Why is Lemmy-world so reactionary, radlib/liberal and religious intolerant?
Yesterday I was banned from Lemmy-world due arguing with Liberals and with religious intolerants (atheistic religious intolerants) there. I am very shocked on how much radlib and new atheist they are. They literally can't take any left-wing take and or any religious take without mass harassing you and mass brigading you until they just ban you.
Ngl, Lemmy-world is basically a Liberal 4chan, and that is wacky how they think that all leftists are pro-Trump and pro-Conservative and how much they can't take anyone being against US/EU/NATO on that place, I've seen straight up Zionists, straight up Ukrofascists, straight up New Atheists (Atheist Fundamentalists) and so on on that place. And you can't respond them without you getting banned...
Ngl, I can even say that lemmy-world is a proof of how much the Fediverse can go completely wrong... And now I got a negative view on Lemmy and on the Fediverse after the awful experience I had on Lemmy-world. It (Lemmy-world) is far worse than Reddit itself, because people can mass harass you and mass brigade you and if you say anything you're banned. And they will mass downvote you if you post anything pro-left-wing and or anything pro-religion...
I said it when they first defederated Hexbear. If you block the left in any space you create you are drastically shifting your community to the right, and this causes nazi bar syndrome where slowly but surely everyone who is uncomfortable with being around so many nazis gets pushed into leaving.
What remains are the nazis and the people that are comfortable around the nazis. Some of those people are oblivious apolitical idiots that couldn't tell a mask-on nazi from anyone else, some are not.
Liberals consistently cause their spaces to lurch to the far right by doing mccarthyism against leftists. Then they complain about it being far right with absolutely no self awareness about what caused it.
With a little less snark: when someone from Hexbear or Lemmygrad says "liberal," we're referring to the ideology of Liberalism and its adherents. Liberalism is the dominant ideology today, with features such as capitalism, representative 'democracy,' and ennumerated individual rights of which private property is their most cherished. Liberals are liberals, conservatives are liberals, libertarians are liberals. Essentially, if someone isn't a socialist, they're probably a liberal (or worse).
Liberals emerged as the opposition to the feudal system, along with enlightenment philosophy, science, industrialization, etc. Revolutionary liberals wanted freedom, democracy, self determination, independence, freedom of movement, and a world without the tyranny of a king. The class that emerged during these periods was the capitalists who also wanted to get away from the feudal system ruled by nobles and the church, who said, "the way to get rid of these feudal relations and get freedom, democracy and independence is a system built around private property rights." But of course once the capitalists seized power and owned everything, those other values of self determination, freedom, independence all became wrapped up in and subordinated to private property.
Now when people talk about these values, the only one that really has any social substance is property. Socialists are in many ways the inheritors of that first mission that early radical liberals were fighting for, but when we talk about liberals, what we mean is anyone who believes that private property is a core political and social value to uphold. This includes most conservatives and what would traditionally be considered as liberals, like the Democratic party. But we recognize that private property and capitalism was not the way to win freedom from tyranny, it was just a new form of tyranny. It was a big con, a game of switcheroo, and it continues to be that to this day. Liberals can't really see it because there are things that they believe to be essential and natural that are really social and historically contingent. But becoming a socialist we have to sort of de-liberalize in that we purge those core beliefs that uphold private property and dictatorship of capitalists, which has this weird side effect of always having to distinguish our socialist beliefs from liberalism.
when we say liberal we mean the ideological backbone of capitalism. People who believe the primary political subject is the individual and that economic classes either don't exist or aren't the primary political feature of any given society.
To tack on to what everyone else has said, almost all political discourse in the US is composed of liberals. The democrats are all liberals. The republicans are 95% liberals with the occasional fascist.
A liberal is someone who justifies the continued existence of capitalism and the power structures that uphold it, they also tend to elevate property rights above individual and collective human rights
World and to a lesser degree .ee received the absolute worst liberal posters from Reddit. The people who cared enough about the API changes because they were addicted enough to Reddit to need a third party app, but also angry that they weren't coddled enough by the platform owners to either get a fedposting view or to be in the premium club forever.
The most aggressive posters with a chip on their shoulder, who were too absurd and detestable to be showered in Gold made their way to World. They were supplemented by some weirdoes who took a weird against the concept of paying for their premium posting features, usually steeped in some bluemaga conspiracy about China or Russia getting their Reddit money because of Trump somehow.
All of the chud Redditors who bailed went to Truth Social or one of the other various right wing social media grifts that flopped and they all ended back up on Twitter.
Tangentially: as an old, life-long atheist, the new atheist movement was a profound disappointment for me. What a bunch of Atlanticistwar on terror racist fucks.
I agree. The new atheist / skeptic movement has the thinnest veneer of atheism, but its entire foundation is rotten with white western supremacy. Having conversations with these losers always devolves into them spouting off what amounts to religious phrenology. It’s not concerned with atheism as an intellectual or moral or scientific pursuit, just as a rationalization for bigotry.
I'm in my mid 30s and can remember very clearly back to when I was like 7 or 8 my mom would make me go to church and I hated that shit so much. I would just sit there and reread genesis over and over every Sunday just to "do something" other than just sitting there, bored as hell.
Anyway, I told my mom at some point I hated church and didn't wanna go and she basically said "fine, don't love Jesus if you don't want to." And didn't make me go anymore. By total coincidence, I'm sure, my little brother and she both quit going as well not long after.
