I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it’s going to, but… Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.
Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It’s a different group here.
Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others’ needs.
Reality is left leaning
I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It’s truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.
Reality is left leaning…
It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.
To an extent. But whenever there is a political discussion on Hacker News, the lib right response is very, very loud, and I try to remind myself I appreciate Hacker News for its tech news.
I think the culture is just different. Lemmy was started and run by Tankies. Hacker News was started by Y Combinator, which incubates silicon valley startups. They’re going to attract different audiences, or at least different groups of people who will put up with different politics. I can’t claim to be particularly upset about the .ml domains being pulled and the center mass of Lemmy moving away from those instances.
What’s a tankie? I keep seeing it.
I had to look it up too. Apparently it’s an authoritarian leftist. Thinks state-socialism was a good thing. As while most leftists are more of the democratic, market, and anarchist varieties.
State socialism is a good thing, what tankies promote is something else, they’re fascist that can’t accept that fact because it would mean having something in common with the fascists in the USA, a country that they hate so much that they’re ready to deny reality to have an anti USA opinion.
I’m confused, and you seem to be a lot more familiar with the term. I read the wiki link that explains tankies. I don’t personally know any left leaning people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes. Maybe because of my America-centric viewpoint and where things are today, but typically people who are economically left are also socially and politically left (equal opportunity is more important than individual freedoms), which is very anti-fascist. I’ve heard people say how great a true communism could be if it were possible, but no one’s ever made it past a dictatorship to get there.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right, and think someone has achieved a communist utopia without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it. Tankies promote authoritarian views similar to fascists but with a different economics view (not even that different some times), hence they prefer the dictatorships like USSR (in these days even Putin, which is idiotic), North Korea, China; over what they perceive as imperialist, the USA (I agree on calling it imperialistic and disliking it, but not on considering it worse than dictatorships).
I’m a communist which likes state socialism, but what is and was present in those dictatorship (ignoring the authoritarian side which I despise) is state capitalism.
Thanks for explaining for me, that’s exactly what I meant, I just didn’t have the time to reply!
The problem is not state socialism, it’s the authoritarian side of it
The communist utopia needs authoritarianism to work
The confusion comes from so much mass media that equates socialism with communism. They’re orthogonal concepts! Saying socialism is the same as communism is like saying beer-making is exactly the same as cheese-making. Anyone who understands what beer and cheese are would be like, “I’m sorry, what‽”
The best way to think of socialism is that’s it’s a governance strategy that can be used wherever you want. Want everyone to pay taxes in order to fund and deliver government-run firefighting services? That’s socialism. Want to do the same with the military? Socialism. Whenever the government is delivering some good or service by way of taxpayer dollars that’s socialism.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems. You can have socialist government constructs under either capitalism or communism. It’s just that communism doesn’t really have the flexibility to provide goods or services in any other way than via the government.
Then there’s countries like China that claim to be communist (and the Right loves to call them that) but really, they’re more capitalist than communist. What they do have that most communists and fascist governments have is authoritarianism.
That authoritarianism is what fascists and “tankies” have in common: Fascists support an authoritarian, pseudo-capitalist government while “tankies” support an authoritarian, pseudo-communist government.
people who support Russia/Stalin/China regimes.
Congratulations: That, and only that, is a tankie. It is a good practical defintion for the term.
Are tankies people who are economically left but socially and politically right
As I see it, tankies are just the same as the Trumpers. You can’t really say where they stand socially and politically, because they do not have a coherent opinion or ideology. Everyone who opposes their favorite regime is WRONG, and everything their favorite regime does is RIGHT. Bonus points for every action and opinion that hurts “woke lefties”, because the favorite regimes of tankies are all inevitably incompatible with progressive ideas and ideologies.
without knowing anything about the corrupt oligarchies in Russia or CCP China?
Imagine the answer a Trumper would give when you ask them if they don’t know about Trump’s corruption and character. The tankies answer just the same in response to allegations in regard to corruption and character of their favorite regimes:
First of all, none of that is true, because the woke lefties, the media, and everyone are all corrupt, and lying. And what is true, is all a well played move of brilliant 5D chess which will save us all, because the supposed “corruption” is actually all part of a very smart and deliberate system of ploys and strategems which the woke lefties just don’t understand.
Now, do the tankies and Trumpers truly believe that? Who knows. Doesn’t really matter anyway. What is clear is that both of those “ideologies” are dumb idiots.
Thanks for not leaving out the anarchists
I don’t think you understand how small of a global majority white European men are.
The political vibe on Lemmy isn’t really a new thing. Reddit had it 15 years ago. Good forums and IRC channels had it before that. It’s been part of the “golden age” of every online social medium
Eventually, teenage edgelords find start taking up too much space. Shortly after that, the far-right turn up to prey on them.
