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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • One of the most important things to understand about political violence is that the state (in this case, the US law enforcement) have a monopoly on legitimate violence. We just saw it today: the SS can legally kill the assassin with no problem, and of course that makes sense. But the point is that political violence against the state, as opposed to fringe groups like neo-Nazis, is hugely asymmetrical. The state doesn’t face repression when they commit violence, for obvious reasons.

    So political violence against the state (such as its electoral system and the candidates) is foolish and ineffective. An escalation, yes! It’s an ineffective strategy, as we saw back around the late 1800s and early 1900s.


  • Taken as an obvious parallel with the attempted assassination of Trump, political violence in America is very clearly a bad thing at this point.

    But trying to stop looming fascism through random political violence is like trying to stop a bear attack by covering yourself in steak sauce.

    In my opinion, the issue isn’t that it was political violence, but it was (as you said) random political violence. Thoughtless and extreme political violence. What happens if Trump was assassinated? I propose that Trump would be replaced by a more competent career politician, more appealing to capital and to the closer of the Democrats. I think Trump is like Hitler in that they’re somewhat of outsiders to politics who understand popularity more than pragmatism, related to that first answer you gave. There’s no point to just cutting off the head of the hydra, the failed tactic of propaganda of the deed already demonstrated that after killing a lot of presidents, kings and police chiefs. The problem with the Republican Party is systematic, not that it’s being headed by Trump. (obviously this all may not be the worldview of the would-be assassin, I’m just explaining this from a non-Republican perspective)

    But political violence as a broad umbrella goes well beyond this example and there’s not really any reason to leave it until it’s too late. I think it’s perfectly appropriate to have a Battle of Cable Street before the fascists get elected, and it (along with later '43 Group violence) worked. The BUF deteriorated due to forceful repression by ex-military antifascists. These are not just random acts of violence, but intentional, tactical violent resistance and then violent suppression of fascist movements. Non-violent methods are generally preferred by anti-fascists today for good reasons (easier to get mass involvement, more sustainable, etc.), but violent actions are a legitimate and effective part of the arsenal against fascism when used appropriately. Attempting an assassination of a state figurehead is not that.






  • If anyone considers themselves a historian and thinks anything is unbiased, their experience and insight will be dubious at best. Understanding that everyone has a distinct worldview and therefore bias is literally high-school history class, years before History 101. Do they think reddit.com, or any reddit alternative for that matter, is unbiased or neutral??

    Not only is it irrelevant in context (FOSS, forkable, the devs in question only moderate this single instance), it’s especially unreasonable coming from /r/AskHistorians. They of all people should be able to understand bias, context and causation. If anything, this bias is just a guarantee that they won’t sell out and extort the userbase.


  • I’d say most hackers were anarchic full-stop. Most probably without any analysis of economic systems, merely a distaste for rules or authority. It’s intrinsic in the act of hacking.

    There is certainly a huge influence from (socialist) anarchists, such as zine culture and other punk influence, and rejection of intellectual property (e.g. piracy). “Anarcho-capitalism”, as far as I can interpret, is founded on a respect for property and non-aggression. Hacking is possibly the opposite.

    Cyberpunk culture, especially historically but even today despite recuperation, is a direct critique of capitalism-without-government, or where the corporate has become the government, depicting it as a dystopia.


  • I’ve covered some of the points about anti-capitalism in the reply I just wrote for a similar post, so I’ll link there to avoid redundancy.

    I don’t really understand the intended message with the Mastodon example. “Free speech” platforms are almost always swamped with neo-nazis, literal pedophiles and other super controversial people searching for sites to host their garbage whenever they get kicked from other places, and revolt most other people who would consider using the platform. This has nothing to do with the anti-capitalist and queer-only instances not wanting to host them, it would have happened even if those instances never existed. You might as well blame Beehaw for blocking the Trump fanatics and neo-Nazis who ended up populating Wolfballs. It doesn’t make sense, they’re not to blame. Almost any site bans those users, not just far-left, or even left, sites. Most centrists and almost any site with advertisers don’t want to share space with Gab users screeching out edgy slurs and spam either. It’s a basic expectation of being able to hold a productive conversation. Any community should be allowed to kick out anti-social invaders.

