I saw a post that talked about racism towards people and when I talked about it the response I got was very heated and a person even called lemmy.world a community of ‘hitlerites’
I have been around for a week or so and this is my first time seeing such explicit vulgar reaction towards another community, is this a one-off or should I block hexbear?
You either block them and die a liberal or you engage and observe and live long enough to start spreading their agitprop and using your new pronoun “comrade” as you lead the way to glorious revolution.
(Seriously though, they’re just people on a leftist political instance. You’ll get the good, bad, and weird, same as any other place).
I just took a look at your participation in the hexbear thread you are referencing, and I’m confused about the issue. Seems like you got mostly thoughtful and positive replies. There was some .world bashing at the end including the bit you quoted. It seems strange to me that rather than ask questions about hexbear to the actual users there, you came over here to ask on an instance that has daily threads complaining about leftist instances.
Note: being on Lemmy for about a year, I didn’t live through the early days of this place. Here’s what I can recollect, as neutrally given as possible.
TL;DR The recent conflicts between two politically different groups on Lemmy have radicalized many people, and many Hexbear residents in particular. Unless you are to discuss the far-left ideas and are very radical about disadvantaged groups, you are safe to block it.
Hexbear is a far-left (as in actually communist) anti-discrimination community, initially more of a safe haven to promote equality and foster a healthy and welcoming place for leftists to come together.
With core developers of Lemmy also being far-left, Hexbear naturally fitted the landscape along with the official Lemmy.ml, heavy far-left Lemmygrad.ml and others.
As time went on, however, all sorts of left-leaning and apolitical folks, not just far-left, came to the platform, filling other instances like Lemmy.world (now the most populated of them all), sh.itjust.works and many others.
As a result, Lemmy has two groups of people with radically different political views: one is a group of more or less organized far-left, and the other is everyone else, most commonly liberals. This distinction has caused a lot of conflicts and heated discussions based on political adherence.
Most notable case is latest US elections. The far left side generally called not to vote Democrat as Biden has failed to deliver on many of his promises and empowered Israel to commit war crimes in Palestine, while the liberal audience called to vote Democrat to not let Republicans take the lead, which may arguably lead to an even worse outcome than unaccountable Dems can make.
This divide has raised a lot of mutual hostility, brigading, and uncivil behavior, which has radicalized many on both sides of the conflict, the consequences of which you have got to experience.
What to do with that is up to you to decide. Hexbear is very politically uniform and very political overall, so if you’re not here to discuss communism, you won’t lose much and will gain additional peace of mind.
Hexbear users will bully you to hell the very second you say something they disagree with. In my case, I said South Park is a funny show. They also think Putin is a good guy and at the same time they pretend 90% of their users are trans. Basically it’s a bunch of douche kids playing revolutionaries and intimating anyone they disagree with. My 2 cents.
Tankies
It’s an instance meant to seem attractive to western youths while explicitly only serving the needs of the Chinese Dictatorship.
Most of their users are bots, human decency is their kryptonite. If ever you are convinced that any of them are your friends, you’re just another mark they intend to make full use of and throw away: you are not a human being in the eyes of Hexbear.
It’s a bear with six legs
Seems this post is being brigaded by hexbear alts fyi
It’s a tankie instance. You’re not missing anything important or reality-based by blocking it. You should also block lemmy.ml.
It’s an instance that became known for brigading other instances to “dunk” on anyone who has remotely different ideas than they do, as well as spamming oversized emojis and pictures of pigs shitting on their own testicles. They have been defederated by most instances for good reason, as they always showed up enmasse to completely derail discussion and their own stated purpose of federating with other instances was to “dunk on liberals and dismantle Western propaganda”. Their users would harass people in DMs for weeks on end if that person said something they didn’t like. I was there to see this happen in several instances before they all defederated from Hexbear and it almost made me quit Lemmy entirely.
