TIL lemmy.ml is a pro-authoritarian CCP shill instance

https://lemmynsfw.com/post/262488

TIL lemmy.ml is a pro-authoritarian CCP shill instance - Lemmy NSFW

For all the newcomers that aren’t aware, I just stumbled upon this insane drama. Apparently lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] is the result of a reddit sub ban of a bunch of pro-china bots who vigorously defend the Chinese government, and the two top admins are also the top devs of the Lemmy source software. Pretty terrible stuff! The linked thread is full of their insane ramblings and denialism.

Good thing that what they are building is super transparent, open source and distributed. That critical post wasn’t even deleted.

As long as that remains the case, I’m happy that Lemmy is a place where you can find all kinds of views represented.

What I’d like to know is why they’re developing Lemmy if they’re like, actively Chinese agents. No Chinese citizen could even use Lemmy so it’s baffling, and the Chinese government would not want a social media site that’s uncontrollable by the state.

If they aren’t Chinese agents I’m completely flummoxed as to how this community formed that’s so incredible pro china?

They’re probably idealists with good intentions at heart
Citizen Smith ain't dead yet!
Nobody who willingly supports the CCP has good intentions.
I have no idea, but I’ve seen many people incredibly pro-China who are not Chinese or have any association with China. It’s baffling but it is a thing!
No idea why but on the other hand many people are pro US and they have interfered all over the world. There there is the pro russian crowd and so on. As others have said thankfully a platform such as this gives space for all viewposts and we can respectively share different views.
As someone living in a country once under a US-backed dictatorship, I welcome the arrival of a new superpower in town. Not that China is much better than the US but at least they should keep each other in check.

It's a form of brain rot when you hear the phrase "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and think that they're your actual friend, and not another potential enemy who just so happens to be in a position to take up the resources/attention of your main enemy.

Almost everyone agrees that capitalism is the most evil system ever created.

The part where we disagree is that the tankies think you need an authoritarian state to murder all the capitalist, and anyone sympathetic to capitalist ideals, and eventually anyone who disagrees with all the murder.

At that point, you have an elite class (the ruling dictator) and everyone else who either obey or die. That's not communism, that's feudalism with extra steps. Which coincidentally is also the endpoint of capitalism.

No, the correct way to spread communism and socialist ideals is via educating the masses until the masses demand it, and then it can only ever truly exist under an actual free and fair democracy.

Coincidentally, the first step in the process is the easiest to sell. Voting reform. Everyone knows that voting in a two party system sucks. It's how the rich maintain control of the government, it forces the people to choose the lesser evil and not the greater good. STAR voting is the answer.

That's step one. It lets us regain control of the government for the people. After that, we simply let the people decide, because the vast majority of people like left leaning policy. The two party system of plurality voting tricks people into voting against their own interests, despite how much they like any single policy.

And before anyone chimes in with Ranked Choice as an option. Real world elections with it have produced worse results than Plurality. It's about the single worst design for a voting system that you could have. A coin flip often produces a better result than Ranked Choice. Aside from the other faults of the system, Ballot Exhaustion is particularly evil. Up to 20% of votes cast in any given RCV election aren't counted in the final tally because of Exhaustion.

RCV actually sets voting reform efforts back. It actively hurts the cause because of how bad it is.

Anyway, that turned into, like, three different rants.

STAR voting - electowiki

STAR voting is an electoral system for single-seat elections, though variations exist for multi-seat and multi-seat proportional representation elections. The name stands for "score then automatic runoff", referring to the fact that this system is a combination of score voting and runoff voting. It is...

electowiki

Great points, I do love me a meandering rant! Could you explain more about STAR voting? From a skim of the wiki page it sounds basically how I understood rank choice voting to work.

I tend towards the more anarchist side of things. The hope of the people ever getting any meaningful control over the existing levers of power, without becoming that which they seek to destroy, seems like a fools errand. I tend to think a more pragmatic approach would be building real, positive, anti-capitalist, local communities that live like the world is dying, and work survive the death throws of the state. And also democratization of the workplace for the love of fuck!

What I really like so much about Lemmy is the apparent willingness of folks to have real honest discussions about things. Even agreeing to disagree. I am intelligent enough to have a vague understanding of how much shit I don’t know, and that there is no end all, be all ideology. I just know that the world could be a damn sight better than those in charge believe it can be.

