Lead Lemmy Developer, Dessalines, denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre and praising the Uyghur Genocide
https://sh.itjust.works/post/8419342
Dessalines AKA “parentis_shotgun” on Reddit, is the main Lemmy dev, also the admin of lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml.
Their post and discussions on Reddit (archive as the original post must have been removed):
Please join the discussions for Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem:
https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
And the discussions for finding/creating alternative communities on other instances:
https://lemmy.world/post/16235541
What is a tankie?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical.
This whole lemmy tankie dev thing has been discussed ad nauseam here for the past year or so. Not sure what solutions you suggest, but if I were to filter my software by who’s an asshole dev and who’s not, that list will end up really short.
As far as the ml instance goes, I don’t agree that we should start defederating left and right with any and all undesirables, but to each their own. At least people now will be in the know, and it might take some weight off lemmy.world
It’s the Vampire Castle phenomenon of online leftist spaces. One dev and instance admin of Lemmy has problematic personal beliefs, so now we aren’t allowed to be on Lemmy anymore because it’s failed an ideological purity test that OP decided for the rest of us. In other news, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is a hardcore Ayn Rand style freemarket libertarian, so I guess we should all ditch wikipedia and each buy a 400 pound Encyclopedia Britannica set. Because that’ll show him to believe things I think are terrible.
It’s all so melodramatic. I’ll take a jaunt into the comments sections of these posts once in awhile to see what the libs are clutching their pearls over now. Today we have:
Oh nooooo, a dev is a ban happy shithead! How unusual and extreme! Better raise the banner and gather the troops, the tankies are coming for us all! We must defederate and/or fork a parallel Lemmy because only tankies have weird ban happy power trips! This will solve all the issues!
On the bright side, block op and the surprisingly small number of the other more vocal tankie drama lords and it gets a lot quieter.
OP has been here two months, and they were shocked to find out an instance literally named after Karl Marx and John Lennin would pretend to be on the left but support authoritarian governments…
And they assume since they just “discovered” it, no one else knows.
… John Lennin?
I’ve only been on Lemmy a month, and this shit is already exhausting. Isn’t a main point of this whole fediverse thing that you can just block entire instances as well as users? Why is this even an ongoing topic that spans multiple communities?
OP wants to feel like a saviour of us all from tankies.
Yeah, like linus is a known cunt to work with, i’ll still update my kernel regularly though
Yeah, I honestly give very few shits about the political opinions of the lemmy devs as long as it doesn’t taint the project itself -and if it did at some point in the future, forking an open-source project is stupidly easy.
I even donate a smidge of money to the development effort via librepay - man does need it to live after all.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
Dessalines & Nutomic put a lot of effort into building and maintaining the lemmy codebase. I respect that.
I’ll add that they’re also generally quite pleasant when I see them on Lemmy. And I haven’t seen either of them involved in being ban-happy. Some will argue otherwise based upon misconstruing the relationship between FLOSS devs and FLOSS consumers as a business/customer relationship (expecting customer service and product manager input on software that’s donated free of charge). But, I think that those folks are just not yet familiar with how FLOSS development works.
As a fellow communist, I was always bewildered by this urge of many tankies to prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good.
It’s neither. China turned to markets, privatized many industries, and really did commit atrocities on Tiannamen square and in Xinjiang.
Doesn’t mean socialism as a system is dysfunctional. United States are directly responsible for insane atrocities all over the world, and we don’t need to deny that either.
We need to learn from the experience and strive for it not to happen again. Not close our eyes, scream “blah-blah-blah” and pretend it never happened.
China and the Soviet Union were responsible for acts of genocide, mass murdering/starving people, etc.
Doesn’t mean this didn’t happen in a capitalist world, and doesn’t mean we should close our eyes on that to defend the good look of the system. If anything, this does the opposite. Problems need to be solved, not ignored.
