Over the past months it has become increasingly apparent that the 196 moderation team has a member who does not align with the goals and values of the rest of the team.
196 has a very clear stance on tankies and other authoritarians. No authoritarian apologia of any kind is allowed in our space. It’s not our intent to tell leftists how to be leftist, but we’re not willing to allow somebody we so fundamentally disagree with to moderate our community.
Based on this stance we’ve decided to remove Kittenzrulz from the moderation team.
Kittenzrulz has consistently been opposed to the condemnation of tankies and has made several worrying statements that show that there’s a deep ideological gulf between her and 196.
Furthermore it should be noted that kittenzrulz has not taken part in moderation decisions on lemmy for months, while she is only somewhat active on the matrix (as a mod). This will not be a major change in that sense.
The following is a list of screenshots that should help to showcase what we mean.
Collection of based statements
This one is from yesterday
First to be clear we’re not banning her from the lemmy community or the matrix space and she is free to continue to interact with all of us. We still want her around as we think of her as a friend who we care about and want to see happy and healthy, though we understand this decision might cause kittenz some stress.
As of this moment kittenzrulz is no longer a mod of 196. A vote was held and all mods that voted voted in favor of demoderation, with a few mods abstaining (either due to not having an opinion on this or due to being inactive).
And just to make sure everybody is on the same page, this is not a condemnation of kittenz as a person. People can disagree on things and still get along, we’re just not comfortable letting her make decisions on our behalf and want to prevent any further problems we see as a likely outcome.
@kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com I do really appreciate your desire for honesty and I admire your willingness to lose your standing on it, but I don't think all of your comments on Stalin make sense.
First of all, the thing about the CIA self-debunking, if you're referring to that one note (the "leader of a team" thing), is a myth and a crass misunderstanding that got perpetuated for a long time. That was basically the equivalent of a tip line and doesn't reflect the agency's actual informed stance on Soviet leadership, which afaik we don't have such a tidy summary of.
Secondly, I object to the "strong leader" rhetoric. You are of course right that Stalin was superior to Allende, but that's because Allende was a reformist while the Bolsheviks took a hardline stance (generally, the right wing was more conciliatory). Stalin's cult of personality (which objectively did exist and which he did less and less to combat and more to support as he aged) is a key element of the undermining of socialism in the SU starting with Khrushchev, because it became very easy to make the SU's socialism synonymous with the already-fallible figurehead who in death had no ability to argue anyway, and so by looking both at real bad choices and invented ones create a basis for a movement that didn't actually do much to address the real issues with bureaucracy except insofar as it promoted liberalizing at the expense of socialist construction.
My broader point being that socialists, as supporters of radical democratization, should be much less concerned with strong leaders than with systems that have the correct incentives to tend toward the outcomes we want and resist antidemocratic corruption. Also, there are significant points of Stalin's success (e.g. during WW2) where he did well because he let experts do their jobs rather than act like he's a universal genius like Hitler did (though of course Stalin also had important strategic input).
Conversely, I think you can make a much stronger claim about Xinjiang, because there has been real repression that is worthy of condemnation but the claim of genocide has been continuously refuted or considered to not have adequate evidence, which in a country like China is a ridiculous thing to be in epistemic suspense about when people have cellphones with which to document things, among many other factors like a lack of militant resistance.
I'm saying all this because I believe you are coming from a place of sincerity and are interested in trying to have a nuanced understanding of these subjects and, while I won't claim to be an expert on literally anything, I'm pretty sure about these points.