The people who made the platform good in the first place leave and the cycle begins anew.
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Are those groups right wing, or just centrists that don’t react well to people trying to push far left ideals in their spaces?
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It’s not the tech nerds funding the right wing; it’s the venture capitalists
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Those are CEOs.
There’s a huge contingent of socialist/leftist techies. How do you think the open source movement happened? The most popular operating system for both servers and smartphones is given away to the world by a .org
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I’m not saying there are no right-wing tech nerds, I’m saying that your argument that tech nerds are right wing is overly reductive.
You concede my point about FOSS but then try to muddy the waters from there by citing “their platforms started getting cracked down on and [their having] adopted cryptocurrency” to try to make your prior pidgeon-holing still work. Mind citing me a source for either of those claims? Neither of those seem to me to be issues plaguing the wider FOSS community, and as a participant I’m interested to hear about this news I’ve apparently missed.
Silicon Valley is not representative of tech nerds in general. It is, like Hollywood, a small area filled with desperate people trying to turn their talents into fame and fortune. Insinuating that tech nerds in general have the same culture as Silicon Valley is like insinuating that actors in general dress, act, and think like Hollywood actors do. It’s ridiculous on its face.
All this to say it really sounds like you’ve built up a stereotype based on what you read in the news rather than by engaging with the actual community in question.
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I wouldn’t call them nerds because they’re venture capitalists not nerds. Nerds implies some sort of technological or engineering skill or ability. Steve Jobs would qualify; not these two.
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Perfectly summed up.
Lol! I am totally a nerd
There’s been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.
Lemmy was the first one that I’m aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.
They just have their own instance and are defederated by some but not all, which is the best solution as it means they stick to their part of the fediverse instead of hijacking subs that weren’t right leaning in the first place.
Yeah, right-wingers flock to “safe-spaces” as much as the far-left does. Lemmy doesn’t have the tools to make a single community isolated like they could on Reddit, so they have to go to their own instances and end up defederated.
The main differences between left-wing and right-wing communities is that the right-wing ones quickly deteriorate towards a lot of hate related things. This leads them to being isolated from the rest. The left wingers are mostly tolerable and are just over zealous in preaching things like forcing everyone to use pronouns, lmao.
And everybody wins!
Lemmy is much less US-centric than Reddit.
I wonder if there are demographics by IP already? TBH most of the threads I’ve been in have felt very US Centric. I also came with the great reddit migration too though.
On my feed, at least, I have my frontpage set to whatever the kbin equivalent to “all” is. I see lots of other languages beyond English populating - particularly German. The Lemmy instance I chose when I initially made my way to the fediverse operates out of China. They’re chill over there.
I dunno. I think if you’re only finding people discussing the US here, then you’ve probably accidentally pigeonholed yourself based on your own interests. The fediverse is diverse.
I mean yeah. Being only English speaking with gringo Spanish doesn’t let me understand memes in German or any of the other various non-english speaking magazines lol.
English is the defacto lingua franca though. Particularly on the web. The diversity I’ve seen still heavily leans English, and western, which makes plenty of sense.
Lemmy was initially created by communists.
It’s still in the process of being created, and the communism is a bit less in your face now alongside there being other contributors to the code, but that’s how it started.
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Are you arguing that Twitter is right wing because it is US-centric, and not because of Musk’s leveraged buyout?
I would argue that US social media platforms are (now) right wing because of aggressive financial attacks meant to break up open social engagement, as this is bad for business and sociopaths looking to exploit people for profit. Reddit was left wing, until it was bought and sold. Same with Twitter.
However my comment was merely rejecting the idea that Lemmy is left wing because it is not US-centric. Lemmy was started by tankies, who say they’re left wing and have some left wing ideologies, but really they’re more authoritarian fascists, and fascism is in fact right wing. However as Lemmy grew it became apparent that this stance would impede its growth - particularly in western markets - so the main devs have tried to minimise their political views and keep the program neutral; now those views are primarily concentrated at lemmygrad.
Lemmy is not US-centric, but that’s not why it’s left wing. Lemmy is left wing because rational empathetic thought is naturally left wing. Lemmy is full of communism because it was started by communists/tankies.
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The US is not inherently nor totally right wing, and Twitter was predominantly left wing until fairly recently. It might not have been full left wing socialist, but it was certainly left of centre.
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Both parties in the US government are indeed right wing, but not everyone and everything in the US is right wing.
Communism is unfortunately a dirty word in the US, and socialism isn’t far behind it. It doesn’t help that there have been numerous foreign governments that call themselves communist that the US has labeled as enemies and fought against. As a result, an American labeling themselves communist is often ostracised. However, many people do in fact hold those ideals, albeit quietly and/or without naming it such.
An American politics forum is of course going to mirror American politics.
