I don’t have much of a problem either way as I don’t think I’ll be engaging in political discussion on this website past this post but it seems like any sort of non-left wing opinions or posts are immediately trashed on here. That’s fine. There’s clearly a more liberal audience here and that’s okay. I just don’t want Lemmy to become a echo chamber for any side and it seems to be that way when it comes to politics already.
Mostly making this post just to drum up discussion as I’m new here.
Edit: Thanks for the rational replies. I was expecting to get lit up for even mentioning this topic lol.
Right wing opinions should be less welcome everywhere.
They’re not going to have the numbers to get any traction. Honestly, the bulk of the vocal conservatives are older and a bit brain rotted at this point. They won’t want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it’s not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there’s not great app support. That demographic is almost exclusively mobile device users. Note; the above description is of your typical boomer esq white dude who you imagine taking a tik tok in his truck from a too low angle with wrap around shades on.
The actual alt-right and neonazis don’t need lemmy, because they weren’t really on reddit to begin with. The majority of them that are just on the surface of the alt-right are on 4chan, voat, and shit like that. Those that are a lot deeper are very tightly knit and on IRCs, telegram, onion networks; and are typically invite only or you need to know a guy who knows a guy kinda thing.
Conservatives have no need for Lemmy, they have their primary platforms still and can easily migrate. Reddit was basically all the leftist sphere had.
the bulk of the vocal conservatives are older and a bit brain rotted at this point. They won’t want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it’s not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there’s not great app support. That demographic is almost exclusively mobile device users.
This is directly contradictory to my own understanding of generational technology use. In my experience, young people (zoomers and younger) are almost purely mobile device users. Hell, colleges are actually having problems with newer applicants not really knowing how to use actual PCs for basic things since everything has either been done for them by mom and dad or all the services they ever gave a shit about were accessed through a mobile interface. Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials are more familiar with PCs than them.
This is one layer of criticism to your reply, the other is that it’s a genuinely dangerous idea to think that conservative ideology is constrained to specific age groups. It’s true the internet has become more “ghetoized” as time goes on and conservatives tend to concentrate in specific places rather than just being distributed across all services, like they used to be, but reactionary ideology is alive and well among Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z. It just doesn’t look like typical Baby Boomer conservatism. And that’s dangerous because if all you look for is Baby Boomer conservatism, you won’t recognize it when different flavors of conservatism start closing ranks and forming meaningful voting blocks to get some lunatic like Trump 2.0 elected.
Older people, millenial/genx/boomer don’t necessarily want to learn new stuff just because they have competency with the tools they were required to use at the time. You can probably count the number of GenX accountants in corporate america who have made a Lemmy account on a single hand. You can probably count the number of genx rural blue collar workers who have made a lemmy account on the other hand. I obviously don’t have any data to back this up, and we probably never will, but there simply isn’t enough users statitically in the lemmy sphere for it to be untrue. No one this early is going to be browsing lemmy without making an account, and making an account requires some level of commitment or effort beyond mindlessly scrolling.
App usage on cell phones is the preferred method of doing things across the entire world. Mobile usage accounted for 44% of reddit traffic, and that was with reddit being better on a desktop than on a mobile device. Tiktok is borderline unusable on a PC, facebook, insta, SC, twitter, all of them the majority of use is mobile, not desktops.
My point remains, it’s not that Lemmy is hostile to conservative viewpoints (although it is), it’s that the extreme majority of conservatives, be they middle of the road, rural, alt-right, neonazi, neoliberal, whatever flavor you want, have alternative options already established that they can congregate towards.
Older people, millenial/genx/boomer don’t necessarily want to learn new stuff just because they have competency with the tools they were required to use at the time.
I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you’re a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don’t get to say “old people don’t like learning new technology” and “boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone” at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.
You can probably count the number of GenX accountants in corporate america who have made a Lemmy account on a single hand.
I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I’m pretty sure you don’t either, so I’m not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.
No one this early is going to be browsing lemmy without making an account, and making an account requires some level of commitment or effort beyond mindlessly scrolling.
What you’re probably referring to is the absence of single sign on for Lemmy instances. Like how many people are used to SSO with Google or Facebook auth systems. That doesn’t exist for Lemmy. You have to have an email. Y’know, like back in the old days of forums. The things Gen Xers, Millennials, and, yes, even Baby Boomers, made popular…which, since they have that experience already, would imply that Lemmy’s sign up process would potentially be more familiar with older audiences than younger ones.
App usage on cell phones is the preferred method of doing things across the entire world. Mobile usage accounted for 44% of reddit traffic,
Okay…just to make sure we’re on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.
