Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I got banned for “inventing reality” after talking about the 2009 Green Movement in Iran and how a lot of Iranians don’t love their regime. Basing this on Iranians living in Iran apparently was akin to “inventing reality”.
It went quite a bit deeper than that, you were contesting the idea that Iran is the most democratic country in West Asia. This is pretty true, considering their neighbors are largely monarchies or the genocidal apartheid settler-colony. The idea that Iran is all sunshine and rainbows is wrong, but that wasn’t the point actually being made, which was that Iran isn’t literally Mordor while many of their regional enemies are far worse than they are.
Yes, and I will contest this idea. Should I be banned for that? Are they more democratic than Turkey? Or is turkey not in West Asia? And how democratic can you be if, again, a protest questioning the results of an election gets 1.500 people shot?
That’s like saying that chicken is the tastiest vegetable. It’s not a vegetable.
Their supreme leader is an unelected position that controls, by design, all access roads to power. This position was now literally transferred from father to son.
The new Ayatollah was not picked based on inheriting the title, but through a council election. That’s like saying the presidency in the US was handed down from H.W. Bush to W. Bush. I’m not going to say that the democratic process in Iran is amazing or anything, but I’m also not going to waste time trying to argue against it while it is currently fighting for its life against a genocidal terrorist empire.
I will say, I am not a fan of the mod of Inventing Reality, Geneva is a doomed and essentially a liberal with better than average political instincts. This means Geneva is frequently wrong and often takes ultraleft positions, argues that Hexbear is “transzionist” and other such absurdities.