I’m finally making the switch from Reddit. The Voyager app seems like a pretty seamless transition, but I’d love to hear any tips about using this platform, or what quirks distinguish it from Reddit as a whole.
I’m finally making the switch from Reddit. The Voyager app seems like a pretty seamless transition, but I’d love to hear any tips about using this platform, or what quirks distinguish it from Reddit as a whole.
You have to curate your feed yourself. Personally I use the all feed and block what I don’t like because I enjoy seeing new communities. I also recommend the jerboa app if you have an android, its free, open-source, made by lemmy devs, and doesn’t have ads.
Also many of us are communists or anarchists so prepare for political takes you aren’t used to.
And lemmy.ml communities are often managed by pro-communists and they don’t like if you don’t trash talk capitalism as much as they want you to
That’s a sad part of Lemmy
Time to make accounts in lemmy.ml
I don’t think they are that dogmatic too.
Like, they seem to support China lead by a Socialist/Communist/Marxist political leadership, that declares its aim as transitioning into socialism by 2050 or so.
They often leave a dogmatic impression when someone says something which is completely normal to hear and say in (for example) the USA, but is unknowingly bigoted or ignorant misinformation. The .ml admins have no time for that and I think its unfortunate that there’s little attempt at linking them to resourced that explain why their post was prejudiced, because it’s usually not intentional or heartless.
One can absolutely critisise China there and you’ll probably end up banned if you aren’t critical of the Russian Federation. I’ve made posts on Lemmygrad challenging their notion of China’s form of worker democracy. But certain popular critiques are just bigoted or unfounded propaganda which the admins will ban people for, so it comes off as just shutting down opposing viewpoints. And that’s really unfortunate.
Said China doesn’t respect human rights because they’re doing a Uyghurs genocide, got banned from [email protected]
Yea, China #1, we love that they spy on their citizens, and don’t have freedom of speech
In the comment that got removed and got you temporarily banned, you just said “China is a place where human rights aren’t respected,” nothing about the Uyghur people or how the PRC treats them.
Either way, I recommend you read the UN investigation report and China’s response, both linked here.
As for spying on citizens, Western countries are just as, if not more guilty, of doing as such. Freedom of Speech doesn’t truly exist in the West either, when corporations dominate the media and the US State Department funds propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia in order to drum up hostility towards its geopolitical rivals. “Freedom of Speech” is more often a way to allow corporations unlimited control of speech through flooding the information space with information they want you to see. True Freedom of Speech would require placing restrictions on the power of lobbyists and corporations to dominate.
There’s a lot that can be legitimately criticized about the PRC, of course, but a lot of the common “criticism” tends to be either distorted or exaggerated, or from holding China to a higher standard than other countries, which makes genuine debate more difficult to find.
I got temporarily banned for a month indeed, but what does that change? Not a lot in my opinion. I won’t be going back anyways.
Why do I need to explain my reasoning when it’s pretty well known that China isn’t the best place to live for human rights? On the other hand, I get banned with no explanation, apart from a “Don’t be rude” rule, like what??
Companies censoring speech isn’t the same as a country censoring speech. As far as I’m concerned we still have some sort of freedom of press. Btw, where did I say the USA was perfect? I would put it in the bad countries for human rights due to how they treat non-US people (you probably know the many wars/conflicts they’ve been into and how they feel like they have every rights on other territories like how Isreal was created, or that they can kill civilians in military operations).
Surely the political opponents in Hong Kong are fine and not persecuted as well.
From the little I’ve read about the report you sent, which I don’t have the time to read rn, but might later, I saw multiple things like acts of “disruption of social order” can be considered as terrorist activity. We know that in countries with strong control of the government like China, “terrorism” is often used to justify repression against political opponents. It’s even stated in the report (didn’t saw that it was as I was writing this)
What I’m reading is a lot of bad things. The report is rather incriminating.
It changes the nature of the ban, being given a slap on the wrist vs being permanently shut out, like I have been for calling out the Democrat’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians on .world comms, or giving a nuanced take on what Socialism should be considered on a comm moderated by PugJesus.