My point remains, it’s not that Lemmy is hostile to conservative viewpoints (although it is), it’s that the extreme majority of conservatives, be they middle of the road, rural, alt-right, neonazi, neoliberal, whatever flavor you want, have alternative options already established that they can congregate towards
Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was “naturally” insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you’re saying they won’t join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options. But then, why would leftists necessarily join Lemmy if they already have better options? Reddit is pretty overwhelmingly left leaning, if still controlled by ghoulish corporate overlords. Historically, the things that extreme conservatives have dealt with, namely getting shut down by their service providers, they’ve dealt with through self hosting. Here’s a historical anecdote: one of the largest and oldest permanently self-hosted forums in the world is called Stormfront. It’s a far right neo-nazi forum. They self-host because no one will host their content. Lemmy might be leftist, but they didn’t “invent” the selfhosting game. The extreme far right were actually doing it first as a way of surviving in a digital sea that’s grown gradually more benign, progressive, and intolerant towards their perspective over the years. My point is that instances like Beehaw, and others, need to be actively on guard against people like that, because the idea of Lemmy somehow being self-inoculating against them by design is the most dangerous possible kind of shortsighted complacence imaginable.
I would say that resistance to learning new things is not necessarily generational. It might get harder the older you get, but if you’re a baby boomer and are extremely familiar with how smart phones work, then you had to learn that technology as an adult. Like, the original iphone came out in like 2008. The youngest baby boomer would have been in their late 40s when they got their first smartphones. You don’t get to say “old people don’t like learning new technology” and “boomers only know how to use things on the smartphone” at the same time, because the material evidence for that is explicitly contradictory.
Primates can use smartphones. We’ve made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don’t really “learn” how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.
I have no metrics around user age groups cross referenced with occupation for federated social media. But I’m pretty sure you don’t either, so I’m not sure where your confidence on that statement is coming from.
There is like 70 thousand accounts across all of the lemmy instances, I’m sure people have multiple at this point to deal with limited federation. We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics, heck we don’t know if anyone will even collect metrics, the whole thing could become a dead mall before someone gets around to it. My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch, is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy. I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35, and the younger demographics are going to skew left/far left (lemmygrad) and LGBT (Blahaj/196). I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I’m just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn’t going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.
Okay…just to make sure we’re on the same page: you do understand that if 44% of something comes from one thing, then 56% must necessarily come from something that is NOT that thing, and 56 is a bigger number than 44, right? Like, this specific statement directly contradicts itself.
I’m not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it? Reddit was a tiny website in the overall scheme of internet traffic wasn’t it (this is actually a question, I’m pretty sure it was very small overall), the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.
Your underlying statement was based in a foundational premise that conservatives were too old and/or stupid to figure out how to use Lemmy, therefore Lemmy was “naturally” insulated from conservative perspectives. And now you’re saying they won’t join Lemmy instances because they have better existing options.
Yes, because none of those conservative groups are a monolith, they’re a much of a “big tent” as the left is in a lot of ways. Hardcore fascists aren’t browsing tiktok, they’re in smaller cells that converse in IRCs and other very hard to find niche groups. Run of the mill conservatives are mostly on things like voat, facebook, truthsocial, the_donald, basic run of the mill shit. There’s a big difference between your average conservative genx father and someone who would be right at home on stormfront. Just like there’s a big difference between your average live/laugh/love suburban mom who has a left slant and wants people to be happy, and a hardcore leftist that would gleefully put a billionaires head under a guillotine. There’s nuance and niche group within niche groups within niche groups.
Also, remember dude we’re on a very small instance, this isn’t reddit, we’re likely going to get to know each other relatively well if we frequent the same instances and conversations, this isn’t reddit where we’re going to get lost in a sea of accounts. Things are small enough that we’ll probably recognize each other on other instances. Just like back in the day when forums and image boards were gaining big traction. Lemmy is where Reddit was 12 years ago, and where 4chan was 20 years ago.
Primates can use smartphones.
Humans are primates, my guy. Of course we can use smartphones. We invented them.
We’ve made the format so user friendly we have other species which can meaningfully interact with it. You don’t really “learn” how to use a smartphone, the designs are just that good now. Apple holds 57% of the cell phone mobile market, and their UI is nearly perfect for usability.
This is an insanely specious argument based in, seemingly, nothing. Like, I’m sorry but this is pure opinion. If you have citations for this, please share, otherwise I’m going to ignore it as entirely pointless and irrelevant to our discussion.
We have no metrics because this is all brand new and no one is collecting metrics
Probably a good reason not to making sweeping claims about composition of the ecosystem, then, huh?
My hypothesis, which is by definition just a hunch
Well, a hypothesis is an assumption. The underlying definition of a hypothesis implies eventual research and testing. Which I don’t think is going to happen here. What you do have is an assumption, but it’s just an assumption.
is that we can make some pretty strong guesses on the demographic makeup of lemmy.
I would (conditionally) disagree.
I would suspect the makeup is predominantly center left people in the united states who likely work in tech of some fashion, aged 24 to 35,
I would say that it’s Gen Z and Millennials (broadly speaking the age group you’re talking about). That’s purely based on the fact that those groups are the most online of any age group, so odds are good that Lemmy follows established trends as much as any other social media service. I don’t have any information to speculate on occupation or other demographic statistics, though.
I obviously have no solid evidence of this, I’m just going off the activity levels of the various instances. The OP in this question was whether lemmy was actively hostile to conservative viewpoints, and my response to that was and still is there isn’t going to be much of a conservative slant for lemmy yet because they have no reason to be here yet they have other social media that is infinitely more active than any lemmy instance.
