Are you really comparing a completely optional forum to a society where people can and will point guns at you?
Anybody who sees Authority as a responsability is naturally averse to having it because they would feel the weight of it and would feel bad if, whilst holding Authority, they made a mistake and others got in some way hurt because of that.
Those who see Authority as power to advance something (be it their own personal upsides or some idea they believe in) with little or no feeling of responsability towards others (be it not all directly or they’ve suppressed it by convincing themselves their actions are somehow “for the greater good” hence any bad they do with the authority has that grand excuse to salve their conscience), have no such aversion to holding authority.
That posture towards authority of people of the second kind applies more broadly to all manner of things which serve to pressure, convince or manipulate others (Authority is generally power force something on others) so of course they also have no aversion to using other such tools, including using ideology to manipulate others, and sometimes that means passing themselves as somebody who holds a certain ideology, and that includes Anarchism.
So yeah, you’re going to find that certain people who parrot Anarchist talk aren’t in fact people whose Principles mean they’re naturally Anarchist but rather people being Performative Anarchists in order to fit-in and manipulate others driven by entirelly different Principles, and such people are absolutelly pro-Authority as long as they’re in control of it.
In summary, there are two types of people who seem Anarchist:
- Those whose personal principles means they are averse to people controlling other people. There are naturally against any form of Authority.
- Those who want to control other people and are in a specific situation where Theatre Of Anarchism can advance their objectives. These are against forms of Authority which hinder their objectives but are in favor of forms of Authority which advance their objectives.
IMHO, the best way to spot the second kind from the first is to look for the often repetition of common slogans and having a superficial level of ideology with no actual tracing back to personal principles since they learned the ideology at an intellectual level rather than being drived by their Principles - i.e. what feels Right and what feels Wrong - to finding that formal ideology as something that fits them.
By the way, this method to identify the real ones from the performers also works for all other ideologies and even things like Faith - start paying attention and you’ll spot all manner of teatrics around ideologies all across the entire political spectrum as well as in people professing some faith or other.
Not true for everyone. But sure, I understand the idea. Its just that i know people who hate authority and because of that, they know how to act with compassion instead. They dont speak bad of others and they dont have a lot of ego to defend.
The best leaders are reluctant to even have power. And they see it more as a responsibility to do right by the people.
I dont see that type of leader in America at all, but they exist in real life in Europe.
They exist in the US you don’t hear about them because those leaders don’t make good headlines.
All communities have moderation, depending on the desired results.
-Anarchist instances nuke Nazi and Tankie viewpoints because they consider them authoritarian (see db0 and quokk)
-Tankie instances nuke Nazi and Lib viewpoints because we consider them authoritarian (see hexbear and lemmygrad)
-Lib instances nuke Tankie viewpoints because they consider them authoritarian (see .world)
-Nazi instances nuke Tankie viewpoints because they’re nazis (see feddit and piefed)
As a tankie, I take pride that Nazis and Libs nuke my content, and consider it sad that anarchists don’t reflect on why anarchist content doesn’t get nearly as nuked from mainstream capitalism.
Nazi instances nuke Tankie viewpoints because they’re nazis (see feddit and piefed)
Can you tell me what nazi viewpoints are promoted on Piefed please? Be specific.
The anarchist code of conduct

in misanthropy we call this being human
I think “being able to select which community(ies) one is part of and having the ability to opt out” vs being born into it is a key differentiator.
Fwiw, I’m not part of any moderating teams.
Okay, I’ll bite. I need to add to my block list anyway.
Y’all have heard of the Nazi Bar problem, right? Paradox of intolerance? Which turns out not to be a paradox after all? You should def look that one up rather than waiting for me to type it all out.
Y’all have heard of the Nazi Bar problem, right?
Bullshit genetic or reductio ad hitlerum fallacy. Carried to its logical conclusion, anything tainted by Nazis (eg, the universe) is a Nazi bar. Have you considered finding yourself another universe to inhabit, since this one is irredeemably tainted? While we may argue the universe is far too vast to be a “Nazi bar”, so is the internet or any “platform”.
Worse, censoring ideas gives them covert power. It doesn’t discredit them or strip them of power like challenging them in a public forum could. It’s also a disservice to better ideas
- it withholds opportunities for people to become competent enough advocates to discredit bad ideas
- instead of deradicalize opponents, it drives their discussion elsewhere: they continue to radicalize & grow opposition unchallenged.
