That article is straight dog shit. The author is basically saying that Ted Kaczynski is the stylistic precursor to a particular brand of white nationalist terrorism because he 1) killed people and 2) had a manifesto. That’s it. The article even states:

Effectively, Tarrant followed Kaczynski’s eco-terrorism but reinterpreted it to employ white supremacy and Islamophobia.

Brenton Tarrant was the Christ Church Shooter. He hated non-whites and Muslims. Saying he “followed [Kaczynski’s] eco-terrorism but reinterpreted it to employ white supremacy” is, at best, misleading, and at worst a bald-faced lie. Tarrant had virtually no ideological connection with Kaczynski. He described himself as an eco-facsist because he was a dimwitted 4chan kid who blamed overpopulation on Muslims. For all of his flaws, Kaczynski was an incredibly intelligent and well-educated anarchist and would have despised Tarrant. He didn’t “reinterpret ecoterrorism as white nationalism.” He just labeled himself something he thought sounded cool without understanding it.

maybe the author is also a white supremacist.

What does white supremacism have to do with Ted Kaczynski?

I think I initially read that on a Vox article, but I looked again today and it looks like I must have read that somewhere else. They’re also saying that’s not the case and that there were false reports going around about that. I guess the rumor mill got me this time. Which is good, because no one deserves to be fired for talking openly about sex.

She also got fired from her teaching job over it.

Edit: Luckily, this was not true and she did not get fired for talking about oral sex. Which is good.

on holy disaster

unholy

If there’s one thing I understand, it’s the desire to bicker with people. But I will say that anyone who is a true flamewar veteran knows you have to be able to pick your battles well enough that moderators won’t get involved and will let you have it out in the comments with people.

I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It’s lemmy. There’s a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn’t be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I’ve been on .ml for a while, and while I don’t comment in political threads, generally, I’ve seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they’ve seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems…normal…banal even? There’s a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying “well, their political communities are terrible” is all well and good if that’s your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that’s up to them. And that’s what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I’ve seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

I suppose it’s probably a natural course of events that you’ll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It’ll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

But part of what’s great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.