It would be unfortunate if some of the creators of Lemmy lacked the empathy and curiosity of it’s members, and supposed reason for Lemmy’s existence. I hope that isn’t the case, but it seems, by virtue of the fediverse, to be ways of growing communities in spite of.

I do find it pretty amusing that the supposedly “CCP tankie agit-prop” instance isn’t Lemmygrad, considering they literally have a fucking tank for a logo.

Lemmygrad is tankies idolising the USSR instead of the CCCP.

Okay, Ranked Choice is a system where you have to rank candidates in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Fuck that up and your ballot is thrown out.

The way Ranked Choice is counted is thus, If no single candidate has at least 50% of the current valid ballots, the candidate with the least amount of votes is ejected from the election and the ballots that have the ejected candidate move on to the next remaining candidate on said ballot.

This works quite well if the election only has two rounds. You have your first choice and then a backup. Done.

It falls apart badly if you have more than two rounds. Your backup might have been eliminated in an earlier round, and now your vote goes to the backup of the backup, but maybe they weren't popular either and also got removed in an early round. Now your vote goes to your last placed candidate, your most hated option. Or your ballot is just completely thrown out. The ultimate winner needs 50% of remaining ballots, which can end up being 80% of the initial ballots cast. 20% of ballots are just thrown out.

And the really fun part, if you had swapped your first choice for the second, the chances of either of them winning would have skyrocketed.

Because Ranked Choice makes no fucking sense. There are about a dozen research papers based on actual real world elections that try to explain how the fuck the results happened. Results that never match the polling data, because the system is fucked.

Also, Ranked Choice has to be counted in a singular location, you have to physically ship all the ballots over, and if extra ballots show up, well, who the fuck knows where they come from. The single counting location also means you cannot start counting until after the election is over.

The "mysterious additional ballots fuckup" actually happened in a NYC mayoral race, the winning candidate was actually the one to say hold on, this doesn't line up right, the source of the extra ballots was found as test ballots that should not have had the actual candidates listed, it should have had something like ice cream flavors or some shit. Anyway, the winning candidate still actually won.

We can't say the same about the fuck-up in San Francisco, where the count procedure was wrong, and the actual winning candidate was eliminated in the first round, and the candidate who should have actually been eliminated was sworn in and actually served in the position for a full month.

It's these sorts of fuckups that set the entire voting reform effort back by decades.

STAR voting is substantially different.

A voter basically gives each candidate a 5-star review. Multiple candidates can have the same rating.

Counting is also different. You simply count up the score that each candidate gets, and add it to the running total. Counting can be done at the polling location. This makes the election more secure. There's no single point of failure.

You can also count ballots as you go. You can then publicly release that data as it comes in.

When the election is over, the two candidates with the highest average scores compete in an automatic runoff.

How it works is simple. You look at every ballot. If candidate A is rated at a 5 and candidate B a 3, then the vote goes to A. That's it, whoever is rated higher on any given ballot gets that ballot as a vote.

The twist is when two candidates are rated the same. Those ballots are still counted. They're counted as "No preference" and the number of those is also released.

This lets the newly elected person know just how much of a true mandate they have. If your average was a 3.2 and almost a third of the people who did vote for you had no preference between you and the runner-up, your behavior in office should probably reflect that fact.

Rather than just saying "I'm the winner, fuck you" which would likely still happen...

Thanks for the explanation! So the main difference is in STAR you can rate a zero, and ranked choice you can only have a least preference, correct? I can see how that could be problematic.

The main difference is in how the votes are counted.

In RCV it's a series of tiny first past the post elections all rolled into one. You vote for person A at the expense of person B. You have to choose one or the other, and that forced choice often comes back to hurt you. It's an Ordinal voting system.

STAR is a Cardinal voting system at its core. Think of it this way, giving a 5-star review to the local steakhouse has nothing to do with the 3-star review you gave to the sandwich shop down the road.

Basically, Ordinal systems fall prey to Arrow's Theorem. This boils down to eventually being forced to choose the lesser of two evils. Which then leads to two-party dominance. Cardinal systems sidestep that completely.

This live stream is about three hours long, but breaks down STAR and RCV, and the massive flaws of RCV.