Censorship is incompetent advocacy: it mistakes suppressing the expression of bad ideas for effective advocacy that directly discredits bad ideas, develops intellectual growth, and steers toward better ideas.
Paradox of intolerance?
The bogus social media version subverting the original message or the real one?

text alternative
The True Paradox of Tolerance
By philosopher Karl Popper[1]
You think you know the Popper Paradox thanks to this? (👉 comic from pictoline.com)
Karl Popper: I never said that!
Popper argued that society via its institutions should have a right to prohibit those who are intolerant.
Karl Popper: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.
For Popper, on what grounds may society suppress the intolerant? When they “are not prepared to meet on the level of rational argument” “they forbid their followers to listen to rational argument … & teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols”. The argument of the intolerably intolerant is force & violence.
We misconstrue this paradox at our peril … to the extent that one group could declare another group ‘intolerant’ just to prohibit their ideas, speech & other freedoms.
Grave sign: “The Intolerant” RIP
Underneath it lies a pile of symbols for Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Black power. A leg labeled tolerance kicks the Gay Pride symbol into the pile.Muchas gracias a @lokijustice y asivaespana.com
Karl Popper opposed censorship/argued for free inquiry & open discourse.
I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Censorship (or willfully blinding ourselves to information) plays no part in suppressing authoritarianism.
Only cowards fear words. Words are not the danger. It’s the dangerous people whose words we fail to discredit.
Source: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl R. Popper ↩︎
People like to refer to the paradox of tolerance but always skip out on the inconvenient bit:
""Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
— In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.“”
If you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn’t be bigoted, I don’t know what to tell you.
i mean, seems you’re also conveniently skipping over the part that says:
as long as we can counter them by rational argument
it’s right there in the text:
popper states outright, that there are some ideologies and by extension people, that straight-up cannot be argued with. these, therefore, must be excluded from the community, and thereby form the limit to tolerance that must be enforced.
people really love to misinterpret popper…
what goes along nicely with the tolerance of paradox is the quote about anti-semites being entirely aware of how absurd their position truly are:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
take both popper and sartre together into consideration of a larger context and it becomes abundantly obvious that a certain minimum of intolerance is strictly necessary for a functional society.
what happens when all checks on speech are removed can be clearly seen in the rotting corpses of facebook and twitter… it’s disastrous.
One problem with bigots is they dont care about truth or logic. Its a waste of time to continually argue the same points over and over again with people who refuse to learn or think.
But remember, be sure that your point is logical and truthful, and not parroting talking points in spite of them being repeated all around you.
Being truthful and logical is not always a popular position. Some would say it’s not even often the popular position.
You personally don’t have to. Always plenty of people out there willing to do it for you.
If you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn’t be bigoted, I don’t know what to tell you.
it’s not that people can’t, but spaces which have unlimited tolerance for sealions suggesting that it’s necessary to argue about that are likely to have less interesting discussions than spaces which do not 🙄
Then be clear about the rules. I have 0 problems with people creating communities with very clear rules on what is allowed and what isn’t. I wholeheartedly welcome that. What I take issue with is when people claim to have open discussion, or the space is for “rational discourse”, or “anarchist” discourse etc. but then ban everything that doesn’t very exactly align with the mod ideology.
If most people waving the anarchist flag would admit they’re just doing it because it’s cool but actually, they just want to be the authoritarians in place of the authoritarians, that would be fine. I’d happily avoid them. Problem is that when they don’t admit it, they drag down the whole anarchist ideology because they are misrepresenting it.
key words there are discourse and discussion.
As is explained in a few responses to your paradox of tolerance reply (that you seem to have conveniently not replied to so far), the kind of discussion or conversation they are referencing requires both parties to be working in good faith.
from your own reference
as long as we can counter them by rational argument
If one party can’t or won’t provide logic or reasoning to their side of an exchange, that’s not a discussion because there is nothing to discuss with someone not willing to engage in good faith.
There are absolutely places that are ideological echo chambers, despite claiming otherwise, but banning someone for the inability (or unwillingness) to engage in good faith isn’t a removal based on ideology it’s a removal based on not adhering to the basic tenets of how discussions are supposed to work.
If it just so happens that most of that kind of banning happens to people with ideologies you subscribe to, perhaps it’s worth considering how you can help these people understand how to have an actual conversation.
