t really popular probably because anything non fiction in China that has anything to do with history is at risk due to censors and people in the west aren’t really interested in reading ccp bootlicking.
I was trying to learn some Chinese the other day to read some of the raw wordings in Ascending, Do Not Disturb. The novel itself is not amazing, although I did like it a lot, but the translators left some terminology untranslated and I had some fun researching how to read that.
I can’t recommend Chinese sci-fi or nonfiction, haven’t read any, I only read fantasy novels. My favorites are Coiling Dragon and Douluo Dalu. If you can read Chinese then why not try those lmao. I wish I could read Chinese. I wouldn’t spend so much time finding translations.
Haha I can’t read a drop of Chinese, but the one that everyone tends to recommend as a gateway is The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Haven’t read it yet but I did watch Wandering Earth on netflix, which is based on a short story by the same author.
novelupdates.com has a lot of translations of asian novels in general, most terrible quality bc they’re done by amateurs but some are great, and sometimes it doesn’t matter cuz the stories themselves make up for the shitty translation.
What are your 5 favorite xianxia novels.
There are plenty of awful regimes around the world, but China is unique in how powerful and dangerous it is.
In particular, if China were to invade Taiwan, which it has a stated intention of doing, then the TSMC chip fabs—the only place on Earth capable of mass-producing modern electronic circuits—will almost certainly be destroyed in the fighting, and that will cause a global economic depression that’ll make 2008 look like a minor inconvenience. That’s a huge global threat.
There’s a crazy amount of sinophobia on Reddit, but let’s be clear, the people who fervently defend the Chinese government are being just as disingenuous.
It’s not sinophobia to criticize the CCP. I haven’t seen anyone saying anything about the Chinese people. What’s more common is criticizing the CCP and its actions as the ruling party of China. I don’t think there’s generalized “sinophobia” as you claim.
The commenter above made it pretty clear that criticism of the government, i.e. the CCP isn’t the issue. The issue at hand is that there most definitely is casual racism on some very popular subreddits that are tolerated more than I’d like. Redditors have blindspots, just like anyone do, but their particular blindspots include casually racist attitudes towards Chinese people. I hope that you’re just lucky in the types of threads and subs you frequent, but I 1000% have seen more than just casual sinophobia that had nothing to do with criticizing their government.
idk maybe i am indeed very lucky cuz i have not seen that, and instead have seen a lot of criticism against ccp being re-purposed as “sinophobia” by the genzedong community.
notice, for example, how we ended up talking about racism in a thread about criticizing the CCP. coincidence? i think not.
I don’t really know who they are, but it’s still important to consider even if some bad actors also bring it up disingenuously. The alt-right likes to call everyone groomers now, that doesn’t mean grooming is a convenient smoke-screen that isn’t real.
i don’t know what you’re talking about here. what’s important to consider? that criticizing the ccp may be racist? and what does the alt-right calling ppl groomers have to do with the topic? sorry i don’t see the connections here.
I’m saying that it’s important to consider that just because disingenuous people call attention to something as a way to dismiss your argument, it does not mean it’s not real. It just means they know how to dismiss your argument really well.
What does that have to do with the alt-right? Because lately any time someone says that it’s not evil to be gay and that pride month isn’t some national holiday to turn everyone gay, instead of trying to defend their insane stance they just call you a pedophile or groomer and leave it at that. They don’t actually care about pedophiles or groomers, otherwise they’d actually do something about the church or conservative congress members either being investigated for or charged with sex crimes against minors. All that matters is whatever works to shut you up.
Yeah idk what could possibly be the motivator for that, I mean it’s not like they’re currently in the middle of any genocides right? Or posturing about invading a certain island neighbour? Nah no way, they’d never do that!
As i stated: “The Chinese Communist Party is absolutely not above criticism”
There is a point at which the criticism becomes a weird fetish though, and that is something that was a common occurrence on reddit. Likely moreso tied to nationalist politics and rabble rousing foreign policy that I personally have a disdain for.
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As someone who lives in China, I’ll tell you your perspective on that isn’t wrong. People abroad too easily conflate what the Chinese govt. dues with Chinese people and “China”. Their concerns are all valid, but people grossly overestimate how much impact regular Chinese folks can have on their own govt.
How happy are people in the US with their govt and how much control they have over it? Not enough right, well the Chinese have even less. They’re even less engaged, though, oddly, but because the stakes for caring and speaking up are so high. People abroad probably rightly wish the average citizen constrained their own govt more, but the reality is they don’t have a way to do it, so they just focus on daily life. Also, they are in a misinformation bubble like crazy.
I think this is the best take in the thread.
Also, as someone who’s from there, it’s just pretty weird seeing folks on there saying “f the ccp” to each other, sometimes adding a “but not the chinese people tho”. Like what is the point of yall repeating this shit to each other. It makes me feel like I’m sort of excluded, and I think I cannot really have a more in-depth conversation with those people because I do not think they will really understand my situation and the world around me.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head.
Do the anti CCPers really care about people? Or is it just a hate boner/we love freedom meme?
The way it comes off it’s like there really just isn’t any depth too it and it seems really performative with little real substance.