Either way, you need to explain because anti-China views are only really common in Europe and the US/Canada, Australia, and their allies like Japan. Pro-Chinese views, and views of a good nature on their Human Rights, are more common among people globally. Why does this discrepancy exist? Because western countries are not given free reign to plunder China economically like they do elsewhere, and thus manufacture outrage paid for by the US State Department.
It isn’t about calling the US perfect, it’s about weighing problems in China specifically more than problems elsewhere. China is not perfect, but at the same time it is better than contemporary powers.
As for speech censoring, the speech gets censored, why does it matter more to you that companies be able to do so?
As for HK, about 3/4s of the population want integration with the PRC, with some wishing more autonomy but very few wanting a hard break.
To return to the issue of Uyghur sepparatism, there is a well-documented history of violence in the region, such as the 2009 Urumqi Riots. There was factually a problem. We can critique the Chinese response, but this was a real problem China addressed with reeducation camps. Claims that these camps are for genocidal reasons aren’t backed up by UN investigation, though, such claims come exclusively from Christian Nationalist and US and UK government-funded propagandist Adrian Zenz, who believes China is the antichrist and it is his mission from God to condemn them.
Again, we can absolutely have real critique of China, but blindly repeating claims with dubious origins and generally maintaining a distrust of the Chinese on the basis of having a strong Public Sector is not real critique, hence why I wanted you to look at the UN report. This is a similar situation to the Iraqi UN Weapons Inspectors, who never found WMD but the US lied and invaded anyways. Real events are distorted so the US can pressure into economic capitulation, and even justify invasion, and then apologize if ever called out later for it.
So you spouted the standard route “China bad” takes.
Sure. China bad, USA bad, Russia bad. So? Doesn’t make my criticism invalid, nor misinformation.
There’s just a biased moderation that censors people that have strong takes against some countries.
It’s the same tedious thought terminating cliches that western chauvinists are pre-progammed to repeat. Many of them are misinformation, (like the “Uyghur genocide” narrative), but most of them don’t even have enough substance to even get to that level.
Right on lol. I’m a socialist leaning democratic socialist but I can appreciate that communism gets a bad rap—and the current US administration is radicalizing me more than ever, so I’m happy to get pulled further to the dark side.
Since you did ask, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list after the US election in the hopes of helping those increasingly radicalized along their political journeys! I also wrote a post on how to determine if an overall system is Capitalist or Socialist, from a Marxist perspective.
As a side-note, Socialism is generally seen by Marxists as the intermediate stage between Capitalism and Communism, with Communism as a fully publicly owned, global democratic economy with thorough planning, and Socialism as a society where Private ownership has become subservient to the public sector and now Public ownership is the principle aspect, which is the method of getting to Communism. No country has achieved Communism, which must be global, but many have achieved Socialism.
A bit on “Democratic Socialism,” and how it differs from Marxism-Leninism:
Democratic Socialism usually can refer to either something like the Nordic Countries, which would technically better fit the term "Social Democracy* as private ownership of Capital is the principle aspect of their economies, or as Socialism achieved through electoral means, ie public ownership as the principle aspect of their economies.
I say “principle” as no system is “pure,” every country has a public and private sector, but the public sector in China and Cuba, for example, has far more power than the Private through having firm control of large firms and key industry, while in the Nordics the public sector is in support of the private. The Nordics also rely on international exploitation in order to fund their safety nets, meaning it isn’t a system that could be adopted by just anyone with the same results, it requires winners and losers.
As for how it compares to Marxism-Leninism:
Democratic Socialists usually wish to achieve Socialism through elections, while MLs are revolutionary. Just like you can’t just ask a billionaire to give you their money, MLs don’t believe you can simply ask them to implement a system that dramatically weakens and eventually erases their power when they control the State.
Democratic Socialism is generally a far less defined, while Marxism-Leninism has a rich history of testing theory to practice, and changing over time. This is because Marxism-Leninism is almost always going to be the underlying ideology of any country deemed “Communist,” such as the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, former USSR, and more. This means MLs are usually more in agreement than disagreement with each other.
And that’s enough to go off of, I think! Let me know if you habe any questions, though the reading list is my recommendation for a good place to start. It even has audiobooks for most of the listed works as alternatives, as well as links to epubs or pdfs.