I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
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What you’re noticing I think is actually a pandemic in modern society. People cannot fathom nuance. I dunno if social media put the final nail in the coffin of a long-festering problem, or if social media and the ensuing collapse in discourse birthed the problem alone.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary. “You’re with me or you’re against me.” Or “information supports me or it’s rigged.” Extending that: “you’re my ideological enemy and whatever you think I think the opposite.” It doesn’t matter if it’s logical or it’s entirely contradictory. All that matters is getting to say “NO! You’re wrong and I’m right! You’re a [liberal, conservative, fascist, etc.]” Whatever serves their argument.
The complete inability to have logical discourse where the basis is reality, is itself responsible for the larger systemic problems. When there’s no common ground because the ground is either “yours or mine,” and when it changes in every discussion, there’s just no hope to ever do anything about problems. And the problems are mounting. And the ownership class is capitalizing on this constant culture war bullshit—and I mean “culture war” in the sense of each “ideology” having its in group and everyone else belonging to the out group—to run wild on what’s left of this current paradigm.
It’s hard not to feel doom when realizing this foundational problem. It undercuts any kind of underclass solidarity, so the class war is really just an ever-worsening class slaughter.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary.
I’ve started to notice that this particular brain rot is becoming more and more common among Democrats as well. To a distressing number of people I’ve encountered on the Internet, be it here, Reddit, or elsewhere, Democrats ran a perfect political campaign and their candidates and policy were flawless and above question, so it’s entirely the fault of the voters that we got Trump again. Never mind that Democrats actively facilitated a genocide and largely ignored their base in favor of appealing to moderate Republicans who were never going to vote for them anyway.
The number of people in this country who are just incapable of seeing (much less understanding) any kind of nuance is dropping rapidly, even among demographics who should be aware of this trend.
They’re brainwashed and also fascists. They don’t stand for communism at all and never had.
Communism is pretty much tied to authoritarianism
Okay, if you define “communism” as “whatever the fuck the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is doing” then your statement is sound. However, most people around here (including myself) define the word to mean something like “a classless, stateless, moneyless society” and sometimes then regard the statement “The USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is communist” as an outright lie. They often assume that the person making the assumed-lie is ignorant, actively trying to infiltrate leftist spaces by pretending to be a leftist (the way tankies do), or are actively trying to smear leftist ideas.
I’d like to remind everyone that which words we choose to use to express our ideas are usually far less important than the ideas those words express. So long as we agree that the things the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. did/are doing are bad, acknowledge that capitalism has caused a great deal of strife, and seek to make the world kinder and more equitable, I think we should be able to agree and work together.
Can you name a country that is communist then?
I’m not trying to smear. However, I’m extremely skeptical of Communism
I’m not here to say whether communism can work nor to explore methods/history of implementing it. The scope of my comment was limited to bringing into focus the semantics being used. You don’t need to be a communist to understand the extent to which capitalism has caused and exasperated the problems of the present.
Communism does not equal capitalism
I don’t get what you are saying. There is lots of gray. In communism there will always be a little bit of capitalism and in capitalism there will always be a bit of Communism. (Please don’t kill me Mr. CIA) Usually you don’t call it by those words but the concepts apply. (I suppose it would be socialism but that’s a charged word)
I mean, I think you and I agree. The foundational ideology of communism is sound. It’s just that the application is flawed because it relies on that “dictatorship of the proletariat” stage. Whenever during the transition that stateless, classless society the plan is to hand power to people in order to accomplish the stated goal, it’s always going to fail. Its where it always has failed and always will. Because that small group of suddenly very powerful people will not give up that power when the time comes. They will sabotage the progress because…well, powerful people don’t typically give up power willingly or peacefully.
that’s like saying socialists are tied to national socialism…
when a power hungry group adopts a title that’s incongruous with it’s actions, like, DPRK, it’s always in an attempt to distract from their actions and policies.
Communism has quite the track record of being authoritarian. I don’t know of a single Democratic nation that is communist.
it’s a cute title for an authoritarian state. even the soviet union would hardly be classed as communist in anything but label.
Then inform me, what country is properly communist? It seems fascism and communism are not that far apart. They both involve the government seizing control of assets. The USSR was communist even if it doesn’t mean your definition.
Communism and Fascism are poles apart… like literally diametric opposites.