I would say a good reason is also that most Lemmy instances are openly hostile to conservative viewpoints, by design. Like, they advertise a set of core principles and expected conduct that are typically antithetical to the kinds of things you stereotypically find in conservative spaces. That’s regardless of age. Beehaw is a good example of this. It’s a heavily moderated website with a fairly stringent code of conduct that explicitly says it operates in such a way as to totally prohibit any and all hate speech. Your typical reactionary can figure out that they aren’t welcome here unless they’re participating in such a way that betrays nothing of their ideology.
I’m not sure if you missed the context I was going for, or are purpoefully misconstruding it?
My main point was that you were presenting your case poorly based on the information you were providing, not that you were wrong. There is statistical data to support that most social media is accessed largely via mobile devices. You chose a hilariously poor statistic to support that argument, though. My case didn’t go farther than that.
the vast majority of the internet is browsed through mobile devices, reddit was an outlier. Twitter, snapchat, tiktok, instagram, facebook, all of them are browsed in the majority on mobile. The demographics skew even more towards mobile when you go world wide and not just the U.S. Mobile devices completely dominate the internet worldwide.
Your main point seems to be that old people only know how to access social media via the apps on their phones. This may be true. It might not. You don’t really have any evidence to support that statement, though. You have the argument that most social media use is done via the phone. But as we know from actual statistical data (like the results discussed here: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/5-charts-that-show-how-and-why-you-should-reach-millennials-online), most social media is accessed by Gen Z and Millennials. Older Americans use social media far less than their younger counterparts. It’s just as plausible they access their social media via the medium they knew when they started using it: the PC.
They won’t want to learn or deal with something like Lemmy because it’s not as easily out of the box on their cell phone yet, because there’s not great app support.
I don’t know about all that. I’ve pretty much dropped kbin until they get their block function working, because I keep seeing threads started by quasi-polite cryptofacists complaining about the censorship (through defederation or otherwise) of right-wing voices and “civil discussion”.
If your “conservative / right wing opinion” is that austerity measures are a good thing, then the most generous interpretation of that is that you’re just a moron. As it turns out, though, today’s “conservative / right wing opinions” are way worse than that. Things like “trans people aren’t people”. Or “we should do a treason”. Or “bribing supreme court justices is totally fine”. If you hold any of those opinions, the most generous interpretation of that is that you’re evil. And probably also stupid. That is the MOST generous interpretation, mind.
Saying that austerity is always bad is pretty dumb too. Economic policy is hard. It’s not a simple as shoving one lever in one direction as far as possible forever.
For example, “austerity” could mean ending corporate subsidies, taxing the wealthy, auditing the wealthy, reducing the military budget, canceling freeway expansions, etc. Too much public debt can absolutely be a bad thing and needs to be controlled.
I concede that you’ve got a point that austerity isn’t an all or nothing proposition. But your examples are laughable. No country that has implemented “austerity measures” has ever interpreted that as “ending corporate subsidies”, or “taxing the wealthy”, or in any way fucking with the wealthy or military’s purse. It just doesn’t happen. I agree, that would be an amazing thing. But it just doesn’t exist in human history. What ends up happening instead is that they cut the educational budget. Or they cut social programs, like housing subsidies or food subsidies. Because governments aren’t run by the lowest common denominator, who actually benefits from those programs. They’re run by the wealthy. So no government is going to fuck over its supporters by cutting their benefits.
I think we need to have better conservative content. All of what your describing sounds like negative characterizations of conservatives made by far left individuals.
Yes, there are some absolute morons in the world. Probably a lot of them. But not all conservatives are morons, despite what many left leaning people would like to believe due to the polarization brought about by social media echo chambers.
due to the polarization brought about by social media echo chambers.
Due to the actions of recent right wing political parties whe gaining any power.
That’s a bit like saying
"How dare you call us all arsehole. Because we keep voting for arseholes to lead our parties. "
Unless you and others are prepared to form a right wing that opposes these ideas. Then that is the reputation the right deserves.
For the record, I would not consider myself right wing. But I do oppose many leftist ideologies. Grievance studies (Critical race theory, queer theory, and other ideologies based in post modern belief systems), for instance, are eroding many useful and productive enlightenment ideas. Color blindness is a legitimate way to reduce racism. Instead, leftists believe they should elevate group identity at all costs, thereby expanding and heightening racism. Queer theory denies human physiology, elevating the idea that everything is socially constructed. This framework is a grave distortion of the reality.
I agree that conservatives need to do a better job with their policies. Trump was a stain, and the few (okay maybe more than a few) loud idiots in the party make conservatism look bad. But if left wingers only get their information about right wingers from hyper left sources, we are going to have a lot of distorted views.
On social media, people are served more and more radical content. Much of that content includes great distortions of the “other side,” which pushes people further into an untenable and undesirable belief system.
We need more debate and we also need people to stop simply calling the other side morons.
