Not saying that this is a bad thing, but it's kind of amazing how opinions of the public can shift so drastically within a month: https://lemmy.ml/post/2080934. Last month another user posted in the very same !unixporn@lemmy.ml asking whether people consider the term "rice" racist. The majority opinion back then was "if you get offended over a term like this you should take a break from the Internet."
400 comments total is rookie numbers. You should check out the news posts involving either Russia, China, or Taiwan. Or check out this post where the admins of lemm.ee asked for the users' opinions of whether to defederate from hexbear.net. There are 1884 comments. (There was once more than 1900 comments, but I guess the mods removed some.)
Neither is your reply. When I saw your comment, it immediately occurred to me that you must be from hexbear.net. (My client hides the @instance.org part in usernames.) There was something inherently characteristic of hexbears in your comment. I clicked on your name to check, and voila - of course you were. Your comment is extremely condescending. This is how dreaded the userbase of hexbear.net is. I bet that at least 25 of your 30 upvotes are from other hexbears who upvotes anything from hexbears. I wonder why so many instances have decided to defederate from you.
Having a lot of prisoners is not an indicator of authoritarianism. In addition, you should take note of the fact that the while US does have the highest incarceration rate per capita (629/100k in 2021) and the highest prisoner count (just over 2 million), China comes as a close second with 1690k prisoners. Though this is in part due to the massive population of China (the rate per capita is only 119/100k), this number only includes sentenced prisoners. There are many in pre-trial detention and figures for those aren't available (was 650k back in 2009), bringing the total over the US.
While it is possible for democracies to possess authoritarian elements, they are somewhat opposites of each other. Authoritarianism is characterized by the rejection of political plurality, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. The US embraces plurality and democratic voting, and also has a separation of powers. The government of the US does have its flaws, but it is by absolutely no means authoritarian. You are thinking about another word. While I'm not sure what that word is, ChatGPT suggests that it could be "illiberally democratic."
Sorry, I think my sentence was worded poorly. What I meant was that authoritarianism is a concept suppressed by the government, yet some people believe that it is better than democracy.
As someone who has gotten many, many, many rude comments from hexbears, I felt the need to share my experience. (Some of the comments from hexbears were polite though.) These comments had me brooding over them all day long for a couple of days. (I have since then moved on.) I listed the links to the rude comments below, but I think I should make it clear that while I used to support the idea of defederating from them, I have changed my stance since I heard about the upcoming changes to Lemmy allowing users to block instances. I am no longer in favor of defederating from hexbear.net. People should be able to decide this for themselves, but it is too much effort to switch instances to decide which instances you don't want to see.
Please do also note that I chose to leave out the polite comments in the list below. If you don't want to click on every link, just check out the first one and the last one.
(roughly in chronological order)
There are so many people who believe that the ideology suppressed by the government is always bad. While this is sometimes the case, this is definitely not the case for authoritarianism. (Edit: what I meant was that the ideology suppressed by the government is authoritarianism, which many hexbears seem to support)
Edit 2: Before this is inevitably pointed out, I should admit that some of my comments were rude as well. I apologize for those comments.
randint @ randint @lemm.ee Posts 1Comments 266Joined 2 yr. ago
Why does 50% of hexbears tell people they don't like to go back to reddit? I am never going back.