Authoritarianism can turn up on either side, although it’s worth noting that Fascism cries out for the “big strong leader” type
oppressorsaviour.The Communist Manifesto suggests there have never been any real communist countries. Communism, it proposes, comes after capitalism - according to dialectic theory. Most/all countries that are/were called communist went there straight from agrarianism.
If you want to know how AES (actually existing socialism) countries view this then I suggest you ask one of the theory reading brothers and sisters around here to explain - I’m not really into politics and political theory.
In their mind it is. In theory, no.
In theory no but in practice yes. The problem with communism is that it doesn’t provide incentives to drive industry. If something works ok then it will stay the same regardless if there is a better way. The other issue is that to be a part of communism society there needs to be forced conformity. You end up getting controlled by the state. In communism nations many people died from both starvation and because they failed to conform.
Tankies= Republicans
That’s all you gotta say. They love the orange fucker.
To build off that, I was going to say it is easier for them to understand authoritarianism than liberalism. They more closely relate to using power to enforce will rather than consensus and damned the consequences.
Eh, I think that only applies to Hexbear. The ml instances seem to hate anything US (or western, for that matter) without picking sides.
Not in my experience, but ml seems less obviously pro trump at least.
They sure love to criticize the “west” but god forbid China or Russia gets called out for their savagery
Tankies are very much not Republicans
Extreme left and extreme right are similar since they both embrace Authoritarianism and government oppression.
As an anarchist, I take issue with saying the “extreme left” embraces authoritarianism. But I get what you mean.
“As an anarchist”
Lemmy has the weirdest people
I wouldn’t call myself an anarchist, but that doesn’t meant that I don’t educate myself on what these words mean… You should do the same, you might learn something.
Read Emma Goldman and Piotr Kropotkin.
My dude/dudette, you use Linux, grow some self-awareness.
It’s astounding how many Linux users engage with tools founded in left-leaning ideas while insisting politics aren’t brought into their fav.s.
I hate the conclusions Libertarian Linux users draw but at least they see the parallels.
In to up vote you before someone cries
"hOrSeShOe tHeOrY! HoW dArE yOu CoMpArE aUtHoRiTaRiAnS tO aUtHoRiTaRiAnS! We’Re So OpEn AnD dEmOcRaTiC tHaT wE wIlL hAvE tO lOcK yOu Up Or KiLl YoU. FoR bEInG a ThReAt To ThE vAnGuArD bY dIsAgReEiNg!”
I agree with what you’re saying but I always downvote this obnoxious alternating case nonsense. Shit needs to die.
No
Too late, already done
I have been calling this out since my first interactions with those instances. They are heavily infested with right wing trolls making “leftist” noises. And the ones who aren’t actually trolls are either so blinded by their disdain for liberalism, or just too young to notice.
Yeah. I’m genuinely curious how many of them are right wing trolls, how many are useful idiots, how many are normal trolls, how many are subject to mental illness and will sincerely believe anything and yell it at everyone else because of brain chemicals, how many are some other category, just what are the details of the real demographics there. I wish there was a way to know.
They are left wing
Just extremely far left (the farther you go the less sense it makes)
Nah, there are very obviously a whole bunch of Russian trolls in all of these spaces. They legit just parrot Russian narratives about the war and US politics. It’s extremely transparent.
This is just cope. You don’t have to look hard to find people, on YouTube for example, making the same points. With hundreds of thousands of lefty followers.
deleted by creator
They are not bots or trolls or foreign agents. Lemmy is already radicalised.
lemmy was literally started by radicals
Tankies are the alt-right fabricating an alt-left. Tankies are a deliberate disinfo campaign most likely out of st petersburg. Remember the russian troll farms? See how easily they penetrated the right wing in america? The left are free thinkers and are a harder nut to crack. Their best shot at this is to cosplay far left and push liberals further left. Tough to foment a civil war when only one side is fighting. TLDR; Hexbear is most likely 90% mother russia phoning home.
You make it sound as if the “left” in the US is as left as it should be and pushing it further is a bad thing. The “left” in the US are full on capitalism appreciators, even under the Obama admin which liberals look upon fondly large mergers and consolidation of power were allowed to happen. This country is lost if we act like one side is doing its job (doing things in the interest of the populace and not corporations).
In the United States being on ‘the left’ is arbitrarily just being ‘left of far-right’.