Below are some examples of various instances considering federating with Hexbear, only for Hexbesr’s users to cause enough problems to get defederated. The threads themselves are best viewed from an instance that federates with Hexbear in order to see the awful behaviour for yourself, and the lemmy.ca thread has several more examples of this.
https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 https://lemm.ee/post/4543536 https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2017079 https://lemmy.world/post/249833
Do note that a lot of Hexbear users have alternate accounts on lemmy.ml and midwest.social (because nobody wants to federate with Hexbear), and a lot of these people will be in this very thread trying to defend Hexbear. Don’t be fooled by them. Hexbear is a toxic cesspit.
TLDR: they are right-wingers pretending to be left wing
I love this image. Something that always confused me is that they are communist, but support russia? An extremely far right government?
Authoritarians like authoritarian regimes. They’ll perform extreme mental gymnastics to reconcile their preconceived notions with reality, like the tankies that declare China to be socialist. Also, most of them see the US as the Great Satan that is responsible for any and all evil in the world. Therefore anybody who opposes the Great Satan must be good.
most of them see the US as the Great Satan that is responsible for any and all evil in the world.
That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
America is largely fine. The problem it has is a violently coercive economic model that forces people to be profitable to other people or risk destitution, homelessness, or even death by exposure, and a political system that is militaristic, imperialistic, and dysfunctional.
My favourite quote is this:
America has three political groups, but is serviced by only two political parties - the extreme ChristoFascist right has a party all to themselves, while the moderate right and centrists share a party such that it cannot effectively function.
I can’t help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers. I should probably ask that on NSQ some time, when I can figure out a way of asking that won’t get me banned.
I can’t help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers.
One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can’t adequately counter with objective evidence.
The only problem with that is that I don’t have the political knowledge to be able to counter their responses, and nobody else responds to the thread, so it kind of dies there. If for instance they say (as they have) that North Korea is a perfectly normal country, I don’t have any location-specific knowledge to be able to respond to that, and I’m aware our own media have their own agendas so I’ve no way of knowing objectively who’s right.
What are you talking about? They usually counter with a whole monograph, with links to receipts, like you got just now.
North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they’re not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I’d be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they’re alive. It’s hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we’re given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they’re enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it’s not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people’s lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there’s only so much we can really learn from these foreigners’ experiences.
Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:
- Their mindset, especially the skepticism and national security extremism didn’t come from nowhere. A major cause of their lack of development are that the UN Command bombing ‘destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.’ [wiki] and the US and later UN sanctioned them [wiki].
- The pervasive propaganda is VERY blunt by our standards. That said, their nationalism and idolization of political leaders is certainly not unique, even if the pictures and statues of their ‘glorious leaders’ everywhere are freakin’ weird. For a comparison to a more familiar country: the US pledge of allegiance, idolization of the Founding Fathers and pervasive flag display are also unusual manifestations of ingrained nationalism, even if to a lesser degree than NKs patriotism.
- South Korea is also pretty far from normal. Their First Republic stage included their leader getting exempted from 8-year term limits and executing the opposition leader while arresting other members, and has repeatedly become a dictatorship up to the present Sixth Republic, where the current president just got impeached for establishing a dictatorship, making them the third SK president to be impeached so far (the second-previous president was being directed by a cult leader’s daughter along with the ‘Eight Goddesses’ group of billionaires who were basically writing legislation themselves.)
But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that’s why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they’re just the same as other countries.
Damn, that analogy is apt af
There’s no support for the Russian Federation. Support for the USSR? Absolutely, but not the RF. There’s critical support, as in the RF currently takes an antagonistic stance towards the United States, which many Leftists see as the greater global evil, but no leftist genuinely thinks the RF is doing that out of “good intentions” or has any model that Leftists should replicate.
That sums it up.
I’ve spoken to plenty who were way too sympathetic to Putins ‘Ukrainians are Nazis’ chat with complete disregard of the nuances.
Support for the USSR? Absolutely
Wait, really? The ones responsible for, among other things, the Holodomor? Those guys? Why?!
