I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
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“HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point”
Without taking any sides, saying some group is insane and then saying that them lashing back “proves your point” is beyond stupid.
Like, of course they will, what else do you expect them to do? Sit and politely agree?
We should stop with this kind of BS in any sort of debate. Groups will protect themselves, and will not get polite to those who throw slurs at them; that’s natural, normal and speaks nothing about their average behavior.
This never proves any point and is nothing but a dirty rhetorical device aimed to shut your opposition up and make them seem irrelevant. This is not part of any possible healthy conversation.
Also, post is not a genuine question.
If someone calls me insane, the response that proves them wrong is a reasonable, chill response at most. The actual sane thing to do is ignore them or make a joke about the claim.
Just like if someone calls me weird, the response that proves I’m not weird is to say, “hahaha, sure, whatever” or “so what?” The response that would prove their point is along the lines of, “I’m not weird, you’re weird” or “they’re not calling me weird, they’re calling my associate weird.”
Also, post is not a genuine question.
I’ll answer yours in good faith.
what else do you expect them to do? Sit and politely agree?
Internally reach consensus to segregate themselves, then brigade the fediverse whole with content that allowed the majority to believe it was their choice.
Because such actions are well outside of status quo want for bandwagon validation they’re by definition “insane” and “unexpected”. But, the hexbear community is well aware that the majority is better off not yet knowing what they believe. Many expected such actions as it was an obvious moral and ethical imperative that lacked internal leadership support.
Internally reach consensus to segregate themselves, then brigade the fediverse whole with content that allowed the majority to believe it was their choice.
Hexbear was the only lemmy for 4 years, over that time their code base diverged, it took a few months to make federation possible again. There was never a consensus on whether HB should be segregated, a lot of users opposed federation over concerns about harassment or just valuing one of the few leftist communities. The end result was slow federation, with users suggesting specific instances to federate with, and instances getting defederated if the admins failed to take adequate action against transphobes/chasers.
hexbear community is well aware that the majority is better off not yet knowing what they believe
Half this thread is hexbears and others telling people exactly what they believe about random topics. If you doubt that, Hexbear has 4 years of history and a search function. You can even find the struggle sessions where they came to the conclusions I mentioned previously.
Many expected such actions as it was an obvious moral and ethical imperative that lacked internal leadership support.
What are you talking about?
Hexbear was the only lemmy for 4 years, over that time their code base diverged, it took a few months to make federation possible again… a lot of users opposed federation concerns about harassment or just valuing one of the few leftist communities. The end result was slow federation, with users suggesting specific instances to federate with, and instances getting defederated if the admins failed to take adequate action against transphobes/chasers.
Now there’s two of us that are speaking truth.
Half this thread is hexbears and others telling people exactly what they believe about random topics.
Are they? That wouldn’t be thematically consistent with their years of telling others what they’d like to hear for their entertainment. Their culture is selfish in that way.
There was never a consensus on whether HB should be segregated
There was never formal consensus in that leadership repeatedly denied the vote, favoring a granular, instance-by-instance approach.
What are you talking about?
An organized, grassroots movement that employed questionable means to force the wisest decision upon leadership and everyone else.
That wouldn’t be thematically consistent with their years of telling others what they’d like to hear for their entertainment.
What?
There was never formal consensus in that leadership repeatedly denied the vote, favoring a granular, instance-by-instance approach.
Here’s the vote that approved the granular instance-by-instance approach
An organized, grassroots movement that employed questionable means to force the wisest decision upon leadership and everyone else.
Are you describing the consensus building and struggle sessions as “forcing the wisest decision on everyone”?
To be clear, this is coming from you getting banned for being a debate-pervert after you claimed Putin invaded Ukraine to “reinstate the USSR” as a secret Commie and refused to take a pro-Palestinian stance, equating Palestinian resistance with a century of settler-colonial genocide.
I think it’s a bit terminally online to run away to a defederated instance to lick your wounds, rather than reflect on why being a debatebro is unhealthy.
Please tell me what a debate bro is for the people who don’t know the terminology
Someone who goes fishing for fights online.
equivilating
I think the word you’re looking for is “equating.”
“Equivilating” is not a word.
“Equivocating” is, but it means to deceive without lying by creatively telling the truth, to seem you’re saying one thing while really saying something else. This is an art form if you play a lawful good face character and your DM says you aren’t allowed to lie.
Just woke up, corrected, haha. Thanks!
This is an art form if you play a lawful good face character and your DM says you aren’t allowed to lie.
This is the real pro tip.
The irony of being banned for being a “debatebro” in fucking hexbear of all places, where “debatebro” is just the zeitgeist.
Call it what it is, he like most others was banned for having differing beliefs than the chosen narrative there.
Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.
As to Palestinian resistance. I don’t think Hamas is a good resistance movement. For a whole host of reasons. Which is why the Israeli government has been propping them up since the 80s.
An unsympathetic resistance movement can do more to damage a cause than not having a movement at all.
From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.
It didn’t work in the 1920s in Europe. But maybe with the Internet… Likely not though.
Everyone knows Putin invaded Ukraine because he’s a dumbass dictator who started to believe his own propaganda. It’s the dictator trap. Putin surrounded himself with backstabbing yes men by literally killing anyone who wasn’t.
Do you have any evidence of this? Could it be that there were economic factors at play, and rational actors, regardless of morality or immorality? This seems utterly vibe-based and lacks a materialist analysis, so I’d love evidence.
From now until the ethnic cleansing is complete, Israel will call any resistance movement Hamas, regardless of their actual name or beliefs. I’m not sure how to fight that… I don’t think anyone really knows beyond screaming the truth everywhere we can.
