In the current moment I would agree. I’m not sure that would be true in comparison to a hypothetical sole superpower China. But who can say for sure.

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Is this a bad thing somehow? I would think reducing debts is generally beneficial, especially in times of economic crisis.

What do you mean by keeping write-offs from occurring?

Chinese foreign policy has been fairly cautious and covert compared to other world powers. I think this has generally been a good strategy as it has avoided major conflicts with the US and Europe in recent times.

I can’t think of any coup they’ve directly supported but they certainly have supported military movements and governments in other countries, including Vietnam, North Korea, Myanmar, and Venezuela. So they’ve been a bit less prone to overthrowing governments but they aren’t afraid to use similar tactics to keep friendly regimes in power, and help those factions expand power. So is it a coup to help the North Vietnamese conquer the South? I guess it depends on the definition of coup which can be a fraught word.

Personally I’m not sure I see any of these as coups. The closest might be Myanmar but while China has protected and supported the junta there, it’s not totally clear they actually supported the coup itself. I interpret their actions as seeking stability and wanting to minimize Western influence.

Most likely some other country (or countries) would simply fulfill the same role of projecting their military and economic power onto the rest of the world to maintain their hegemony. We see this in limited ways already with many other countries, though with a few exceptions, they’re careful in how much they conflict with US interests. One of these, likely China, would move into that role and while the details would be different in some ways, many of the overall dynamics would be similar.

Funhouse mirror version but yeah it is pretty similar, never thought about that.

It’s a website from the early 2000’s that had absurdist flash animations centered around weird cartoon characters in a fictional small town. It was kind of like a weird interactive TV show for a while.

Wait blocking an instance doesn’t block its users? That seems a bit useless.

Yeah I do enjoy him but he’s definitely got a different vibe. Much more satirical.

Shit I was not aware of this. I’ve just seen his YouTube channel.

Andrew Callaghan. Just sit there an ask Trump simple questions with a vibe so chill he self destructs without any outside interference.

I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.

As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to. Again, ease of migration has an effect on the severity of the problem, but not the underlying dynamic itself.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch. Fundamentally, I lack the expertise to do so, though I’d be interested in a community discussion on how this could work.

This is very similar to telling people being exploited at work to get a better job or start their own business. Sure, theoretically, this might sometimes solve the problem, but it’s going to be a much better solution if we change the underlying system that creates these problems in the first place.

One could also simply move to another country if desired. I think there is a parallel. Obviously that’s much simpler with instances than countries but there is still a commonality here.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Again, I have acknowledged the problem is far less severe with instances compared to countries. But the power structures involved are quite similar.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

In a shallow analysis, one could blame admins for not implementing democratic governance (as you claim LemmyGrad has done). But you need to remember that running an instance is typically an unpaid act of mutual aid done for the community—blaming admins for not doing more work to make a better system seems a bit harsh when it would take substantially more work to set up such a system.

A better solution would be to build democratic mechanisms into a social media platform itself. This would allow democratic decision-making in defederation and other issues by default, rather than forcing admins to create such a system from scratch. I actually think both Reddit and Lemmy were steps in this direction, with Reddit adding upvotes and downvotes to democratize content curation, and with Lemmy’s federated nature at least allowing user choice in which admins they want to be subordinated by.

However, both of these platforms were created by people who believe in authoritarian ideologies. These democratic elements were added individually to solve specific problems—neither Lemmy nor Reddit had an explicit goal of making a more democratic platform in all respects.

I am hoping that the online space will continue to evolve in this direction. Since I doubt Lemmy developers share this vision, there may come a time when people who want this will need to migrate to another platform, or create a fork of the current software. Since I’m not a developer, can’t contribute myself, but I will keep my eyes open for good ideas in this vein.

I’m not aware of any left vs right definition that would place the kkk on the left. Can you provide one?

Where did you get the idea that the KKK was left wing from?

Basically all of them.

Yup that’s what I was talking about.