And, seeing the post reminded me of why I am banned and can’t respond on .ml with my feelings about it. That reason is: Someone some days ago posted a genuinely hopeful article about how these somewhat-leftist candidates are actually winning in America now, which really doesn’t happen all that often, and then this transpired:
“The authoritarian simply cannot meme. Their reactionary mindset lacks the capacity for it. They have but one joke, and they are always the butt of it.”
I am not at all surprised to see that geneva_convenience is involved in posting this one too. It is getting downvoted on the “main” instances but not on lemmy.ml, which I think is part of the point of the banning and similar.
Their compliance-based banning practices are objectively working, it seems. They’re more unified than ever. And their comment sections even grosser
Yeah, kind of. The other way to look at it is that they’re getting increasingly isolated over time to the point that they have their own little hivemind (at least on political matters) that just doesn’t interact with the rest of Lemmy.
It didn’t used to be that way. Previously, they had their viewpoint but it was a back-and-forth where everyone on .ml / Hexbear would yell at you if you were one way, and people on lemmy.world would yell at you if you were the other way. Now it’s becoming just a monoculture on .ml. There’s no yelling (except for isolated intruders who are driven out pretty quickly), there’s just agreement.
And yes stuff like hearing them joking about Ukrainians not wanting to die in the war and how funny it is that they don’t want to die in the war was pretty horrible to me.
What I fear is the people who do not realize that they’ve been brought into a fold. They don’t recognize the ideas that are shaping them. Molding them. Pulling them away from their moral center into an extreme outgroup. I am, myself, a colossal jagoff who has done precisely that to others, so I recognize the danger in producing an ostracizing, extremist environment to quench and fold fresh little soldiers.
They steal from you, those spaces. Make you less than you are. I hate seeing them more than I can possibly describe.
Yeah. There are insidious little features like the way they encourage toxic and hostile behaviors towards “outsiders,” so that it’ll be very very hard for anyone to talk sense into them, because it’s always just a fight. And on their side, they therefore won’t feel comfortable (they’ll feel like everyone’s being hostile to them) if they go outside their little bubble. And so, eventually, they can only really talk to people in the bubble, and so they get more extreme over time with no one to really check them.
That’s like 30% of the people in the US right now. I think we’re fucked. I don’t think there is a way forward for us that leads to anything. I’m completely serious. The amount of damage that lemmy.ml itself can do is pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things, but I 100% agree, those types of little propaganda bubbles and total fantasy-worldviews are a huge factor in why civilization is stuggling so much right now to maintain itself. A lot of people don’t have the blessing of a whole other community just one server over that doesn’t operate that way.