To be honest I really hated how if I criticized something about America I would sometimes have tons of people chiming in how everyone hates on America or how if you expressed any kind of view regarding how the ultra capitalistic (maybe not even that but monopolies protected by lobbying?) stuff has fucked people over you would be called a dirty commie or how if you expressed how fucked up is that USA supported coups for fucking bananas you get called out for not supporting freedom, and the list goes on.
Unfortunately it seems like at least on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad it seems like the positions have shifted to the other extreme where you’re an orientalist (I’m from the Orient lol) if you criticize China or how bad things that China/Russia do are just western propoganda (I consume plenty of non-western media too).
Honestly it just sucks that people want to pick a side and basically defend it to death without really caring about connecting with actual people. Like really talk to someone, try to see what struggles and problems they’re facing and try to communicate what are your concerns.
At least beehaw seems to be better than most communities I have been a part of.
Yeah as a leftist sometimes it’s hard for me to understand where people are coming from on both sides. It seems like people always fail to take a step back and realize that whatever their favorite government is doing can be wrong and is never a true representative of their ideology. (Some) Americans slobber over the flag and join the military just to get fucked over by the US government acting in its own geopolitical interest and manufacturing their consent, and then on the other hand tankies out here try to act like authoritarianism and genocide are both made up and justified if it’s done under a communist government because they can’t fathom that a democratic alternative like market socialism could work and think the commoners are too stupid and brainwashed to work for political change.
Luckily I didn’t see too many people on Reddit unironically supporting US intervention (except r/Conservative and r/neoliberal lol) but the situation with the Lemmy leadership is super concerning. Fortunately the nature of Lemmy, FOSS and the activity pub standard means the software could be forked and adopted quickly by the federated admins, so it’s not a huge problem. Still not a good start for this platform imo
I completely agree with you on the first :) which is why I’ve started going by humanist rather than leftist. I ultimately care about people and want to have a system where they have all the needs met, however we can achieve it without harming others or the environment.
I get that ideas thought out by Marx or Adam Smith seem really cool (I think they’re cool too) but people don’t need to think of these as basically religions and defend all of it or try to practice all of it to the letter of the text. These are there how people thought things worked conceived by really smart people, but still people. We have to constantly mix and match, improve and question theories to make progress.
As for Lemmy, it makes me slightly sad because the devs seem like really kind people in their interactions who grew dissatisfied with the system they were brought up with and decided to go in the polar opposite direction, to the opposite extreme. I’m hoping that once we see the community grow beyond the original membership numbers of lemmy.ml+lemmygrad (10k+7k at worst), it will be less of an echo chamber.
Western media famously laid the groundwork for Iraq war based on obviously false propaganda, so I suspect that the same frustration you feel about people denying the documented and obvious flaws with America is felt by people who try to explain that western media exaggerates a lot of things about foreign states. Especially ones the government is currently hostile towards.
I won’t say this is justification for blind defense of the targets of our medias current hate campaigns but maybe this will help you find a way to relate to them and share less sensationalized information that you have access to by virtue of crossing language and cultural barriers.
I understand what you are getting at but I have observed that almost all news media has some agenda, which is different for say the sources in my first language.
I have found the best way to understand things is to actually look at reporting from a few sources and see what is the commonality which usually has the kernel of truth. I usually look at the guardian, reuters, economist regularly and whatever articles that come up in Google on specific topics.
Once you have an idea, you go out and talk to other people and learn from your conversation. This is exactly the procedure I followed when I first heard about Iraq war and it led to me discarding the idea of WMDs in Iraq almost immediately.
I find it funny that people’s reaction to finding some news media untrustworthy is not to view all media with scrutiny and try to triangulate the facts, but to blindly switch their trust to some other news media.
Hey person!
To be honest I really hated how if I criticized something about America I would sometimes have tons of people chiming in how everyone hates on America or how if you expressed any kind of view regarding how the ultra capitalistic (maybe not even that but monopolies protected by lobbying?) stuff has fucked people over you would be called a dirty commie or how if you expressed how fucked up is that USA supported coups for fucking bananas you get called out for not supporting freedom, and the list goes on.
Unfortunately it seems like at least on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad it seems like the positions have shifted to the other extreme where you’re an orientalist (I’m from the Orient lol) if you criticize China or how bad things that China/Russia do are just western propoganda (I consume plenty of non-western media too).
Honestly it just sucks that people want to pick a side and basically defend it to death without really caring about connecting with actual people. Like really talk to someone, try to see what struggles and problems they’re facing and try to communicate what are your concerns.
At least beehaw seems to be better than most communities I have been a part of.
Yeah as a leftist sometimes it’s hard for me to understand where people are coming from on both sides. It seems like people always fail to take a step back and realize that whatever their favorite government is doing can be wrong and is never a true representative of their ideology. (Some) Americans slobber over the flag and join the military just to get fucked over by the US government acting in its own geopolitical interest and manufacturing their consent, and then on the other hand tankies out here try to act like authoritarianism and genocide are both made up and justified if it’s done under a communist government because they can’t fathom that a democratic alternative like market socialism could work and think the commoners are too stupid and brainwashed to work for political change.
Luckily I didn’t see too many people on Reddit unironically supporting US intervention (except r/Conservative and r/neoliberal lol) but the situation with the Lemmy leadership is super concerning. Fortunately the nature of Lemmy, FOSS and the activity pub standard means the software could be forked and adopted quickly by the federated admins, so it’s not a huge problem. Still not a good start for this platform imo
I completely agree with you on the first :) which is why I’ve started going by humanist rather than leftist. I ultimately care about people and want to have a system where they have all the needs met, however we can achieve it without harming others or the environment.
I get that ideas thought out by Marx or Adam Smith seem really cool (I think they’re cool too) but people don’t need to think of these as basically religions and defend all of it or try to practice all of it to the letter of the text. These are there how people thought things worked conceived by really smart people, but still people. We have to constantly mix and match, improve and question theories to make progress.
As for Lemmy, it makes me slightly sad because the devs seem like really kind people in their interactions who grew dissatisfied with the system they were brought up with and decided to go in the polar opposite direction, to the opposite extreme. I’m hoping that once we see the community grow beyond the original membership numbers of lemmy.ml+lemmygrad (10k+7k at worst), it will be less of an echo chamber.
Western media famously laid the groundwork for Iraq war based on obviously false propaganda, so I suspect that the same frustration you feel about people denying the documented and obvious flaws with America is felt by people who try to explain that western media exaggerates a lot of things about foreign states. Especially ones the government is currently hostile towards.
I won’t say this is justification for blind defense of the targets of our medias current hate campaigns but maybe this will help you find a way to relate to them and share less sensationalized information that you have access to by virtue of crossing language and cultural barriers.
I understand what you are getting at but I have observed that almost all news media has some agenda, which is different for say the sources in my first language.
I have found the best way to understand things is to actually look at reporting from a few sources and see what is the commonality which usually has the kernel of truth. I usually look at the guardian, reuters, economist regularly and whatever articles that come up in Google on specific topics.
Once you have an idea, you go out and talk to other people and learn from your conversation. This is exactly the procedure I followed when I first heard about Iraq war and it led to me discarding the idea of WMDs in Iraq almost immediately.
I find it funny that people’s reaction to finding some news media untrustworthy is not to view all media with scrutiny and try to triangulate the facts, but to blindly switch their trust to some other news media.