Not sure where you are from, but your type of worldly reasoned view does not come without exposure to multiple systems of governance. Labels like “socialism”, “communism”, “capitalism” are the Newspeak that are used to place the populace opinion into buckets with which to control. And I completely agree about the US - its entire history is based upon capitalism and will always be based upon capitalism. Biden is the MOST progressive president in 50 years, yet it’s a stretch to even call him a centrist he’s so enmeshed with the existing corporatists.
I operate dictionary definitions.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production.
Socialism is dictated by the common (social) ownership of the means of production, and communism is a subset of socialism that entails absence of money and private property (note: not personal property).
US is blatantly capitalist. Nordic countries are capitalist, too. USSR was socialist, Russia is capitalist; revolutionary regime preceding the creation of USSR was also briefly communist (see: War communism), though, make no mistake, this wasn’t the kind of communism anyone wanted, it’s just that government couldn’t run monetary policy properly at the time and had even bigger issues.
I operate dictionary definitions.
What. The. Fuck?
prove by all means, against any evidence, that China is socialist and ultimately good
Taps life expectancy, infant mortality, and education statics
That’s it. That’s the nefarious methodology of the villainous Wumao.
By that I primarily meant “Chinese government is not guilty in atrocities it ordered to commit”
But in general, of course China is a miracle in many ways.
You could write textbooks about bad Chinese policies - foreign and domestic.
But a country on it’s fifteenth five year plan is most definitely socialist. And if any nation can qualify as “good”, the miracle of Chinese central planning would seem to qualify.
That’s why leftists are prone to like it. That, and the derth of foreign military conflicts. At least from the perspective of an American, the Chinese government is practically saint-like, simply because it isn’t trying to regime change every country it doesn’t like.
Pre-Iraq, I think you could make a much stronger “China bad” argument. But the bar is so much lower now.
The economy of China is not characterized by the common/social ownership of the means of production, which means it is not socialist. No amount of five-year plans can change that.
China does spark international conflicts and does bully its neighbors, but it is true that the country doesn’t cosplay world police and doesn’t participate much in military operations outside the country, which is a big plus.
As per the bar, it shouldn’t fall lower just because some country got even more evil. We can compare the evils, but the evil will be there.
With all that said, I do not say “China bad”. But claiming “China good” would also not be correct.
The economy of China is not characterized by the common/social ownership of the means of production
30% of their industry is SOEs. They have a 90% home ownership rate and one of the most generous pension systems left standing - affording Chinese workers the opportunity to retire inside their 50s. The local property laws force foreign companies to share equity with regional firms, keeping both profits and IP domestic.
And while the high point of the old-school Commune System is long passed, the household responsibility system still guarantees public ownership of arable land. If you work the land, you own the fruit of your labor. That’s textbook Communism.
China does spark international conflicts and does bully its neighbors
the country doesn’t cosplay world police and doesn’t participate much in military operations outside the country, which is a big plus.
It goes beyond the negative. They’ve been a positive force for international relations, helping to buffer North and South Korea to prevent a new war, exporting $100B/year in agriculture products to curb global hunger, and pioneering industrial scale solar, wind, and nuclear technologies to mitigate climate change.
As a global diplomat, they’ve got cache that the Western states have squandered, making them a popular back channel in Middle Eastern politics.
And to quote Dr. Lubinda Haabazoka, Director at the University of Zambia’s Graduate School of Business
Every time Britain visits we get a lecture, every time China visits we get a hospital.
I would say that alone illustrates why Chinese foreign policy deserves praise.
Textbook communism is an economy that is 100% worker-owned, with everyone’s needs directly met without the intervention of money. The rest is not that, by literal definition. Let’s not play into the hands of people who want to call that communism and ultra-left to exploit in their own needs.
China does have some strong policies, but it doesn’t make it communist by any definition. Also, high home ownership rate is mostly a cultural phenomenon, with housing still seen as “best investment” despite the fact there are entire ghost towns full of houses that never ever filled.