Marxists support the USSR as the world’s first Socialist State. They don’t believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages, and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.
Hexbear aren’t unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.
They don’t believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages,
“doubling” the life expectancy? Life expectancy was 30 years old prior to the USSR forming in 1922, so yes “doubling” to 67 took until 1967, and before they doubled it, they dropped it to 23.6 years old. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens died early deaths to get there. Starvation didn’t end for many and rationing was commonplace. I suppose killing off a sizable portion of your population would mean less mouths to feed, but what a horrible approach to try to solve that problem.
Perhaps a better measure would be infant mortality. The USA, with its “worse” healthcare, has had consistently less than half infant mortality (or even lower) for every year the Soviet Union existed.
and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.
…in Russian. If you spoke a different language, like Ukrainian, it was forbidden by USSR law from teaching it in schools. This happened to dozens of languages in other Oblasts.
dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages,
On the surface this looks good, but that would be with a Western view of what earned wages could buy. Even with money there was limited food to buy for decades at a time during the Soviet Union. Further, you couldn’t just do something like go a buy a car. You had to get on a wait list for years to even have an option to buy one.
Hexbear aren’t unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.
Better than the final Tsar or Putin, probably, but those are both really low bars to gauge a win by.
I’m not saying everything about the Soviet Union was bad, but holding it up as an example to aspire to would be rejected by most folks that would be forced to live that life (or die an early death under its heel as a consequence of actions of the state). Do the Marxists you’re referring to really pine to live in 1940s or 1950s Soviet Union?
A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don’t you think? Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality. The bit on literacy is also misleading, the vast majority of all SSRs pre-Socialism were illiterate.
Outside of curiously leaving out World War 2 and the massive devastation it brought (80% of combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front), as well as comparing directly to the United States that never saw the same destruction and started the century several laps ahead, your only real criticism was a lack of consumer goods. This is true, light industry was lacking and being closed off from the Global Economy was indeed a contributing factor to its dissolution, but you could have pointed to that honestly.
No, most Marxists don’t want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn’t and be part of building a Communist future.
A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don’t you think?
No I don’t think so. For one reason part of the massive losses were Soviet Military tactics of meatwaves (which Russia still uses today) during WWII. For another, the Holomodor was an extra 10 million citizens of the USSR starved to death that occurred long before WWII when Stalin took all the grain from the people that grew it and let them starve to death. Starving your farmers to death is a monumentally stupid decision for a nation that struggles with food supply. This is the hypocrisy of Soviet Communism. Marx and Engels wrote about empowering the masses, equality in everything, and society without class or station. Yet the USSR was anything but that. History shows that the actions of the state saw massive numbers of dead citizens as a means to an end in both war and peace. Trotsky himself was a victim of the Stalin’s USSR. Famous and brilliant Soviet orbital rocket designer Sergei Korolev, was another victim dying from complications from living in gulag. Do you think Marx and Engels would have seen their ideas at work in the Soviet Union?
Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality.
The infant mortality was more than double the USA every year for the entire existence of the USSR. Or are you claiming WWII was still to blame for the higher infant mortality 45 years after Hitler ate a bullet ending war in the European theater?
No, most Marxists don’t want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn’t and be part of building a Communist future.
Is there consensus in the Marxist community about any nation today practicing this Communism 2.0 or is it all just political theory at this point?
“Tankie” here, russia sucks
What makes you a “tankie” if you don’t share their beliefs?
If you agree that “russia sucks” make someone not a tankie, then you’ll conclude that 99% of Hexbear are not tankies.
Can you go over there and get a poll started?
Russia and China. The two groups who are well documented to use tanks against their citizens; hence the name. A tankie is someone who defends that, at least historically.
People usually call me a tankie
You called yourself a tankie
deleted by creator
we don’t, we just hate the us more.
It’s obvious you hate yourselves most.
how so?