That all being said, from what i’ve seen here I’d guess you’re on the purposeful bad faith side of things so I’m not expecting any reasonable consideration, but feel free to surprise me (or block me, i suppose).
i think people not knowing how to actually win an argument against a bigot is exactly the reason there are so many these days
shit’s easy. not that they’ll admit defeat but getting them babbling irrational nonsense takes very little debating skills. and when they inevitably start throwing ad hominems, then the mods have legitimate grounds to kick them out.
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves in to.”
Though it is occasionally possible to point out how their arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny and get them to engage on it.
Only works with the ones not doing it on purpose, however.
Just to let you know before I block you, I didn’t read your “reasonable disagreement” of a wall of text
You mean the direct quote of Popper that you yourself referred to? You didn’t read the very piece of text you told me to read?
>“look up paradox of tolerance UwU” >“ok, let’s look at what it actually says” >“i didn’t read it UwU”
that tracks
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
so I guess you have an intolerance to intolerance?
Lemmy is a Tankie Bar.
Okay, that’s just funny. Hi friend
So how is that different when it’s online vs offline?
You know that anarchism doesn’t mean no rules right? It just means no rulers, but that’s not how it works on Lemmy or any social media of this type for that matter.
It just means no rulers, but that’s not how it works
…anywhere in reality.
Humans spent thousands of years without rulers. Also, look at all the grassroots organizations trying to stop fascism in America right now.
Leaders are dispensable AND disposable. We do not need them.
Humans spent thousands of years without rulers.
orly? which thousands?
Looking at you, leftymemes
ugh
groupthink central, do NOT divert an inch from the state sanctioned opinions, OR ELSE
It’s all fun and games until you say that China is wearing socialism as a cloak the same way America wears Christianity or Israel wears anti-semitism.
I’ve seen better moderation in .ml instances.
Uh oh. One or the other found you, here comes the brigade!

I’ve been brigaded by better instances.
“You are allowed to do anything you want, so long as it’s exactly what we say”
Hey! I will have you know that we’re are all different and unique in exactly the same way.
Dbshitters are alt-left and should be treated in the same way as any libertarian nutjob.
right-wingers aren’t allowed on leftist spaces. nothing positive comes from that.
This is very true - I usually refer to it as “BOFH behavior”. I think it stems from many people who end up hosting or moderating feeling that they themselves have been marginalised before so “now they’re going to show them!”.
A great example is a Mastodon instance where if you don’t agree with the site’s admin they’ll block you at the server level instead of from their personal account. The belief is that if they have an opinion that opinion must then be enforced for everyone else under their control too.
I don’t love moderating my communities at all. I barely even read the reports. 🤷♂️
If people are trolling, they can get banned and troll elsewhere. That’s common sense, right?
And one might say they didn’t mean to troll, which just means they need to lurk moar.
unmoderated internet spaces are quickly overrun with bigotry, csam, and spam.
if, in the name of “free speech”, you only moderate the csam and spam, the space will be primarily occupied by people looking for a forum that welcomes bigotry.
respect to @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com for rm’ing bigotry and not letting childish anarchist free speech ideals cause lemmy.dbzer0.com to be a nazi bar 🥂
It’s a misunderstanding of anarchy to equate it with either total chaos or total control. True anarchism is about opposing coercive authority, not creating a new, rigid authority that dictates what discourse is acceptable.
You can absolutely oppose bigotry and harm (which are coercive actions) without resorting to silencing anyone who doesn’t conform to a specific ideological viewpoint. Genuine community defense is about voluntary association and preventing harassment, not about restricting the exchange of ideas.
Eh?
Coercive authority is how we enforce rules that not everyone agrees with. Rules like “don’t rape your kids”. The answer shouldn’t be “they get their own community but we kick them out of ours”, right?
I really, really hope that having rules against molesting kids aren’t the only thing keeping you from doing it.
You can hope all you want that I’m not a pedophile, and coincidentally I’m not, but some people are. For some people, the only reason they’re not doing it is because they’re in jail for doing it.
And that’s my problem with all of these explanations of anarchy that I’ve heard. They all rely on people being fundamentally good and choosing to do the right thing together as a society. And most people are like that. But a not insignificant amount of others aren’t.
How would anarchy handle those people?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24695927
Responded to someone else.
