this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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I feel this so hard, the sheer number of openly LGBTQ+ people here really skews the demographics of the site. I'm not saying it's a problem, just saying that LGBTQ+ people are dramatically over-represented here. It's an interesting contributor to lemmy culture, and I wonder how much that impacts homogeneity here (e.g. upvotes and downvotes for certain types of content).
But yeah, it's missing a lot of demographics.
That said, I'm really into Linux (been using for >15 years), so that's cool I guess.
As a cis straight man I'm taking this as a learning opportunity until the demographics level out. An inherently inclusive bias will be more helpful early on than more niche communities anyways.
Sure. Again, I'm not saying it's bad, just that the bias seems to exist.
There are certainly worse biases that exist, such as very little representation from people on the right side of the spectrum, so hate against half the population seems to get a pass and downvotes silence constructive comments/posts just due to political bias. That's incredibly frustrating, and I think the high focus on supporting LGBTQ+ people goes along with that (i.e. the message that conservatives "hate" LGBTQ+ people, which is only true for the more extreme end of conservatism).
That said, I do like the support LGBTQ+ people get, I just wish the demographics were a bit more diverse without sacrificing the culture. I live and work in a conservative area, but my company has built a pretty inclusive culture (at least for the area), so I think it's totally possible.
Oh man I don't miss that at all. Moderating out a pervasive delusion isn't bias, any more than we're biased in favor of a round Earth. On Reddit there were constant "enlightened centrists" who kept making appeals to moderation.
There's nothing of value to be gained from conservatives. The "good" ones who don't say the homophobia out loud are still voting for politicians who do. If it was just the extreme end, then Trump wouldn't be their nominee. Hate is their normal now.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: casually dismissing half of the population based on little more than association. That drives division and pushes people into echo chambers.
Understood. I am disagreeing with you. If that wasn't obvious, then I fear you may have missed my point.
Half of America supporting fascism is reason to create somewhere - anywhere - where that shit is shut down. You're free to go associate with freeze peach Nazis on X, Facebook, Nostr, wherever. I don't want any part of that and prefer a server that moderates them out. Paradox of tolerance and all that.
If you all believed the Earth was flat, then I would prefer the "echo chamber" of people saying "no, we checked, it's round". There simply being a lot of believers doesn't imply an idea has merit, and we don't have infinity time for BS.
But they don't. I live in a very red state, and most people here dislike Trump and the direction the party is going. They vote Republican more due to habit and because they think Republicans are more likely to keep spending under control. They ignore 99% of what goes on in politics because they have other things going on.
The people you see on X, Facebook, etc are the very vocal minority that the vast majority of people would reject if they heard about them. They're not "invited" anywhere, they just show up and cause trouble and claim to be part of "the right." That's still a problem, but it's not something "half of America" supports.
I absolutely agree that we should be moderating out fascism and intolerance, but we shouldn't be creating an ecosystem where something like half of the population feels unwelcome. You'll change a lot more minds with tolerance and healthy debate than putting up walls.
Nice strawman.
Yes, not all ideas have merit, but generally speaking, the really bad ideas have very little support, and we're left with a set of reasonable ideas with varying degrees of merit and debating those gives all sides a chance to be educated. However, if there's opposition to an idea merely because of its source and not its merit, then that's not healthy at all (and that's what I'm talking about).
I think all ideas, regardless of source, should be defended by their merits. I personally don't identify with any party and find policies and arguments from all parties, big and small, to have merit. For example, I like the Ellis Island approach to immigration many Libertarians support. I like the idea of ending the Department of Education as we know it from Republicans (I think fed student loans have done more harm than good). I like the idea of Universal Basic Income from Democrats. I like the carbon tax from the Green Party. I think each of those have strong arguments in favor of them, and I'd like to see more open discussion from all sides about them.
I want a place for real free speech. Not the "free speech" Elon Musk seems to want (rules for thee but not for me), but a place for open minded people to have open discussions, while shutting out intolerance of all types. I don't trust "big tech" to make such a space, so that leaves communities like lemmy to create such a space.
It doesn't matter what reason they have for supporting fascism. They're still doing it.
Do you think I'm saying you think the earth is flat, or picking an obviously false example to illustrate a point? Half the population is voting for climate genocide. But I would rather not go on a tangent convincing you that anthropogenic climate change is real, if you think that's still a topic worthy of further debate.
The specific policies you just listed are all great, I agree with you and think they're worth discussing right here on Lemmy. But they're also nowhere near the Republican platform. Their platform is intolerance; that's why there is no "real" free speech place which includes them.
The second.
And half the population isn't "voting for climate genocide," in fact, a large chunk of them probably don't agree with their party about climate change policy. Voting choices are a complex beast, and it's unfair to assume every voter is okay with every policy the people they voted for support. Everyone will have a different set of issues they care most about, and it's probably not going to be climate policy for most.
The actual number of "climate change deniers" is quite low, and it's mostly rhetoric used by politicians to justify their actual policies, which is essentially, "doing something is worse for the economy."
Again, I don't think that's actually true. That's what they say to rile up their base for the elections (the whole "anti-woke" nonsense), but that's not what they prioritize when they get in office, and a lot of voters see through/ignore that nonsense. It's the same idea as with people on the left talking up LGBT rights and fixing healthcare, but when they actually get in office, they don't really do anything about it.
Your average voter isn't following the "project 2025" nonsense or even the party platform, they're largely just voting for their party because that's what they've always done. Or maybe they think that this time their party will do that one thing they keep supporting them for (for the GOP, this would be balance the budget and shrink the government in ways they want). That never actually happens for much the same reason that the Democratic Party doesn't actually do what a lot of supporters want them to do (universal healthcare, tax the rich, etc).
So your average voter either votes for their party regardless (something like 30% on each side) or they vote based on what direction they think the country should go in (more left or more right), they rarely support the platform as a whole, and IMO they rarely actually care who the candidate is, unless they're extremely far off from the typical candidate. However, arguments like the one you used earlier assume that supporting a party means support for all of that party's policies, and that's just unfair and inaccurate.
The issue is that we have an overwhelming amount of representation from a handful of demographics, politics being one of them, and whenever you have a majority, minorities get the shaft. And that's what I'm frustrated about. I want a platform with open, civil discourse that attracts a diverse set of people, and so far I haven't found a platform that provides that. I want lemmy/the fediverse to be that, but it doesn't seem to be happening. It's less bad in some ways to most of the alternatives, which is why I'm here, but it still falls quite a bit short, especially on the political side of things. I don't know how to solve this problem, so my knee-jerk reaction is to try to provide high quality opposition to when I see evidence of group think.
Anyway, thanks for tolerating my TED talk. I despise the GOP as it is today, but that doesn't mean I think calling them Nazis is appropriate or even desirable. I think good ideas can come from all ends of the political spectrum.
I think this might be the core of our disagreement. They are explicitly consenting to that candidate's policies, regardless of how much they claim to disagree. They're pulling your leg; their primary votes accurately reflect their average beliefs.
IMHO Harris is already polling better than Biden because she talked back to Netanyahu. A significant percentage of Americans were so not OK with the Palestinian genocide, that they were going to not vote.
Meanwhile, completely reasonable not-fascist people will vote for Don "Finish the Job" Trump because Republicans supported small government during desegregation. While he's officially executing political minorities, we can take some solace in the fact that we didn't ban his supporters from any servers.