Is there a more politically and ideologically diverse alternative for Lemmy?

Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 96 points –

I know the real answer is reddit but I really don't want to go back now that I've already grown used to life without it. I was hoping for Lemmy to be a viable substitute but it isn't. I can see how this place is wonderful for the certain type of person but that person is not me. My experience during the past 6+ months has been a net negative and I'm pretty much ready to move on. I just don't know where else to go.

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“America does bad things, so I should support china/russia instead!”

“Stalin/mao were (anything besides utterly reprehensible dictators)”

“Communism could’ve worked if-“

Honorable mention to thinking this coy “I’m going to act all hyper respectful and yet also like I know more than anyone about anything” bullshit gets you anywhere.

Though to be honest, tankies spouting #1 and #2 get heavily downvoted. I don't even see them anymore, guess my instance defederated them, but they were never strong positions here.

Perhaps it's the defederation, but my experience here does not resemble yours.

They’re mask off on hexbear/lemmygrad, they try to be subversive on lemmy.ml. I have in fact instance blocked the first two, you can usually dodge them on .ml. Lemmy is far less enjoyable if you have not blocked them.

First two sound like tankies, but communism definitely could work :P

Commune-ism sounds like a lovely idea on a small scale, you gotta solve a lot of political problems to make it work on anything bigger. Social democracies like the scandinavians seem to be the best way we currently know to run a humanitarian society.

Are they though? I just feel like we aren't solving the issues we ought to.

First, nobody gets hungry ever again.

Then, everybody gets roof over their head.

After that, we can start discussing the next steps.

And yes, we need to do this globally, with nobody left behind.

That’s neither exclusive to communism nor has it been achieved in most purportedly communist states (I hear Vietnam’s actually been having a good run of things but I can’t speak to specifics).

Socialism != communism.

It's definitely not happening now under any social democracy.

Socialism is supposed to be a transformative period, leading to communism. I have no idea why people write the !=.

Because exclusively that’s the communist viewpoint. There are different socialist ideologies than communism. It’s a rectangle vs square situation.

But everyone knows that. Nobody even remotely suggested anything close to it.

“Socialism will transition to communism” is just a communism thing. Social democracy is different. It doesn’t involve communism. Because communism is cringe.

Communism isn't cringe, wtf are you talking about. And yes, if we want to discuss communism, we need to take into account that it was suggested to start with socialism beforehand.

Social democracy has jack all to do with socialism, if we want to keep being pedantic. And social democracy does not fare all that well in poorer countries, even after massive EU funds. Which is the real cringe.

If you aren’t human, perhaps

It's like saying we are too stupid to survive.

That is not an unthinkable scenario. The universe is so vast yet there is no sign of life anywhere else. Why? Perhaps intelligent life simply isn't intelligent enough and they always end up destroying themselves. A so called "great filter". Is it behind us or ahead? Who knows.

Given the state of our climate, I would say it's very closely ahead of us, and we are not going to make it. Which is a shame, we are so close.

I don't entirely disagree

Right now I don't see how our current society can survive. We are doing nothing at all to stop burning fossil fuels (renewables go up, but so does fossil burning), the richest find more and more absurd ways to waste energy (bitcoin, LLMs), everywhere more and more people go poor even in developed nations (prices skyrocketing, mainly food and rent), and we are just starting to see that climate is starting to change, and not to our optimistic scenarios.

I don't think we are going to make it.

For me it's more about the political climate. I don't see the actual climate change as an existential threat to the human race in a way something like nuclear war, a pandemic, asteroid or AI could be. It's bad but it's not that bad. I never really understood why so many seem to think this way when I don't even hear scientists making such apocalyptic claims.

Maybe I understood the situation too bleakly, but my impression was, that we are losing topsoil (used to grow almost all our food), biodiversity is plummeting (which can trigger chain reaction of massive die-offs), the ice is melting (blue ocean event, likely irreversible) causing billions of people to lose their homes, and depleting aquifies (drinking water). Hotter climate will cause runaway effects, that will multiply all of this, which could lead to decimating most of life in the oceans (food for majority of people), meaning more hungry people inland, politically already unstable, now without soil, water, and getting severe droughts and much more acidic rain. There are possibilities of new diseases appearing from the thawing permafrost, as well as newly mutated ones.

Everything will be made worse by the current trends in politics, but I suspect those politics are trending because some people are aware where are we heading.

Much of those things will to some extent surely happen but despite it still being really bad, it's still not going to make us go extinct. That atleast is my current understanding of it. The worst case scenario rarely actually happens and given enough motivation we humans are pretty good at problem solving aswell. I have a strong feeling, that if we're going to end ourselves, it's going to more or less be an accident and will happen rather quickly. I still tend to be (techno)optimist about it. It's all I've got.

Complete wipe? Certainly not. Reverting our society in standards of living and numbers? Heavily and quickly. People as a species may survive, but will pale in comparison to what we as a society are and can do now. Unless we get cheap fusion power distributed all over the world in the next 20 years, we are gone.

I don't see the actual climate change as an existential threat to the human race in a way something like nuclear war, a pandemic, asteroid or AI could be. It's bad but it's not that bad.

"My ignorance is worth more than your knowledge."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/20/climate-change-ipcc-report-15/

Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered.

The report reveals thresholds in how much warming people and ecosystems can adapt to. Some are “soft” limits — determined by shortcomings in political and social systems. For example, a low-income community that can’t afford to build flood controls faces soft limits to dealing with sea level rise.

But beyond 1.5 degrees of warming, the IPCC says, humanity will run up against “hard limits” to adaptation. Temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — where humanity appears to be headed — the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals and people

"I've never understood why..."

And I can bet you never tried to understand.

Nothing in your post indicates an existential threat. Sure some places will become unhabitable but not the entire earth. I also don't understand why you need to include the passive agressive ad-hominems and belittling tone instead of just making your point. People like you is why I'm considering leaving this platform. You make the experience worse for everyone.

Because you're a willfully ignorant dolt, that's why the tone.

People like you is why I’m considering leaving this platform.

Good.

People like you make the world worse for everyone.

So you think AI is more of an existential threat to humanity than climate change? This informs me that you really think some Skynet type of shit is more likely to happen than extreme weather phenomena. Do you know what an ice-age is? Do you have any idea what it means when we don't have enough water to grow crops? You think Alexa will hunt you down because you programmed it poorly, but you can't understand why a category 4 hurricane is deadly af.

Please, the faster you leave, the better. Head to Wikipedia to get rid of some of that ignorance. Here's a few bit of material to get you started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change

Perhaps you're more of a... ehm "visual learner". Here: Here's a handy flowchart. and here's some examples in a video form Europe’s climate in 2050

There's a reason the deserts of our world aren't populated, and I'm sure you can figure out what that reason is.

"I don't see an existential threat in permanently and majorly fucking up the only known world to support life" - You

I just have Lemmygrad blocked and I never see this

There's a bunch of very active non-ml users that always turn any political discussion to "both sides are terrible, don't vote for genocide".

Once you start recognizing names (or blocking), it gets less depressing. But it does feel like there are a lot more fascist enablers in the political communities than there really are, just because of how fervent those few users are.

Once you start recognizing names

One of my favorite features of the Boost app is they allow you to tag a username with whatever label you want. It really helps to highlight the users that regularly argue in bad faith, troll, etc.