However Twitter and reddit as a whole were left wing. Not as in reading Marx, but in being for the good of everyone, with the core principle of serving the needs of the many rather than the desires of the few. They were also incredibly liberal. They’ve since been taken over by pseudo right wing authoritarian interests, gradually since around 2016.
Most of comments on popular communities boil down to “capitalism bad communism only solution”. Very in your face and everywhere
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Left and right are two stupid categories built up by propaganda, get them out of your head and start to think on your own terms
It’s pretty meaningfully different when one side wants to fix the climate and create social and economic policy that benefits the majority, while the other wants to concentrate wealth into the hands of the few at the expense of everyone else, and the climate, and is creating propaganda aimed at the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ and perceived-non-Americans (even when they’re citizens).
Any party that label themself as left or right is applying the same politics that benefits those in power and lie about it to the public.
This. There an infinite number of ideologies that you could have, but our first past the post voting system (in the US) only allows for two candidates, so an infinite spectrum gets funneled into two camps.
Left/right isn’t an exclusively American concept, it is used all over the world regardless of the political system of the country.
Well, there’s a self-proclaimed Left which, though probably having started out with good intentions, is all about “lets classify people on visible things they were born with and then presume things about them purelly on their “classification” and treat them differently”.
If this sounds strangelly like the far-right thinking that’s because it is kinda derivative: the same architecture of deeming individuals as worthy/unworthy likely-good/likely-bad because they were born with certain characteristics as the far-right is used, and then the categories are swapped and the whole thing is called “being progressive” as if it was only unfair to judge and treat people because of their genetic makeup if done in one direction but not in a different one.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made. Because these people follow the recipes without examining the against the principles and ideals and in contexts which are very different of the ones for which those rules were created, you went up with ridiculous ideas directly opposed to “the greatest good for the greatest number” principle like supporting Putin’s invasion.
The followers of such “Lefts” hate it when their faith-like beliefs are examined against the actual Principles of Equality and “the greatest good for the greatest numbers” and found often to be directly opposing them, just like when you grab some religious book or other and point out the inconsistencies in it: there is no greater hate than that of the faithfull who sees the basis of their Identity be examined under the cruel light of logic and found to be mainly bollocks.
Or in other words, I think the Left here is a lot more the product of thinking things through and concluding that it would be a lot better to live in a World with less poverty, more equality and were a few did not amass more power than whole countries thanks to their wealth, and continuing to actually continue to think things through when face with slogans from the tribalist flag waving slogan parroting and social-circle-jerk groups which call themselves “Left” and which are the leftovers from Marxism in the XXI Century and the Neoliberal-inspired “in the greed is good context, lets pursue personal-upside maximization as an ‘Identity’ group instead of individually so that we can claim we’re lefties”.
PS: If it sounds I’m raging against the Left here, that just because I find the pettyness and self-serving sociopathy of the modern Right to be self-evident. I actually don’t think you can be a true leftwinger genuinelly fighting for the greater good if you just blindly follow slogans and tribes. Funilly enough it also means I can actually respect a genuine old-style conservative, even whilst wholly disagreeing with him or her.
Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made.
The “tankies” are absolutely not utopian. There was a great big schism about this very question more than a century ago, with Marxists roundly rejecting the utopianism of the libertarian socialists (Anarchists). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels is a good starting point.
Yeah that’s a whole lot of words for “both sides”. Maybe you’d be happier on Reddit.com/r/conservative
Yup it is. There are a lot of communist techie people I guess. I still generally state my political opinions here though. Let them be downvoted.
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This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they’re opposed to Reddit’s API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy’s appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.
This is my thought as well. Lemmy isn’t what everyone is looking for. It’s a free open source software project for creating a decentralized federated network of content aggregators. For most people that sentence doesn’t make any sense nor do they really care. They just want a site they can doom scroll for hours.
The people who choose to use Lemmy are people who care about open source projects, care about decentralization of online platforms, or both. These types of people by their very nature support groups of people coming together collectively to do something big.
A collection of people working together towards a common goal without a strict hierarchy. You could say these people are community focused. Maybe we could call that communityism or something. Where people make rules as a group, or a union you could say. So yeah, no idea where the left lean is coming from.
Whenever I see a political thread here, it seems like the comment section is dominated by the most extreme of the left, with takes like “All right wingers are part of the MAGA crowd and advocating genocide” and “The right wing is weak, stupid, evil, and dangerous so we need to shut it down.”
As a centrist (not a rightist,) I don’t like this. We need rational discourse, not extremism and hate. Actually talk with reasonable people from outside your political circle please. (Reasonable people, not the right wing extremists that seem to be the only right-wingers y’all hear about.) Remember when we actually had a class struggle that made the people in power nervous instead of identity politics that get the working class fighting each other?
