are actually very well defined
Eh, I can’t quite agree with “very well defined”. Even Nazism isn’t really internally coherent, it’s surprisingly nonsensical, let alone all the variants of fascism straying so far from classical fascism.
But that’s me nitpicking academically. Fascist organizations are crystal clear about their association, beliefs and what they want. When they heil or wear neo-Nazi symbols in a political context, there’s no longer any need to doubt.
It is a concerted effort to redefine or undefine them so there is no longer a word to describe them.
Absolutely. Nazis have been made very aware that most communities reject them on sight and so wolf-whistling and pathetic attempts of plausible deniability are used to pretend they’re just ‘regular’ patriotic nationalists (see: Musk salute, and this related salute overseas a few weeks earlier). But even then, these are paper thin attempts. “You’re the real nazis!” “Oh everyone’s a nazi these days!” “Actually they were a specific party at a specific place at a specific time!”, you just gotta laugh.
Nazism refers to a school of political beliefs. It’s not some vague unknowable thing, a Nazi is perfectly capable of advocating for Nazism using speech and symbolism. So don’t pretend they have no clue what a Nazi advocates.
No, killing a Nazi does not make someone “the Nazi”. It would be nice if you didn’t trivialize atrocities like the Holocaust.
People who self-identify as Nazis, as well as those knowingly in neo-Nazi organizations, are therefore perfectly valid targets of assassination. Historically, Nazi killers are seen as national heroes, so don’t give me that ‘winning people over to your side of history’ junk.
When it is strategically effective to shoot a Nazi, and it often is, then I advocate you do so without hesitation. Where it is not strategically effective, I advocate the myriad of nonviolent techniques put in use by antifascists. These are preferred, not because of some silly claims that Nazis should not be harmed, but because they’re safer and more sustainable than individual actions.
Listen closely to what a Nazi wants, yes even the ‘cosplay Nazis’, and think about whether their life is more important than stopping their goal of mass extermination.
I don’t know specifically about Mastercard and Visa, or other jurisdictions, but I recall in my country that financial institutions have responsibility too. Finance is a major part of child exploitation just like it is with other organized crime, and they have a decent amount of power to analyze and flag suspicious finance networks, and governments benefit from compelling them to look into money instead of simply accepting it.
Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.
Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that “[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!” with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it’s weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.
The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I’ve heard are banned on Lil’RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).
My point is that it’s very different from moving from WhatsApp to Signal, or from reddit to Lemmy.
Let’s imagine on an instance, a community mod started flooding their /c/technology with ads and deleting any posts criticising them. And suppose the admins decide not to step in, saying it’s their community and their right to do that.
How painful would it be for users to go from /c/technology over to /c/tech or /c/[email protected] ? There is a far smaller barrier - it’s basically two clicks on their side to change their comm subscriptions, they don’t risk losing communication with friends or miss out on a larger site’s content feeds, or have to deal with ‘one more app’, they don’t have to learn a new tool, they just use a different community.
absolutely nothing in the Lemmy model protects communities from the admin of the instance where it was created to go full Elon
I’d say the low cost of migration does, especially if user awareness remains high (and since most users are here over complaints of the APIs being restricted, I’d say there’s an above-average awareness). It’s pretty easy to clone a community onto another instance, and it would be trivial for users to migrate too.
Those articles are describing a very different thing. Jon is not saying (or supporting your implied claim that) Mastodon is a white supremacist service, let alone a white-supremacist community. In fact, for both Lemmy and Mastodon, they praise the responses of staff to racist content. As far as I can tell, the closest is them saying that their broader society is white supremacist and that has systematic implications on Mastodon which typical users can be ignorant or dismissive of.
Freedom of speech may be great in the abstract, as an ideal, but unfortunately it isn’t very useful when speech platforms are controlled by the owning class. Our speech means little compared to the speech of national TV channels, news outlets and restricted social platforms. The utopian marketplace of ideas becomes a rigged supermarket.
I highly recommend the book Manufacturing Consent, which explains some core systematic factors which shape the US mass media (also applicable to other countries) into essentially a largely-homogeneous echo chamber without the need for legally censoring opposing speech.
Frankly, doing this openly on X/Twitter versus some obscure unknown forum or encrypted platforn is a positive.
Hardly - they’re doing this to spread their message, not to have a good faith discussion and expose themselves to other viewpoints. It’s purely predatory, and removing their platform reduces their impact. Yes, they will always find ways to communicate but they struggle more to find ways to advertise and recruit without public platforms amplifying them.
‘ex-4chan users’ isn’t really an important criteria, especially if you’re including the people posting there before 2016. In fact, some hobby boards like /co/, /mu/ and /lit/ were notoriously left-wing. “Ex-” usually means the ones who were smart enough to leave.
But furthermore, calling Mastodon a white supremacist site is just funny. Might as well be saying that about Lemmy.
America, the state, is white-supremacist and has been since birth. Absolutely. Although that’s not good logic for explaining how. I doubt most voters for Trump did so because of his or their racist views, there were plenty of other policies (sorry, ideas and themes) Trump platformed on that appealed to them.
The amount of Democrat supporters again surprised at how non-whites can possibly vote for Trump on a non-trivial scale is a testament to why it’s important to understand voting patterns beyond race ideology, beyond “Trump is a disgusting racist, only a white supremacist would vote for them.”, especially if you’re on the ground trying to organize your community to create the positive changes neither candidate can offer.
- ZA/UM International
- ZA/UM (Marxist–Leninist)
- ZA/UM League
- The People’s ZA/UM
- Popular ZA/UM
Glancing at the article, this quote stood out: