SeborrheicDermatitis [any]

I think a lot of people might think…well why does it matter anyway if the words aren’t being used right as long as it gets through to people? But I think from a social-scientific perspective, and from the PoV of actually wanting to eliminate genocide as a practice, it is important.

Let’s use a medical analogy. You cannot treat cancer without knowing exactly what cancer is-when something is cancer and when it’s something else, and the specific mechanisms through which cancer occurs and becomes fatal. If you are an activist and you see every serious ailment as cancer and go “we need to treat this cancer, now!” and people take you seriously, then you will not understand the cancer, nor know how to prevent/cure it.

It’s the same with genocide. You cannot have a “cure” or a “preventative technique” for genocide unless you study it. Study how it occurs, why it occurs-the specific causal factors that lead to political elites making the decision to commit genocide. For this-because we never have experimental conditions in the social sciences-we need to use comparison. We need to compare between cases to determine common factors that are specific (probabilistically rather than deterministically, in reality) to genocide. You need to be able to have a list of cases you can compare between to do this, and you need to be able to have a boundary within which these cases exist, and outside of which you can put everything as “not genocide”. If this boundary is wrong (e.g., if you put every case of persecution in the ‘genocide’ case list) then you’re going to end up msunderstanding every little thing about genocide, and you’ll never get any closer to figuring out how to stop it or prevent it.

Thus ipso facto making a political/activist call of ‘genocide!’ to get attention is actually extremely harmful, and it is a key part of the social scientist’s job to determine whether X or Y case can be considered genocide because, if we consider genocide an ontologically specific phenomenon (e.g., it has its own mechanisms and processes separate to that of, say, general repression), we need to keep false positives outside of our case list which will make it harder to uncover the causal logics of genocide in the first place.

Theoretically he could still be right but there is no reason to believe he is. He doesn’t speak any local languages, has never done any fieldwork in the region, and his methodology/analysis is extremely unscientific and poor. I would encourage you to read his articles and see for yourself-it’s based on extremely shoddy and weak correlations w/ no serious causal connection whatsoever. I was honestly shocked at how poor the “scholarship” was considering how many people take it seriously.

There’s obviously extensive evidence of persecution and forced cultural assimilation, but that is not genocide. These things matter.

Considering there is absolutely no scholarly consensus on Xinjiang (my very own former genocide studies teacher, Dr Jens Meierhenrich, does not consider it genocide, for example. He is not a ‘tankie’, he is an extremely well-regarded political scientist who has taught at the best universities in the world) being a genocide it is pretty silly to support defederating because of it. Adrian Zenz is not a valid researcher as he’s done no fieldwork, doesn’t speak any local language, is a Christofascist fundamentalist (look up some of the stuff he’s written about Jews), and his methodology + analysis is extremely poor. I’ve read through all his papers to see what the big deal was and I found it was completely unscientific and was just based on some very lousy correlations. The UN investigation simply did not find proof of genocide and did not claim to. It said there is evidence of human rights abuses which is something most will agree with.

I have no doubt there is genuine persecution + forced cultural assimilation against the Ughyur-I have a friend whose wife is an Ughyur who fled the region because of it-but there is simply not evidence of genocide.

No, I do not agree w/ most Hexbears on China because I do not believe it is democratic, but that doesn’t mean China’s political system is beyond discussion, does it?

People being rude and mean is not good and I do not suppor them. Hopefully Hexbear admins will ban them or whatever.

I think this does not constitute a valid reason for deferation whatsoever. It just feels like people are not open to seeing other opinions that they’re not used to.

It’s more so that stuff just appears on the hexbear.net front page and people comment on it (like this one). I don’t even know what Lemmy really is so I just comment on whatever’s there! There is no organised brigading effort as such, it’s just how Lemmy works combined with the unexpected introduction of an active community changing the pre-existing community balances.

tbf it seems like the majority of people there replying to you are replying in good faith, though it is obviously not good even when a significant minority of people are mean/rude. I do agree with you in part with what you were saying on there (not in full as I do not feel generous towards the US motivation towards its support for Ukraine) and honestly I’ve never been receiving hostility for my position when I’ve talked about it on here (see my recent post history if you want proof). I guess people are seeing the new @lemmy people commenting and getting jumpy unjustifiably and thus being more harsh. I hope that sort of thing goes away when they’re more used to seeing other lemmys in their communities but I don’t blame you for feeling not great about it (even if plenty were also engaging in good faith that doesn’t get rid of the bad faith ones). I hope it changes.

I vehemently disagree with Hexbear’s support of the modern CPC but I don’t think that makes them bots or indoctrinated or whatever, they just have a different viewpoint on the matter and it doesn’t take much prodding to get past the shitposting and to get a fairly detailed/nuanced understanding of why from a lot of users on the site. Same with their thoughts about Russia and Ukraine and such. Again, I disagree w/ the majority of people on Hexbear on this issue, but you wont get attacked if you engage in good faith (at least, I don’t) and people are more than willing to explain themselves.

I fundamentally disagree w/ the notion that there is any significant amount of actual “Kremlin bots” or “CPC bots”-I mean this community has been its own isolated thing, a dwindling relic of an old Subreddit, for 3 years before federation happened, what’d be the strategic value anyhow? They all show their humanness if you give them the time and the good faith, so to speak.

I agree that deplatforming is good against Nazis and the like, ‘debate’ as a sacred virtue is just not how you defeat these sorts of awful belief systems (and people acting upon them, more importantly). I think studies have shown repeatedly that deplatforming does work + that debating them just boosts their message.

As you say, I think equating socialists (even revolutionary socialists) with Nazis and fascists is completely wrong though, for certain. It’s unfortunately too common these days in certain areas of the internet.

At the end of the day ‘evil’ is not a particularly valuable analytical framing if we are being proper social scientists (since, of course, “the capitalist becomes capital personified”, e.g., their actual personality traits don’t matter and they needn’t be sociopathic to do horrible things. Though a disproportionate of landlords are horrible people ofc). On a social media site, however, there’s nothing wrong with using emotive language like ‘evil’ and using venting memes like the guillotine pictures and I guess there is a disconnect in how it’s perceived to the ‘materialist’ mode of analysis that does not focus on individual personality traits + does not see the individual as the supreme and singular unit of analysis.

This is on the front page of chapo.chat/Hexbear.net. Isn’t the whole deal w/ federation that the communities merge their posts and their commenters? I apologise if I am misunderstanding. Personally I just comment on whatever things I think are worth commenting on regardless of what community it’s on as I think my comments never violate any particular rules anyhow. It’s not brigading it’s just people wanting to comment on what’s in front of them and directly referring to them, IMO. I understand how it would feel that way when it has come so suddenly, though. It’s just what happens when an old and active group suddenly joins a bunch of smaller and/or less active ones (or, at least, larger to a small enough extent that the new commenters are still noticeable).