Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
They do it for the same reasons you vehemently defend Israel and their genocide of the Palestinians.
This comment really sums up the issue here. Notice how this user makes wild assumptions about OP. YOU vehemently defend Israel and genocide. Nowhere in this post is that said or implied. In fact the opposite is what’s implied. It’s like they’re setting up some kind of man made of straw to point a finger at but that man doesn’t really exist.
The .ml crowd, including the user I’m responding to, don’t care about anything other than feeling smug. They’ve found a moral issue and then put the entire world into one of two categories. 1. The in-group that spends all their time trolling on the Internet and creating straw men of everyone who seems even slightly less zealous than required on a single issue, and 2. the rest of humanity who are characterized as demons with no morals whose lives completely revolve around supporting the IDF. There is no one in between these two groups for them.
They are the same as the religious groups at abortion clinics who pat themselves on the backs for calling a bunch of people they don’t know murderers. Murder is bad so I’m right and I’m better than you. Well yes, murder is bad but you’re completely ignoring the fact that abortion is not murder and it’s far more nuanced than that. Their conclusion is that you either think abortion is murder, or you are the enemy.
Genocide is bad, which means I’m better than you because even though you also think genocide is bad you happen to have a slightly different opinion than me on how to stop genocide. Since your opposition to genocide is a little different than mine “you vehemently defend Israel and their genocide of the Palestinians”. God damn my farts smell good. You either think that voting for an imperfect candidate to stop a fascist one is identical to being a full throated supporter of the IDF, or you are the enemy.
This isn’t about genocide. It’s about tribalism and getting to feel that they’re better than others with absolutely no effort. If they cared about Palestinians they’d actually do something about it. Instead they spend all their energy dividing people into groups.
Next time you pass a stranger on the street make sure to let them know that they’re evil because someone in the county they live in is on the sex offender list and that means that they fully support pedophilia. This is the same as the accusations that are constantly thrown around by the white knight above and the most outspoken .ml users.
Whataboutism
The post literally says “our flaws are nothing compared”, can you read?
Eh that’s relevant to the discussion since OPs argument is that they’re worse.
My arguing point is that at least the US has a free enough press to keep track of most of their bullshit.
Half of the US still believes Isntreal is right, the other half has found out about the reality of the colonization of Palestine by Isntreal only over the past 3 years, and they found out not because of US media but because of China-born social networks such as TikTok.
I found out because of the us media?
The US never did. The American media has been lying to people for over a century and people have been pointing that out just as long. Now the media is so horrifically corrupt that everyone is starting to notice it, not just minorities or queer people.
exactly
just because people can give criticism does not mean the system actually accepts criticism or even that it does not retaliate against such criticism. yes there are instances where criticism has led to genuine change (easy example is “The Jungle”), but for every instance of successful criticism i argue there are hundres, thousands, even millions of instances where said criticism has led to the harassment and discrimination; tenfold if the person was a minority in any capacity. by and large american media, industry, government, and society has suppressed any and all forms of criticism or even nonhegemonic thought until its existence has been so normalized amongst cishet white peoplr that they finally let it exist in a heavily moderated and monetized manner. this can be seen time and time again with hayes codes, mccarthyism, the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, queer acceptance, trans acceptance, the war on drugs, 9/11 and the wars in the middle east. we are actively seeing it right now; you cannot look at the NYT, Time magazone, the WSP, CNN, or any major American media institution and tell me that they are actually free press. At best they are controlled opposition. this is not a conspiracy theory, these are documented facts1. This has only gotten worse as more tech CEOs have bought more and more news and media companies. anyone who actually reports on important, topical information in a way that is contradictory to the Americam hegemonic system of thought has been target, oppressed, and even sanctioned2. Mainstream media has enjoyed a degree of freedom allowed by the understanding that maintaining the visage of a free press was important, the current high profile cases as of late3 are realistically the exception correcting itself.
America is not free, has never been free, and will never be free until the system is radically and fundamentally changed. The ideals expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are noble, but the implementation of those beliefs were created by entitled white men who encoded racism, misogyny, bigotry, and hatred into the DNA of the country. At one point there may have been an opportunity to change the direction of America to actually align with the values it professed, but much like a cancer that has metastasized to every part of the body any effective treatment would be lethal; America cannot both exist and actually improve. From the moment this country was built on stolen land we have placed ourselves on fhe wrong side of hidtory, and what has become evident now has always been evident to black, brown, queer, and disabled people. It is not a few apples that are rotten; the barrel itself has rotted.
^1. https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/us-media-index^
^2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_government_attacks_on_journalists_in_the_United_States^
^3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2026/01/31/journalists-are-being-arrested-fired-and-silenced-what-this-means-for-the-future-of-the-profession/^
Straw man actually. Bullshit either way though
Idk, I personally have never met Ism but I heard they were a pretty cool cat