Having lived through the “Eternal September” beginnings, I’m sorry but you’ve got very strongly rose-tinted glasses on.
(Ref)USENET was a cesspool on the order of any modern *chan board or their ilk both before and after the Eternal September. Having a high technical bar to entry just meant most participants were obsessive lunatics with poor socialization (instead of merely half).
It was quoted just a bit above you, dude:
7.0: The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Finland Suomen.
I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.
And I don’t care.
OK, let me unpack a few things here.
And here’s where it gets messy.
The China Watchers™ crowd always says they “hate the government, not the citizens”. (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with “hate the sin, not the sinner” whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)
Yet…
Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government’s actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who “hate the government, not the citizens” take perceived citizens to task for their government’s actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments’ actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don’t have).
Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the “hate the government, not the citizens” crowd with a zeal that puts the “not the citizens” part of things in the firm category of “blatant lie”.
And that is just flat-out racism.
So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren’t being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it’s my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.
You don’t like that default? Well, here’s a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: “Rein in your crazies or you’ll be mistaken for them.”
I’m at work. I can’t watch video at the moment.
But I can make some guesses.
“Random stranger with a camera crew walks up to a citizen of an authoritarian state and asks ‘do you know what happened today?’.”
Fuck yeah I’m going to turn away and walk off. Hell I’d be tempted to do it in Canada! (Not a fan of most Canadian media.)
… how could the Chinese government enforce this vast national amnesia of a major, recent event in their country’s history, one in which the government sent troops to slaughter perhaps 2,600 peaceful protesters?
In the very first paragraph Vox gets it wrong.
Not a surprise.
Here’s a little hint: look up Columbia University’s Columbia Journalism Review and see if you can tell why I’m laughing at Vox right now.
If you can’t work out the difference between “lived in China for 23 years” and “is Chinese” then there’s no help for you.
Of course you couldn’t read a statement that baldly said the PRC’s government wasn’t a good one, so there’s that for you as well.
Oh, this is going to be juicy!
Tell me what you think happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. I’ll wait with the reams and reams and reams of corrections on standby. (Hint: There’s a very good chance that literally everything you “know” about Tiananmen Square is wrong. Just as a taste of what’s to come if you take the bait: “tank man” wasn’t run over by a tank. No matter what you think you know.)
Well given that the idiot thinks I’m a) Chinese and b) in favour of the Chinese government, you’re absolutely right: nothing got through.
And if the CCP is good, why does it conduct genocide in Uyghurstan?
Dude. I literally said the fucking opposite. Read what’s in front of you, not what the voices in your head are telling you is there. I’ll leave finding this as an exercise for the student: see if you can find where I said the exact fucking opposite of this. Then come back and talk like an adult instead of a tantrum-throwing toddler.
I’ve lived through protests at scales China hasn’t seen since Tiananmen, which your government still covers up.
The Canadian government covers up Tiananmen? That’s news to me. I’m going to need some citations here.
… instead of assuming anyone who disagrees with you is immediately wrong.
Given that you couldn’t read very plain statements that are directly the opposite of what you said, and that you made idiotic assumptions on top of that, I’m going to go with “yeah, dumb fuck is wrong” until you show some basic reading ability and stop stupid assumptions.
Most of lemmygrad.ml are lemmy.ml users saying the silent part out loud on a separate instance so they don’t get lemmy.ml defederated.
Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
If you want to engage with extreme stances, go to instances (like lemmygrad.ml) where the extremists hang out. Don’t insist that I need to engage with the fuckers myself. Knock yourself out and engage. I’ll stay here where I feel, you know, semi-comfortable.
Reading is a skill you never developed, isn’t it?
It would be good practice if admins would link a selection of the offensive material. That would allow both sides to debate how they judge such behavior.
Are you paying the bills? No? Are you doing the moderation? No? Are you doing any work for this site in any meaningful capacity? No?
Then fuck off and shut the fuck up about how they run it. Go to lemmygrad.ml if you think there’s no bad behaviour there.
Paradox of tolerance lifts its ugly head again, I see.
The problem with “perhaps challenge their beliefs” as an approach is, well, I don’t know about you, but I’m here for information and entertainment, not for dealing with Nazis and other forms of authoritarian scum. If this place becomes just another battleground in the fucked-up “culture war” the PTBs insist on stoking, I’m not going to engage, I’m going to leave. Which means all you see, then, over time, on “perhaps challenge their beliefs” Freeze Peach sites is … the shitheads.
Both those sites are larger than lemmygrad.ml so it’s expected more shit will flow from there. Unlike, however, lemmygrad.ml the admins of both those sites seem to try to rein in the chaos themselves, thus leaving the workload here on lemmy.world lighter, so there’s no need to defederate. The admins of lemmygrad.ml not only won’t control their mob, they egg them on.
Thank you for not being a Freeze Peach site!
I’m wondering if you’re trolling or just ignorant. I’ll do you the respect of assuming ignorance.
There will always be hate speech in any forum. Period. This cannot be stopped short of closing the forum down entirely. If, however, the hate speech is low volume, it can be dealt with individually with post deletion, user bans, community deletions, etc. Standard “tactical” moderation techniques.
But…
Shitholes like lemmygrad.ml release a veritable flood of hate speech, as do their right-wing “Freeze Peach!” equivalents. Individual, tactical moderation does not scale to that level without a whole lot more money than a hobbyist-run instance can bring to bear. Thus if hate speech and calls for violence reach the point where tactical moderation can no longer keep up, you start with the strategic moderation. In older-style forums that might be an IP ban. In the Fediverse it’s defederation.
See how that works?
Now please, prove to me you’re not trolling and simply didn’t understand how things work.
A Windows IRC client … to access Lemmy?
That would be a high technical bar to entry!