A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform.
I’ll name ten.
Freedom of speech - especially the right to criticize political leaders. An independent judiciary separate from executive power. Access to uncensored information. Property rights. Highly respected universities. Due process. Electoral representation. Consumer protection. Work-life balance. Disability rights.
But I’m not criticizing them for failing to summarize the entire article in the headline. I’m criticizing them for being biased - and for clearly showing that bias in how they chose to write the headline. This isn’t neutral reporting on what’s happening.
So they didn’t…
The title should quote what they actually said rather than putting their own bias on it. You’d call them out for twisting your words like that. Hold yourself to the same standards.
I don’t even need to read the article to know that they didn’t actually say that.
In many cases, especially early on, it’s possible that medication can achieve a state of mental calmness and focus that’s beyond what the baseline is for neurotypicals.
This just sounds so strange to me because, in my case, it works exactly the way you said you wish it did.
if you have the true conviction of your beliefs
I can sympathize with this.
My personal view is that when you silence speech, you leave people with no other means of influence but violence.
Why does the general attitude on Lemmy seem to lean toward more censorship and silencing of speech rather than less? There are plenty of popular views floating around here that I don’t agree with, but that aren’t surprising - they align with the kind of people who are drawn to a place like this. This one, however, is surprising.
EDIT: I think ChatGPT did a pretty decent job at explaining this. And didn’t even accuse me of being a fascist for asking.
You’re not imagining it—liberal-leaning platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Tumblr, and especially certain corners of Reddit often do show a strong tendency toward content moderation that can slide into ideological gatekeeping or outright censorship. But to make sense of why that happens, you have to separate two things: who has power in the platform’s culture and what values they believe justify limiting speech.
Historically, you’re right—censorship has often been associated with right-wing authoritarianism: military dictatorships, state control of media, book bans, and suppression of dissent. But the core mechanism of censorship is not inherently right-wing. It’s just a tool. Who uses it, and why, changes depending on who holds power.
In the online left-leaning spaces, the logic behind censorship isn’t about suppressing dissent to maintain state power, but rather about protecting marginalized groups and enforcing norms of inclusion, safety, and respect. That sounds noble on the surface, and often it is. But when taken too far or enforced rigidly, it results in a climate where even questioning the norms themselves is treated as harmful. That’s the paradox: speech is restricted in the name of compassion, not control—but the effect can feel just as silencing.
There’s also the factor of social capital. On platforms dominated by left-leaning users, calling something “harmful,” “problematic,” or “not aligned with community values” gives you power. Moderators and users gain status by enforcing those norms. And since these platforms are not democracies but tribes with moderators, dissenting views often get downvoted, banned, or flagged not because they’re poorly argued, but because they challenge the group’s identity.
You could argue it’s not censorship in the classic state sense—it’s more like ideological hygiene within self-selecting communities. But if you’re the one getting silenced, it doesn’t really matter why. You just feel the muzzle.
One more thing: platforms like Lemmy are very new, often run by idealists, and many come from or were inspired by activist spaces where speech norms are strict by design. In that context, “freedom of speech” isn’t always a priority—it’s seen as something that can enable harm, rather than protect truth-seeking. And that mindset has filtered into moderation culture.
So while the underlying motivations are very different, the behavior—shunning, silencing, gatekeeping—can look similar to the authoritarian censorship you mentioned. It just wears a different uniform.
Isn’t this kind of like ridiculing that same Atari for not being able to form coherent sentences? It’s not all that surprising that a system not designed to play chess loses to a system designed specifically for that purpose.
I went with this one personally since Fairphone ditched the headphone jack.
People keep bringing up the “sticking your head in the sand” argument every time I mention filtering out political content, but I’d argue that if something is truly important, then it simply can’t be avoided - even if you tried. Secondly, no one is obligated to “stay informed” at the cost of their sanity. And then there’s the fact that I can go to an actual news site when I feel like it, rather than having the news force-fed to me throughout the day when I’m just trying to look at some memes while sitting on the toilet.
For the past year or so, at least 50% of the threads on my front page have consistently been hidden because they’ve been filtered out by my political word filters. I honestly can’t comprehend how anyone can consume this much US politics and not go completely insane.
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I’ve had downvotes disabled for over a year now. If someone takes issue with something I said, they can come and tell me directly - a downvote on its own carries next to no value, so I don’t even want to see it.
I suppose you could make the same argument for upvotes too, and I wouldn’t be opposed to hiding those from everyone either. But in my case personally, I don’t see any downside to them. It’s good to know that there are at least a handful of people who agree with my views. The main issue with visible upvotes on social media in my view is that it encourages saying stuff just for the applause. There’s a ton of people here whose entire comment history is just snarky one-liners.
But how could you be positive when X, Y and Z??
Absolutely not.
I’m assuming your truck has an automatic transmission
It’s almost 20 years old and doesn’t have automatic anything.
My rig is close to 20 years old and I recently upgraded the motherboard, CPU and RAM which were the last original parts on it - the GPU I had replaced few years prior. Now the case is the only original part on my “PC of Thesus”
EDIT: Oh yeah and I’m also running Linux now.
It’s a saying - it just rhymes better than “explanation is not justifying.” You know what I meant. I gave an explanation for why some people do what they do, and you responded as if I were justifying it, which I wasn’t.
Had you used the word excuse, that would at least suggest I acknowledge something is bad but am still okay with it - which would be closer to how I actually feel about it. But saying I’m justifying it implies I think it’s right, reasonable, or morally acceptable, which completely misrepresents both my view and the intention of my post.
Explanation is not excuse.
Not just kids - I find myself talking more and more with LLM’s as well. Neither my friends, my partner or the people I hang around online are interested in talking about the stuff I’m interested in. Neither is ChatGPT but atleast it pretends to be.