Hamas isn’t the only resistance group in Palestine, there are others such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The key though is that Israel has been committing settler-colonial genocide for a century, oppressed peoples have a right to use violence against their oppressors, especially when non-violent means have tried and failed, and especially in the face of active genocide.
Equating Hamas to Israel equates resistance to genocide with genocide itself.
There was no economic or rational factors. The only thing that makes a lick of sense is the irrational.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/
Those are a warm-up, but then you have the purges since the invasion began.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-purges-in-putins-shrinking-inner-circle
Putin has sort of been the butt of jokes for years for killing anyone who looks at him funny. He’s a KGB stooge, who made his career out of backstabbing and paranoia. His entire inner circle were afraid to tell him the truth, because he would kill them if they did.
He’s never been “savvy”, he’s just been willing to kill as many people as necessary to secure his own power.
The classic authoritarian dictator who throws people out of windows for saying no. And whose vaulted military had body armor made of cardboard, because the corruption was so ingrained that every single level was accepting bribes and stealing shit.
I’m surprised that they’re still going, but Russia has shown the world that they’re a third rate military, at best.
As to Palestine. It doesn’t matter what the resistance movements call themselves now. Israel will just say they’re Hamas, and no one likes Hamas. There are good reasons not to like Hamas, they’re religious extremists who want to kill all Jews.
And for decades, Israel has funded Hamas behind the scenes, while coming down extra heavy on any other resistance movement. And now it’s all paid off for them because they can just claim that anyone they kill was actually Hamas.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
This tactic of creating the perfectly detestable opposition has been used in quite a few places. For example, Greenpeace gets a lot of money from oil company heirs. Specifically the Rockefeller family.
I doubt anyone from Hamas, or Greenpeace, ever took orders from the people giving them money. They were given the money with no strings attached, because they were already jackasses. The money just extended their reach.
There are absolutely rational reasons for Russia to invade Ukraine.
Looking back to the dissolution and subsequent plundering of the USSR, there became a rising Bourgeoisie within the Russian Federation. Since there wasn’t already Imperialist infrastructure for the Russian Federation to exploit the Third World (large, monopoly and financial Capitalists with international footholds), Putin tried to join NATO and join hands with the rest of the Imperialist western nations, and take “their share” of the super-profits. This was denied, and thus began a long few decades of growing tensions between NATO and the Russian Federation.
Ukraine on the other hand has been increasingly militarized, with anti-Russian sentiments rising. NATO increased expansion against Russian requests, leading to Russia trying to forcibly demilitarize Ukraine.
Regardless of morals, there is a material basis for this conflict.
As for Palestine, again, the oppressed have the rights to use violence to free themselves, especially if non-violence hasn’t worked, and in the face of genocide.
Ukraine has been super militarized with anti-Russian sentiments rising since they illegally stole a part of their country in 2014 and started providing money, arms, vehicles, and soldiers to separatists premised on said separatists murdering their fellow citizens and providing a thin pretext for Russia ultimately taking more of Ukraine.
Given the profoundly destructive nature of any such conflict with Russia and the impossibility of winning or even surviving without a coalition of supporters there is zero chance of Ukraine ever starting a conflict with Russia itself.
Given the risk of nuclear war and the impossibility of pushing Ukraine to start such a conflict there was never any chance of NATO either starting such a conflict OR being able to start one by proxy.
It’s hard to argue that Russia had security concerns when the only person in a position to light this candle is themselves.
NATO was virtually entirely a mutual defense pact vs Russia in their previous incarnation as the USSR. Inducting Russia into NATO would only serve to give them veto power and influence on an org which virtually exists to defend against THEM! It makes no coherent sense nor would it somehow provide the Russians some share of “super profits” it would solely give them an opportunity to undermine NATO which is why Putin wanted it.
The material basis for stealing the Ukrainians country from them and murdering its children is that by doing so they gain access to tax payers, resources, people, strategic resources, land, fossil fuels etc. Based on what we know about their strategic planning we have every reason to believe they thought this would be an inexpensive and quick affair that would be concluded in a matter of days with minimal loss of life.
It is purely a function of avarice, stupidity, and immorality. It is no more complicated than asking why a burglar invaded a home and took the lives of people there when he just ended up leaving bloody himself. They did it because they thought it would profit them and because they thought they could get away with it.
NATO was virtually entirely a mutual defense pact vs Russia in their previous incarnation as the USSR.
This “defense pact” has invaded, bombed and destroyed many countries within only my lifetime, it’s a laughable statement unless your historical horizon is less than a decade.
Living in America it’s incredible to me how people I run into don’t even know the countries that their own government has invaded using its “defense pact”, or pay attention to people whose lives they’ve ruined, and thus can’t even understand why people see them as a threat.
That’s some blatant Russian propaganda there. Blame NATO twice for Russian imperialism.
The “Russia had to invade a sovereign nation because they were talking about joining NATO to prevent Russia from invading them” logic has some holes to it.
The fact that Russia has invaded their neighbors 14 times since the end of the cold war tells you why one of their neighbors would want to join NATO.
Also, remember that time that Russia shot down a commercial airliner? The Ukrainians sure as hell do. That was the true beginning of the invasion, which is why Ukraine was in talks to join NATO.
And yes, people have the right to defend themselves. But the Israeli government has locked down the anti-terror propaganda, because Hamas is pretty vile as far as organizations go. It’s why Israel let Hamas grow and become powerful, and why the Israelis paid to keep Hamas in power for the last decade or so.