See, this is why capitalization matters.
im not a native speaker but wouldnt the word for this in this context be “ourselves”?
What does the Y axis represent here?
Technically, the X-axis doesn’t represent anything either, as the far-right plot point curves upward, rather than continuing.
The amount of mental gymnastics being done to justify their ideology
Mental gymnastics is the term given to people who read books by the mental couch and potato chip crowd.
Separation from reality, maybe?
“Y” is the name of one of the major meme/shitpost contributors on lemmy.ml
It looks like another way of drawing the political compass left/right (collective vs individual rights) on the x axis and authoritarian/libertarian (obedience to centralized authority hierarchy vs distributed political pluralism) on the y axis. Tankies and far right would be in auth q1 and q2, far left q3, and not representing q4 labeling the quadrants from top left clockwise.
It’s a reference to horseshoe theory with the addition of the left wing where it’s actually democratic as opposed to communism authoritarianism which can resemble fascist authoritarianism in a war economy.
“tankies” (aka Marxist-leninists) fully believe in Democracy - they just reject the idea that neoliberal two party American democracy is the be all and end all.
For some reason they are more pro Russian suppression state, Chinese one-party censorship state and even apologise for DPRK. It’s pretty tall order to call any of those democratic. Then from my discussion with tankies they often advocate for an armed revolution which are very undemocratic in their nature and often lead to one-party states or a military junta government.
Marxist-Leninism is a democratic ideology but the way tankies talk doesn’t sound very democratic to me.
For some reason they are more pro Russian suppression state
They really aren’t. I keep seeing .worlders assert this but I’ve never seen it there. China and DPRK yes, but not Russia. (I also do consider China to be at least as democratic as western countries, not so much Korea, but I don’t mind hearing opposing views.)
Is it the way tankies talk that make it sound not democratic to you? Or it the biases you went in with?
If we read it as a political compass
Auth+
Lib-
Why would supposed right-wingers be holding Leftist theory reading groups, hosting mutual aid comms, donating to Palestinian gofundmes, and supporting trans rights to some of the highest degrees on the fediverse? Irony? Seems like a silly hypothesis.
posted from lemmy.ml
I don’t see how that discounts anything, why would right wingers create a relatively isolated community to read Marxist and Anarchist theory, protect and advocate for trans rights, and frequently pin donation threads for Palestinians? Seems like way too much effort to be ironic, and defederating from other instances would hurt their supposed goal of “trolling.”
hosting mutual aid comms
I’ve seen those posts (I have no filter)… “I need money for rent” 🦗 🦗 🦗
Okay, that is legit hilarious and makes so much sense in retrospect.
I like horseshoe theory. Basically far-left and far-right come to be same extremistic pieces of shit that are more alike than not, e.g. Hitler(right) and Stalin(left).
The left-right spectrum itself just isn’t a useful model, but the mere existence of anarchists contradicts horseshoe theory.
Judging by the dislikes in my previous post, my point did not get across, but whatever…
You can be a dictator on either spectrum. And if you’re a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning values… Today it seems its easier to become one (a dictator) going right, since these folk are by nature more guilable…
If you consider your self a liberal and you think thats far-left (what republicans for example like to paint their opponents), you’re an idiot. Also those that think they’re marxists or whatever, you’re even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communism… oh the irony
And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn… or profit in a lawless society
And if you’re a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning values…
But this just evidently isn’t true. Take the fascist dictators like ᴉuᴉlossnW and Hitler, who clearly believed in their ultranationalism, irredentism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, militarism, etc. etc. until the days they died (ᴉuᴉlossnW even created a last testament while captured shortly before death re-iterating all their beliefs despite their lost of dictatorship). Then take socialist-party dictators like Castro, Stalin and Mao, who, despite any and all critiques and shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures, intentionally took actions with measurable results to improve living conditions, health and literacy for the worker class as a whole, while limiting and even oppressing the owner class (bourgeoisie). If you already checked out that video in my last reply then we’d know ‘left leaning values’ can mean a heap of different things in different contexts, but I believe that these progressive and anti-capitalist efforts are solid examples to prove the point.