Queer theory denies human physiology, elevating the idea that everything is socially constructed
You’re already getting pushback on your other points, so I thought I would weigh in here. Biologically speaking, sex is multifaceted, variable, and somewhat malleable. Even anatomically or physiologically scientists say that gender and sex are not as simple or clean cut as you are making it out to be. Additionally, gender diverse people can be found across all cultures and throughout history - transgender people are not an invention of the post-modern era.
I don’t think that acknowledging the reality that human experience is complex and multi-faceted is a left wing value. It is evident to anyone who honestly engages with scientific consensus and with the lived experiences of LGBTQ folks that those people exist. They’re not going anywhere, and I don’t think it’s especially “left wing” to say we ought to make space for them in society to just live their lives as they are.
Colour blindness is not a way of combatting racism.
If you have a real world system, and you bias it heavily to be unequal, then you try and correct it by biasing it to be equal, the average output is still vastly unequal, and the absolute best case scenario you can hope for is that it will trend towards equality over time without ever reaching it.
There’s a reason that people who actually study and think about the topic come out as antiracist and people who don’t think it about it except when it inconveniences them just wish everyone would stop talking about it and we could pretend like it didn’t exist.
Yes, it is. There are a lot of academics that have fallen prey to post modern ideologies like anti racism. But there are also academics that haven’t, like myself and John McWhorter.
‘nuh uh I don’t believe that’ isn’t an argument.
I’ve explained how balanced system + inequality + balanced system = inequality, and you’ve just said “nuh uh that’s not convenient for me”.
To be absolutely clear to anyone who runs across this, this person has been banned from our instance, you don’t need to report it again. The only reason this reply is still up, is for others to see all the ways in which this person is wrong and the whole they dug themselves when they did reply to someone and were rightfully reported and ejected from our instance.
Grievance studies (Critical race theory, queer theory, and other ideologies based in post modern belief systems), for instance, are eroding many useful and productive enlightenment ideas.
Have you studied any of these yourself? Or are you relying on characterizations of them you heard in media?
Color blindness is a legitimate way to reduce racism.
In theory, sure. But in practice it often gets used as a rug to sweep racism under.
Instead, leftists believe they should elevate group identity at all costs, thereby expanding and heightening racism.
Keep on mind this is a society where certain groups have been marginalized and terrorized for decades or even centuries. “Elevating” them is only a reaction to that long-entrenched bigotry. But (what’s that quote?..) when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Attempting to bring historically marginalized groups into equal footing with mainstream groups probably will look like they’re being “elevated” to the people who enjoy the privilege of being accepted broadly by default.
Yes, I have a Ph.D., you will encounter grievance studies and post modern ideologies when you pursue this path. I have indeed studied the philosophical foundations of these ideologies. I don’t agree with post modern ideologies, nor do I agree that you can state that something is purely constructed by a culture. An individual is defined both by their physiology and their societal structure. It’s physiology and culture. Post modernism denies objective truth. I believe in objective truth. I also believe in intentionality, which post modernism denies. We could go on. Stop using the “have you actually studied this” argument and actually engage in productive debate. An appeal to academic authority is really not useful here.
It seems some forget, for instance, that the native population of America benefitted greatly from their encounters with colonial people from France and Britain. They sold and traded items. They learned knew technologies. Hell, many native tribes fought alongside the Americans during the American revolution. They also fought alongside France. The whole situation of the American colonies is really messy. Anyway, colonialism is not a black and white issue.
It seems some forget, for instance, that the native population of America benefitted greatly from their encounters with colonial people from France and Britain.
ah, yes, the minimum of 30 million people killed just in the Americas really benefited. get out of here with this settler colonialist apologia, my dude. you are a textbook case of why nobody is interested in hearing out conservative “thought”, which appears to be impossibly tied to being pro-genocide.
Either you’re the stupidest person who has ever received a PhD in the world, or you’re a fucking liar. There’s absolutely no god damned way that you can hold this many imbecilic, counter-to-reality views while having had to engage with primary sources for the multiple years it took to achieve a PhD. Stop lying, seriously. Nobody buys your bullshit anyway.
Wow, what a shocking comment. Explains your original I suppose.
You can’t just lay judgement on something because you don’t like it. You need to actually understand it, hopefully your read the other responses you got with an open mind, lest ye drift deeper into bigotry via ignorance (chosen ignorance, at that)
The conservatives you’re describing are becoming more uncommon by the day. So much of conservative politics now is driven by misinformation and fear, I legitimately can’t remember the last time I had a constructive conversation with a conservative. They live in a different world, which makes constructive discussion almost impossible.
Yes, this is true, many conservative people are smart - they worked out that in order to get money and power they can exploit conservative talking points easily because they don’t have to be truthful, thoughtful, or in any way care about other people
The issue is the party overwealming supports these ideas, we are not debating what color school busses should be or how we should ensure we have clean water into the future, we are instead debating should X group be allowed to live. An option that involves taking rights from others based on misinformation isn’t an opinion.
I would agree with you, but at least in the US majority of conservatives fully embraced those moronic ideas.
