Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
It sure would be swell if people could, at the very least, elevate to a 2d view of politics. Hearing the majority of quadrants II, III, and IV all referred to all “far-left” is confusing at best.
it’s not even 2d, it’s 1d. everyone who isn’t me is bad and wrong. many folks here are are straight up solipsistic.
and you aren’t going to elevate anyone like that. they have to take their own head out of their own ass, which is possible, but more likely to be triggered by real life experiences and trauma than internet posts.
of course that’s also not necessary they will ever get better, they often get worse. i have had friends have a traumatic life experience an just shove their head further up their ass even more than it was before. especially during covid.
That’s because adding a 2nd axis does almost nothing to mitigate how insanely reductionist political spectrums are. People are not that simple x1,000,000,000.
Nothing wrong with building models with limitations but one cannot test the political compass to measure how reliable it is at predicting future results.
As such I genuinely think the frustration you’re experiencing is because the people who relate to it the most tend to view people over simplistically, usually because they can’t empathize with any human experience that isn’t theirs. Aka conservatives.
Like me as a progressive can empathize with my conservative family that’s never been exposed to trans people and only fed anti-trans bs. But flip the script and they cannot fathom why I don’t go to church or vote conservative like a good christian. I know because they’ve told me.
In 1d about 2/3 of the political spectrum is being called the same thing. Elevating political discourse to where we are not calling tankies and social libertarians the same thing seems like more than “almost nothing” to me.
The people who do that don’t give a fuck about the difference and never will.
The fact that you point to that as the schism further evidences me that the political compass inherently confines ones thinking.
To be fair, the quadrant system is also bullshit. Authority isn’t a sliding scale, it depends on which class controls the authority of the state and is therefore either the beneficiary of or victim of authority.