I came across a post requesting to remove Nutomic from the Lemmy devs due to a comment he made here. In it, he suggests that the ruling class promotes both LGBTQ+ rights and transphobia as a means to create division among the working class. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this perspective. Do you agree or disagree with his viewpoint? What other topics do you believe are used to divide the working class? Let’s discuss!
No. They’re not pushing [human] rights to then push the opposite to push division.
For division, they can push against rights, and still segregate them as others.
One set of people grants rights, and another set of people doesn’t like that and pushes against rights (often with lies and constructing otherlike and images of enemies).
I think it’s rather divisive. Can we talk about the important shit? Like is a hot dog a sandwich?
In it, he suggests that the ruling class promotes both LGBTQ+ rights and transphobia as a means to create division among the working class.
I will never understand how these phobes don’t understand that they are the ones promoting division in the working class by othering people who could be comrades.
If you’re othering people for what consenting adults do behind closed doors, you are the problem.
It’s the working class’ fault. They divide themselves only because they fall for these arguments that x-topic is more important than class issues. The distractions the elite utilize are not sophisticated. We fall for them because we’re dumb.
LGBTQ rights are workers rights. We’re all in this together. The ones arguing against those rights, are the ones being divisive. Support for equal rights, should never be a question.
I do also understand where Nutomic is coming from, though. Using these issues to create that division is cynical politics, and that is a problem. But that should never be used as an excuse to drop the fight for equality.
The ones arguing against those rights, are the ones being divisive.
Lol. Very “no you” energy
Which you’ve deftly countered with ‘nuh uh’! Don’t have an actual argument against the actual ‘the people peddling divisive rhetoric are the actual problem’ argument?
I’d really love to hear how the people saying that all workers rights matter are the ones really being divisive here, rather than the people who are trying to keep workers out of the movement.
One side is literally advocating for inclusivity, while the other is arguing against it, my man.
It can be true that something is both an important right and used unethically by people that don’t actually care about the topic. See Rainbow capitalism as a very related example. Nutomic is right that identity politics are used to create division among the working class, because anything that can create division will be used to do so.
See Rainbow capitalism as a very related example. Nutomic is right that identity politics are used to create division among the working class, because anything that can create division will be used to do so.
I mean that part is accurate. But abandoning whatever issue it is that is being used to create division is not the answer. They use all kinds of legitimate issues to create division. The solution is clearly to get rid of that whole concept where disagreement = division. Not to say that it’s just “all good” if I think people deserve human rights, and you don’t. We can still work together on some things, sure. I’m still going to give you hell about your bad point of view. A lot of people on the left seem to have this concept like it has to be a monoculture, like everyone has to see all issues of right and wrong and good and evil in exactly the same way, and if you don’t see it my way, then you’re a total shit and an enemy on purpose and I need to try to destroy you first before even trying to attempt anything against the right. And that tendency is one that the right absolutely loves to exploit, and they have wild success at it.
(Nutomic also in an extra irony takes it a step further, because his server will not just “divide” from you ideologically, but outright ban you if you try to say that some particular people deserve human rights.)
Sure, but the fact that some people’s basic rights and freedoms are divisive is not an excuse to abandon them. We can’t create a liberated society by accepting oppression. It needs to be confronted or changed in some way. I’m open to discussing the issue differently, or focusing more speech on other topics when possible but I’m not open to letting people be subject to state violence because their existence is unpopular. So what are we really proposing here?
Sounds like the classic leftist drama Monty Python was already making fun of 50 years ago. It’s never actually about what it’s claimed to be about.
yeah but that’s nothing new ; divide and conquor
could list 100’s of other topics: race, gender, religion, abortion, prison, climate change, the police, etc.
The issue with the idea of using queer rights to create division is that our existence is not up for debate. “Queer people deserve a happy life” and “queer people should not exist” are not equal stances that merit equal consideration. Our existence is not a game piece for someone else to play with.
Also, the ruling class never promotes us unless it’s to line their wallets.