    No, instances with basic standards kicking our hateful users isn’t to blame for why general instances host them. It’s the general instances that accepted them and didn’t also say no. Those general instances were allowed to kick them out too, they chose not to. Most Lemmy instances historically have kicked them, even those run by liberal capitalists.

    And if they allow they platform to be turned into a Nazi pub, they’re certainly not being apolitical. Abstaining is a political decision. Trolley problem 101.

    I’m fine with people not wanting to connect with instances filled with people who obsess about wanting to kill them. I don’t see the issue here.

    I do understand the value of exposing people to different to viewpoints, and the dangers of echo chambers, but there is a lot of space in-between complete isolation and letting everyone into everywhere. And I actually enjoy using separate communities for each. I was one of the few users who used the former Go Talk It Out (gtio.io) Lemmy instance, where any conversation was allowed provided it was good-faith and civil. There are some conversations where I do want a range of political opinions or where political opinions don’t even matter, and others where I want to discuss a theoretical idea without unproductive spam from people who see a word and whine or troll. So I would rather see that system of federation, where instances specialise and choose who they link to appropriately.



  • A pro-capitalist can absolutely value OS and freedom of information! But there is inherent tension. For one part, private property is a fundamental cornerstone of capitalism, which (I assert necessarily) led to the invention of intellectual property, a direct inhibition to freedom of information. FoI is not within the best interests of any leading business under capitalism, they have an active interest in maintaining market dominance, and the most power to make that happen through harassment or legislation. So, as a result, we get laws like copyright and major government agencies enforcing it even for things like films and medicine. Piracy like LibGen happen in spite of the worldwide attempts of publishers to destroy it.

    Wolfballs admin was an example of a pro-FOSS (Lemmy-contributer!) capitalist who was able to provide benefit to with the project because they shared pro-FoI values. I’m not saying pro-capitalists can’t have a place here, or can’t add value, but a huge influx and culture shock is the quickest way for Lemmy sites to forget or misdiagnose the causes of reddit’s failure and the strengths of Lemmy, and try to turn it into an ad-infested crypto-integrated hellscape or otherwise put profit above users. Even basic things like using an advertising income model creates censorship (Manufacturing Consent has a good section explaining this in detail).

    Anti-capitalism is deeply rooted in lemmy.ml, and Lemmy, it’s even brought up in the software documentation. It’s not incidental or trivial, it is the cause for many effects. It’s a big part of why we didn’t do what other reddit alternatives did, and avoided their pitfalls. I don’t want to be a product here. So yes, it is sad to see that shift into conflict with the software and community’s founding values, and it’s not just because of some team sports, it’s because profit-seeking is what killed reddit and I don’t want it to kill us.



  • Absolutely, discovering something new has always been a great part of all sites where users create their own communities. One I know even had a feature where each week they randomly (in a fun game) selected a nominated community to advertise sitewide. I’ve almost completely avoided large communities for the past… eight years, give or take. The fun was always on the fringe, nowhere near as much low-quality attention seeking or dumbing down to twitter screencap reposts there.




  • While I had this issue a whole year ago, it’s intensified a lot these last weeks: People just don’t want to lurk and understand the place. I see people calling communities “subreddits”, not reading the rules or basic purpose of the site before signing up and posting and complaining when they get banned, someone asking completely off-topic things in /c/linux, people reacting to titles and not reading the post, people commenting without reading other comments. Especially people coming from popular subreddits and streams where being perfectly redundant is acceptable. If you agree with something and have nothing valuable to add, use the voting instead of burying it! That, and the extra aggression we’ve seen, especially with people getting culture shock from the politics but just in general.

    It’s a general attitude of arrogance or uncurious ignorance and it’s hard not to be offended, especially when some of us came here, in part, to get away from that culture.

    Also, the normalization of pro-capitalist attitudes is a huge bummer. A non-trivial chunk of people trying to rationalize Reddit’s actions as ‘just a bad CEO’ is unfortunate to see, that narrow-sighted denial of systematic factors and of what makes this ecosystem act differently, it’s unfortunate especially on lemmy.ml which until recently was explicitly anticapitalist.

    Again, this isn’t completely new, but it’s suddenly become a huge issue which may no longer be manageable without either mass action calling out inconsiderate attitudes, or harsh moderation.