I’ve been writing under the assumption that the accounts that I gave the same name to would be connected (like a proto-federation thing), so don’t worry about that. I appreciate the concern, though.

I have criticized China, you can dig around on my Hexbear account if you really like and find that (@GarbageShoot)*, but China isn’t nearly as afraid of criticism as the “literally 1984” redditors say, it just has a practical sensitivity over issues of sovereignty that they fail to understand as part of a coherent ideology other than hyper-defensiveness (go figure, Redditors are politically illiterate).

China is a very diverse place with a wide spectrum of ideology – most of which I disagree with, going by rough estimations based on recent statements from their central committee. Speaking in terms of meaningful factions that have sway above the municipal level, I’d say they are much more diverse than the US in this respect, since the US is characterized more by the harshness of disagreement than the actual extremity of differences in overall policy. If we imagine Chinese politics on a spectrum from “Maoism” to “some hodgepodge of reactionary antiquarianism and desire to be a western vassal again, plus religious zealotry**” where the former is a 1 and the latter is a 10, our friend Xi seems to be at maybe a 4, I’m at about 3. I’m not a full-on ultra but I think there’s some right-deviation going on (not as much as in past decades, admittedly). Are you following?

It feels a little unfair to dismiss me as a “tanky,” I don’t think I called you names, but at least you aren’t being too mean beyond that. What do you mean “patriate”? That’s something that countries do, as far as I can tell.

*I am completely confident that you won’t actually find the remarks I’m talking about, but I think you’ll trust me that they are there.

**This last part is mainly among rightist minority groups rather than the Han Chinese rightists, who mainly stick to the first two categories.

Redditors will believe anything that supports “China bad,” even silly lies that were debunked decades ago. Here are some different testimonies from student leaders of the protests. You tell me what seems credible.

hmm, I guess it depends on your definition of disparage, but the thing is that even if I was out here in America hawking the most shameless bullshit, China wouldn’t do shit when I visited short of question me a bit harder in customs because arresting me for pretty benign actions I took in another country as someone with no affiliation with China would typically be considered kidnapping under international law. Of course, America calls most instances of its enemies arresting its citizens kidnapping, but China rarely arrests Americans (including when tourism to China was higher) or foreign citizens in general.

Reddit geopolitics work a lot better when they stick to vague insinuations and cartoonish hyperbole, because when you drill down and try to set realistic expectations based on the information available, it falls apart completely.

Lots of things happened in the square at that time, as the Chinese government discussed on TV the following days. One thing that did not happen was people dying, though some were struck with batons to force them to disperse after they declined to follow the demand to disperse (most left peacefully).

China is going to put me, an American in America, in jail using a game launcher?

Or, they simply lie and say that there is no genocide going on.

Even state department mouthpieces have walked back the lie of there being a genocide in Xinjiang. Leave it to Redditors to be to the right of the state department.

How is that relevant?

Also as a european, i don’t really care if the Data gets funneled to the USA or China, both equally bad imo.

This is super off-topic but since you have a more reasonable stance on this than I usually see in the wild, I need to ask: Do you truly think the US is no worse than China or are you speaking in terms of impact on your life personally? (the latter would be fair in this context too, just wondering)

That and they’re owned by China, so the chances of your data being funneled out to China is practically 100%

a) Tencent has a minority share b) what the fuck is China going to do with my data? Target ads a little more precisely the one time a year I go on newegg or whatever? Shouldn’t you be much more concerned about an entity like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft having that information? And it’s not like at least two of those don’t have a history of working with the US government and others, i.e. governments that actually impact your life.

Footnotes first:

1. It’s hilarious to imagine what kind of Marxist retains the magnitude liberal brainworms you display there. Would you like to tell me what sect you identify with? I’m just fascinated to find out, since your line of reasoning is completely against ML ideology. Are you one of Richard Wolff’s spawn, maybe?

2. I’m sure you feel like a big boy but I’m familiar with the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate, don’t worry

3. What the hell are you talking about here? The Gilded Age was a ~30 year period in America following the Civil War where the government went full classical liberal on its non-regulation of the economy, which produced all the famous robber barons like JP Morgan, from which we inherit the classic image of such figures, which went on to inform basically every political cartoon ever along with the mascot of Monopoly. It spawned or popularized immensely infamous practices such as “company towns” and “scrip”, along with its own genre of literature (see Stephen Crane). It’s fine to not be educated on such matters but it’s literally the most well-known era in American history other than the Great Depression or a war (back when America’s domestic society was even culturally involved in wars).

4. N/A

5. Whoops, no citation, not even a name. Don’t give a shit. CTH moderated itself pretty well, the admins just hated it (and the neoliberal userbase of broader Reddit).