Moral ideas can still be used to stoke division, though I doubt that’s the case here. I firmly believe the LGBT hate in America is Russian social media influence. They are who are stoking the flames.
Get down on the ground and talk to people. Even in my deep red county, no one gives a fuck about persecuting LGBT folks. Problem is, they’re like I used to be, “Don’t have a dog in this fight.”
When gay marriage was being debated, I finally came around to the idea the gay rights are civil rights. We need to get back to that messaging.
“Queer people should be as miserable as the rest of us”
our existence is not up for debate.
Also, the current administration might have something to say about that
Lot’s of people would like to strip social justice from leftist ideology and only view the world in a strict Marxist sense where class divisions are the only thing. They claim that a classless society will automatically solve bigotry so we don’t have to worry about that.
In reality modern racism and capitalism were born as conjoined twins and one cannot be understood without the other. Ironically, black radical thought in America has always been bifurcated and marginalized from other Marxists largely over the issue of racial capitalism. This in part explains black voter’s skepticism shown toward politicians like Sanders.
Well said. I’ll just add: Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism
Personally, I think all of this “Person X holds an officially wrong viewpoint on this one singular issue, so let’s attack them and create as much division as possible and take energy away from defending ourselves against people who hold objectively wrong and dangerous viewpoints on 100% of the issues and are actively trying to destroy us” thing is silly. But that is me.
The Lemmy devs are a little bit unusual in that I have problems with their overall politics (even if we actually agree on more than we disagree, probably), not just a one issue. But even in that case, where it’s a sizeable difference of opinion (instead of WE CAUGHT THEM BEING BAD ON THIS ONE ISSUE FUCK EM FUCK EM FUCK EM), I don’t think should be a reason to “divide” from them. People are allowed to hold viewpoints, even allowed to contribute while holding those viewpoints, even if I think they are wrong.
I feel like this is the best approach. An ally is an ally. If they have weird, socially unacceptable, or poorly thought out ideas, but they
- aren’t acting on them,
- don’t promote them,
- still act in good faith on issues we have in common,
then they’re fine for the stuff we care about. The right has built a big tent because they understand this. We’re only holding ourselves back by subjecting each other to purity tests.
As always, there are limits, but generally we need to build more coalitions.
I agree with this. The liberal side has been for too long carving ourselves into “Holier than thou” people of who can be the most accepting. It creates a backfire that while you yourself are going for who can be the most accepting, they push away people who may just have one small idea that may need to be tweaked or altered. The problem is that it’s much easier to push them away rather than invest time in understanding their viewpoint and asking them why they believe that. So they push away potential allies, and look right there the conservative movement has their arms wide open. “We don’t think you’re whatever-phobic or racist, you’re welcome here, look we’re all good people too!”. And the right grows.
We tell Laura that she’s not welcome because she’s unsure if she should accept dragon-kin as a true gender ideology rather than just saying “That’s okay, we’ll chat about it”, so instead she goes to the right who says “Oh you’re not crazy at all, they’re crazy!”
I don’t want to exile them per se but I do have a huge problem with the way they manage their instance, and I think a boycott of that instance has become the only reasonable way to respond to their abuses of power.
If they ever stop being thought police then we can reconnect. It’s not their politics or views that are the problem, it’s their behavior. Even though, yes, I also think their politics are extremely toxic.
Hm… yeah. I mostly agree. Or sort of almost agree. This one issue of Nutomic having an offically incorrect stance on trans issues is one thing, and then their wider pro-authoritarian politics is another, and then the way they manage their instance is another. They are related but separate.