As long as Israel can point at Hamas, they have just enough of an excuse to claim their ethnic cleansing is actually just an anti-terror campaign.
Hamas is a full on terrorist organization, not that all terrorist organizations are bad. Or rather, there are some causes where a terrorist organization is the appropriate response. John Brown tried it. So did Nelson Mandela. But Hamas is a religious extremist terrorist organization. One that has distasteful views, and was sort of put in place by Israel for those views.
You see what I’m getting at here? Hamas is fucking evil, and Israel has mostly succeeded in making Hamas the face of Palestinian resistance against Israel.
I doubt many of the original leaders of Hamas are still alive, but that doesn’t matter either when Israel can just lie and say that whoever they kill is Hamas. It’s a bit maddening, and I doubt there’s an answer to it all except for the other Palestinian resistance groups to step up their social media game.
what about the 10s of thousands of baltics sent to siberia? wasn’t that a genocide? or all the famine in Ukraine? or the invasion of Hungary and checkoslovaka after they implemented democratic reforms?
The transport of Baltic peoples, Tatars, Japanese, etc were ethnic cleansing, but not genocide because it didn’t seek to destroy those people. I don’t think you’ll find anyone defending those actions.
The famine in Ukraine was part of a wider crop failure of the grain-producing regions of the USSR. The role Soviet policy of distribution grain, reaction to soviet policy in the form of destruction of grain and livestock, and the reaction to that resistance all played is contested, but no serious historian argues that the USSR intended to bring about the destruction of the Ukrainian people.
Life And Terror In Stalin’s Russia, is a great book that is critical of the USSR, but with more nuance than the western narrative. Here’s a free PDF.
The invasion of Hungary
While the initial uprising was sparked by democratic reformers, it was quickly co-opted by fascists, as evidenced by the destruction of communist imagery and murder of Hungarian communists.
i have my own narrative as an estonian. and stop talking about fascists, hungary and spain were never going to be fascist nuclear powers.
Thank god for hexbear and lemmygrad though. Imagine the effort needed to block them all individually if spread over all the other instances.
If you think yogthos isn’t the main account of return2ozma you’re gonna have a bad time.
Really? Damn that’s crazy.
fuck that guy.
Yeah, it’s actually helpful to have safe spaces for hateful assholes so they can be corralled away.
Its a safe space for them to be… away from me
On the other hand, an isolated community can also become a nasty brewing pot, reinforcing harmful behaviors and even intensifying them over time.
I don’t think calling them safe spaces for hateful assholes is accurate, but I understand frustrations with them.
They still get loose and troll .world while the mods there give them free reign and ban you if you report them for trolling. You can’t call them trolls, but they can call you a troll.
Before instance blocking was a thing I blocked individual trolls wheb I saw them and after about the fifth block I didn’t see a lot of hexbear, so it they have a few very loud individuals but instance blocking hexbear really made my browsing a lot more chill
lemmygrad? Oh, I missed that one.
Most instances have already blocked lemmygrad. Yours is one of a very few that has not.
I think HB and some of the other groups are mostly trolls or Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, or aligned operatives trying to gas up trolls or wannabe trolls.
There are definitely some well meaning Americans and others who get suckered into the bullshit tornado that is those sites. They are definitely worth saving if we can. But it’s hard. They ban and block anyone with a dissenting voice no matter how calmly presented.
Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.
Nope. They seem pretty sane and rational in comparison to places like Reddit, Lemmy.world, Twitter, 4chan, Facebook, etc.
You wrote reddit twice in a row.
Found the Hexbear user doing a psy-op.
Edit: stay mad, tankies.
That persons instance and hexbear are defederated. It’s unlikely they’re a secret hexbear user.
Prolly just a regular idiot then
huh, surprisingly this tanke isn’t using the hard r
I’m not a tankie lol. I’ll use this opportunity to encourage everyone to vote for Kamala Harris though, and to say fuck hexbear and it’s smooth brained users.
oh sorry for assuming all of .ml users are tankies, please go switch to another instance though as you will be categorized as a tankie.
Yeah I’ve been meaning to but I’m lazy. When I signed up I didn’t k ow much about lemmy and ml was popular with signups
Have you considered that its simply possible for somebody to have an opinion that differs from your own?
Do you have any examples of this? Since world is defederated from that instance, I only end up visiting it when people like you come in and talk about how absolutely crazy it is over there, so occasionally I’ll take a curious peek. This time I see… a post about Indigenous rights, a post criticizing capitalism, a post dunking on musk, a post about FOSS… when do I start seeing the crazy?
Read the comments.
They very quickly ban people who disagree with their propaganda. So just browsing, it looks like left leaning but generally sane people.
Go on there and say anything negative at all about China. You’ll see the crazy.
I might not agree with the moderation practices or even their opinions, but that doesn’t make them crazy.
You got cause and effect mixed up.
We disagree with them because they are crazy.
do you have an argument that doesn’t rely on ableism?
Yeah. Here it goes:
“ableism” is used as cover for shills to attempt to shut down people who call out their batshit insanity.
Oops
got it. for anyone else reading this: why exactly is jumping straight to mental illness as the source of any disagreement not ableist? Does someone who struggles with mental health get no say on literally any topic?
Blah blah fuck tankies. Fuck Putin. Fuck the CCP. Fuck hexbear.
lemmy.world users don’t interact with hexbeqr users because your admin preemptively defederated from hexbear “as a last resort”. At no point were the two federated. I don’t know about crazy, but that seems inconsistent. Don’t you agree?