The ‘Radical Far Left’ is anything that isn’t devoted to capitalism. This isn’t a Republican talking point but the central prerequisite to American politics that thinks Bernie Sanders would’ve had executions in central park.
I agree with everything you said. I just think hexbear is a psy-op
Joe Liberman blocked single player from the start, this fun fact really hurt DNC Komissars and their online shills
The left are free thinkers
Idk, there are a lot of leftist echo chambers. Please avoid anything close to the “we’re right and everyone else is wrong” argument.
But yes, agree with much of the rest. I also think there are a lot of trolls from China in the mix as well.
Yeah being a “left” doesn’t all of a sudden enable the critical thinking package
That’s certainly part of it, is my guess. But it can’t be all of it, just a whole community of Russian trolls talking to each other. How many useful idiots are there?
And Dessalines likes Hexbear. Presumably he’s not a Russian troll. How many others are there, and how did they come to their decisions? I believed a bunch of dumb stuff when I was young. How much of it is that?
This is false. They’re not alt-right or agents out of russia.
Horseshoe theory is just always correct
Horseshoe theory is horseshit. It is the creation of a journalist and any attempt to study it has concluded the notion is false.
Saying shit no one has ever heard of like “horseshoe theory” and trying to make the regular people who never heard of it out to be stupid or abnormal is exactly what outs you as a Russian bot.
Check this guy’s post history. It’s pretty clear which team he plays for.
The majority of people on leftist spaces know what horseshoe theory is.
You mean obscure ATP group missions.
Tons of people have heard of horseshoe theory which is the notion that the extremes of the political binary have an overlap and that a fascist and an authoritarian communist are not all that different. It’s a bullshit creation from the mind of a journalist and IRL does not seem to be true.
Settings ▶ Blocks
While yes, that is a thing. This is however literally a community meant to discuss this sort of thing.
This is my contribution to any discussion about Hexbear or Hexbear communities.
I’m a reasonable man and I’m willing to talk to anybody. But Hexbear and the communities it harbors are simply unbearable to me. I have no other instances and no other communities blocked.
Something I generally support as well. Though I’m lucky enough to not be Federated with 2/3 of the problem locally. It’s just kind of out of place in a community like this is all.
IMO I agree with the sentiment but it serves a good purpose at indicating to errant users around what they should do regarding that instance.
I’m just fascinated by it though. I’m curious about human behavior, and I think the ways that people get themselves worked into a non-reality view of the world in a big community that all agrees about it is a highly relevant topic for the modern world.
I won’t pretend to understand what’s going on over there completely, but I’m interested enough in it that I want to be able to observe it. From a distance.
If you want to understand and observe there is the podcast ‘Chapo Trap House’ which you can look into. Hexbear quite literally originated from its fanbase, and makes their antics make a whole lot more sense.
I don’t know… I appreciate the suggestion but that sounds a little closer to the sun than I want to fly.
You don’t really need to listen to the podcast itself, but knowing about it is really useful. Essentially the whole schtick is being vulgar to trigger those who are unable or unwilling to challenge the status quo.
The podcast does it better than the derivative of its fanbase.
The other Hexbear thing is they don’t have downvotes and encourage dogpiling in disagreement, which is a big cultural no-no for the redditor.
So the antagonization forms a feedback loop, understandably.
Hm. I have had people do that to me on Lemmy, quite badly. They’ll argue in bad faith, and then I’ll get irritated at them for it, and then they’ll say they’re just being wrong on purpose, so they can challenge the status quo, and if I’m irritated then they are succeeding. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I just have never heard of a people’s powerful movement that used that as the tactic, and had that type of thing be instrumental in its success.
There are plenty of people who’ve been extreme or shocking in their presentation to attract attention to the cause, without being abrasive cocks about it. The Yes Men did it, the Yippies did it. I did look a little bit into Chapo Trap House, and I definitely did like what little bit I read, so maybe you’re right. I’m just so skeptical based on see what their fanbase is like.
Of course, I think almost anything effective on the American left at this point is going to get assailed by all kinds of glowies trying to divert the conversation into hostility, infighting, and impotence. Maybe the podcast format lets the authentic stuff speak, and anything online and anonymous with mass participation is just too porous a medium to keep those efforts out, and so it’s inevitably doomed to collapse into Hexbear over time.
I just have never heard of a people’s powerful movement that used that as the tactic, and had that type of thing be instrumental in its success.