The people that call themselves conservatives no longer are conservatives, their only goal is how to hurt “liberals”.
At this point true conservatives that still care about the country started voting for democrats or not vote at all, but they are now labeled as RINOS.
I know it is a loaded term, and many will quickly dismiss it, (but it is correct given the definition), but the party was taken over by fascists and real conservatives aren’t doing anything to take their party back.
At this point true conservatives that still care about the country started voting for democrats
Compared to most countries, Democrats are conservatives. And Republicans are extreme right wing.
The US doesn’t have a left wing party. Nor even a truly centrist one.
True. Many of them are just plain evil. But I would argue that the vast majority are some combination of evil and stupid.
I think we need to have better conservative content.
Haven’t seen a lot of examples of that for many decades.
You are essentially using a “no true Scotsman” defense here, which is wild given the public stances of America’s Conservative Party, the GOP.
You act like they are talking about outliers but the whole GOP is in lockstep with those awful stances and decisions. You say we need better conservative content? I say you need better conservative leadership because the majority of conservatives follow what they are fed of fox, oann, and whatever other sources of disinfo
Come back to us when the official party line isn’t supporting the big lie, or attacking climate change or attacking science and vaccines and masking, or that trans people shouldn’t exist, or that students should not be given the forgiveness that those with money get (PPP vs student loan forgiveness), or that Russia and Putin are not our allies nor role models, I could go on and on and on.
You want a better conservative image? You need better conservatives first. Talk about putting the cart before the horse
You say what we mention is mischaracterizations made by the left. Please, point out which are untrue
I have yet to see a modern conservative position that is more backed by real world evidence than whatever more progressive position it opposes.
Climate change? Denying overwhelming scientific consensus. Gun control? “It doesn’t work”, even though it works in every other western country. Healthcare? “But the death panels will decide if you get to live”, they don’t exist, and are used as pretense to ignore all those people who die because they can’t afford treatment. Car infrastructure? It’s literally better for drivers if more people are using transit or cycling. Student loans? I don’t even know what the argument is here except “I had to pay them so everyone else should too”. The money certainly isn’t going towards the teachers.
Some of these are US specific, but the sentiment is the same everywhere. The list goes on and on. If someone refuses to listen to any reason or evidence and instead bases their worldview on only their own, limited lived experience, why shouldn’t they be characterized as a moron? And if they understand that their view isn’t based in reality and they hold it anyways, why not call that actively malicious?
I’ve always loved the irony of the argument that if the government pays for healthcare, there will be “death panels” that decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. Because those already exist under and directly because of a system of private healthcare funding where if you don’t have enough money, you’re refused treatment. Meanwhile under a system of public healthcare funding, people get treatment based on who’s most in need of the resources available, and that’s only if the system is already over capacity.
Lmao fucking seriously.
Routinely my primary fucking care physician will approve a prescription just for my fucking insurance to say you know what, we will BLOCK that medication from being released to you at the pharm cuz we don’t wanna pay for it yet. Try again next week!!
god fucking damnit like let me just pay for it out of pocket!! They won’t let me.
Private insurance death panels are alive and well lol
Ultimately that’s like asking if they are allowed on the Web. Lemmy isn’t a singular thing or a singular community. It’s lots of individual communities that can choose which other communities they interact with. There will inevitably be communities or groups of communities that are more insular and ones that are more open. I guess the real question is whether the eventual major communities that interact freely with each other include right wing groups or not. That’ll be something that works itself out based on to what degree everyone else is willing to interact with them. Which seems to me to be an approach to these things that most people on the right often endorse. If in this case it happens to leave them on the outside of the mainstream dialogue looking in then they should probably do some self-reflection about why their participation is undesirable.
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Fantastic reply. Also consider the dramatic and sustained rightward slide of the Overton window over the last 40 years.
Within right-wing media spaces that window has slid in so far to the right that mentioning vaccines, public housing, or a living wage is seen as outrageous or absurd or communist, and outright white supremacy is a major plank of prominent politicians’ platforms.
So when someone says “there’s no room to talk about right-wing ideas,” they’re saying “why don’t you all accept an equivalence between radical Christian nationalism and moderate democratic conservatism as they two poles of political debate?”
And the reality is that “right-wing ideas” in America are mostly fabricated or deeply bigoted. And outside of conservative media environments, they are accurately perceived that way and so are not talked about much.
Depends on what we call “right wing”.
I keep asking, and have probably asked more than fifty times over the last 4 years, what right-wing Americans stand for other than the “culture war”. Why would someone call themselves a conservative/Republican if they are opposed to the Republicans’ stances on minorities, stances on LGBT+, stances on gestures broadly at Florida, etc. What’s left of the ideology when you take those things out, especially considering that the right has pretty demonstrably dropped their support for “fiscal responsibility”, “small government”, “anti-judicial activism”, and “opposing the influence of Russia”.