Ranked voting - electowiki

Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]

electowiki
We’re currently in stage ??? of the “make the world like you by feeding them delicious Chinese food” plan
I suspect the CCP has effective LLMs running coordinated campaigns on here and other social media. A downside of anonymous social media, it’s hard to know who or what is voting/you’re talking to.
Now that’s a conspiracy I can get behind
Reminds me of how SubscribeStar (an alternative to Patreon) is run by two Russians with kinda shady histories.
But instances are controllable by the state. That's the entire point, to be the admin of your feudal kingdom.
They're just dumb, typical tankies. It's a lot more common than you might think.

It's worth noting that a lot of Chinese citizenry have actually benefitted from the CCP in regards to the serious economic growth China has seen in the last few years. Or at least, a lot of the Chinese citizenry attribute the growth to the CCP, and it's understandable why.

There are a lot of people in China that genuinely like the CCP government, and not in a Stalin way where you only said so to avoid disappearing.

Yeah, the Little Pink are very real.

The post 80s reform saw a massive growth of the Chinese middle class, at a time when the Cultural Revolution was no longer talked about or taught in schools.

It's not that surprising what has happened.

Little Pink - Wikipedia

Because the CCP is ensuring they have ways to influrnce citizens of other countries. Just like all modern intelligence states.

No Chinese citizen would even be allowed to use Lemmy

Some Chinese netizans are used to climbing over the firewall. There's even a slang term for it, though I've forgotten what it is.

Patriotic young Chinese internet warriors are a massive cultural phenomenon. E.g the Little Pink Army.

It’s obviously step 3: ??? Profit

Same reason Russia backed both BLM and Qanon. They believe democracy can be attacked by fostering dissent.

Same reason “capitalism” is a bogeyman on lots of gen-z oriented social-media.

Anyone who has anything positive to say about China must be a pro-China agent 🙄

Maybe they just disagree with Western propaganda, like the ”social credit” bullshit that everyone on Reddit parrots despite it not being true?

They’re literally financed by the EU, via NLnet grants. They aren’t CCP agents, they’re just communists, who tend to have a more nuanced view of china because they’ve actually read the history and theory of the chinese state.

There are tons of commies who have major issues with modern china, though idk if the lemmy devs are in that camp or totally onboard with dengism/modern chinese policy, but typically their (communists’) issues aren’t as surface level as “but tiananmen square! uyghur genocide!”. because they see those issues as being 99% used as western propaganda and heavily distorted.

EU

The .ml instances are financed by the EU? What are NLnet grants?

Oh yeah, I’m really happy that alt-right/ *ist/neonazi/etc views are represented.

So glad for diversity of bigotry!

Suppressing different views on a platform doesn’t make them go away, it only radicalises them. The only real, long term solution is debate and persuasion.

I remember a point of time not too long ago when the world didn’t tolerate this bullshit out in the open.

Guess what? We didn’t have the extreme issues we’re seeing now from these groups after allowing them to advertise over every legit platform.

So don’t feed me this shit that if we don’t give them a platform, that they will become a problem. They are a bloody fucking problem ** now** that we have.

Anger and bans and lack of discussion is exactly what fuels it. Let natural attrition happen and people will find common ground.

people will find common ground.

Halfway between racist and not, is not somewhere I care to ever be.

Common ground is not necessarily right in the middle

Don’t take this badly, but we’re all racist (or at least some kind of “-ist”) because the Human Cognitive System naturally uses simplifications to be able to interpret and take decisions on the world around us, including on people, so boiling people down to some “group” on something very visible (gender, skin color, clothing, the kind of words they use, how they move and speak and so on) and then assuming they’re “like” some idea you have about people from that group (i.e prejudicing them) is a natural tendency.

Further all those ideas one has about “people from a group” are invariably bollocks and often absorbed subconsciously through the same mechanisms as used by Marketing to influence people.

All you can do is be on the watch for you yourself making such unfair judgements on others due to your own mental simplifying and categorizing of people, and stopping it when you notice it and refraining from acting based on any judgements that cannot be traced to what that individual has done and said (all of which if Cognitivelly a lot heavier than “categorization and assumption”).

So de facto racism isn’t about holding prejudiced ideas it’s about a whole range of how much effort you make to treat people based on their individual actions and words alone and stopping yourself from using categorization to judge people (and even decide what to tell them and how to act towards them).

