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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • But it does exist; preaching is persuading or guiding others to follow your own beliefs. If no distinction existed then we would be mechanically bound to preach what we believe, and we’re not, so it’s a choice.

    Let me clarify: there is no such distinction where it pertains to determining the morality of an action. Preaching a value or holding it privately only impacts the perception others have of your transgression, not whether something is a transgression.

    Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree.

    Everyone who doesn’t reexamine their morality to match their actual values and/or does not have a spine will inevitably become a hypocrite given enough time.

    If when faced with a moral quandary you actually examine why you are finding yourself in this position of wanting to do something that, by your own moral standards at that point, would be evil, and you stick to an honest self-critique (as in, if it is indeed a moral failure you own it and correct your behaviour) you’ll rarely stay a hypocrite for long.

    In OP’s case, what is happening is one such moment, and they’ve got nothing on either the re-examination nor the self-critique end. They’re like looking to a crowd of strangers for moral absolution to do something they themselves consider immoral/evil.

    That is the truest most cut and dry state of moral void, where the individual ignores their own conscience because they were given a pass to do so by someone else, as if anyone has such an authority.

    It comes from the fundamental principle of harm minimisation

    LMAO get that consequentialist bullshit outta here.

    Consequentialism is a fundamentally useless moral framework, you would need to be prescient for it to be in any way useful to you and it can be used to justify literally any action regardless of held principles.

    ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is a biblical commandment, not a principle.

    You are high if you think any human society was ever cool with murder, (the 6th commandment is more correctly translated to ‘thou shall not murder’, which tracks given how much killing happens to be not only fine but sanctioned by god himself in the old testament) given how it’s almost definitionally wrong to murder.

    Also even more ludicrous that you’d think this is somehow something introduced by the torah when we have mesopotamian written laws with explicit punishments for murder and even unjust killing regardless of motive or premeditation.

    Humans simply don’t want to be killed willy-nilly, this predates the written word and possibly actual coherent language.

    It’s morality for babies

    You’re the one who brought in consequentialism, don’t blame me for making this conversation basic.

    Morality is never that simple.

    Nor did I ever state it was.

    You think I am claiming it’s that simple because you seem to think I’m coming from a place of disagreement with the OP and that’s why I argue they’re a moral failure.

    The problem is that OP is in a place of moral failure to themselves, which is why they’re asking for moral license to break their principles instead of doing the arduous work of self correcting, whether by shedding a moral principle they don’t actually believe in and accepting their past self being wrong, or by standing firm and accepting the inconvenience that comes from sticking to their principles, and that their present self is wrong.

    Regardless of your moral framework, this is the peak of amoral behaviour, as it renders any moral framework fundamentally optional and useless when faced with outside approval.

    It makes you a definitionally amoral agent because not only are you susceptible to peer pressure (which is always true to some extent) but you actually seek it out whenever sticking to your principles becomes inconvenient enough, which means you are only ever going to be moral whenever it’s convenient, which is just as good as never being moral in the first place.

    OP is like an alcoholic looking for enablers, when they know they should be calling their sponsor.


  • Holding morals and preaching them are different things.

    I fundamentally disagree that this distinction exists, and even if it did this is not a situation where it would apply.

    Morals regulate your own actions, there is no point in holding a moral value that you don’t abide by. That makes you a hypocrite whether you preach that value or not.

    Preaching it also makes you a public hypocrite if you get caught, but you’re still hypocritical even if you are only betraying a private value, you’re just not accountable to others.

    And if that’s all that matters to you then you don’t actually hold that value.

    I think there’s got to be room for some grey areas in morality.

    There is room when you can draw a clear line as to why a principle ought to apply in one situation but not in another, an argument that “it feels different when I do it” is no such standard.

    For instance, killing is permissible in self defense, but murder is not acceptable. Easy line to draw that makes the same practical action morally distinct depending on context (aggressor/victim).

