They won't actually beat back an infestation though. They are too territorial.

.ml is absolutely abusing the federation system though. They've been caught red handed modifying mod logs several times, and there's evidence that they run a modified version of Lemmy which gives them additional levers of control.

.ml should be treated like the malicious state actors they very obviously are. It's crazy to me that otherwise paranoid techies who are afraid that Google is recording their very boring lives, just doesn't seem to care about actual, very plausible threats from actual, very plausible state actors.

It's funny because you are still allowed to post these shit takes, but if you switched Hamas and Russia you'd be banned from .ml at light speed.

Calling you an asshole is not authoritarian

LGBT rights are human rights. If by "has a quasi-religious character" you mean that it is ideologically derived, then sure. Human rights are normative ideology. But to say that the idea of individual liberty and human rights are ideologically equivalent to watery tarts handing out swords, is to demonstrate an extremely profound ignorance of moral philosophy.

Pride flags have never been used as a symbol of hate?

Wow that sounds really familiar.

Right, fascism molds itself to a particular condition and ground truth. There's actually a decent body of work which holds that it is a historical form of autocratic politics, and that searching for it in modernity is problematic because of how fungible the core ideology is. You can always stop fascism by stopping autocracy, regardless of whether you positively identify it as such, so all autocratic movements should be treated with the same level of urgency as Nazis. Easy peasy, okie dokie.

The biggest problem with this is that a lot of leftists like autocracy as well. And I am convinced that's where a lot of this rhetorical pearl clutching really comes from. A whole generation of left wing opposition is effectively null and void because it reduces to a very inconvenient "well our autocracy is different..."

Nah, some of have been calling out right wing propaganda and the impact it's having on the political scene for a while now. And it's not just teens. Right wing propaganda has infested the left as well, to the point where you still have people repeating confirmed propaganda from the 2016 election because they've internalized it and can't let it go.

It's not that the left has bad messaging or unpopular ideas, it's that there are a ton of cynics under the big tent. Cynics who actively poison outreach efforts because they are intellectually lazy, but love their own farts.

That's not true, I actually am trying to turn your kids gay because I know it makes you mad.

*Haskell

It's just simple abuse. It's no more complicated that that. Trump is not some genius, he's just an abusive asshole with a megaphone.

The whole point is to constantly be testing the loyalty of supporters, while punishing detractors. For the supporters, the constant "attention" is a reward. Every opportunity to say "there are three lights" is making themselves part of the lie. For the rest of us, the constant, unavoidable gaslighting is exhausting, and the visible, ever present degradation of our civic institutions is horrifying. Yet we are forced to either witness it and confront it day after day if we are to oppose it, or check out and let it happen, just hoping it ends quickly.