Most of the time, that question just gets ghosted. Like, over 90% of the times I’ve asked it, it’s just been a conversation-ender. The rest of the time, the answers boil down to “my bigotry is more fine-grained than that”. They’re good friends with Mexicans and Asians and African-Americans, but hate Muslims. Or they’re fine with gay people, but feel transgender people shouldn’t exist. Or they love gay people and minorities, as long as they’re all Christian whether they want to be or not. These folks call themselves Republicans not because they hate everyone the Republican party hates, but because they hate one (or a few) groups that the Republicans hate.
Your comment is a pretty good attack on what the GOP has become. My criticism is that the GOP doesn’t represent all of right-wing political ideology. I think most people, or at least people like me, aren’t dogmatically locked into any party or ideological label. I have some views which conservatives would agree with and plenty that they wouldn’t. Overall, I think that most conservative-oriented communities are narrow-minded at best, and openly racist and authoritarian at worst. But the left-leaning communities aren’t great either. They (justifiably) want to insulate themselves from the hateful parts of the right. Unfortunately, this often devolves into an echo-chamber without real discussion. I’m hoping Lemmy as a whole doesn’t devolve down either path.
Unfortunately, this often devolves into an echo-chamber without real discussion.
I haven’t seen a discussion about the merits of different tax policies (and no, “cut all the taxes!” isn’t a policy), or the role of local/state/federal government, or social service policy (and no, “stop all poor people spending!” is not a policy), or the appropriate division of power between executive/legislative/judicial, or anything like that, in decades. W was president the last time I saw any form of media having a real discussion about those things.
Before 2015 or so, there were a handful of people in my circle who identified as conservative that could have a real, nuanced, complex conversation about public policy with; people who I thought were incorrect, but who could articulate their points well enough that I could kind of see where they were coming from, and we could come out of a discussion with a better understanding of each other, and maybe one or the other of us might even have softened on a given position in the process. It was possible to find basic, fundamental points on which we agreed, and use those as a foundation for a broader discussion.
Since 2016, all of those people, to a man, have become Q-anon deep-state groomers-coming-for-our-kids frazzledrip climate-hoax hunter’s-laptop gays-have-it-too-good morons. Not a single one of them still believes in any of the fundamental points of agreement we used to have, from which a productive discussion could be based. They have entirely left reality behind in favor of Jewish space lasers and (the latest talking point) “every father thinks about his daughter that way!”.
I have not met someone who identifies as a conservative or a Republican who isn’t on that same train for a very long time.
Obfuscating hate and intolerance by cloaking it under a “conservative” platform does not make it “conservative” - it is still hate and intolerance. People calling this out are well to do so. I don’t see echo chambers, in those cases. I see people testing the bonds of the social contract.
There are greens, yellow, and reds. Greens agree with you, yellow may not agree but you can have a constructive conversation, and red are people who never will and will only double down and care little for evidence or logic. Angloworld conservatives are reds. They are fascist.
I hope you’re enjoying the discussion, and I hope you are understanding a lot of the excellent points made here, because I have not seen you engaging with anyone so far, at least not in the Hot replies. I was hoping to see that engagement. I don’t have much to add that has not already been added. It’s hard to unwrap the hate and bigotry from conservative ideology nowadays. Even so-called mainstream conservative ideas like “tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy will create more money and prosperity for everyone” rings pretty hollow after over 40 years of that sort of ideology having been very thoroughly put into practice with very little benefit one could name. It’s hard to engage when you can just sort of gesture to the current state of things and the lives of people who have grown up in the last 4 decades as being self-evident of the failure of that idea.
Basically, I ask, what does conservatism have to offer, really? I am completely open-minded and would listen, but you would have to do better than just repeating the same tired things I have heard my whole life, having grown up in a conservative catholic household and over 43 years slowly but surely drifting to the socialist atheist person I am now. Better believe I’ve heard a lot and am well-read. And there are a lot of people out there just like me.
It’s hard to unwrap the hate and bigotry from conservative ideology nowadays.
This is the trouble I have with conservative thinking now. Even here in the UK, where our Conservatives aren’t as bad as the Republicans in the US (yet), I’m at a place where I can no longer offer the benefit of the doubt to rightwing policies, because now they only seem to exist to make life hard for marginalised people. I can’t point at a single member of our government who supports what they’re doing because it’s what they genuinely believe to be the right thing to do. They’re all interested in how it can enrich them, and they’ll worry about the morality later.
I mean, say what you like about Margaret Thatcher (and believe me, I do), at least she seemed to actually believe in the policies she pushed through. She had an ideology, and was given room to try it out. And it worked. For her and her rich buddies.
But these days it just seems to be hatred and fear for the sake of riling up the proles because it keeps them in power. The power is the goal, not the governance.
People forget that Thatcher was a greengrocer’s daughter too rather than a product of the Eton to Oxbridge to Parliament pipeline of privilege. In my opinion Thatcherism was like a doctor giving a near-lethal dose of chemotherapy to a patient with a broken leg but at least it was done with the intention of helping the patient, I feel the present incarnation of Tories have known since Brexit that they’re bound for a decade out of power and just want to behave as much like Russian kleptocrats as they can get away with before the election next year.