6. I never called TD people Nazis. This is an irrelevant tangent, what I was talking about was the nature of reactionary cesspits in general, not Nazis specifically. I don’t care what flavor of reactionary someone is, I don’t like any of them.

Anyway, most of your post is just listing informal fallacies and I have no interest in entertaining high-school level bullshit when it’s tediously rendered, so I’ll just pick out a few more parts:

Just to clarify, my point of the laissez-faire comparison is not that using that term makes you a libertarian, but that it was interesting how it corresponded to the very libertarian-like ideology you expressed in your arguments. More on that later.

even if we disregard that this is a big “chrust me” (anecdotal evidence does not lead to meaningful conclusions - bring data or arguments, otherwise you’re just calling your reader gullible/stupid with this sort of anecdote)

It’s ridiculous to dismiss cth out of hand as an “anecdote” when it represents years of interaction on the website with what was, for a period of a bit more than a year, the largest extremist community on the website and easily, easily the most active. Treating it as a though it were a single data point equivalent to other extremist subreddits would in fact be warping the information available against what would be a reasonable representation of its magnitude. TD is the only stronger example due to how long it was active unless you want to get into the old Reddit Lore of fatpeoplehate or whatever.

The admins are not your parents. “ADMINS, I CAN’T CONFRONT THE NAZI BY MYSELF” is not support to marginalised groups, it’s to act like a Reddit baby. A kid sees the ant in the kitchen and says “MUM! I SAW AN ANT! KILL IT!”; the adult crushes it.

Also, stop dealing with marginalised groups as if they were “fragile little things, who can’t defend themselves unless big admin patronises them”. That’s perverse incentive - you’re disempowering them. You might have “good intentions” doing so but perhaps you should pave Hell with them.

This – and how you talked about the Nazi bar issue before – is a strange case of equivocation that seems almost deliberately obfuscatory. If I could crush the mosquito myself, I would, but because this is a forum and I am merely a normal user, I cannot and the community cannot ban them. The admins are the only people who have that power, so the best course of action (since a poll would be open to manipulation and those fuckers at beehaw wouldn’t even blink before doing so) is to have admins use their power with the consent of the governed and for the governed to become ungovernable if the admins act unilaterally against the popular consensus.

In a similar way, patrons running the Nazis out of the bar would be illegal on many levels. The owner is the only one who is legally protected in doing so because it is his property, so he can pick up his bat and say in so many words “Leave or I will consider you a trepasser and beat you to a pulp” where a patron would be easily charged with a crime for making such a threat. Now, could the patrons act illegally and take things in their own hands anyway? Sure, but just like the difference between real futball and a Fifa video game, breaking the law in reality is possible while breaking the rules in a “programmed space” generally isn’t. I could hypothetically strike a Nazi with a hammer, cops be damned. I cannot ban a Nazi here if the site does not give me permission, it literally just can’t be done.

I fully support arming minority communities in real life. There is no way to smuggle a banhammer to a non-mod.

Also, the idea that supporting minorities is “babying them” is just asinine. Sitting by as they are attacked is not an example of being an ally, and forcing them to fend for themselves in the interest of what may as well be “protecting their honor as warriors” doesn’t do shit except consign them to miserable lives of fighting in their own defense no matter how successful they are. That is why, in civil society, the main thing social minorities typically fight for are legal protections that make it so they can avoid those fights or make them easier to win! Black people in general don’t seek to repeal the 1968 Civil Rights Act because the concept of a hate crime is “patronizing” to their ability to … what? Go catch racial aggressors on their own? Fuck off with that “the Democrats are the real racists” shit. The Democrats are indeed real racists, but so are Republicans.

By the way:

perverse incentive

Are you really going to tell me you’re not some kind of Hayekian? Between your general lines of reasoning, your sophomoric list of wikipedia fallacies, and turns of phrase like this, you really, really seem to be a libertarian.

Thankfully they had the evidence pinned for some time:

Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation.

Later:

Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it.

And there’s more but you can just read it yourself:

https://beehaw.org/post/524300?scrollToComments=true

Obviously I support cracking down on hate speech, you can see my activity throughout this thread, which consists entirely of me doing that while taking maybe two or three asides to knock beehaw when someone else mentioned it. What I don’t support is taking the absurd position that it’s not a political stance.

Of course, this all works as an excellent bit of smoke and mirrors for an audience of credulous radlibs to whom you don’t want to confess you are splitting with instances that are decidedly to your left – such as Hexbear.net , the only instance which actually has site-mandated use of self-identified pronouns, which was put on the blacklist pre-emptively before it had federated with anyone (and it still hasn’t) for reasons that the userbase are left to conclude are “hate speech” or its “endorsement”.