Also those that think they’re marxists or whatever, you’re even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communism… oh the irony
I don’t have either of those, but I can’t understand why there would be any irony or contradiction there, at all. Marxism isn’t an anti-technology or anti-fun lifestyle or some religious glorification of poverty. At its core, it’s an analysis of society which (long-story-short) concludes capitalism is an exploitative system and socialism is an alternative economic system where the worker class, as opposed to an owner class, control the tools and resources of production. There’s far more depth than that, but how much time or money someone has doesn’t (directly!) come into that analysis. The famous rallying cry in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is “Workers of the World, Unite!”, and those workers rich enough to afford luxuries are still workers with shared class interest with other workers. You don’t need to be committing crimes against labor to reach that level, they’re not buying factories, commissioning mega-yachts and flying to space.
And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn… or profit in a lawless society
I’m talking about the political philosophy and movement, anarchism. Most of them want to abolish the concept of profit whatsoever, and they make up a major part of the environmental and social justice movements. There’s plenty of critiques of their movement, but they really only want to burn down the state which exploits us.
Lol, ok :)
haha love that
Bend the far right and tankies closer to the center dot.
They seem like grad users in the fact that no one outside their instance wants to federate with their toxic instance. Who would’ve guessed that a highly charged instances calls people “Hitlerites” as an insult. (Obv I lack context here regarding the comment.)
Hexbear, lemmygrad and (in great part) lemmy.ml are tankie instances.
They basically deny any crimes of Stalin, Mao etc…
I mean Mao greatly regretted his plans and was very sad they didnt work, he went onto become a vegan and grow his own food as to not get the food meant for the workers
Responsible for estimated 40 million deaths on the low end.
“Oopsie, my b.”
All is forgiven.
Life expectancy doubled under Mao.
Life expectancy tanked from 40s to the 30s under Mao in 1960 because of the famine. It went back up because Mao took a step back from governing and moderates introduced economic reforms to save the economy that Mao hated by the way and life expectancy shot up.
If I kick someone in the teeth then a dentist gives them implants, they technically have a better smile because of me. Are they gonna give me credit for it? Doubtful. Likewise, don’t give Mao credit for someone else fixing a mess he created.
Mao introduced some terrible measures, for sure, but it’s a long shot to say he’s “Responsible for” every death or imply it was at all deliberate. Famines in China were more widespread and frequent pre-Mao.
It shows he tried his best and was sad when he failed, he cared for his people
Mao played a personal role in organising the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[175] which were often exceeded.[165] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[176]
You ever love a group of people so much you personally set an execution quota on them?
So all hitler had to do was say he regretted his plans and all would be fine?
Hitler was a vegetarian, so half as good as Mao who was vegan, obviously.
Hitler killed them on purpose
so did Mao, see this comment
Hexbear is pretty overwhelmingly queer/trans and anarchist/communist.
If you’ve never run into a transfem communist IRL it’s probably because you’re not in many queer or left wing organizing spaces.
I’m actually pretty new to Lemmy in the last year and in that time I’ve seen way more .world posters being toxic about .ml/hexbear and making vague posts about how bad they are. I have to imagine that’s why you’re now seeing backlash to .world. Also most of the time I see people complaining about these instances and I dig into the modlog it’s overwhelmingly because they got banned at some point for being reactionary and are bent out of shape about it.
ITT: everyone says they’re bad without giving any examples, telling you what to think instead of letting you form your own conclusions.
Here’s my take…
They’re more cohesive and insular than most groups you’ll find on social media.
They’ve brewed their own strongly held culture and ideology.
Many are also used to being ostracised by other communities due to sexual preferences or other personal attributes.
The result is, if you naively post in a thread in which they are active your opinion will get stomped on if it does not directly align with theirs.