I don’t mean the Russian kleptocrat line ironically either, Boris Johnson literally put the son of one into the House of Lords as the Baron of fucking Siberia. You can’t make this up.
is Conservative/Right Wing opinions completely unwelcome on Lemmy?
Yes.
No, there are communities and instances dedicated for them.
Edit: speaking in a general sense, “conservative” is a broad term.
Dumb answer. I don’t care. We shouldn’t tolerate oppression, and we shouldn’t burden ourselves with the need to support them or equivocate. If they want their own communities, they can support that completely on their own (including research on whether they can run their own shit and how) without our help. It’s really fucking easy to just say “nah” and let them figure out whether to trust that answer or not. You’re choosing to shoot yourself (and me, and everyone else) in the foot. How about just don’t.
I think what Dankenstein meant was that there are already today servers dedicated to right wingers (we block them but they exist), not that we should help them or something like that.
Or at least - I think that’s a good faith interpretation.
That’s okay. We don’t have to help them set them up, or find them, or even know they exist. Why is everyone so obsessed with giving reactionaries the IT help they need to setup and grow communities of hate? Doesn’t make any sense at all, TBH.
You go low, we…help you go low.
Again - we’re not helping them. Why do you think we’re helping them? I don’t understand where you got that from - genuinely trying to understand…
Again, why would we help reactionaries discover communities they can become a part of where they are welcomed? Why would we tolerate their existence and their growth? That’s absolutely silly. I don’t “agree with you”, but here’s how you can find communities which do, so you can organize with them to crush me and the people I love. Dumb shit.
@straycatfrump - you are arguing against a point that Lionir is not making. Please assume good faith when engaging with users on Beehaw. Our one rule is: Be(e) Nice.
Gentle reminder to try to assume best intention of others and provide nuance where appropriate. If by ‘conservative/right wing’ this person means they’re all about what these things have morphed into lately in the US (transphobia, homophobia, and otherwise thinly-veiled hateful notions), then I completely agree. Fascists aren’t welcome here. Nazis aren’t welcome here. Beehaw is explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. But there can be honest perspectives that fall ‘to the right’ of the liberal perspective that can and should deserve consideration (they just seem to be rare these days, as political discourse has become so polarized).
Conservatives I can deal with, but modern right wingers have lost their goddamn minds.
And the entire issue is that a lot of people who view themselves as moderate conservatives are enabling this ideological brain rot by not vocally disassociating it with more reasonable conservative positions. Because of that, I am way more comfortable saying that conservative voices should be viewed with suspicion than I used to be.
My brother is conservative. Small C. He recognises that the Tories are a shower of pricks and wants them to actually do conservative things, rather than focus on race baiting and hatred. I can talk politics with him, and enjoy doing so even though I’m getting more and more commie as every year passes.
He’s not a right wing shithead.
I’m not sure why “I don’t want to see a space become an echo chamber” is always what gets said. Everywhere else IS a right wing echo chamber for the most part? Conservatives aren’t the ones chased from reddit and twitter?
What probably isnt welcome is questioning people’s right to exist, right to live unmolested because of someone else’s beliefs (and real molested, not "i saw a minority existed), and the right to make your own medical choices for yourself and your kids. Considering means testing has been proven a waste and the right opposes taxing fair share, i wouldn’t even argue that actual financial conservation is even a point the party makes.
So it’s really hard to see what need this space has for those talking points. Unless it’s actually about being open to real discussion, which frankly facts aren’t often on the side of the right, what good to this community do these ideas offer?
What should be asked is what place does the Right/Conservative philosophy as a whole have in the Lemmy ethos? Is it in and of itself could be argued to be an antithesis to the whole structure and philosophy. Can authoritarian ideals thrive where they cannot take power?
Tumblr i the only other real leftist space I think. You could maybe put baseline social media is somewhat leftist, tik tok, instagram, snapchat, most of those have a leftist lean, primarily because they trend younger. Your general use social media is going to have a left/right lean based on age demographics. That’s just the lean those general social medias are going to have.
Oh yeah tumblr. They pride themselves on being extreme i think in some of the spheres, where as i think nost people in this space are sharing deeply held beliefs. Most of the extreme stuff i see from there seems to be teens/outrage bait.
I forget the ages but i think beehaw/lemmy skews a tad older?
It basically has to skew older, probably 25 to 30+ The vast majority of those younger are going to be on tiktok, sc, insta, or something like discord. Lemmy will be considered more “left” overall than even reddit was. There will be of course bad instances, but i think pressure to defederate from them overall will be strong, especially when the “free speech” instances start having difficult legal questions thrown at them when their users inevitably start saying the quiet part out loud.
God i hate discords and what they have done with gaming documentation. I am completely turned off by any indie dev who requires you join their discord.
But im here, clearly i like forums. The fact that discord is basically backwards adding in forums with their threads thing is proof forums are still useful!
I guess it depends on which conservative or right wing opinions you’re talking about.
The traditional conservative opinion of smaller government hasn’t existed now for 50 years. Reagan, Bush, and Trump all grew the size of government.