So by my teens I already had a resentment towards my quasi-religious family; Christian by label, but never in action. I was too young to understand what else religion could be beyond fear-porn bullshit that I absolutely never bought into for a second. I actually posted a bunch of what kids now days would call "cringe" around 2003-04 somewhere in there. Age like 14-17. Just paragraphs and paragraphs ranting about how dumb someone has to be to believe in God.
Fast forward another 5-10 years, so like 2008-2010ish, I started noticing everyone who identified as atheist was 1) extremely vocal (I hadn't really spoken about it since like 16 because I realized no one gave a shit) 2) had an odd hyper focus on Islam.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't fall for that trap for a while myself. I think I caught on fairly quickly though when I figured out like you're interacting with probably almost all white, middle income, western guys who have never met a Muslim person and yet all these people post 90% of the time about... whatever. Shit about Muhammad as a warlord is popular. Amongst other topics. I just remember thinking like "ok, yeah, that sounds bad. But the Christians...? They live right next to me and they're kinda crazy." It was just a weird outlet for "acceptable" Islamophobia which often was just anti-Arab racism under the thinnest possible veil. I also didn't know any people from any Middle Eastern countries at the time, but didn't feel much hatred towards them.
I was (self jerking off) genuinely of the mindset like "all religions are equally dumb" and that is why I eventually stopped calling myself an atheist. It was just too cringe and associated with "I'm an atheist and I'm about to say the most anti-Arab talking points bullshit you've ever heard" and many others ran straight the fuck away from that immediately. Everyone who's like mid-30s and calls themselves an agnostic now days is probably one who ditched the online atheist stuff sometime in that era.
As I got older I met a bunch of people from a ton of faiths. Mostly Christians of course, but I met an orthodox Jewish guy and some Arab Muslims and some white American Muslims. I met most of them in an academic setting, and so I saw they were definitely not dumb. Nor were they much different than me. They didn't give a shit that I didn't believe in what they do, I also didn't really care, and it was just like "why did I ever care so much about this?" I suppose a lot was a childhood resentment for Christianity being forced upon me. I think it's natural some people will resent that forever. But coming to kinda learn about Judaism and Islam in a second hand way showed me a lot. I think I finally realized that for some people religion can be more than just a label, like it had been for most of my family. It can be like a path in life. Or an anchor. Something like that. I still can't say I fully understand really, but I could see that despite what the internet would have you believe these people held no special resentment towards me. I guess it was a classic case of just finally being exposed to different cultures and people and immediately going "oh, anything bad I ever imagined was just bullshit someone put in my brain" and it kinda washes away.
Also, perhaps ironically, my field of study was biology. You'd think such a field almost by definition would be packed full of atheists. How could someone believe in evolution AND creationism? Well, you can, long story short.
I've actually been on the defensive side of theists multiple times over the years when some (usually ignorant, but some are highly educated) dingus tries to insist on the impossibility of god. I just have to explain to them over and over that we simply don't know a lot of stuff, may never know it, and yeah, sure, I agree there's in all likelihood no god. But if someone chooses to believe that god sparked the first life or caused the Big Bang, who cares?
I actually wrote a paper in college, I think in my third year, about how I had begun college as a "devout atheist" and several years into my biology undergrad program was questioning if there was a god after all because so much stuff is... just crazy. I felt like I was having daily existential crises with some shit trying to fathom it. Maybe I'm just a dumbass, I dunno, but I think the resolution to my contradictions was found in writing that paper (the prof was doing that kind gesture of "you're all fucking up, so I will let you write a paper on basically anything and average it in with your finals so I don't get 50 whining emails over my break" type thing) and putting into words for the first time then, but also since then, how far my opinion of science and religion had changed from my teens. Accepting that maybe I was wrong, and that I didn't somehow just magically come to the right conclusion because I'm just so smart. Or accepting that none of us know and insisting I knew basically by definition was against my own beliefs.
I'm kinda like Mulder from the X files or something. I just want to believe. Or maybe that was his partner, whatever, point is I'm the forever-skeptic because I want to believe, but I also want to justify that belief. I want to understand why people believe, but I probably never will. Maybe not until the final season when I see those sweet, sweet aliens for myself.
I agree. This is why I created a Hexbear account after my original lemmy.ml account. I didn't want to be locked out on lemmy.ml
Seems like they will only stop after Hexbear/Lemmygrad are totally isolated. But it's also a shame because lemmy.world has a large population and some communities I like but can't access now since we defederated because they are too lib brained.
I have a fantasy of us decending on these spaces like a plague of locust, shit posting and harassing until the libs flee, crying and nashing their teeth.
Most Lemmy instances seem to comprise of a very specific cross section of middle aged white men who work as software engineers and own at least one rental property. They're gonna have a particular political outlook and it's not going to be a good one.
religion is a really easy to see abusive hierarchy that well off white people can get oppressed by, and religious bullshit is a proximate cause for a lot of problems polite liberals are supposed to care about. A bunch of people just stop there and don't become skeptical atheists, fewer still apply those tools to our own biases and the status quo of society to become intersectional feminists, and few enough of those apply it to the very foundations of our society to become communists.
It wasn't just 9/11, there was also the catholic sex abuse scandal getting big in the early 2000s and stuff like answering "jedi" on the census was taking off in the UK prior to america's chickens coming home.
having so recently lost abortion rights and with the hegemonic army of christendom champing at the bit to put us in camps i should hope generic pro-religious sentiment would get owned. for every that one guy catching a charge to let homeless people sleep in his church there are millions of zealots who want to kill me and my friends.