Found the hexbear with a .ml alt rofl
That’s how we interact with hexbears. Via .ml
Have you considered you are just observing this:
Hexbear is for communists to talk to communists. They get plenty of the “default” liberal opinions from waves hands around vaguely and are entitled to their own community, no?.
Obviously if you go into Hexbear and just start posting anti-China stuff they’re going to ban you. It’s not like the English-speaking world is bereft of anti-China news articles.
I’m not trying to join their cult. I’m not feeling excluded from their cult. I’m saying their cult should not exist. It is a mixture of crazy people and Chinese propaganda, and it deserves to be stamped out.
Ah yea, everyone that has an opinion that isn’t mine is dangerous and deserves to be silenced. I totally agree. I think lemmy.world should refederate, and then defederate a second time, just to make sure they get the message.
Not everyone who disagrees with me. Just extremists and morons. Tankies happen to be both.
REAL communists are cool. Hexbear is a pile of shit.
Are the real communists kept around back with the real scotsmen?
What do you consider a real Communist, if not people who read Communist Theory, advocate for Communism, and defend real movements towards Communism?
Not tankies.
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Lol who the fuck said anything about Falun Gong? That’s out of left field. You got a bug in your programming?
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i guess I don’t understand your point. Cults are bad, seems like we agree on that.
This isn’t accurate, they were very active in brigandine other federations, hitting random threads on .world for instance with hundreds of reply comments drowning out anything that may be a tiny bit critical of china or Russia. Or pro west.
There wereultiple cross-posts daily pointing to specific threads posted on hexbear to organize brigading.
hitting random threads on .world
Dang that’s pretty impressive for an instance that got blocked by .world before they ever started federating.
Or did I already miss make stuff up o’clock?
This isn’t accurate, they were very active in brigandine other federations, hitting random threads on .world for instance with hundreds of reply comments drowning out anything that may be a tiny bit critical of china or Russia. Or pro west.
Have you considered that their users were just browsing the front page and what you’re describing is just the nature of lemmy and how federation works?
There wereultiple cross-posts daily pointing to specific threads posted on hexbear to organize brigading.
You’re likely referring to the_dunk_tank which is a community that encourages bullying homophobia, transphobia, fascists and liberale (pretty based imo)
hitting random threads on .world for instance with hundreds of reply comments
.world preemptively defederated from hexbear “as a last resort” can you clarify when the events you’re referring to would have happened?
Many of them, yes. They’re among the most radical of the leftist instances, which means that they attract a lot of propagandists and tankies. They have some perfectly reasonable people too, but you know, vocal minority. Its the main thing most people notice about those instances.
Many people block hexbear, Lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad for these reasons.
I have yet to see any reasonableness from hexbear.
Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
They brigade like annoying unwanted fleas that you cannot get rid of.
I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Definitely a joke, I’m having trouble imagining a person who could believe this in earnest, let alone enough to say it out loud. I’m even having trouble accepting that you can imagine that a person would say this with no sarcasm. No one actually believes that.
edit: just realized that maybe you’re trying to be funny and I’m slow on the uptake
Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.
Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.
excluding anything tanke related.
Especially anything tankie related.
Y’all will believe literally anything with zero evidence of it means making people you don’t like look bad.
how the fuck do tankies fall for communism, LIKE HOW?
Well, for starters, I don’t blindly believe anything people say about it.
What is a ‘tankie’?
In theory, the things the other replies said.
In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.
I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
I was sure to not be an absolutist for a reason, I’m not always cruising Lemmy. Hexbear in particular absolutely has a sense of humor sometimes that I myself am a bit old for, but judging them for that is very much more “Old man yelling at clouds” than anything. If you don’t like it, sure, but that doesn’t say A or B about them.
Maybe there’s blatant apologism, but in my experience it’s people taking whatever scraps they can find to claim “Apologism.” For example, discussing high speed rail development in China. Admiring a rail system isn’t “blatant apologism,” but most lemmy liberals would call it as such, because it was built by China. It’s like calling me a Putin apologist for discussing Dostoyevsky. Yes, I’m admiring a creation of the country or it’s culture, but I’m not saying that their current governments are the only way forward or really saying anything about governance at all.
Again, I’m not claiming you haven’t seen something “blatant” before (I could name so many one off events I’ve witnessed that don’t hold to norms,) I’m just saying that people claiming it to be this widespread norm on every leftist instance are spreading disinformation.
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
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As I mentioned, I’d be inclined to wonder what you’re considering “apologism.” The fact that you didn’t address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to “apologism” to take up arms against instances you don’t like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.
Apologists for Chinese/Russian government.
the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.
here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
That’s the gist. Then he goes on with another paragraph of whataboutism but of course not a single mention of the tens of millions of dead both, Stalin and Mao, were responsible for.
Of course he’s also an western armchair socialist. People that actually lived in the Sowjet Union (and not in today’s Russia) draw quite a different picture.
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Stalin and Mao both killed a hell of a lot of their own people that is what they are referring to
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Mao was responsible for the deaths of 30-50M in famine. Estimates of Stalins score from famine, execution, forced relocation, labor camps is more difficult to ascertain. Estimates range from 3 -20M. Whether you disagree with this estimate it is incredibly likely that the prior poster was referencing the 33M–70M who died in intolerable conditions not the nazis.
The fact that you justify the state getting in the systemic murder business for any cause is a fundamental difference between our understanding of what can ever be morally acceptable.
It’s interesting how the only criticism anybody can drum up is “tens of millions dead,” but nobody bats an eye at the death toll of capitalism, capitalist countries, and their endless war machine/endless interference in other countries via funding coups or outright assassinations in support of harmful leaders who will play nice with the corporations.
