They would disagree because “lots of people are liberals.” Which is, ironically, a common defense a lot of cults use to justify why they aren’t a cult.

The “Call centre” script is pretty fascinating though, reminds me a lot of creationists. You can show them evidence of transitional fossils, biology experiments demonstrating evolution in a lab, it doesn’t matter. They’ll ask for specific evidence, then when presented with it, find some excuse to ignore it, like tone policing or attacking a source for being “illegitimate” or “biased” without even reading it. And when they can’t do that, they’ll just ignore the responses and only interact with the people hurling insults because they can dismiss that much more easily than a reasonable argument.

That’s an interesting idea. I’ve said something similar irl, that there’s a bourgeois script.

There’s no point arguing with someone who goes into it by default. Especially family members. Not everyone uses it, but for those who do, the only end point is an exchange of insults.

Good examples are reactionary TV ‘news’ presenters. They aren’t interested in the argument or evidence, only providing their audience with another example to confirm their pre-existing worldview. There’s always another quip, another reason why they don’t have to consider a new idea. It’s infuriating. But when you can recognise it, you’ll save yourself a lot of intellectual hardship and emotional pain.

>liberalism is just a cult at this point

Had this viewpoint since my Neocon through Third Position days. Still had it by the time I entered communism. Agreed comrade.

Especially the prejudice, it’s always that we need to save Chinese people from their government, it’s always some extension of the white man’s burden couched in softer language

It really is treated as a “sin” to be ignorant of something in the west. Personally, I love not knowing something, because it means I get to learn something, but again, education in the west is treated as “that thing that happens when you’re 6-18 and no other time.” and refuse to ever try to educate themselves as adults.

Rent-free, just as Mao intended

Good.

Tbf exploding heads is defederated even more extensively than we are, and are much smaller instance than us, a lot of them probably aren’t even aware of exploding heads

I’m honored , honestly it wasn’t even my intention but it’s an added bonus lol

based critical

Yes, we aren’t blocked by 2 of the biggest instances. I didn’t mean “half the users”, but every time I see a new instance in a username I go check their blocklist and it seems like ~1/2 the time lemmygrad is blocked. You would be welcome to post here even if you weren’t a socialist, you just can’t post capitalism apologia

There are quite a few socialists over at .world. And some others who aren’t socialists but willing to talk in good faith. It’s nice to see you and them over here.

There’s some mechanics that need to be sorted out with federation. But I say this while not offering any help to Lemmy, so I’m just ranting and not criticising where the project is right now. They only have so many devs working on it and the founders are doing overtime to bring new features in.

I’m banned from lemmy world apparently which means that lemmy world users who interact on lemmygrad or any other instance will not see my comments, as they won’t be federated (copied over to lemmy world’s database essentially). I can see some problems with that because while I get the principle, it effectively allows instance administrators to determine who can read whom. If you make a friend on another instance too and they get banned or their instance defederated, you’ll lose all contact with them.

Perhaps even worse is that lemmy.world users who come to lemmygrad won’t be able to read my comments, which is just weird because this is my instance. I effectively cannot interact with them even on my home instance! Being an admin too makes it more complicated, like if I posted a pinned message to welcome users from X instance and I’m banned on that instance, they effectively wouldn’t see it. You also don’t get a notif when you’re banned or unbanned, so you would never know.

But I’m sure these will be improved in due time.

And all their users don’t realise that the reason those censoring instances look more like Reddit is because Reddit had a campaign to censor all radical speech. It’s not rare because radical speech isn’t popular, it’s rare because it’s hidden and crushed.

Would you talk me briefly through setting up your own instance? Do you just run it when you want to go online or do you need to stay connected with a 24/7 self-hosted server? Don’t answer these questions if it means sharing details that would compromise your security.

That would be a spectre haunting lemmygrad, comrade, although that gives way too much weight to him tbh

deleted by creator

Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come

Reminds me of https://existentialcomics.com/comic/148

“A spectre is haunting the Young Hegelians: the spectre of my glorious beard.” “I thought we agreed not to do the spectre thing anymore”

Edit: Fixed typo

I meant like people who regularly post or comment, we have way more lurkers than 300

Per the sidebar right now it’s just 150 per day, 350 a week, and 669 per month.

I think we’re preeeetty active for our numbers.

because it’s a bad faith argument that we’re “pro-Russia”, we are anti-Nato. Sometimes we’re sloppy with our language in here because we expect other comrades to engage with us in good faith and not assume that we are pro Russian. The United States is the great Satan, and any country that opposes it is our temporary ally.

We are not “Pro-Russia”, this is a bad faith label that is used to smear us. We SUPPORT Russia in the current conflict against Nato and the west. Which is what any principled anti-imperialist would do.

why people on this instance are so pro-Russia today,

You, just like every other tourist from afar, miss the point of "critical support". Deliberate emphasis on the ‘critical’. We do not uphold the kleptocracy. We do not uphold Putin. We do not uphold the federation. But right now, at the same time, Russia is one of like… The three or four world powers currently spitting in the Evil Empire’s eye. That, we critically support, in that we can support one action while holding critique bordering on condemnation for everything else they do.

I don’t speak for everyone here, but the prevailing attitude I see from most communists I associate with is not one of overt support for Russia. I have occasionally seen misguided nostalgia for the USSR, which the Russian Federation is not, but it isn’t common.

Not supporting the US via a proxy war, or NATO, or Ukraine does NOT mean supporting Russia. A common misconception liberals have is everything must be black and white, us vs them. If you don’t support X you must support Y. In their minds, everything must be a simple “good guy vs bad guy” dichotomy. That simply isn’t true. When two imperialist capitalist countries are at war, we should only strive to encourage a peaceful resolution as soon as possible for the sake of the actual people affected ((EDIT: Just to clarify since I realized I might be unclear here, I am speaking in generalities. I don’t think this particular invasion has imperialist undertones, there are many more other underpining reasons it started). Supporting NATO would only serve to escalate and prolong their suffering. If they truly cared for anyone in Ukraine, they would not have repeatedly blocked attempts at signing peace agreements.

We understand a lot of the underlying justifications for the war and the provocations that led to it, but again that does necessitate cheerleading for Russia either. It just means we know that Putin did not wake up one morning and randomly decide to invade Ukraine for fun.

Nobody is pro-Putin. We are anti-NATO. That’s a very different thing.

That’s the whole problem. In western circles, it’s socially unacceptable to say one word in favour of Russia. If you do, you’re branded as succumbing to russian propaganda or a bot. Because nobody reasonable would support Russia.

There was an article posted here recently that was written by one of you. He served as the assistant general secretary for the UN. Not a troll, educated, and has no reason to support Russia (just like we don’t). Also “escaped East Germany”. He wrote this:

https://www.meer.com/en/74782-will-the-ukraine-war-be-the-undoing-for-the-european-union

It’s something that could well have been written by people here, aside from the swipes at the Soviet Union. I strongly suggest you check it out, if you actually wish to understand our viewpoint. It was written with liberals in mind as the target audience.