If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/
Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.
What do you think about this case ?
No.
The majority of voters are centrists, if we were just ashamed of being right wing a Democrat could never win office, now could they? You require centrist votes to win any election
(major parties are only 30% of voters each, the other 40% are not secretly right wing)
~11% of American voters are more on the extreme left, another ~11% more on the extreme right-wing, leaving a solid 4/5ths in the middle.
Which is why these terms aren’t useful in a global forum like the Fediverse - when USA Democrats are simultaneously both left and also right, depending on the recipient’s POV, then the term ceases to convey any (non-ambiguous) meaning.
Or we could use the terms properly in relation to the country of origin… except as the person you replied to shows, people refuse to use that level of consideration that their preferred way is not the only lens through which to view the entire world.
Honestly, spending time on Lemmy has made me less left-leaning than I used to be. All the hate and vitriol and especially disinformation spreading has really turned me away from it all. Especially when I see how it is identical to the right-wing POVs.
Extremists on both sides: death to everyone who holds viewpoints different from my own!!
“I don’t support human rights as strongly as I once did because I don’t like how everyone acts on the internet” is a weird take. I’ve always thought it was.
Thank you for proving my point.
I am very likely to be killed myself, though whether by the Left or Right is anyone’s guess at this point.
The two are not so dissimilar after all - since the right claims to be correct while the left says that bOtH sIdEs SaMe, hence don’t bother voting, which amounts to the same outcome.
In fairness, I should have said that the “left” and right are similar, since the left is more like “genocide is always wrong” whereas the “left” is like “genocide is only wrong when done by oThEr SiDe BaD” (i.e. Russia, China, and North Korea can do no wrong).
Saying you have dropped your support for things like fair wages and human rights because you can’t bother to learn to distinguish how that’s different from the right-wing has made me more right-wing, is not the win you seem to think it is.
Then it is a good thing that I never said that.
What’s the difference between tankies and the far left?
Leftists believe in, well, frankly, leftist policies. The far left believes the most strongly in those policies.
Whereas tankies deny reality itself, choosing to believe in um… “alternative” facts, such as that Ukraine forced Russia to invade it, rather than the other way around.
One might therefore justifiably call them the Alt-Left, similar to the Alt-Right.
And whatever you want to call them, they are both violent extremists who want to see the other side literally killed, and anyone who disagrees even slightly with their viewpoints rounded up to receive pain in return for their wrong-think. Hence the placement on the graph next to one another, since regardless of the term used to describe them, they share far more in common than they differ from one another.
So for example someone who is against genocide wherever it occurs is a far left believer, while someone who claims to believe in leftist principles while actively calling for genocide, but against the oThEr SiDe, is a tankie. And clearly by the very definition of the terms, cannot possibly be an actual leftist.
Their rationale I believe is that society must go through a period of purifying cleansing before it can attain perfection on the other side of that process. But there are several things wrong with that, like for one thing that does not include their “perfect” society where glorious leader most definitely has clothes on, again this only applies to the oThEr SiDe BaD that must undergo this procedure (so Russia, China, and North Korea are fine and never to be criticized, while everything done in a Western culture is by definition bad, even if in other circumstances it would have been considered good, if done by someone else).
Also, by actively rooting for the downfall of Western civilization, this is by definition a genocide - the ending of an entire people group, identity, and way of life (which admittedly has gone more than a little off the rails).
But don’t miss how there is never any discussion about what ELSE may lie on the other side of that cleansing purification ritual. Feudalism under the boot heels of tech overlords seems far more likely to me than communism, especially given today’s bent of technology. But again, there are not plans to guide anyone through THIS process, almost like the fall of the West - and perhaps the corresponding rise of Russia & China? - are the whole fucking point?
TLDR: extremists on both sides want me dead (tbf I’m collateral damage either way, as each side merely shows off performatively in front of the real audience of their supporting base), and the authoritarian practices of the Alt-Left tankies are really not much different than those of actual Right (Alt- or otherwise) fascists.