I was wondering how the pre-reddit lemmy members feel about the influx of ex-reddit. Have things got worst or better? Is there any lemmy etiquette that we are missing?

  • @lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I’ll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don’t take it like I’m trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.

    Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

    Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.

    But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures.

    In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we’re still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.

    As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.

    To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I’d be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.

    So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?

    In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you’d get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.

    break

    In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.

    • tikitaki@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      debate bro and own you online

      don’t worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I’m glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here

      so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You’re absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn’t mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).

      I agree that I’m not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don’t think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky’s beliefs. I’m a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.

      Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky… there’s a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

      Here’s what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier

      Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi – such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here – this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read – largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him – I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort

      I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended

      If we give up the principle, we lose everything.