Humility is key to learning. Admitting that you can be wrong and don’t know everything. Unfortunately in capitalist society the opposite behavior is encouraged and rewarded.
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: March 23rd, 2022
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Definitely. I have liked the attitude i have seen so far from this person a lot. I think the most important thing is being curious and open to learning. Ignorance is only a sin if it’s willful. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, some other people choose go to great efforts to remain ignorant.
It’s probably healthy for them to take a step away from social media and go touch grass for a while.
It only seemed that way because we were not as aware of the extent of western information warfare operations. In reality the firewall has always been justified.
The Nazi regime in Kiev which came to power in a US orchestrated coup attacked Russian speaking regions of Ukraine and has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2014. Sources here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686
Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting.
They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or giving money and weapons to help Nazis kill Russians again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more racist, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more detached from reality.
but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.
Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?
You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media
Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.
when the thread was about internet control and social media
Yes, social media is being censored and controlled across Europe and the broader West. Let’s not even mention how often Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter have banned anti-imperialist channels, deleted pro-Palestinian or pro-Russian content. The governments themselves are legally persecuting social media based news outlets, forcing them to shut down
Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.
In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn’t know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.
They are also very racist.
Lol. If we didn’t do that then we would get accused of not including our sources. But i get your point, sometimes we can tend to be overly thorough.
I view this as being a bit like mathematics. The things we say make sense to someone who is already versed in the subject but for someone who doesn’t already understand or agree with certain concepts or ideas we don’t necessarily want to rehash arguments that were already laid out in works a hundred years prior so we just refer back to those in the same way that when you do modern mathematics you don’t need to repeat proofs that were already done in the 19th century. You can just take those theorems as given and if you are really interested in how they were derived you can still go back to the original literature and read up on it.
Of course you can still engage with and understand the more advanced arguments even without going all the way back to the basics but then you need to accept certain things as axiomatic, because it would take too much time to go back and explain them every time.
Let’s say for instance that we are talking about imperialism. To clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about imperialism we may briefly give the Leninist definition of imperialism. You can either accept that this is the definition or you can ask why. Why is it defined that way and why does it make sense? Well for that you would have to go and read Lenin’s work on Imperialism. Which in turn references but does not necessarily thoroughly explain certain concepts about the nature of capitalism that were worked out earlier by Marx.
You see, you can either choose to go down this rabbit hole and invest the time it takes to really go to the basics and build up from there, or you can take it as given that this has already been worked out and you can try and understand how we apply it to the modern day, which saves time and is more practical. Neither is wrong, it just depends on your personal interest.
The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don’t live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.
but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel
Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges
Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down
Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the “wrong side”, in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU
Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe’s victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn’t like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed
Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn’t change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.
You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.
The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.
131·2 months agoA reminder that both AOC and Bernie Sanders are genocidal, lying, Zionist warmongers:
https://xcancel.com/zei_squirrel/status/1870599903812198837
https://xcancel.com/zei_squirrel/status/1892488386096615846
There is no such thing as a “free and neutral net”. It would be nice if there were but sadly that’s just a fairly tale for children. Someone is always in control.