Your link describes discussion of labor camps as if it’s some long lost relic of a bygone era - but slavery of inmates is, right now, legal and prevalent in the US subsidizing private industries for pennies on the dollar. It references the conditions of the camps, but plenty of current US inmates face subhuman conditions and treatment. You imply that everybody suffered all the time under the Soviets, but a far from insignificant number (depending on how you do the numbers, with more support for the USSR than we have for our own government this past decade or so) remember the USSR fondly, or at least as better than their current governments.
All the things y’all constantly belt about to argue socialism is the great evil of the world is shit we do now that you support as long as it benefits private entities instead of public. I’m not going to argue that everything was perfect, or that nobody was corrupt, but I WILL argue that y’all spend a lot of time defending those same imperfections and corruptions under capitalism with this lazy weak ass “but fixing it would be spooky scary socialism” argument. Per the common reasons people call socialism a failure, so is capitalism. That’s why leftists call for, as you call it, “prettied up” socialism - not to fool people, but because what we’re doing now is FAILING EVERYBODY and tripling down on funneling even more of our economy to 1-3% of the population hasn’t helped anything so it’s time for something different and realistic change is gradual, not “seizing the means of production” overnight. Practically, we find a functional balance like the rest of the “first” world.
To co-opt my criticism of zionists defending genocide with the “1,200 dead” figure: If tens of millions dead under socialism makes you so mad, just wait til you hear about the hundreds of millions dead under capitalism.
((I don’t know anything about how to do the thing notating an image so in the off chance it helps someone: Drake No/Yes Meme DrakeNo - tyranny.gov DrakeYes - tyranny.com ))
Yet more whataboutism. This thread is about tankies not capitalist slavery.
Maybe you shouldn’t have defended your point with a link using these talking points then if you didn’t want them responded to.
Thanks for proving my point though about liberals just saying shit then going “SeEeEe??!?!” no matter the response.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
this is directly preceding it. Even if I accepted your frankly hilarious black book of communism death tolls, the argument here is that the soviet union and China still greatly improved the lives of the average citizen compared to what came before while facing huge problems that you would crumble upon immediately upon encountering, like imminent war from the west that they predicted and prepared for correctly. As far as your other claim, it’s not nearly so simple as you make it out to be:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/21/why-do-so-many-people-miss-the-soviet-union/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ebrd-transition-survey-idUSKBN1422U2/
edit: also, nia frome is a trans woman
This essay resonates with me, thanks for sharing, the author makes her points pretty effectively. I’m not a historian and I don’t know shit, but I think even if I give the critics the concession that everything is absolute rubbish, I still think there’s no convincing argument that the beliefs are dishonest or malicious or not genuine.
There’s so much bullshit and conflicting views about literally every historical event that I find it really hard to penetrate the context of the discussion and feel confident in anything, but I think the fact that I keep seeing people who hold “tankie” opinions dismissed as malicious propagandists pushes me very strongly towards feeling that the critics have not made any attempt to seriously engage with the ideas they’re fighting against.
I think the realization I’m coming to now is that when part of your ideology is that people who claim belief in a specific conflicting worldview can be dismissed as bots or propagandists, finding out that those people aren’t manufactured makes it a lot harder to take everything else you’ve said seriously.
On the other hand, the guy you’re replying to is correct that the author’s points fall completely flat and are ridiculous once you hunt down that specific paragraph and remove the context immediately before and after. Then it becomes obvious to an unbiased reader that the author actually ignored communist death tolls because it was inconvenient for her argument.
glad it managed to reach someone! If you want the best nuanced review of Stalin from anyone anywhere, you will have to read Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo (free pdf here!). It is well sourced, and also uses western sources that should be biased against stalin to make its arguments! review on the same site as the tankies article here: https://redsails.org/on-losurdos-stalin/
additionally, some other articles I highly recommend if you want to understand our position better:
https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
https://redsails.org/the-case-for-socialized-ownership/
https://redsails.org/concessions/
https://redsails.org/what-is-dialectics/
https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/most of these are quite a bit longer, so sorry to flood you with them, but I’m always eager to share these excellent articles with anyone who will consider reading them!
Tankie is such a weird thing to call these communists. They are way way less violent than liberals and conservatives are. They don’t even support any on going genocides like the others do.
The historical through-line is that the term originated from British Communists that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian Counter-Revolution, which involved tanks and violent fighting.
Nowadays, Tankie is used for everyone left of liberalism that agrees with the Marxist theory of the State, rather than the Anarchist, it’s muddled and has no meaning.
Heavily scratched liberal gets banned from hexbear for being a debate pervert and trying to start fights, immediately proceeds to call everyone there mentally ill
I’m not banned from there and I agree with OP. Those people need serious help.
Edit: I mean they think Donald Trump is a liberal FFS. Donald Fucking Trump.
Dude…he used to be. Lol
I mean they think Donald Trump is a liberal FFS. Donald Fucking Trump
I mean, yes. Donald Trump generally supports the free market, individualist ideology of Liberalism, and is extremely pro Capitalism.
Liberalism doesn’t mean “left wing” or “center left.”
Trump is also a far-right populist, but falls under the umbrella of liberalism.
Lol Demential DonOLD is a fucking puppet who got his stage thanks to Russian interference. He’s whatever the highest bidder wants. Obviously Putin, the highest of bidders, wants him in so he can have his access to top secret documents restored and the supplies to Ukraine stopped.
What the fuck is a debate pervert? Yall are weird af to be following this dude over here and commenting on his posts and having your alt accounts or other weirdo friends upvote lol looks pathetic.
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Here’s the thread in question btw. The mods left up OP’s comments that had some semblance of effort.
