Why are they in lemmy.ml? Because they wanted to congregate somewhere and Lemmy was made by far left people and is federated so it’s probably a good choice to avoid censorship.

Why do they admire authoritarian regimes? Each may have a different reason but one common reason is because those regimes are anti-western or socialist/communist. So if you’re socialist/communist, hate a lot of aspects of the west or just like rooting for the underdog but still want a big team you can throw your support behind then those countries are the obvious choice. Of course you can be socialist, communist or anti-western without supporting authoritarian regimes, but then you basically have to admit that every time socialism/communism has been tried it has failed and you may be discomforted by the thought that there’s no powerful countries fighting for humanity and become hopeless.

Why are people socialist/communist? Usually because they see a lot of problems with capitalism, often to do with inequality, while socialism/communism promises total equality and fairness.

Why are people anti-western? I wouldn’t say the people we’re talking about are consistently anti-western, since they don’t oppose many things the modern west represents, like LGBTQ, technology, “democracy”, human rights, common law, federalism, hedonism, progressivism, etc. It seems to me they only dislike the aspects they’ve been told to dislike by western mainstream media and education, which focuses on things like the Atlantic slave trade (rather than slavery in Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, pre-Columbian America or literally anywhere else in all of world history) and Nazi Germany (rather than Communist Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba).

You mean human societies everywhere are failing and some people attribute that to capitalism

I think it’s debatable who is worse. The country who killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons and millions more in world domination efforts including soft power and manipulation, or the country who killed hundreds of thousands in a single communist purge, millions more in Holodomor and would probably have nuked cities if they had invented nukes first. Several other countries are/were similarly bad and many others would be if they had sufficient power.

But they don’t oppose everything the west represents. Like technology, LGBTQ, “democracy”, common law, federalism, etc. It seems to me they only dislike the aspects they’ve been told to dislike by mainstream media and education, which focuses on things like the Atlantic slave trade (rather than slavery in Africa, the middle east, eastern Europe, pre-Columbian America or literally anywhere else in all of world history) and Nazi Germany (rather than Communist Russia, China, North Korea or Cuba).

But wouldn’t that be very odd? A lot of those 40-year olds would probably give the middle finger.

This seems like an excuse to normalize age/ID checks even for people who are obviously over 18. Totalitarian Britain being totalitarian as usual.