Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Well, just got banned from the book server I loved over discussing communism. I know, not a great idea (possibly the worst idea) but they had a political channel and it wasn’t explicitly against the rules, and I informed them numerous times early on that I would stop if I was warned.
I certainly learned my lesson.
Edit: I also asked what was and wasn’t allowed and they informed me that anything was allowed so long as I was respectful about it.
Edit 2: It was a Discord server. I bet you could tell already but I still felt the need to clarify that.
Let me guess: it was something to do with Stalin, gulags. the Holodomor, Mao, Tiananmen Square, Stasi or anything of that caliber?
Every place is cool with discussing communism so long as it’s conveniently only theoretical and nothing actually historical because the 10,000 lies dumped on every actually existing socialist state with an utter refusal to consider those well-funded narratives are wrong.
tl;dr It was Mao.
We went back and forth about Chinese revolution for a short bit and they asked if it was worth all the people who died from starvation and the executions of educated people. I said the second part didn’t even happen (I’m pretty sure this is what did me in), I probably should’ve looked into it and tried to debunk it properly but it just looks so wrong on it’s face. Why would the Chinese even do that? Why would anyone do that (Pol Pot did because he was a crazy person but besides)? Given that the barefoot doctors program existed they clearly didn’t mass murder doctors, what the hell even is this claim?
I’m sorry that happened to you. Strategically speaking, maybe it would have worked better to hunt down a source on it and post that? But at the same time, it sounds like they were trigger happy about finding an excuse to ban you anyway.
In my experience, communism or not, few places on the internet are actually moderated with any kind of fairness or consistency of standards. Lemmygrad is one of the few places I’ve seen where I mostly agree with the decisions made and think they are genuinely trying to be principled about it. And I don’t say that to kiss ass, it’s just sadly true how rare it is in my experience. Much of the time, even in my liberal days on the internet, my experience is that moderators either act based on the letter of their law and ignore the spirit of it. Or they act basically on what they feel like doing in the moment and then (maybe) cite a rule after the fact to try to justify it.
Thank you. I don’t know if it would’ve helped in this specific case, but you are right comrade. I should do more reading and gather my sources properly if I end up doing something like this again.