OP claimed putler was trying to bring back the USSR or some shit here lmao. At least OP deleted it.
They also went on to equate Palestine with Israel and refused to take a pro-Palestinian stance.
this person needs serious help, and by help i mean
eliminating one or the other is agiast self determination, 2 state or die.
States don’t have rights, humans have rights. An ethnostate is not compatible with human rights. The only solution is a single, multicultural Palestine.
Nice to see you going mask-off and thinking Nazi Germany should have remained.
Obviously you can’t lump them all into one category, but the majority of them seem to be willing to cause chaos on other instances for a laugh. Doesn’t sit right with me, so i blocked them
If you’ve heard of Chapo Trap House that’s them. If not, most of those kids/idiots/trolls are the type of terminally online fake leftists that give other leftist a bad image in general. They were so ridiculous Reddit got tired of their shit and banned them a couple years back.
They were banned when reddit cracked down on any leftist thought, not because they were especially bad from what I saw.
They were banned around the same time as The Donald because everyone was tired of the shit both groups were doing.
They were banned while saying John Brown did nothing wrong and that slaveowners deserve to die.
Sounds pretty cool to me.
While true there was a lot more behind the decision than that final post. They had been fighting with the admins for a long time.
evidence? I see people say this but from what I remember the mod team was repeatedly stonewalled by the admins, or at least that was their claims, and I don’t think the admins ever disputed that
Hardly, the mods kept refusing to do anything about the brigading of other subs. To the point the admins stepped in and removed a couple of them. Then afterward the sub decided they’d rather go private than comply. At this point most of back and forth is wiped out because the sub is locked. But there was far more going on for a while than their claim that one post shut them down immediately. They had already been in trouble for a couple months.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/bp39gb/chapotraphouse_gets_a_call_from_the_admins/
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fmfirtv1vndy21.png
I wasn’t clear enough, what I meant wasn’t that the admins literally never said anything to the mods, I meant they made it relatively unclear what exactly they needed to do to stop getting warnings and eventually getting banned. no conversation, just relatively vague commands from down high also, as you can see in the SRD thread it was never made clear if they were removed for anything besides the john brown posting. However, even this is more clear communication than I remembered so I’ll admit fault on that at least.
funny thing I found browsing the thread is this comment about why chapo got banned, which mentions brigading, something people constantly accused/accuse hexbear users of doing:
…
The second aspect of this is that chapo is becoming so large that it is capable of effectively “brigading” threads without any direct co-ordination on the subreddit. By this I’m referring to stuff like the police dog situation, in which any meaningfully upvoted thread on /r/aww and other “cute” subreddits gets a shitload of “40%”, “ACAB”, and other anti-cop rhetoric. While screenshots of this often get posted to /r/chapotraphouse, the vast majority of the time this is AFTER the thread has already been “brigaded” by chapo users scrolling through /r/all or the specific “cute” subreddits. This behavior is not against the TOS, but it is incredibly annoying to /r/aww mods and therefore concerning to the admins, because the “cute” subreddits are the easiest to manage and please, and more importantly, the most advertiser friendly. When chapo users fuck that up, there’s a problem.
…
sounds familiar doesn’t it?
No, The Donald was encouraging political violence and was becoming a legal liability for Reddit to continue hosting. But they needed to ban a major left wing subreddit at the same time to do a “both sides bad” thing and preempt the fascist talking points about social media having a liberal bias.
The Donald had largely abandoned the sub well before it was banned though.
Largely because they moved to different subs.
The Chapo crew didn’t want to calm down with all the threats of violence and other ridiculous antics. So they left completely.
Threats of violence against confederate slave owners.
Speaking of, John Brown was right.
TIL Reddit admins were confederate slavers
When the sub was put on probation, the post Reddit cited was justifying violence against slave owners. As far as I can tell, you just made up that they threatened Reddit admins.
Seeing the ban coming, they financed and suffered alpha and beta of the Lemmy platform we all enjoy. Then, they chose to become the most GLBTQ+ friendly destination on the internet.
As it’s always been, they cope with the horrible events with satirical, sarcastic humor. And, in the middle of that will be a well-reasoned, nuanced, and quite serious post.
But, perhaps the part I like most is the struggle sessions. The entire community will heavily focus on a current topic, then hash it out with good faith discussion.
Their shit isn’t convenient or comfortable. It’s not easy to understand. And, I fucking love them for it.
edit: Lazy coders need choose a randomized target value and timing or be a moderator to avoid detection by the user. Perceiving is easy when your code is trash. Ask for help from an industrial engineer.
As it’s always been, they cope with the horrible events with satirical, sarcastic humor. And, in the middle of that will be a well-reasoned, nuanced, and quite serious post.
Oh yes, they are so funny, misunderstood, thoughtful and nuanced thinkers.
F them and f you for defending them.
This ~1800 comment thread about whether lemm.ee should defederate with them is all you need for some eye opening, in case anyone needs that.
Above screenshot is from said thread.
The comrade in it actually suggests that there is a time and place for such rhetoric, it is just not right here, right now. you have to think politically and wait for your moment!
Yes, please read what the .ee admin says about where the bigoted users originate and the actions of the hexbear mods in response. It certainly speaks for itself.
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Your portrayal of them just being made into regular peasants seems to me viewing the whole affair with more than rose colored glasses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]
Those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police. Those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property. Those to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.By most people’s reckoning in most of planet earth they stole the lawfully earned property of kulaks and either murdered them or otherwise destroyed their lives. Treating them worse than most developed nations treat burglars and thieves.