I’m well aware that US pressures China militarily, and that China has a much more peaceful approach. However, Chinese ships regularly bully other countries in the South China Sea against international maritime laws.
The infrastructure China builds is not just a gift - but an investment on which China expects a return. I’m not convinced China is actively pursuing debt trap diplomacy, but it certainly uses economic power to pressure other countries into various concessions.
Textbook communism is an economy that is 100% worker-owned, with everyone’s needs directly met without the intervention of money
Utopian Communism is a stateless, moniless society that was hypothized by 19th century European theorists as a possible result of generations of revolutionary struggle.
But if you sit down and read the textbook, you’ll discover even the most idealistic thinkers don’t hold that it would happen overnight. Marx, himself, asserts a number of transitional states - industrial capitalism being one of them - necessary to reach surplus volumes capable of sustaining a post-money society.
China does have some strong policies, but it doesn’t make it communist by any definition.
The policies are the direct result of experimental application of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socio-economic theory. They are explicitly and deliberately Communist, in the same way that American socio-economic policy is Capitalist.
The end goal of Chinese state policy is to advance to a state of publicly controlled superabundance. This is markedly different from the American policies intended to fashion fully privatized ownership of an artificially scare pool of goods and services.
The infrastructure China builds is not just a gift - but an investment on which China expects a return.
A return in the form of improved economic and political relations. It is for the same reason you would bring a gift to a birthday party.
Regarding lemmy.ml: yes, you should avoid it. It does not make sense to create politically-neutral communities on a politically-oriented instance.
Regarding Dessalines: The great thing about Lemmy is that I don’t need to give a shit about the lead developer’s politics, because he’s not in control of how Lemmy is used, and if he ever tried some kind of heinous cross-instance power grab, it would get shut down before it got started.
Regarding the cognitive dissonance required to A) value decentralization of power, and also B) support the CCP: 🤦
You should know /politics and /news ban anyone critical of israel and Lemmy.world is ran by Zionists.
Then stop posting there.
I have stopped posting there because… they banned me for posting negative things about israel.
Your same argument can be applied to anyone complaining about .ml by the way.
Go find me a post or comment I’ve made in that shithole.
Then come back here and delete your response in humiliation.
This is not about you this is about the argument you are using.
You could type “then stop posting there” as a reply to OP as well. It solves nothing except to create echo chambers.
And I can say the same to you, which I am. Stop posting there if you don’t like it. We’re not talking about OP. We’re talking about you.
No we’re talking about you.
You can stop replying if you don’t like it.
Wow your argument is amazing I am winning every debate with this.
Is that so? How is this about me? I’d LOVE to see you suss this out.
This is true.
Also, some other communities straight up ban you for being in any way critical of NATO/US.
Lemmy.world mods just banned returntoozma from /politics for not posting enough postive news about Biden hahaha.
Only Orange Man bad.
Known shill Linkerbaan defending Lemmy.ml with a whataboutism. Not very original.
Known
shillneoliberalLinkerbaanfuckingkangaroos defending Lemmy.mlworld witha whataboutism.adhominems Not very original.
I take issue with both the authoritarian left and authoritarian right: being an apologist for Soviet Russia as well as being an apologist for the USA is not OK in my opinion.
I find it futile to take a position on which is worse because that just gives space to be an apologist for one that’s “less bad”. I see this happening in this thread right now.
Should I defederate from both lemmy.world and lemmy.ml? Of course not. In fact, I find both to be more tolerable and cooperative than reddit today.
Enlightened centrist found in the wild
Lemmy was built by those tankies you disagree with. Numerous accounts have discredited the official US bullshit about Tiananmen Square and the fake Uyghur Genocide.
Mind linking to a post discrediting the “official is bullshit about Tiananmen square”? I’m genuinely curious about the counter arguments.
And a good thing it is, too - if you liberals were managing it lemmy would have been sold off to Meta or Google a long time ago.
