A thread "Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression" on Mastodon
mstdn.social
Please don't put any hate comments against the developers of lemmy or against the person who posted this.
I am also unhappy about what the main lemmy instance is doing.
What are your thoughts?
You are viewing a single comment
There is a difference between people advocating for human rights abuses and people saying that some actor does in fact not engage in human rights abuses. The difference is stark and even there, if the actor would in fact in engage in human right abuses.
An open society must tolerate the later. I.e. we must tolerate that people dispute that human right abuses occur or occurred. This is because you cannot judge someone purely due to getting the facts wrong or not knowing them.
If we wouldn't allow this, we would de-facto argue for a totalitarian state, since we wouldn't allow people disputing facts (which can be proven or disproven). We would have to nominate some entity that judges what is fact and what isn't, which is the opposite to gathering evidence and engaging in an open, society wide discussion.
To be clear: Allowing discussions around whether abuses occur is notably different to letting people get away with advocating for abuses. The latter is what needs strong responses. The former is what requires engagement.
I don't see anything on lemmy or in the mastodon thread that shows that human rights abuses are advocated for. What I do see is that there are some fractions that show sympathies to China which you would otherwise only see for the USA. I think its useful to compare these sympathies because they seem to express themselves in similar ways.
With all that said, I think the opinion expressed in the mastodon thread is not particularly useful. It, in many ways, minimises real human rights abuses that occur world wide, day to day, in China, USA, and many other countries in East and West.
Let's call out the abuses, let's discuss and present the evidence for them, let's not alienate people and create polarity that looks like us-vs-them.
Very well said. Also, if these people disagree with the rules on lemmy.ml, they could create their own instance, with their own rules. Thats the whole point of federation.
Us: "China isn't committing the atrocities the West accuses them of and here's evidence."
Anti-China people: "OMG you actively advocate for China's atrocities and want them to keep happening!"
We politely asked this fedi account to take this discussion here, but they obstinately refused. They've equated even any discussion questioning the Zenz / Byler / ASPI narrative as genocide denial.
Block 'em and move on I say. It's clear there's no reasoning with them and there isn't much we can do to stop them from spewing propaganda at us. In fact, engaging them will probably only exacerbate things.
The main difference is, that one practice gaslighting as a means to justify such acts.
They will claim "it was just joking", or explain how in fact the abuse is something good, hence they aren't for human right violation because they are for something that they just defined as something good.