If someone shot your grandpa and your uncle, send half your people to Siberia to die out there, and sent the other half to prison locally of course you would flee with whatever you could carry and of course you would at that point be an enemy of the regime that destroyed your life.
So if the original commenter’s great grandparents were kulaks who “suffered at the hands of the soviet union,” they deserved it.
I don’t understand your justification for what is ultimately pretty horrific treatment foisted on people ultimately just participating lawfully in society up until that point.
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America didn’t go from legally sanctioning a behavior to murdering the people today who were behaving lawfully yesterday even if they were immoral fucks. If you don’t understand that then you don’t understand how normal societies run.
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Perhaps now is the time.
No, Time for condoning class war and murder is never and nowhere.
Go back to hexbear, you poor, uneducated, lying, bolshevik piece of shit.
But thank you for showing anyone who may have not had an experience with you before what type of people you are.
One can always count on that, you morons just can’t help yourself.
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You don’t get to call directing state power against the petite bourgeoisie a brutal police regime when your government is supporting the most brutal dictatorships in Africa, whose violence is directed at the working class.
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The vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It’s not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.
Would you say it’s constructive for an Israeli to be critical of gay rights in Palestine? Of course not, because divorced of context, it only carries water for imperialism
Yeah they kept being able to back the most ridiculous claims and then suddenly I was like “oh no they were right all along” and got radicalized 🤷
Coming up with theory in an echo chamber isn’t hard.
and how they kept being able to back it up?
That’s the whole point of an echo chamber yes. You can say whatever you want without being challenged by other viewpoints and make anything seem plausible.
but they are linking a lot of outside sources. That’s what I mean by “backing their claims up”, studies about covid, about the ukraine war, about Israel, it’s not just someone making a claim and then everyone is nodding along.
What I am saying is they were able to completely upend the way I see the world and you just can’t do that by claiming thengs and linking to some other claims you make.
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Hello, low effort neolib troll. Thanks for the opportunity to continue to speak truth.
There’s a cultural similarity to what 4-chan was prior to the LOIC. But, they’re definitely not tankies. Sincere expressions of authoritarian means are soundly defeated and usually result in permabans. The principle and practice is consistent for MAGA, neolibs, and other authoritarians.
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Definitely not a neolib
Language analysis of your post history says differently. If you’re not a neolib troll then perhaps you should stop presenting as such.
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Did I fault your content or your presentation of it?
Nice strawman. You just can’t help yourself.
You are correct. Do your mental health a favour and block that instance along with lemmygrad.
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These pathetic foxes are pissed they’ve been neutralized by defederation.
Hexbear has been around for 4 years, unfederated. It wasn’t until 10 months ago that they started slowly federating. At least try to be honest.
That real lefties, even communists don’t take them seriously.
Who determines what a “real lefty,” or a “real Communist,” if not Communists who regularly read theory, talk about it, and post memes that require understanding theory to even get?
It’s just 4chan cosplaying communism. Truly despicable.
Do you genuinely believe people would put in that much effort to meme amongst themselves something they don’t agree with?
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On what bounds do you say that? If they read Leftist theory, advocate for Leftism, and attack Imperialism and Capitalism, then they are Leftists.
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In what manner does Hexbear advocate for expanding predatory IMF loans to the Global South, and exporting machinery and industrial Capital directly to the source of the Raw Materials so as to over-exploit the Global South by directly owning these sources of production?
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I think anyone who’s even remotely curious about hexbear should go make an account and just… Iunno, check it out? That’s what i did and it ended up being my home away from home.
Their viewpoints are gonna be absolute whiplash for most people unaccustomed to speaking about world topics from a non-us-centric perspective, or who have only learned about what communism actually is from our (definitely not biased) general education.
Calling those viewpoints “crazy” is just a shortcut, a base dismissal of thought unworthy of critical thinkers.
If you take me up on this, go lurk a bit! They can’t hurt you. If after awhile of lurking, you have a question (you will have questions) ask them from a position of curiosity that you’re interested in their perspective instead of one there to “educate the commies” and you’ll be just fine. Hell you don’t ever have to engage in politics at all there, hexbear has as many shitposts as the other instances do
I recall i went to hexbear because sh.itjust.works was defedding and erryone was just so mad at them i had to see what the fuss was about. Im very glad i did
It’s not just you
And increasingly lemmy.ml, sadly
They’re getting there, but so far it’s only a few users that I’ve noticed.
One guy seems to be following me around to attempt mockery.
They’re very much getting to “everyone who isn’t farther left than me is a right-wing nazi” mentality.
They aren’t even really left. They are super authoritarian.
I blocked them since they spew Russian and Chinese propaganda points and take revisionist stances on Tianman square and deny the Uyghur Genocide.
One of the mods is an actual Russian troll. [email protected]
Pro-Russian mod who keeps pretending they’re not.
“If those kids could read…” meme would be fitting lol
I mostly agree with you, but that’s the reason why I picked an instance that does not block them: sometimes it is good to see the world from a different point of view. And it’s not like the other Lemmy instances are completely free of propaganda either.
Yeah it is when you’re not affected by them I guess. But their rampant ableism and transphobia would have made me leave lemmy if there wasn’t a way to block.
The term “authoritarian” is so fraught that under these circumstances it might as well just mean “opponent of the United States” or “organized at all”.
The examples you have provided are quite absurd.