    I abhor late-stage capitalism, but I would not rather die than shop at a chain supermarket.

    And if that’s your only option that is a pretty straightforward line you can draw that has nothing to do with your personal gain by ignoring an otherwise inconvenient principle.

    “I won’t patronise large corporations whenever I have an alternative” is a fair line to draw, as long as you don’t immediately walk back on it as soon as it becomes inconvenient by being slightly out of your way or a bit more expensive.

    OP said no such thing, however. They straight up went “when I break my own moral principles it doesn’t feel as bad as when others break them against me” which is utter horseshit.

    You mean to tell me that when you try to kill someone it somehow feels less bad than when someone else tries to kill you? No fucking way, what a discovery!

    So yeah, unless OP can actually provide a generalized standard by which anyone can do what they’re doing and still maintain an ethical position, they’re just finding excuses to placate their own conscience, while pretending to maintain a coherent moral standard, when really they never held anything of the sort, they just don’t like to be on the receiving end of the stick.


  • If you truly believe investing, and especially investing in real estate, is immoral, then you shouldn’t do it, the same way you shouldn’t eat pork if you keep kosher or halal.

    Anything else, especially “it feels more like buying back my own lost value” is such a gigantic cope that I’ve seen pictures of it taken from the ISS.

    Either accept that your beliefs are incorrect, and participate in the market like a normal person, or stick to your beliefs when it’s inconvenient too.

    This behaviour is morally no better than that of megachurch pastors who preach the immorality of gay sex and get caught paying men to fuck them in the ass.





  • Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.

    No, decidedly not. Unless out there there is an instance whose users are all all-around paste eaters, every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation, furthermore political alignment says nothing about insight or competence in fields unrelated to politics.

    A nazi is just as likely to know how to fix an obscure bug in some game or program than a tankie or a liberal, people are more complicated than their political allegiances and blanket removing an instance does us a disservice as much as it does them.

    Refraining from defederation won’t change that.

    Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance is going to make that better, yes.

    Not everyone who made an instance on lemmy.ml is a tankie. I almost did, and the only reason I didn’t is that they very gracefully and clearly state that Lemmy.ml is the flagship but not the largest instance.


  • Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though

    Yeah, that’s why I’m suggesting making mods of other instances review ban appeals.

    If you ban someone because you’re butthurt your precious red-brown alliance is being besmirched, mods from instances that don’t suck Stalin’s dick on the daily will hopefully call you out on it and force you to reverse the ban or defederate.

    My hope is to make it so defederation is not something we do to undesirable instances, but that they do to themselves.

    The latter is preferable because it requires an instance to be so ideologically far gone that its own denizens would agree with this over replacing the mod team, whereas the former only really needs a bad enough opinion of the instance from its neighbours, which IMO is not a good standard.


  • Man, I genuinely don’t know.

    I’d expect this to be some sort of public cross-instance structure that is readonly to users so we could spectate the conversations and maybe up/downvote, where you could see what essentially amounts to the meeting minutes in the form of a normal thread?

    But before we even get there there’d need to be an agreement and either a fork of the core lemmy code to implement this or we’d need to get the lemmy devs on board and LMAO good luck with that, we’re literally discussing creating a system to divest them of their power and they’re ideologically authoritarian.


  • I fucking hate tankies, but.

    The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.

    The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

    And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.

    Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

    Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.


    I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

    That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

    That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

    I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.


  • Realistically? The way newspapers were, you have a profit driven business where the client is the reader. Buy the paper, read the articles.

    The reality is that that is never gonna happen again; the free alternatives are exactly as shit as the paid ones, so why would I waste my money?

    Journalism had devolved into sensationalism made to drive sales to foster ad buys already well before social media and the web made this exponentially worse, at this point, follow the scant few journalists who don’t suck and go from there.

    Best thing about this is that everyone will think I’m talking about any amount of pundits depending on their and my political alignment, and that makes it funnier to me.