Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Apparently there’s an issue with some instances banning users for criticizing authoritarian governments. Is lemmy.world a safe place to criticize governments?
Keep it in the politics subs.
But I hope there is less censorship, it was a shame that lemmy.ml removed this well-sourced comment (and banned the user) -
You couldn’t have cherry-picked a more inflammatory comment to defend. Truly such a shame that people who misrepresent data for the sake of their anti-trans stances have their obvious rage-bait posts removed.
How is writing a high-effort long comment explaining one’s viewpoints, with sources to back up the opinion-- ragebait? Ragebait is low-effort content that only seeks to troll.
You gotta admit, that it’s way too much effort to troll?
He could’ve said something simple, and it would’ve received the same reaction.
I don’t really feel like explaining what bad-faith arguments are to someone who’s clearly concern trolling so I’ll just leave it at that.
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I don’t really feel compelled to engage with such a bad-faith argument but i’ll humor you a bit.
Followed by 2 links that… don’t talk about suicidal ideation but instead about no longer feeling dysphoric.
And then the poster goes on to claim that somehow this reduces suicidal ideation in children who may be trans. This entire section does nothing to address the fact that reaffirming a trans child’s gender does, in fact reduce suicidal ideation in trans children. Obviously If a child isn’t trans, they won’t feel suicidal if they’re not allowed to transition.
Just because a thought is well worded and lengthy, does not mean it’s worth listening to.
But just because you don’t think it’s worth listening to, doesn’t mean it should be banned.
Ban outright spammers and attackers like this - https://lemmy.world/u/darknightfggot (I don’t know if his posts are still visible, I blocked him) but don’t try to ban ideas just for apparent wrongthink.
If the comment was about “black people causing the most crime in the US”, would you think it’s worth listening to? Something having citations and being written in a “civil” tone does not necessarily mean it’s high level discourse.
Some people hear dog whistles. Some don’t.
If they had facts and hard data to back it up, it would at least be worth discussing.
The problem is too many have opinions based on feelings, and feelings are not stable or permanent … they can change from moment to moment, hour by hour and day by day.
In your opinion … unless you have facts/data to back that up.
“white collar” or “clean” bigotry is still bigotry. Someone doesn’t need to shout slurs at every possible moment to spread hate and attack people’s identitie s or rights to exist.
Bigotry does not need to be tolerated full stop. It doesn’t matter how much someone dresses it up to appear palatable or how much someone claims they’re “just asking questions/just want a respectful debate” when the topic is someone’s immutable identity and right to medical treatment.
I don’t want to participate in this conversation, but I want to leave a note for any people who may be casually scrolling this thread, reading the exchange, and wondering how you feel about it.
You are witnessing, in real time, a technique that has been popularized by alt-right influencers like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder as a means to be racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/etc online and then play the victim when people get mad about it.
The first step is to post something that at first glance seems rational, logical, and supported by facts, which portrays a particular minority group in a bad way. There are lots of these kinds of “arguments” available all over the web, and I’m willing to bet the “well thought out” comment that got the above user banned was mostly copy/pasted. It’s similar to the “despite making up X% of the population, black people cause Y% of crime” thing you see posted from time to time, as @[email protected] mentioned. They often use real facts and data, but typically skewed or taken out of context to push a particular agenda.
The next step is ideally to have someone from that minority group get mad and call them a bad word. Then they can sit back, sip their tea, and say, “See? I told you that gays/jews/trans/blacks/whatever are the REAL bigots! I’m just trying to have a conversation and they start calling me names and banning me.”
In cases like this, where @[email protected] is attempting to call them out in a civil tone, they play the “you’re just mad because you don’t agree” card. Or the “you didn’t provide a master’s thesis counterargument” card. Or the “I never actually said a slur so how is it hate speech” card. No matter what you say to them, no matter how you try to approach the “argument”, they will twist it around so that you are wrong. They’ll keep doing it until you finally lose your cool, which goes back to the first step.
