this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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I’ve been seeing this a lot from instances like hexbear and lemmygrad and my take is either cult members, paid trolls, brainwashed persons prone to pavlovian responses, or all of the above.
I just wish that as a user I could block instances.
It's definitely all of the above.
Hexbear is particularly vexing to me. According to the fediverse observer they're less than a month old and yet have already become one of the most active instances.
hexbear has existed and been building their userbase for 3 years, but during that time their codebase diverged greatly from mainline lemmy to include in-house tweaks and features which made it not possible to federate, and it's only within the past month that they got everything compatible
On kbin you can block domains. It's the next best thing.
This isn't unique to the far-left, though. It's a problem throughout the entire political spectrum.
It's rather dangerous to be creating echo chambers in a democracy, though. Democracy lives off of discourse between opposing views.
The inference here is that both views are of equivalent merit which is very much not true. This idea is called The Paradox of Tolerance. If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant.
Except... That's not what democracy relies on. Democracy relies on discourse of views, even if they are unpopular. Tolerating only the prevailing opinion isn't a democracy, it's an autocracy.
I mean, in practice, there are always limits to the discussion. Something like a constitution, a set of shared base beliefs that allow people to have the same base language to engage in a productive discussion, otherwise it turns into a mob discussing whether the vaccines work or not and no conclusion is reached. In a controlled environment or in a parliament, it's possible to have these wide-view from-first-principles discussions of society. Not in mainstream media and certainly not online, as you've probably seen in any unmoderated forum.
I would not call them far left tbh. There’s something else about them that irks me. It honestly feels more North Korean to me and that ain’t left by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to be more authoritarian minded.
Agreed. Tankies are right-wing authoritarians in that communism is supposed to be stateless. They bitch about US imperialism but are always very quiet about China's actions in Africa. It's frustrating because like I get it. America has some pretty deep problems but to think that somehow it is worse than China is mindlessly reactionary.
It would be funny if behind their firewall and the mandarin that I don't understand much of there were a loud 25% of chinese nationalist weirdos who are as shitty as the 25% of american MAGAs. I mean, look at https://nitter.nl/TGTM_Official looks like 4chan.