Note that I’m not trying to excuse racism here: I’m saying you can’t simply deem yourself “not a racist”, because it’s the result of natural human tendencies so ethernal vigilance is required not to act so even if your intentions are pure.

All this to say that “racism” (or more generally categorizing people and making prejudiced judgements on them base on that category) really isn’t the right thing to claim has no middle ground, because it’s a range and a person’s position on it boils down to how much effort on makes to try and stop yourself from action on the “conclusions” coming through such cognitive paths.

Or to put things in another way - people who practice violent acts against others purelly based on the skin color of said others are very racist (extremelly so) and people who have different expectations on the behaviour, life status and even worth as a person (i.e. presumed good person or presumed bad person) of others based on their skin color are also racist though if they don’t actually act on it or verbalized it they’re way way less racist that the extreme ones.

Can I naturally attrite my fists on a Nazi face? If yes I second your proposal, if not please stop with these bullshit points
Outside? Sure.
I wanna do it even here. It’s that ok with you or are you too much of a pussy to fight back even in a virtual space where there is close to no risk for you as an individual? Or maybe you don’t want to fight because you don’t dislike this ideology so much…
You mean argue? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. Punching the screen? Feel free to do that, but I’ll pass.

Nono, I mean punching literal faces or relentlessly forcing people out of inclusionary spaces. Shun them as the Germans did with nazis post WWII, there is only good to be achieved with this tactic.

I would never punch my screen, I need it to shame nazis wherever I go.

Ah yes, let just allow a bunch of violent extremists bring their radicalising ideas to the mainstream through the use of logical fallacies and of fake news in an historical period where the investments in schools and higher education are stifled by most of the world governments, I’m sure nothing bad will happen.

Am I right, Florida? And what about you Texas, do you also think I’m right? Italy and part of Germany are sure I’m right, so this must be a great idea.

Fucking centrists

Do you think your position is somehow inferior and you cannot persuade people? If not, do just that.
There are mountains of historical evidence and examples to suggest that these people are not behaving rationally or even willing to be persuaded. You can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t first reason themselves in to.
Some won’t be persuaded, some will. Plus, when there’s a bunch of people in a room, there’s a collective will to find consensus and be liked. People who didn’t reason themselves into their position will move their views closer to that of the collective to be more comfortable. At the same time, if they are being banned and restricted, there’s an instinctual will to fight back. E.g. if someone is angry at me or hostile towards me, it almost doesn’t matter if I agree with them, I’m likely to oppose them.

Oh yeah, let’s talk about millions of American voters (to make an example) being fucked in the head by the alt-right as “someone”. Just s few people being duped and convinced to fight for an exclusionary ideology, what could go wrong? They surely would never try to organise a coup to forcibly take control of our governments, right?

Such a great position to hold, if you are deaf or blind

Oh yeah, let’s talk about millions of American voters (to make an example) being fucked in the head by the alt-right as “someone”. Just s few people being duped and convinced to fight for an exclusionary ideology, what could go wrong? They surely would never try to organise a coup to forcibly take control of our governments, right?

Such a great position to hold, if you are deaf or blind

Oh yeah, let’s talk about millions of American voters (to make an example) being fucked in the head by the alt-right as “someone”. Just s few people being duped and convinced to fight for an exclusionary ideology, what could go wrong? They surely would never try to organise a coup to forcibly take control of our governments, right?

Such a great position to hold, if you are deaf or blind

Plus, how would you have handled a swarm of uneducated swines refusing to partake in the most common cure to a viral disease, transforming themselves in the biggest biological threat to our societies? As a centrist I’m sure you would have fought to find “common ground” with the virus…

Jan 6th is the result of exactly the thing I’m warning against. If people are forced to create their own isolated groups, the views that make them isolated will only strengthen. If they are out in the open, it’s an opportunity to bring them back into the mainstream. If antivax views weren’t being removed, way fewer people would believe in them.

The problem with isolating as you intend it is that the sole web isolation Is not enough. They need even more isolation from any aspect of civilized society to learn their lesson.

Bar them from schools, hospitals, streets, public spaces and see how quickly their number will decrease, both for changes of hearts as well as for natural causes

If antivax views weren’t being removed, way fewer people would believe in them.

If google removed Coca Cola ads from their service, more people would buy coke.