In the worst case, no one takes the bait and they get ignored. But even this is still a win, because it means they get to spread their hateful propaganda freely. And a lot of times there will be casual onlookers, with no strong feelings about the matter, who see the exchange and think, “Hmm, that person is being civil and reasonable and all these pro-trans people are getting angry and calling them names. Maybe they’re right, and trans people ARE all mentally unstable. I’m going to save their ‘well thought out’ comment for later.” And so it spreads.
Call it gaslighting, call it trolling, it doesn’t matter. Think of it like this. Imagine two young brothers riding in the back seat on the way to Disneyland. The older brother is tormenting the younger brother by poking him constantly. “Mom! He’s poking me!” says the younger. “Stop poking your brother” says the mom. So what does the older brother do? He puts his finger right in front of the younger brother’s face. Not quite touching him, but close enough to be extremely annoying. “Mom, he’s still bothering me!” says the younger. “No, I’m not actually touching him” says the older, laughing. Finally, the mom has had enough. She turns the car around and says the trip to Disney is cancelled. The older brother, now furious, points at the younger brother: “LOOK WHAT YOU DID!”
The exchange you’re looking at is basically the grown-up version of the big brother in the backseat. They don’t want to have a discussion. They don’t even want to argue. They just want to piss of whichever minority group they hate, without technically breaking any rules (“I’m not actually touching you!”). And then, if they do get banned, they move on to the next space and say “Those out-of-control gays/jews/trans/blacks/whatever banned me from the last forum, but I’m sure THIS forum actually supports free speech and honest discussion. Did you know that despite making up X% of the population…”
Unfortunately, the best thing you can do is ignore them and hope the moderaters clean them out. It becomes a problem on big sites like reddit where mods are already swamped with thousands of other issues. But hopefully in the federated world, communities will mostly stay small enough to be manageable.
If you want to be free to post bigotry as long as you use polite-sounding language and write long posts, Reddit and HN will be glad to have you.
It’s not alt accounts. The base users of Lemmy platform as a whole (lemmy.ml, et al) do not want to see cherry picked, anecdotal transphobia disguised under civility
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Sure bud whatever helps you cope.
Users read and upvote comments you disagree with
Must be alt accounts.
Why did you create alts to down vote Amby and my comments?!
It’s not alt accounts; you just wandered into the wrong bar to go picking fights with communists and trans people.
What did you think was going to happen if you defend anti-trans activism in a community where the majority of people support trans rights? It’s about time for you to have a reality check.
“Anyone who doesn’t agree with me is rage-baiting especially if they use data to do it.”
Yep that’s definitely what I said.
Wow, that’s insane. How is the discourse going to be going forward if high effort replies like that one get removed and gets the user banned
It isn’t high effort. It’s a bunch of canned “gender critical” arguments that we’ve all seen a thousand times before combined with arbitrarily dismissing all of the evidence in favor of gender affirming care for kids using specious reasoning and then citing long debunked studies like the “80% desistance rate” one.
Their bias is even more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the first study they cite isn’t hosted on any legitimate source of medical science, but on “transgendertrend.” That demonstrates that they didn’t find their data via PubMed or Google Scholar or anything, they found it by looking for cherry picked medical studies from people with an anti-trans agenda.
It’s transphobia and perpetuation of misinformation disguised as a polite conversation. It’s the same level of “discourse” as “blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the crime.”
Edit: not only is it arbitrary and awfully convenient for cherry-picking purposes to leave out longitudinal studies of mental health, since mental health is what’s at stake here, and “objective” measures are susceptible to many confounding variables and often not relevant, and standardized tests of mental health are regularly used to ascertain the efficacy of many procedures related to psychology, there are also studies that use “objective” measures such as the ones he wanted, where applicable. Here’s one that’s somewhat infamous due to one of the young adults getting a fatal complication from a surgery, but such surgeries are not performed on minors, and are not particularly dangerous, so it’s largely irrelevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25201798/. Here’s a list of 16 studies on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/political-minds/202201/the-evidence-trans-youth-gender-affirming-medical-care.