I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn’t posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that “Mod” had banned a bunch of people citing “Rule 5.”
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn’t the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
Kansas: if they doubled down on it then it’s hard to claim that it was unintended. Now I agree with you, the humiliation becomes part of the policy - be it due to negligence or actively pursuing it.
And perhaps a better framework to decide if something is fascist or not could be to ditch the concepts of “intention” and “thought” (as blackbox concepts) and focus instead on:
This is also useful to judge what the mod is doing - if it’s just a bad week it’s kind of understandable, but if she’s consistently doing it the actions do lean into fascism, because they stop being simply erratic “people are people, they do stupid shit” and become a policy.
From the fascists’ PoV it’s all about a glorious past that was “stolen” from them. Mussolini for example would babble a lot about Roman Empire times, i.e. times when Italy was the centre of Europe+MENA.
Sometimes this “past” is outright invented though. It doesn’t need to be factual, from the fascists’ PoV, as long as people believe it.
[Sorry for the late reply! Kind of off-topic, but finally I can actually read texts in a decent computer screen. I had some computer problems through those two weeks.]
Well now… that’s kind of a slippery slope there, imho. If a doctor “has a headache”, and thereby kills their patient due to negligence, is that okay? I mean, nobody is arguing that they should never have headaches, but to collect salary, and take up a slot that could have gone to someone else, and basically assert (by showing up for the job, in that role) that they are okay to do it, but then to NOT do it - that’s not okay?
Here again, I am saying that people in positions of authority and power are held to a higher standard. A doctor who allows their patient to DIE as a result of their negligence, isn’t merely having a bad day, or week, they have a moral failing that allowed them to show up for that day or week, and lie about their own capacity - either to others, knowing full well themselves how they felt, or else to themselves first, and then unknowingly relayed that information to others (especially since as a medical doctor, they should know better - not about every single thing in the world e.g. nuclear physics, yet “headaches” are well within their reputed scope of expertise).
Mind you, I need to be VERY careful here: I am not talking about a “sudden onset” of a headache, that nobody could have predicted in advance. And by extension I also do not mean like one that on a scale of 1-10 was a 1 when they went in that morning but by the end of the day got to a 2, and then suddenly in a single moment of time spiked all the way to 10, whereupon in seconds the patient died - that indeed is a “bad day”, unpredictable, if not entirely, then mostly, if lets say that the “reasonable expectation” is that the headache could maybe go up from 2 to 3, but not 10? No, I’m talking about like it started off as 10, remained as 10 all weekend, but then when it’s time to go to work it has not gone down but remains still at 10… there exists a set of circumstances that are so blatantly irresponsible that they cross over to become “criminally negligent”.
I think Trump crossed that line during the pandemic - causing more “excess deaths” than all wars combined (if you think that I am wrong on that statistic, then please Please PLEASE correct me, but I do recall reading that somewhere… anyway we’ll never know, b/c those numbers were hidden from us and we are not allowed to have that information, from certain states e.g. Florida). It wasn’t just casually irresponsible - it was genocide. Aside from that, it was also a bad event for him… but it was not MERELY thus, yeah?
So getting back to the vegan mod, if she were to be forcibly ousted as a result of this “bad week”, that does not seem too harsh for me? Perhaps if she apologized, seemed sincere about her admission of guilt, and wanted to make reparations somehow, it would conversely not be so bad if she were not forcibly removed from the entire instance… but the mod position is different. The standards that a normal user are held to are one thing, while a leader must be held to different, higher ones. Like a doctor, like the President of the United States, not in spite of the fact that they hold their position of authority, but because of exactly that.
About the past: yes I understand that sometimes the fascists may babble about this or that, but I was saying that I do not think that it should be considered as a core part of their identity structure. A fascist can still be one, even if they use different tools, just like a terrorist who uses a bomb is no lesser than a terrorist who uses an automated rifle, despite the former not using the same tool of the latter - such a weapon may quality someone as a “shooter”, but the definition of “terrorist” is more about the action accomplished, spreading terror, than the precise details of whichever weapon was used to make it happen?
And yes, I totally agree that perhaps the concepts of intention need to be, if not entirely discarded, then at least fade into the background? But also, you can’t do something at the level of an entire society, without having had the opportunity for at least one person to have pushed back, at some point along the way - like the situation with Kansas & steak for the poors, SOMEONE just HAD to have warned them… and then they did it anyway. Hitler simply cannot use the excuse that “oh, I did not realize… you see, my mother never warned me that full-on concentration camps and death squads were bad things, gasp/shock, I simply never knew that… therefore I should not be punished, b/c of my ignorance”. Whatever people who get caught may SAY in their defense, they were in positions of authority and power, hence are held to account for their actions, whatever inscrutable motives they may have had.
Conversely, a scenario like a baby pressing a button that manages to cause a nuclear explosion reveals an entirely different set of factors. For them, intention matters, whereas e.g. for a technician whose sole job it is to stand by that button and press it if the call ever comes, but then also to never press it otherwise, except then one day… “whoopsie! an entire zillion people (yes! with a z I say!!! just b/c!!:-D) just died, my bad guys, I was just trying to adjust my shorts you see…” The reason intention does not matter for the latter person is b/c that was their sole job - they were trained to push, and also (arguably FAR more importantly!) to not push that button. Thus their failure to follow their training - but again, still collect a salary, still take up a slot that could have been given to someone else, etc. - rises to a level of criminality that the baby who has zero clue what is going on does not.
Ergo, if Trump had remained merely a TV star, then the fact that he doesn’t even know what a “virus” is wouldn’t matter the slightest bit, it was only because he rose to become President - ousting Hillary Clinton who otherwise would have done the job - that that fact became relevant. imho at least:-)
Sorry to hear about your computer problems, but I am so glad that you got them fixed and can now enjoy a more pleasant interaction on Lemmy, rather than try to work on a tiny screen:-).