That doesn’t actually answer the question. You make some very good points about the futility of our current mode of criminal punishment. I very much agree. But you offer no solutions that would require anarchy or benefit from it.
A centralized institution to implement all the changes that you mentioned is absolutely something a government would be more capable of.
Start building what works now, where you are.
Every reform you like started as people organizing. The second the state touches it, it turns care into control. Prisons, cops, “rehab”, all began as community ideas. Now they’re cages.
Anarchy isn’t “no system.” It’s systems we control. Local, adaptable, replaceable. The state just standardizes failure.
I really, really, hope that you can understand that for some percentage of the population, morality isn’t a guardrail, & that has been visible for millenia.
The person you’re replying-to isn’t the only person in the world, & evidence is that without coercive-force & enforcement & enforced-accountability, then DarkTriad IS GOING TO rule the world, no matter what, & making-believing isn’t going to prevent that.
It isn’t “mere coincidence” that NOT fighting organized-crime ends-up with them running the territory, and it being impossible to root them out.
Ask northern Mexico how it went for them with their insufficient-enforcement paradigm, & then they lost control of the territory, & can’t get it back.
IF you have an immune-system, THEN you systematically assault & kill pathogens, within your own body.
THAT is the fundamental-fact of viability in natural, competitive ecologies, inhabited by pathogens, parasites, cancers, & their equivalents.
All the people who live in goddamn making-believing that “utopia is the natural default: all we have to do is remove all structure, & it will spontaneously arise, blessing all of our lives” are fucking incompetent at knowing actual-human-nature & actual-human-history.
Go without an immune-system, with AIDS, & no medication, & see how long it takes for pathogens to destroy your life.
Will you live multiple months? Your avg remaining lifespan should be somewhere between 1/30th & 1/100th of the average human lifespan, right? Something like that.
If, after they’ve done that, THEN they’d have validity to stand-on, about no civil-immune-system being required, except that they’d be gone, just as their making-believing wants us gone/nonviable.
“Snakes in Suits” had a perfect vignette in it:
a psychopath who’d been let out on a daypass butchered-up somebody.
they couldn’t understand why that was a problem, because it had been ages since they’d done it last-time!!
Utopian morons who pretend that diversity never could extend to THAT kind of diversity, get other-people slaughtered.
And that isn’t tolerable.
IF somebody wants to live in lala-land, THEN it is THER lives which ought be available for the monsters to butcher, NOT random innocent others.
Won’t-grow-up should automatically get one removed from authority, including voting-authority.
This race, humankind, isn’t viable, unless it grows-the-fuck-up, quickly.
& if it won’t, then the universe is going to be scoured-of-it by next century.
All because ignorance is “more comfy” than growing TF up, … & in the deathmatch between the 2, humankind sides with ignorance, obliterating upright-objective-integrity.
Bring it on: universe’s LAW is Natural Selection, & we pretend we know reality, but our behavior contradicts what we say, consistently.
Universe is the only judge of whether any of us exist next century, NOT our making-believing.
Sorry to be absolutely fed-up with won’t-think, no matter how fashionable & politically-acceptable it is, but humankind’s on the traintracks, and the rumbling of the oncoming-train is thrumming the rails, now.
_ /\ _
for some percentage of the population, morality isn’t a guardrail
There’s more to human behavior than expressing ideas of correct behavior and violent enforcement of those ideas. Both of those are very limited, rely on oversimplified abstractions of how people are, and often have adverse side effects. What we are like and how we live is a complex product of how we engage and relate to our environment and the people around us; the best overall solutions to problems will be holistic improvements to that environment.
To extend your medical analogy, sometimes serious threats to your health call for antibiotics, but it is not the case that scouring your body of foreign organisms will make you healthier in the absence of an antibiotic-treatable threat, it’s actually important to have those.
Bringing it back to how online spaces are organized, I think it’s important for most people to feel like there is a way to express their genuine thoughts because if it’s all just people finding different ways to repeat a dogma, that’s a failure of communication, communication is not meaningfully happening, and an environment where you are unable to communicate is a shitty and dysfunctional one. That doesn’t mean all spaces must accept all points of view, but sincere and open communication should generally be a priority, protecting that is what free expression is about.
