It’s sad really. This post was the final straw for me. I’ll be unsubscribing. I saw the same thing happen dankmemes. Post after post of politically charged, right leaning nonsense. My tinfoil hat says it’s intentional to kill Lemmy, and honestly it’s working.
Yes, this post when interpreted as ironic, is making fun of socialism and CRT. Regardless it is leveraging oft used conservative boogeymen buzzwords for a joke. It dilutes the original use of the words, and whether or not intended, degrades their meaning. It’s a very common tactic of fascism and hard right actors. It’s exactly what Trump did when assuming the ‘fake news’ moniker and repurposing it to attack media. This entire site has been circling the drain for some time, and the downvotes just prove none of you value actual discussion.
If you read what I’m saying, the intent matters not. It’s the use sarcastically or not in a joking way that plays right into right leaning agenda. But please keep attacking me.
Again, it’s their use in a joke that delivers the whole discussion around CRT into the shitter, enabling right wing agenda. They’re not out to win the argument, they’re out to muddy the waters.
I didn’t block you from making the joke. That’s censorship. I merely pointed out the problem in doing so and that I’m done with it. Take pepe, see how the right ran with that to the point it represents racism.
I didn’t block you from making the joke. That’s censorship.
No, you don't have the power/ability to censor, so you're doing the only thing you can, which is attempting to stifle speech that you (incorrectly) think is counter to your own beliefs, in true right-wing style.
Congratulations! You've become the thing you say you're fighting against!
The discussion started in the shitter, it's never not been in the shitter. Did you think that Chris Rufo was making some high minded philosophical point when he wrote about making everything CRT as a weapon?
I mean, intent matters a little at least, right? Like, I prefer to use the term progressive when describing myself and I found this meme to be a firm chuckle and not problematic. It's saying that the logic used by things like CRT is thematically identical to logic used in biblical texts, which many on the right would actually oppose politically and ideologically.
So like, if the intent was to reframe CRT in a biblical light so as to show ethical inconsistency on the part of Republicans, and it works on a logical and a humourous level, what exactly is the problem?
It's saying that the logic used by things like CRT is thematically identical to logic used in biblical texts...
I don't think it's even going that far. I interpreted it as the conservative throwing the term around glibly without any actual understanding of what it means, simply because they don't like what is being said, and a perhaps a very tenuous connection.
Yeah. It was intentionally made into a boo phrase and thought terminating cliche. Chris Rufo has a lot to answer for, in poisoning the well of discourse in this country. Not that it wasn't already pretty terrible, but an ocean of piss is no excuse to dump barrels of cyanide.
I understand that. You’re the first one to trust I have a point. Trolling from either side serves right wing agendas. It degrades the discussion. I know this is a meme thread, but this thread has been nonstop political garbage for about a month.
I feel like you might be ignoring the purpose of satirical content. IMO, it serves two purposes: the first is to entertain and consolidate people who already agree with the message, the second is to raise cognitive dissonance in those that disagree with the message by raising awareness of hypocrisy.
As someone who cut their teeth on 4chan and ended up harbouring some fairly bigoted views, political satire is a large part of why I eventually abandoned those views.
To write it off as ineffective or even counterproductive seems to me to be a gross misunderstanding of its purpose.
Okay, so, I am reading what you're saying, and I don't really know how one could make a joke that isn't, by your understanding, part of the conservative agenda.
And if that's what you think, I am curious why you're looking at memes at all.
There’s a universe of thing’s worth joking about, but this post just serves political agendas, mostly right wing ones, and isn’t funny. CRT has become such a punching bag it’s lost all meaning. I’ve had the experience of my (very different) field of study becoming a political football, and the end result was the field suffering for years afterwards. Those setbacks are due to the right wing of political discourse choosing to meme the subject and make it political. The very act of targeting it was the main transgression, but subsequent meming on both sides only dragged things down further.
So, telling people to not try and be funny, even those you agree with, is definitely alienating your allies. I hear what you're saying, but I have also seen parents losing their ever loving shit at PTA meetings... And to say that everyone must treat those ignorant displays with quiet respect, because CRT was mentioned... Seems a bit beyond the pale.
So I spoke up to try and explain to this group the pitfall of continuing the jokes on this particular subject. Likewise everyone should speak up at PTA meetings despite the flack. Not certain my work is being appreciated by the local memelords here.
Well, some advice you didn't ask for, and that I don't always follow: it's easier to start a conversation where it is, and direct people towards the productive conversation you want to have, than to start off by calling someone a villain for something they already said. You didn't make your point easy to appreciate.
I will say you've given me some food for thought, though.
The downvotes only validate I’m right that this site is in the shitter. You just assume because the message is liberal, it doesn’t play into right leaning agendas.
"I'm getting down voted so this site is terrible and everyone on it is an idiot. There is no chance that my position was interpreted incorrectly, I missed the point, or I am wrong - it's obviously everyone else".
I think the meme is fairly clearly making fun of American conservative/fascist discourse. Like the whole watering down of any semblance of a working definition of CRT when referenced by right wing pundits and moral panic board meeting parents, where right wing people call every call to be somewhat decent human beings "CRT" or "wokism", and then have no actual working meaning for those words except as something that seems left wing and makes them uncomfortable.
Sort of. I’m saying mocking only lowers the overall dialogue into the shitter, which doesn’t serve the purpose you think. It may make you feel morally superior, but does nothing to fix the issue, and arguably further entrenches the two sides.
I understand all the component words here and still have absolutely no understanding of how you can make your assertions so confidently this makes no sense.
This is a meme sub. Would be like me getting upset at people for posting Linux related questions under the Linux sub vs some tech sub or Windows sub.
There are proper places to have discussions and if you think a meme sub is one of them then you are going to have a bad time. Whether it plays into the hands of conservatives or not is another debate - but generally speaking I do not think making fun of their religion and views in this manner is something they can really weaponize. At some point they are likely to reach a tipping point where more and more people find them insufferable and start tuning them out. People can rarily keep using the same playbook to engage people over and over without them getting tired &/or fed up with it and them eventually.
A good number of us caught on to their grift early on, but en masse, people are slow and dumb. Sadly they need time to catch up to the latest scams and new mediums.
Lemmy was already dying, just look at plots of active users since the Reddit API flap. It’s going down not up. The sooner it does, the sooner a stronger decentralized platform, or newer version of Lemmy, can take it’s place. It’s current iteration is a rickety Reddit clone that suffers from rolling defederation.
I didn't claim Lemmy was or wasn't dying. I said that you unsubbing wasn't going to kill Lemmy.
I really doubt Lemmy is dying though. In much the same way Mastodon isn't dead merely because the Twitter exodus stopped. It'll come and go in waves, just like Mastodon I expect. Or maybe it'll go back to pre-Reddit numbers, when it still wasn't dead.