This site is in the process of fighting its own culture war. You have the hardcore communists, anarchists and tankies who were here the longest, and the meme page is on one of their original domains (the ml in lemmy.ml is supposed to stand for marxist-leninist ). And then you have the twitter and reddit refugees who in general lean more center left, liberal, or libertarian. ml was the domain that was advertise the most to people on reddit, and world was where people were directed to once ml's sign ups were limited.
memes@lemmy.ml is kinda going throught the gaybar effect with the influx of redditors. Like sometimes when a gaybar gets popular, it attracts non-queer customers, who tell their friends, who invite their friends, to the point the original queer customer base gets crowded out. I imagine that's what the marxist-leninist community base is feeling now that a lot of former redditors call their instance home, and their meme page is the defacto meme community of lemmy.
As long as the mods here allow it, and as long as people keep upvoting, this problem isn't going away, no matter how many complaint memes get posted. The best solution I can think of is boost other meme pages on different instances, maybe with mod teams that are more willing to keep the page apolitical (which is hard to do in general cause everyone's definition of political is different.) kbin has a fairly large meme community that could use some more love, same with memes@sopuli.xyz. Hell, considering most users are from world or shitjustworks, I'm surprise I don't see their local meme pages get more use.
Some claim .ml stands for marxist-leninist, some claim Dessa didn't choose it for that purpose. Personally idk but I'm mentally preparing for another round of this debate :')
Considering what is known about lemmy, its creators, and the original instances, it seems to hold up. But regardless of the true meaning of ml, the political leanings of lemmy.ml were very far left before the reddit migration, and I feel that's the reason why you see such an aggressive presence of communist memes on ml's meme page.
If you don't want to see politics just elect me and I promise I will handle everything for your sweet little head. Just keep playing with your toys now, no I earned all this money.
I totally agree and I find it weird that some people (very loudly) don't. You can make a community for it, but right now this one is the largest general community for people who just want to laugh and politics sometimes can make me cry.
Yes, I wouldn't care if it was occasionally (1/20 or 1/30), but it's more like 1/3 and always the same sub narratives and the same people joining in with their pre-written comments they already used in 5 memes or so. And I don't want to tackle someone specifically as I have seen various examples on all political sides.
And it's not that I'm apolitical. I just don't think I need to convince anyone that my personal beliefs are the only correct ones out there. Our fundamental views and beliefs are being shaped by our environment and our personal experiences alongside many other factors. You may have certainly had other experiences in life than me and that's perfectly fine.
Sometimes when seeing a political comment I'm thinking about only replying "Cool 👍" regardless of whether I agree or not... Better than writing half an essay wasting another hour of valuable life time for literally nothing.
I love this take. I feel very similarly and understand that everyone has their own reasons for their political beliefs. But at the end of the day, politics are usually just depressing and I just wana laugh at some funny, non-policical memes.
"People are discussing the reality around them, it's so frustrating to privileged people like me who are not yet experiencing it in personal enough ways to give a shit"
Is this where we say all the NATO nations are Nazis and that Putin is just trying to save Ukraine from them? From what I gather it's appropriate to make anti-west, pro china/Russia comments everywhere. When the yuan hits my account I just start blasting.
Perhaps the tankies are making you question some deeply held beliefs you have and that’s making you uncomfortable?
It’s easy to dismiss most of their rhetoric, I do as well (I.e. running people over with tanks is a bad idea), but it’s harder to ignore the fact we have a significant portion of the value of our labour taken by capitalists.
Tankies will have you believing that socialism is when the state becomes the manager of the national capital, a deranged belief that has more to do with Mussolini than Marx and Engels. One who's interested in the investigation into value and the history of the labor movement should ignore the dumbass tankie memes and just read Marx. You do not become a tankie by reading Marx or Lenin.
Reading the communist manifesto made me realise the flaws in Marxist thinking as well.
Don’t misunderstand me, Marx was right about a lot of things and still is. Das Kapital is still 80%-90% relevant and accurate but the parts Marx is incorrect about (that capitalism naturally trends to socialism and the worker will have necessarily poorer conditions under capitalism) are addressed through other political philosophers who built upon his and Engels’ work.
Socialism as a political ideology has evolved considerably. Tankies are stuck at a point in time and it’s sad they stand in the way of a socialism without authoritarianism.
They have brought up some good points, but the good points they make are over shadowed by the whole genocide denial and "dunking on libs".
The following example is not meant to represent hexbear users, but to show an example of how I could see it.
Think of a fascist who brings up some good examples of modern problems in about 1/10 of their messages, while the rest are talking about how Mussolini was actually good, since he brought up the living standard in Italy and expanded the public sector. And when someone brings up the bad things Mussolini did, the fascist just says "It's clearly western propaganda".
You wouldn't want to read their messages, since they are full of this fascist apologetic garbage, and the good points they bring up are ignored because of their other opinions.
It doesn't matter how good willed your opinions are if no one wants to associate with you.
I've told them this before. I agree with them on about 60% of the stuff they believe. But they are really, really hung up on the genocide apologetics. I've tried reasoning with them, but I don't think it's going to happen. I'm pretty sure they banned me haha
It's almost like those complaining about "politics" only have an issue when it isn't their politics being discussed...
Everything is political.
A space that shares memes that are created based on current events is always going to bring up political issues, the two are literally inseparable - the whole fucking point of memes is to be snippets of shared cultural and social experiences that get shared around and evolve accordingly.
What the fuck do you expect?
And you know what? I wouldn't be able to pinpoint which memes OP is talking about because as oppose to them, when I see content I don't like I simply block the poster or the community or both and move on with my life (like I will be doing now). I advise they do the same instead of making yet another whiny post about the content in a community they probably never contributed anything to before this point.
As long as politics is not based on the sovereignty of the people but on that of an elite and large corporations and as long as politicians are not employees of these people, but rather see themselves as their bosses, any political ideology is a mere label and becomes a feudal dictatorship. It only deserves a debate between different opinions when this pyramid scheme is reversed, before it leads to nothing.
I wouldn't call myself that. Not on Lemmy and certainly not irl.
I usually manage to piss off both sides because whilst I do agree on a lot of things I usually fail to mention these ending up in listing the topics I disagree with them.
The word centrist itself it very relative as is "being right" and "being left"... one "being left" in the US would arguably be center right in many EU state. In the same way, "being center" on Lemmy means something entirely different than "being center" on X.
Tho I am certainly leaning more towards a certain ideology I do think that too much of it isn't healthy as is with pretty much everything. And just like a wise man once said: "Only the Sith deal in absolutes!"