I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.
I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
I've been banned from .ml for being a 'racist' for being anti-Xi, despite the fact that I am Chinese, and pointed out my ethnicity as such in the discussion. I guess antisemitic Jews aren't the only weird accusation getting thrown about nowadays.
I got a ban for pointing out the nuclear strikes on Japan killed less than the conventional firebombing runs leading up to it, and if nukes wouldn't have been used a shit ton more people would have died.
Like, no opinion on if what was morally right or not, just what the numbers worked out.
It's all trolls over there, when a rational person makes a community, the admins start drama there and troll the mods till they leave or get kicked out for stupid shit.
I just blocked the whole instance. I never see any of their posts now, and as an unintended bonus I don't even get notifications when their users reply to my comments.
Like, it would be best if we defederated from them and that hilariouschaos troll instance.
But I can just block them, works the same.
That's an absolutely disgusting thing to say. Japan was already surrendering, they were only nuked as a show of strength.
I'm not sure what you imply when you say that "a shit ton more people would have died", but if you're saying that the US should have napalm bombed an entire surrendering country just to make an example, I don't think it makes your argument valid. It's not ok to do something horrible, just because you could have done something even worse if you had wanted to.
Who told you something that ridiculous?
They weren't already surrendering, ok. I'm not an expert but imo it could be argued that the Soviet Union joining the war (as they were about to) might have given Japanese command an excuse to surrender while saving face, or triggered an internal coup or something. They weren't stupid, surely they could see the writing on the wall.
If you think there was anyway they'd have surrendered without nukes then yes, I will agree that you are "not an expert".
For fucks sake, after the nukes there was still an attempted coup to prevent surrender...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
People thay think Japan surrendered because of loss of life, have no idea what they're talking about about.
Japan surrendered because they thought America had more nukes, and if they kept fighting then Japan would be left uninhabitable for centuries due to atomic contamination.
The people who tried the coup, did so because they thought America didn't have more nukes.
They weren't, but honor was/is huge in their culture, and Japan was an empire for thousands of years.
They'd have fought to the last Japanese civilian was alive
They surrendered, and I know I'm repeating myself, because they thought their islands would be literally wiped off the face of the planet.
Anything less wouldn't have won the war and cost more lives on both sides.
Even as a trolly problem, it's not a tough call on if nukes saved lives.
If a coup needed to happen to stop surrender...
Sounds like they were planning on surrendering, no?