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Joined 20 days ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • So you allow them to influence other people with their ideas?

    No, absolutely not. I run instances to give gender diverse folk safe spaces. I ban transphobes the instant they appear, I don’t debate them. Offline, I’m visible, active and proud. I am an volunteer at my local parkrun, I’ve spoken openly with people at my workplace, I’ve hosted a queer community radio show, I host a vodcast, and I used to be active in organising events for my local gender diverse community. Because what gets people to change their minds, is an emotional connection with the group they’re targeting. When they start to see us as people, just the same as them, then they start to make choices that aren’t harmful to us, and they start to wind back their own arguments.

    Pushing back is incredibly important, but debating them isn’t effective. Like most people, when confronted with debate points in regards to a topic they hold on to for emotional reasons, they will shift goal posts, and only see the things that validate what they already believe, whilst ignoring the things that challenge it. When they get to the point where they’re ready to challenge their ideas (because their emotional position has shifted) then, lots of the talking points you would normally debate become relevant, but by that stage, it’s a discussion, not a debate.










  • Why does the general attitude on Lemmy seem to lean toward more censorship and silencing of speech

    Because “censorship” in this context is a weasel word. What people complaining about censorship really want, is the ability to be more openly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic etc. What people pushing back against that want is less bigotry.

    But because the bigots can’t own their bigotry, they hide behind “censorship” and not having enough “free speech”.

    This is literally youtube saying “The president says that hating on folks is ok, and we will make more money by aligning with that”. It’s not them taking a stance on free speech, because they still block stuff that costs them money. They still demonetise or block things that are supportive of LGBT folk for the flimsiest of reasons, none of which they would do if censorship or free speech were their reasoning.

    This has nothing to do with “censorship” and everything to do with a deliberate attempt not to increase free speech, but to shift “allowed” speech to the right