You’re right, predators exist, and ignoring that is dangerous. But coercive systems don’t solve the root problem; they just move it around. Prisons don’t stop abuse, they concentrate it. Cops don’t end corruption, they institutionalize it. The illusion is that punishment equals justice, when really, it just perpetuates the cycle of suffering: hurt people hurt people, and systems that rely on domination will always produce more of both.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be consequences. It’s consequences without hate and domination. A world where harm is met with accountability and prevention at the root level, not exile and fear of punishment. The question shouldn’t be “How do we punish?” but “How did we fail this person, and how do we stop failing each other?” That’s not softness. That’s seeing through the delusion of separation, the idea that “monsters” are a different species, not products of the same broken systems we all inherit. It’s the admission that IF NOT FOR THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF YOUR GENETIC MAKEUP AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT, you would be exactly as dangerous and harmful. True safety doesn’t come from bigger cages. It comes from communities that refuse to abandon their own, even the difficult ones.
And yes there are cases where the only answer is to keep someone harmful separate from the rest but it’s possible to do that out of love and care towards those that they would harm, NOT out of hate towards them as a demonized “other”. I’m talking about being pre-emptive, which requires ability for people to have open discourse. It requires the ability to rationally look at horrible behavior and address the causes.
Anarchism is not about zero enforcement of rules. Especially wise ones like don’t dittle kids…
you’re applying this to an internet community that has no real world interaction as a group. i think it’s okay to be authoritarian on your own channel lol.
i think it’s okay to be authoritarian on your own channel lol.
Absolutely. But don’t pretend to be an anarchist then. Be actually honest about your views and people may then (as per anarchist thought) choose for themselves if they want to get on board with that or not.
i don’t see those as incompatible. you can be an anarchist and very controlling over your own online space.
Again, as long as you’re very explicit about it. But don’t call it an anarchist space. It’s then a space, run by an anarchist, that doesn’t follow the rules of anarchism.
But don’t call it an anarchist space
tell me you’ve never been in a non-internet anarchist space without telling me 😂
(hint: offline anarchist bars tend not to tolerate fascists either)
rules of anarchism
😭
(this is a bit, right?)
Schrödinger Anarchist: both has and hasn’t rules.
shrug i mean i guess but there is nothing about enforcing regulation that is anti-anarchist.
Enforcing regulation and enforcing one’s own personal views are two different things. This entire convo is supposed to focus on the latter, not confuse them with each other.
Yeah the problem is that these people are deciding that “I am a nazi and I think white people are the supreme race and I want to install a fascist state” and “I don’t think China is actually socialist” are both nazi, fascist, bigoted speech, and then people like you are saying “no that doesn’t happen they only go after the bad stuff every single time and never get anything wrong”.
and not letting childish anarchist free speech ideals
It’s ironic you state it like this, since we are an explicitly anarchist server ;)
It’s ironic you state it like this, since we are an explicitly anarchist server ;)
it’s not really ironic as i am well aware that you are and i appreciate you for that :)
what i’m saying is that i’m glad that, despite obviously being a (fellow!) proponent of freedom of expression, you haven’t fallen victim to the childish line of thought which leads some people to let their spaces become nazi bars. so: thanks!
They banned me for asking if fascism with human rights could be possible.
The interesting part is that it could be that despite the west’s support for human rights we could already be in a form of fascism. But that discussion could’t be had because the question already triggered a ban.
So I think banning helps to keep an instance clean but it also prevents interesting discussions.
Migrants and refugees are under constant attack throughout the west. The US has secret police racially profiling, beating, killing, illegally kidnapping and disappearing people. Civil rights are rapidly being restricted and rolled back. Israel does a genocide and bombs every county in it’s vicinity while the west offers it’s boots, bombs, and blessings.
The west doesn’t support human rights, and the fascists are already in power.
The west doesn’t support human rights, and the fascists are already in power.
Unfortunately as a society we believe that we support human rights so as a society we are not ready to face our fascist traits.
I don’t think it’s fair or productive to conflate America or Israel with “the West”.
First of all, it’s an ancient term used to describe sides in a conflict long since over, in some cases containing countries that don’t even exist anymore.
Secondly, it includes countries that actively oppose the US and Israel’s actions, like Ireland, or Spain.
Third, it doesn’t make any fucking sense, because it includes Japan, which is about as far east as you can get.
People keep setting up these Punching bars and then get mad when their patrons get Punched.
Removed by mod
Cope