I think my position cannot be defended when my interlocutor dies not engage with a civil and honest debate, using smears, fake news and logical fallacies to cover his lack of ground to sustain his position. Furthermore the only viable way to maintain a power structure based on these assumptions it’s to defend it via the use of brute force. Once these people will gain power there will be no way to avoid their violence repressing any opposition to their ideology, as we are seeing in all those states I cited in my previous reply which are now passing laws repressing the access to voter rights and limiting the people ability to join advocacy groups and activist parties.

So, no, I don’t think my position is weaker than that of a nazi but I do recognise the need to apply the same violence they would use once in power to deny them the chance to make their ideology a reality for all of us.

Intolerance should be fought with intolerance since it does not understand any other reasoning outside of pure physical strength.

Any tactic that they can use to argue, you can use too. Plus, you have the truth on your side. Why wouldn’t the optimal view win? The justification “they’d do it if they were to come to power” can be applied to any group and leads to authoritarianism. Trust that people are, in total, not idiots. There will always be some dangerous people, but that’s unavoidable.

Again, you are arguing to the opposite result of what an in depth analysis of the current world situation would lead to.

First of all I am not going to engage a debate in a dishonest way. Call it my upbringing, my character or whatever you like but if I do engage in a discussion with someone, like I am with you now, I do it with the premise that I don’t hold the truth in my hands and that I can always be persuaded to change my mind if presented with a correct reasoning and with truthful data. This alone does not allow to follow your magnificent suggestion to use dirty debate tactics and false information to fight a wave of bullshit I would be subjected to should I entertain an exchange with a fascist, a nazi or a communist.

Secondly, it is impossible to fight in a logical way an argument which has been implanted in people minds through emotions. The only thing which can counter this seedling is an even stronger emotion and, as Germany has reached us with its re-education campaign following WWII, shun and shame are two perfectly fine instruments in this effort.

Thirdly, there is not an hypothetical in my phrasing (if they were to come to power) because they ARE already in power in states like Texas, Florida and other nations around the world and we can clearly see that, in order to preserve this democratically obtained power, they are dismantling the same democracy which gave them this power in the first place.

Lastly, your free use of terms such as “some”, “someone”, “a few” does present the issue as if it touched to a small number of people. May I remind you that 74 millions people voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 elections? Are they all fascists or nazis? Impossible, but still they are all ready to give a fascist the keys to the white house for a second term, so they are all part of the problem.

A problem which, I reiterate, cannot be solved by simply sitting down and calmly discussing with someone asking for the eradication of a minority for the betterment of his own life.

I’m not against shunning and shaming, I’m completely for it! But to shun and shame, they have to be present on social media.

Abso-fucking-lutely not. Nazis were not present during the German people re-education campaign following WWII and still the German people were able to be taught about the horrors of nazism quite well.

To shun and shame someone it does not have to be present during the discussion, you can just point at it from a distance and explain the reasons behind the social stigma from afar.

If you take away the nazis chances to promote their ideology in the “marketplace of ideas” you are not giving them more power, you are taking the little power they have away from them and you are forcing them to be enclosed in their safe space where they won’t have any possibility to reproduce. Once they will die out of exhaustion or old age no new generation will be left to keep on their fight.

Nazi Germans were not present after WW2? That’s a crazy thing to say when they were the ones who elected the Nazi party in the first place.

We should probably establish who we are talking about here more precisely. Are we talking about literal Nazis who kill people or are we talking about those who are angry at minorities and dislike Jews? Is it even everyone who voted Trump? If it’s the latter, you’re gonna find that you can’t just use force, the % is too large.

Given that this seems to be more of an interrogation rather than a discussion I will return to answer your questions when you will start answering mine.

How would you have handled the Corona virus situation in respect to the anti-vax crowd? Would you have left possible viral carriers free to roam inside your society or would you have placed restrictions on their rights? Should you have chosen the former option how would you have handled the backlash of the weakest people in the population unable to take the vaccine? In case of the latter option which restrictions would you have put in place for these anti-science people?

Looking forward to your reply

Still waiting for a reply to my questions. Is it possible that everyone shilling for fascists is not able to have a normal discussion while being the most pro-debate person on a face value?

EveRybOdY dEseRvEs tO Be diScUsSed WitH

Bitch, I’d love to discuss with you but you run from our debate at the first chance

Literally just had a guy tell me with a straight face that Biden is going to blot out the sun to fix global warming
The fuck has this anything to do with this discussion?