Note that, by laissez faire approach, I don’t mean “do nothing at all”; that’s incompetence, and incompetent admins go fuck themselves, as you said. For me, laissez faire means “keep a close watch on the situation, and intervene if necessary, but otherwise let the userbase handle it”.

“If necessary” is doing all of the work there. By your meaningless definition of the word, I agree that’s a good approach, but you’re letting insinuation occupy the entire point in dispute. We both know what “laissez-faire” actually means, and I think the Gilded Age showed us what a shit approach it is.

And in this case you got a rather engaged community, who’s most likely prone to engage those Nazi, and tell them to fuck off. Is admin intervention necessary in this case?

Yes, it is. I am quite familiar with how these dynamics work – I followed r/cth for about a year before it was quarantined. It was probably the most-hated sub of its time outside of literal Nazi subs (remember TD was long-inactive at that point). People complained about it all over the place for a variety of reasons, both good and bad faith. With all the controversy, do you know what it never was before it got quarantined? And honestly not even before it was banned? Neutralized. The vocal hatred against it fed its growth, and the userbase was quite aware of this fact and took advantage of it actively. When it was finally banned, the slide in Reddit’s entire user culture on the popular and political subs was palpable, and that transformation took maybe a month.

Now, unlike the Reddit admins, I won’t equivocate between TD and cth, they were not the same in a pat little horseshoe theory conception because horseshoe theory is horseshit. That said, it nonetheless stands as a glaringly obvious counter example to your flimsy market solution – as does most of Reddit’s history before that, with various places much worse than cth festering quite aggressively until the admins banned it, either for their own reasons – like cth – or external political reasons starting from jailbait to fatpeoplehate through to WatchPeopleDie.

I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach would be a good approach in this specific case, but it’s generally a good “default” - often people managing communities cause more harm than good when they’re trying to proactively solve issues that didn’t appear yet.

Market solutions rarely work except for the rich and their lackeys, and the people who propose relying on them without any specific evidence should be regarded with suspicion. I’ve heard these libertarian spiels a thousand times before and, well, the only mistake I’ve ever made with libertarian ideology is not having enough contempt for it – which I say having never respected it to begin with.

That’s a great point - the reversibility makes the option less drastic. Still annoying for legitimate users and admins of other instances.

Oh, it’s annoying is it? That’s such a shame, that it’s annoying. I’ll be sure to tell the minorities pushed out of the Nazi bar that preventative measures are possible but really should not be implemented because they would be annoying.

Please, give a stronger tell that you don’t give a shit for the people this more gravely impacts that you acknowledge how reversible this is and yet think that it’s still too much of a hassle because it’s annoying.

And I said nothing because it was an entirely correct thing to do

In fact i believe if you give attention seekers a platform, they will continue to seek attention

Awesome, so you agree with the obvious conclusion that we should take their platform away by blacklisting them, right? . . . Right?

WW1 doesn’t really have a “good guys, bad guys” story that follows the battle lines and the Axis was actively bankrolled by major capitalists prior to WW2, along with Germany being given permission to grow their Navy, take over Czechoslovakia, etc.

You are correct that hate must be stamped out, but it must be remembered that the cause of WW2 was fundamentally that – while there were substantial political differences between Germany and the western Allies which made their conflict inevitable – the nazi infestation was left to fester like it was because there was a huge amount of ideological agreement between those two camps.

Quick, who said the following:

I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

Why should they get a platform? Why should they be allowed “to simply exist”? Because the Marketplace of Ideas will sort itself out and make sure the best ideas “flourish”? I regret to inform you that the real world doesn’t work like the thought experiments of classical liberalism, and TD’s namesake is ironically a great demonstration of that.

Reactionary spaces should be stamped out.

You have no room to talk, your instance bends over backwards to be a safe space for neoliberals who support unipolarity and the exploitation of the third world.

“But some users disavow the US, etc.”

Yeah, but virtually all of them nonetheless parrot the State Department’s talking points about its enemies. That token “both sides” bullshit only supports the status quo while undermining the possibility of a positive alternative.

It’s an absolute lie that they are just concerned about hatespeech – albeit one that the admins themselves very actively promote. They pretend to be ideologically neutral, even going as far as saying “beehaw is just a collection of individuals”, an ironically Thatcherite statement that suits them quite well.

If the admins have a laissez faire approach, then they can go fuck themselves. The difference between a nuke and defederation (well, there are many, but the main one here) is that defederation can be undone. If the admins don’t like their instance being isolated, they can fix the problem by getting rid of the comm. If they are that committed to allowing the comm, then it is correct to keep them defederated.

The one caveat I will give is that it would be incumbent on the other instances to follow through on overturning the blacklist – and making sure their peer instances do – if shitjustworks actually does comply eventually.