Obviously, I am thinking for myself by rejecting your argument that fascism is “not hard right wing”. And you still haven’t provided any sources for your argument. It’s clear to me that fascism is both far-right and authoritarian, and being authoritarian doesn’t prevent fascism from being far-right.

You’re calling fascists “moderate right” and liberal democrats “far-right” because Nazis did some things that you agree with? What exactly did the Nazis do that makes you think fascism is more moderate on the left-right axis than liberal democracy? It looks like you’re either completely ignoring the social policies of fascism, or your understanding of the terms “moderate right” and “far-right” is way out of line with how most people understand them.

I’ll take Wikipedia over a Lemmy comment with no sources that is arguing that fascism is more moderate than it actually is. The Wikipedia articles I linked to are cited, and the citations look very credible to me.

(I’m fully aware of the two-axis political model you mentioned, which is why I distinguished libertarianism from right-wing politics even though libertarians in the U.S. tend to be right-wing.)

Fascism is the dictionary definition of far-right politics. You’d be hard pressed to name a similarly prominent political ideology that is even father to the right than fascism. Likewise, Leninism’s revolutionary ideals place the ideology in the far left, despite its implementations not achieving those ideals. An ideology being authoritarian doesn’t make it moderate on the left-right scale. Instead, the more authoritarian governments tend to be hard left/right instead of moderate left/right.

I have to disagree about right-wing ideology being about “liberty and freedom”. That’s the realm of libertarianism, not right-wing politics. Libertarians in the U.S. tend to be right-wing, but libertarianism and right-wing politics are distinct ideologies. Right-wing politics emphasize traditional values, nationalism, and hierarchial social structures.

Calling Leninism “moderate left” is like calling Project 2025 “moderate right”.

News tip submission forms for Roanoke, Virginia:

• The Roanoke Times
• WSLS (NBC)
• WDBJ (CBS)
• WFXR (Fox)

@UnpopularCrow, since you have more information about this than the rest of us, would you mind submitting the details to these news organizations?

Russian forces invaded Donbas in August 2014, when Petro Poroshenko was the president of Ukraine. Russian propaganda tries to deny the fact that Russia invaded Donbas in 2014, but the evidence is crystal clear.

It is lemmy.ml’s fault that their moderators have been blocking users who criticize China or Russia from unrelated communities like the Linux one. A user’s ability to participate in a Linux community should not depend on them refraining from posting criticism about China or Russia. Defederation protects lemmy.world users from having to self-censor themselves politically to participate in general interest communities.

Your conspiracy theory accusing Meta of being responsible for lemmy.world users wanting to defederate from lemmy.ml is ridiculous. Nobody forced lemmy.ml moderators to block people who criticize China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism from all of their communities.

These lemmy.ml moderators made these bad choices all by themselves without Meta’s help, and lemmy.world has the right to exclude those communities through defederation so that no lemmy.world user has to worry about whether their comment to a front page post goes against a lemmy.ml moderator’s political ideology.

lemmy.ml has changed their level of transparency about their political leanings twice. Look at the history of their home page description:

April 2021 to June 2021:

The flagship instance of lemmy.

June 2021 to November 2022:

A community of leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

November 2022 to now:

A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers

Nobody is saying that there should be no moderation at all. What we are saying is that lemmy.ml moderators tend to remove users and content that are seen as even mildly critical of China, Russia, or Marxism-Leninism, and then sometimes hide the evidence of the removals from the modlog. That’s not acceptable to many people, including me.

I know that and that’s why I said .ml could stand for the country of Mali. However, the .ml in lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml clearly stands for Marxism-Leninism, not Mali, the same way the .tv domain suffix often stands for television, not Tuvalu.

.ml = Marxism-Leninism

This wasn’t obvious to me because ML could also mean the country of Mali or machine learning, but based on their content and moderation patterns, it’s unmistakable that the “.ml” in Lemmy instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml stands for Marxism-Leninism.

Hope that clears things up.