But then, most of the places I talk in are pretty politically left-leaning, so I guess being a centrist does make me look right-wing to a lot of people. I’m rarely seen pushing back against right-wing ideas, but that’s because I rarely see right-wing ideas being presented (outside of leftists pointing at rightist ridiculousness) to push back against. That probably has to do with the internet as a whole leaning more left than right.
progression tends not to be conservative
I’m afraid future will be conservative nevertheless due to the simple fact that they’re the only ones making kids. I’m liberal myself but I don’t have kids and will never have so my traits don’t pass to the next generations. The conservative neighbours with 7 kids on the other hand…
Politics being genetic, of course.
What?
Politics aren’t genetic.
But they ARE communal. Where you grow decides 90% of what you believe in.
It’s actually why I disagree with the top comment chain that smarter means more left leaning. I think it’s more that left leaning communities have better education standards and lead to smarter generations. Cause and effect reversed.
The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It’s sort of the other side of the ‘brain drain’ principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they’re probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.
Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they’re inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.
A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there’s simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.
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This. I hate the whole left/right tribalism.
Like I know that it can be used to get a rough idea of what political motivations someone might have and I know that where my own ideologies would mostly fall in that inaccurate one-dimensional linear spectrum but ultimately it is too inaccurate to use it to classify everyone’s political motivation.
Worse it creates a whole us-vs-them divide. “Oh you aren’t right, when then you must be a commie”. “Oh you aren’t left, then you must be a fascist”. So you might consider yourself in a different position on a political spectrum and just see the differences to someone on the other end of a political spectrum even though you might have more in common then you think. Heck, if you are on complete opposite ends you might even have more in common then you think.
Ultimately, the focus should be less on left/right and more on individual policies. Like should healthcare be public or privatized, should be build another road or another train track here, etc
Why does political debate always have to turn into this tribalistic mud fight instead of proper discussion on how to best address the needs of citizens?
I see just as much if not more complaining about “tankies” as on subs like subredditdrama, it’s not that leftist
I literally saw a guy earlier today in that one large memes thread trying to convince people that Eastern European countries yearn for the USSR days.
Only tankies try to do that lol.
A lot of people there do yearn for the return of the USSR. You can argue about why, but the polling is quite clear that many people miss socialism
“Why don’t you ask people from Socialist countries what they thought”?
“Wait, not those people”.
Where can I see that polling?
https://lemmy.world/comment/1618443
Here’s a link to a comment with some polling
So really not a lot of people, mostly Russians and countries that have strong ties to Russia.
That’s what the first source says and as someone already pointed to a more recent polling showing that it’s no longer the case for eastern European countries.
Hungary source is an old article and the same recent polling shows otherwise.
Romania source link doesn’t even work.
Eastern Germany is a pretty complex and nuanced topic, one that I won’t get into so I’ll give that one the benefit of the doubt that they actually want soviet socialism back.
Czech source link also doesn’t work.
Serbia source literally has the article saying “the Serbian citizens primarily refer to better economic situation and standard of living, but the majority of them would not go back to that period.”
And then there’s the Russian part, which is completely understandable considering the USSR was just a form of Russian imperialism.
Tankies are a tiny subset of extreme far leftists which even far leftists have a right to despise, though.
if they truly are a “tiny subset” then why even spend the time to complain about them?
Because they’re very vocal online, are annoying, and also give actual leftists bad rep. If you’re promoting egalitarianism and distributing social power among everyone, you wouldn’t like people who support authoritarism to share a label with you.
every state in the world is authortarian
Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that’s pretty rich.
The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.
To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that “since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok”: any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they’re too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren’t drown in liturgy.
https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/
ML states are the only successful socialist states in history to hold out for a significant amount of time against the United States empire. I’m not super attached to the vanguard model myself, but can you show me a single other successful model? I think this quote is quite relevant here:
"This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported – what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.
That group was annihilated." - Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method
Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.
Because some of the founders of Lemmy are the worst examples.
do you mean the devs or people using it? because the only 2 main devs are ML, not “some”
(also I’m a lemmygrad user, I’m a spooky scary tankie btw
)You’re a homophobic authoritarian?
cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, try again next time
I doubt he’s an American.
Anti-corporate platforms don’t generally appeal to people that built and uphold the existing corporate status quo.
The first wave here were anticapitalists, anarchists or communists. The second wave are the most anti-corporate “liberals”.
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I absolutely agree. I also think the irritating environment created by the current digital red scare trend will eventually subside once they move onto some new scare words because the existing ones are losing their edge.
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Can you define a liberal for me? I usually call myself a progressive, but from my limited understanding I know liberals are generally pro-capitalists that usually posture morality to uphold capitalism.
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"I’ve noticed that lemmy as a whole has much more moral, empathetic individuals than reddit (outside of political servers of course)
21st century politics in a nutshell, lmao