Tiananmen Square (which you misspelled) is indeed poorly understood in The West, including the historical conensus that there was no massacre in the square itself. It is, in fact, historical revisionism to suggest otherwise. In addition, Tiananmen Square is just a place, a very popular one to visit that has been the location for all kinda of events. In China, the events are called the June 4 Incident / events. Calling it “Tiananmen Square” is sometimes a sign that a person is not familiar with the history as they are using the common but misleading term that is virtually only used to forward the previously-mentioned historical revisionism to a Western audience that is in no way interested in understanding.
Re: Uyghurs, I would suggest that you read into this much more, as the topic is full of misinformation, think tanks with shady ties, fake universities, charlatans pretending to be experts, literal teenagers treated as satellite photography analysis experts, and really weird NGOs, including pro-Trump ones. One good topic to focus on is calling it a genocide at all and how that came to be the discourse. In particular, what The Newlines Institute is, why they were amplified by the US State Departmwnt, their rationale, and, of course, why none of that is taken seriously outside of a very specific political block. Following their members, funding, etc is actually a pretty interesting rabbit trail to follow. Bird’s eye view, the rhetorical treatment of Uyghurs as the subject of genocide was more or less invented, and this is is why you naturally don’t see math death, destruction, refugees, or forced migrations of the Uyghur population. This does not mean bad things haven’t happened there nor that policies were not hamfisted, but just compare how China treated a series of sectarian knife attacks (education, jobs, vocational training, investment, banning extremist Salafist practices) to how the West treated and treats Muslims (invading and killing millions).
So, anyways, I hope that you can continue your education and engage with these realities in gold faith.
Thanks for posting your thoughts, I don’t get many opportunities to hear tankie brainrot as it’s often purged from my feed before I even open the comments.
#1 whatever did or did not happen at the specific location of Tiananmen Square doesn’t address that the Chinese government murdered student protestors. Doesn’t matter if it was two blocks over or on the other side of the country. The CCP will use lethal force against protestors.
#2 a think tank has nothing to do with all the Uyghurs whose family members have disappeared without a trace. The CCP makes people disappear and they offer zero transparency into their judicial process.
You’re quibbling over minor specifics and ignoring the undisputed parts that are most damning. Stop being a propagandist for a government that doesn’t even align with your proported beliefs just because ”america bad".
Thanks for posting your thoughts, I don’t get many opportunities to hear tankie brainrot as it’s often purged from my feed before I even open the comments.
I can see already how much of a good faith engagement this will be. Would you be surprised if people reacted negatively to your introduction?
#1 whatever did or did not happen at the specific location of Tiananmen Square doesn’t address that the Chinese government murdered student protestors.
What I was doing was pointing out that the most common understanding is an absurdity and historically revisionist. There is plenty more that could be discussed if one wanted to, but the common understanding is a cartoonish falsehood based on memes and not any actual attempt to read and understand. The way that parent made their reference indicated that they shared this false understanding.
Doesn’t matter if it was two blocks over or on the other side of the country. The CCP will use lethal force against protestors.
What matters re: the point I made is that there is a conflict with the common mental image and suggests that perhaps a person should recognize when they do not really know something. It might even jostle a person to not reach for the next-worst type of sourcing and instead do a deep-dive that challenges themselves. Wouldn’t want to get caught out like that again, right?
#2 a think tank has nothing to do with all the Uyghurs whose family members have disappeared without a trace.
This is the same illogical structue of the previous response. It sounds like what you would really like to say is that there is something related that you think is important so you would like to skip over what I said. Feel free to make another thread with these other points and I can respond to them there.
You’re quibbling over minor specifics and ignoring the undisputed parts that are most damning.
Ad I said, the entire narrative shift is based on an absurd propaganda apparatus and not any evidence on the ground. The use of the big G word.
The fact that OP is repeating this again suggests a lack of investigation. And yet they are so dismissive! I would hope that they might become interested in doing some media criticism. Maybe ask a question. Sometimes people do this and only tell you until much later.
Stop being a propagandist for a government that doesn’t even align with your proported beliefs just because ”america bad".
Now you are just making things up.
All I want to hear from you is an admission that the CCP murdered protestors, and that they jail people without giving families or the international press any contact.
On behalf of my Uyghur friends who haven’t spoken to their parents in years, because they were imprisoned for their children emigrating: fuck you. A really deep, heartfelt fuck you.
Please, tell us more about your Uyghur friends and their imprisoned parents.
What’s it like to completely make stuff up and post it online pseudonymously?
I don’t know, you tell me.
Please engage with what I said rather than leveling personal attacks.
Have you ever tried choking to death on a boot?
what about märtsiküüditamine? and im not translating for a tankie, kuradi hull!
They didn’t mention it so why would I address it? You don’t seem particularly ready to have a good faith discussion, either.
oh noes the tankie is scwared thwat his narwatiwe of genocide deniwal is being exposed as stupid. now get blocked as i have to gamble gold in roblox flying skibidi toilet tycoon
Found one guys!
Tianmen square test: Failed
Uyghur test: Failed
I love this litmus test so much lol.
What did I say that was inaccurate?
Lol your copy pasted “answer” sounded like Donald Trump tried to wriggle out of a tough question.
You showed that you don’t accept the Tianmen square massacre, nor the Uyghur massacre. What’s next, denying the holocaust?
You saw them run over the guy in the square too, didn’t you? Incredible.
Got another one here!
How are you blocking full instances? I’ve been playing wack-a-mole blocking communities. I’m using Voyager on iOS, if that matters.
Settings > filters & blocks
Thanks!
Keep in mind that user-level instance blocks are not the same as instance-level defederations. AFAIK, it only blocks the communities. You’ll still see comments and posts from that instance in other communities and that instance will still influence your feed with their votes.
It is better to go to an instance that defederates or to convince your current admin to defederate.