The conservative talking point of “states rights!” flies in the face of states who want safe and legal abortions, or equal access to marriage rights, or the ability to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ kids actually exist.
Similarly if you’re talking about the conservative push to make it harder for black and brown people to vote, and make no mistake about it, they are specifically targeting black and brown people.
Let’s not even open the door to the fringe anti-vax or “election was stolen” movements.
So with all that conservative messaging off the table, what are you left with, honestly?
Conversation with right, left, middle, whatever are only productive if based on a principalled ideology. I disagree with the NeoCons of Bush and Cheney, but at least there is an ideology to work with. MAGA, on the other hand is defined by no principals other than authoritarian aims of “winning” where “winning” is making the other side mad.
The post truth world we live in makes this hard, though. Right now there is no shared truth, and with varied truthinesses out there, it makes the conversation hard. Using flat earthers as an example, the sheer rejection of math and science is astounding; having a principalled conversation is hard when the foundations are different.
And with 24hr news, breaking news, and global news, and only so much news worthy content, there is an incentive to come with with differentiation and that creates eco chambers. News Max isn’t going to bring on a CNN contributor (and vice versa) to challenge their views.
This is a good point. There are conservative viewpoints I find compelling, but they have basically nothing in common with MAGA, de santis, or any other popular conservative these days.
I find I can talk with individuals, when we both view the other as individuals, instead of a representative of republicans or whatever other moniker you give them. I mean, not everyone, but at least most people.
What opinions do you mean specifically? The question you asked is too vague to help us sort out the welcome from the unwelcome.
Remember: “lower taxes for businesses” is a mainstream conservative opinion, but so are “children should not be allowed to know of the existence of gay people” and also “Breonna Taylor probably deserved to die” and also “Dr. Fauci is a mass murderer” and also “Trump won in 2020” and also “more brown children should be put in cages”, etc., etc., etc.
If the conservative mainstream is so hateful and bigoted that most of their opinions would not be allowed on a well-regulated platform, that is not the fault of the platform and it does not suggest that the platform has to change just to accommodate conservatives.
One issue is that it sometimes gets hard to discuss something like “lower taxes for businesses” because some people will assume you want to murder all gay people and others come along who actually do want to do that and think they are on you’re side…
When positions are too simplifed into left vs right and all your other positions are assumed to be in line with the left vs. right debate there will never be any real discussion.
Sure. The people who make that assumption are being rational in doing so, IMO.
Part of the reason for this is that people use the “lower taxes” thing as an excuse for, for example, having voted for Trump. “Oh no I’m not into all the cruel shit, I’m just a Fiscal Conservative™️” won’t convince anyone because nowadays you can’t vote for “lower taxes for businesses” without also voting for “trans people are all pedophiles”. Check your nearest Republican state legislature for verification of that fact.
Of course, the other important caveat is that “lower taxes for businesses” is usually packaged with “more deregulation”, which is in itself cruel, always implemented haphazardly, and never promotes the safe and sustainable economic growth that is promised.
This reply is accurate and probably one of the reasons why you see entirely different platforms for people from different political positions. This isn’t the platforms fault, the fault lies with a lot of factors.
-The people who have accepted intolerance as a feature instead of a bug in their political party. -The politicians who continue to rile up audiences using dog whistles.
-The media who allow dog whistles on the air un-critically as though it’s legitimate political discourse. Family Guy example
-Money in politics, specifically Rich people and corporations being allowed to use their pile of money to get whatever they want at everyone’s expense.
Conservative ideology of maybe twenty years ago would likely have a lot better chance at meaningful discussion as opposed to right now. At this time, the political right in the US have thrown full-throated support for policies that many people (rightfully) feel are abhorrent.
For less repugnant topics, say, fiscal responsibility, that one is also a tough one to talk about seeing as the right is trying to gut every social program they can think of while doing all they can to cut taxes for the rich.
I know there are sane conservatives out there, but until that party steers their ship away from bigotry, hatred, and destroying the middle and lower class, you’ll probably not find a lot of discussion. Which is a shame because I think we do need two strong parties with differing viewpoints, but when the other viewpoint is rampant discrimination and further enriching the wealthy.
I feel like there is an idealization of far right conservatism that makes people believe that if we can just move past Trump and trumpism that things will go back to normal. That said republicans used to be more subtle and attempted to keep an air of respectability and civility about them, but a lot of the problem beliefs we had.
Tough on crime but not for white collar big crime politics, tax cuts for the wealthy, anti union stuff, racial dog whistling, gutting social programs, evangelical faux christian nonsense, election fraud, appointing judges, and etc were all present 20 years ago.
And regarding LGBT stuff both sides sucked 20 years ago, but conservatives were way worse.
Going back to at least reagan it’s been a shitshow it’s just decades of Reagan era neocon strategies coming up against impotent neolibs has brought us to where we are today. The current strategy is also far more transparent and aggressive and angry so things feel less civil, but sometimes I wonder if maybe thats not a bad thing. It’s easier to rally against trump than it is to rally against a guy you feel like you’d like to have a beer with.
20 years ago they were panicing over video games and gay marriage try again
