I do understand how the brigades can be annoying for sure, but I don’t mind arguing with tankies, – I think it’s actually really useful for exposing their propaganda for what it is. It helps expose normal people to counter arguments so that they might become a little more aware, rather than just seeing propaganda go unaddressed and being morel likely to assume it must then be true.

The only issue I have personally is if the mods are in on it too and delete your posts/comments because you start to make a bit too much sense.

I was actually banned for linking to the wiki about the Uyghur genocide and the death toll estimates from the Great Leap forward. It’s not about the gore, it’s about them trying to distance public understanding of the true horror and extreme violence that took place at Tiananmen etc.

The CCP’s objective for at least the last decade or two has been trying to make the government in China apoear “normal”. Before this latest era people understood clearly that China was extremely authoritarian, but that understanding is being eroded as the CCP puts up a civilized facade, when that’s not the reality – they’re still brutalizing people it’s just so horrifyingly systematic and industrialized that you can’t even see it on the surface anymore due to how they doggedly chase information and dissidents.

They achieve this by downplaying events like Tiananmen, invasion of Tibet, Uyghur genocide, brutalization of HK etc. They exercise the most extreme measures to silence dissidents even when they are in other countries, and they repeat over and over again how the west is “just as bad!” until it becomes background noise. Having tankies modding communities helps supercharge this effort by allowing them to remove anyone who confronts that narrative, leaving only what they want people to see.

Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though, to do so would entirely undermine their political objectives. That’s kind of the point of the thread here – to defederate so that the tankies aren’t deciding what people can or cannot see and say.

I don’t see how the charter idea would actually help with that but maybe I’m not understanding the mechanics of how other mods “weigh in” on ban appeals from other instances.

Honestly once you sort of realize that you can’t be on the left and also support authoritarianism/fascism (regardless of the label or intent) the factionalism kind of isn’t as troublesome or confusing.

You end up with those who believe in supporting progress informed by rational, current understanding of reality and then you have those who cling to failed ideas the same way conservatives do.

The left can debate solutions and data reasonably without splitting into contradicting camps, people just need to always check and see if they’re actually oriented towards the defining principles of left wing politics; bolstering human rights and well being, strengthening democratic institutions and outcomes using the most current understanding of the world we have available to us right now.

The left, by definition, flexes and adapts to reality to achieve an outcome, conservativism is when people try to bend reality to fit their ideology.

Those “academics” are wrong.

We know this because there are photos of bodies and bicycles smeared into a paste [Source. Warning Blood/Gore].

And because people who were there literally said that’s what happened:

"The shooting was going on and people were still running to try and block the tanks, which were travelling at high speed, some positioning buses in the road. But the tanks crushed the buses and people, they didn’t care. People’s bodies were merged, moulded to their bicycles. They were flat.” [Source: Shao Jiang to The Mirror]

The CCP has desperately tried to cleanse the most brutal images and interviews of the massacre from the Internet, but even 30 years on they can’t completely scrub it clean. There’s a reason The Pillar of Shame monument is designed as it is.

That kind of makes me a bit more skeptical of Lemmy as a whole if I’m being honest. Not necessarily the instance owners, but the system as a whole.