In terms of a response to the third thing, I do agree about a “boycott” meaning not posting new stuff to lemmy.ml communities in general and just preferring communities in more human-rights-respecting instances. I don’t think that blocking the instance, or not commenting on their stuff at all and having isolation, is a good way, though. The thing is that that isolation just helps their censorship to be effective. That’s part of the point of the fanatical way they attack outsiders and try to curate a narrative for their users, and it’s really very effective. If you ever look from inside lemmy.ml, it looks like they all make sense and there is consensus, and we’re the weird ones. One way to tear down that veil is to have open communication, and people from the outside coming in and saying normal things, and then they have to continuously have that fanatical response or else have the mods intervene (and then we can talk about how the mods are overreaching and it’s pretty clear who is talking sense about it, over time). Talking to each other is good. I feel like if all the not-pro-Russian people just self censor themselves from lemmy.ml, because they know the mods are going to go HAM on their comments, then it sort of does their job for them and makes it actually airtight, more so that it would be otherwise. That’s what they would want to see happen.
One related thing which bugs me more than it seems to bug a lot of people: I think it’s a problem that they are so overtly aligned with these malicious actors, and then also they are producing and packaging software that all of us use that is designated for this important purpose. Like if if was an Israeli software development team putting together a new federated web site that all of us were going to trust our communication to, and their home instance was all pro-Israel stuff and you could get banned for criticizing Israel, that would be insane for us to trust the software and the core instance. I mean yeah it’s open source but also, the people controlling all of it are super-green with these people that like to do corruptions to software and sneaky things in the Western media sphere. That would bug me. That’s kind of how I look at the Lemmy devs, and why for example I reacted so strongly when the docs had that “mistake” that would send new Lemmy installs’ admin passwords to lemmy.ml by default. I feel like that aspect of it is also something that should get thought about more often, it is why I am in favor of Piefed even if reimplementing the whole thing from the ground up is this massive amount of duplicative work.
I think you’re underestimating the censorship over there. I agree open communication is good and I used to comment over there a lot—during the initial Reddit migration in 2023 they couldn’t stay on top of it all, or maybe they were more permissive back then. But it all got removed eventually and I got banned even after deciding I should avoid overtly political topics. It’s bad and it’s a waste of time to even try to engage there. Better to wait for their users to come here to educate them, futile though it might be.
I didn’t hear about this “mistake” but I agree it’s problematic and hope my instance eventually moves to piefed. Though I haven’t tried it so I don’t know how well I’ll like it.
On the other hand, I do feel like the ideology of the standard corporate media platforms is about as bad as the tankies and we don’t flip out about that. Makes me wonder about double standards here.
I didn’t hear about this “mistake” but I agree it’s problematic and hope my instance eventually moves to piefed. Though I haven’t tried it so I don’t know how well I’ll like it.
https://lemmy.world/post/32838609
It was interesting.
On the other hand, I do feel like the ideology of the standard corporate media platforms is about as bad as the tankies and we don’t flip out about that. Makes me wonder about double standards here.
Yeah, pretty much. I realized that my Israel analogy wasn’t even completely on point. It would be more along the lines of someone writing the software who was all cool with Palantir and ICE, and constantly spoke highly of them. That’s about the level that I put the Russian government on (which of course isn’t to excuse any of the horror of what the US government is currently trying to do; if anything, it goes the other way and throws into relief the horror that Russia has already been for decades now that has been normalized at this point.) And, of course, all our existing corporate social media is okay with Palantir and ICE, they just have more sense than to talk out loud about it.
Yeah they are generally quieter. But we all know where they stand. However, I find it much more difficult to sever myself from them since everyone uses them.
Yeah maybe but what can we do about it? I’m not gonna de-transition
Is that an option? Serious question, never needed to think about specifics.
I don’t think it’s a conscious or intentional plot (a la Hanlon’s razor, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity), or even specifically caused or furthered by the upper class. People would talk about these things anyway, as society progresses. But it does benefit them, to split the left like that, so that we’re so busy fighting amongst ourselves that we don’t fight against those who really matter.
I think all things need to be discussed but people just have to be smart and not try to 5d chess things. Look at your options and make the best decision. Remember that most of our problems are wealth disparity and even many of the 1% recognize it is not even good for them. I have known many farmers, union folks, retired, all sorts that like to vote against their interest because they get into some zero sum, us or them, mindset. By and large whats good for others is good for me. I would love to be the lowest person on earth in a society where that is a good life.
My opinion is that it’s divisive.