It is about breaking the default mindsets and forcing critical thinking into areas unallowed in most discourse. On one hand it does help people begin to dispel narratives people have been raised on. On the other hand it can just harden people against it and foster prejudices.
Most people I know in America willing to use the C and S word in politics know they will never achieve honest discourse in the current culture and climate. But that’s been changing more in the last 10 or so years than I have ever seen, for what it is worth. But, like, Luigi has done more than a podcast, Hexbear or any instance in that regard.
That’s the only instance I have blocked.
Just so much spam all over the all scroll…
It got old really quick.
Fascists gonna fash.
Cmon. If you haven’t already blocked hexbear you are just part of the problem. 90% 4chan garbage. You won’t miss it.
I tried to block them but they dont show up in the list, so I assume the instance that I belong to already took care of it?
Yeah, Blahaj and Hexbear had a falling out over Hexbear accusing Blahaj users of tolerating ‘chasers’.
Some people are doomed to repeat the same mistake they are brainwashed to make over and over: picking a side in every scenario.
There will always be people who believe absurd things. I just leave them the fuck alone, and hope they’ll grant me the same courtesy.
Thoughts? Right on schedule.
The political spectrum isn’t a line: it’s a circle. It doesn’t matter if you go left or right, once you go far enough, both sides meet on “authoritarianism.” Trump wants to be a dictator. Tankies love dictators. Social cohesion is infinitely more important to these people than how they get there. As long as there’s a government regulated “in” crowd and they’re part of it, they’ll justify any level of doublespeak, goal post moving and hypocrisy, and they’re willing to perform any amount of mental gymnastics to get there.
this is a ridiculous take, just entirely forgetting the existence of anarchists, it seems. by that logic, anarchists are the enlightened center now, by virtue of being as far removed from authoritarianism (and therefore political extremism) as possible.
also, how does that form a circle? if i go even further left than left-auth, would i go over right-auth, right, right-moderate, until i end up at… where exactly?
I mean, if you want a real genuine answer, it’s that simplifying the entirety of political thought into a binary is a rediculous premise to begin with, and highlights one of the core fallacies that the human condition leads to time and time again: that of false dichotomy. Calling the political spectrum a circle is exactly as absurd as calling it a line, and taking either of these paradigms to be literal and infallible is to grossly misunderstand politics.
My point is more that both routes, left or right, have a path through extremism into authoritarianism. Try not to take the silly analogy I used to communicate this point so literally.
right, my objection came more from you making it seem like extremism=authoritarianism, as if libertarianism isnt an extremist idea.
the second paragraph was mostly me having a bit of fun, though tbh i still dont see how a cirular political model holds any merit except that it gives one the ability to say: “look at those extremists, they are all the same!”
I do believe that extremism lends itself to authoritarianism. The deeper you are rooted into your belief structure, the more likely you are to believe everyone else has gotten it wrong, and the more likely you are to think imposing your beliefs on others is in their best interests. The circular model that I proposed is simply a way of highlighting this.
While I am sure this isn’t true of all libertarians, they tend to be ogliarchs (or wannabe ogliarchs) in sheeps clothing. We may have another word for rule by the rich and economically powerful, but I do not think the gap between them and fascists is wide enough to avoid the blanket of “authoritarianism.” I do think libertarianism is an extremist idea that just leads to a different flavour of authoritarianism, thus my point.
extremism isnt an objective thing though, just like centrism, its always dependent on the overton window. thus imo trying to tie any meaning more specific than “outside the frame of common political discussion” to extremism is a fools errant.
besides that, i think we simply speak on different terms. with “libertarians” i refer to both left wing and right wing, while your last post indicates to me that you are specifically talking about right wing libertarians (i.e not anarchists) correct? in that case i agree that this form of libertarianism inevitibly leads to rule of oligarchs.
I think this is something a lot of people here miss. The farther you move to the extremes the more reality gets distorted. Tankies are so far left that there views are wildly distorted. Part of the extremes is also authoritarianism but that’s mostly because that’s the only way maintain there limited world view.
They are not in any meaningful sense left. What happens is it when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. The reason tankies look so similar to magats. Is because they are unified in a Devotion to strong men and a authoritarianism over left or right. They believe that might makes right and disagreement is punishable by Death. No more no less. They are authoritarians and will use whatever economic policy they think serves the case in point china.
I disagree. The defining characteristic of the left is the belief in owning the means of production. Authoritarian right still believes in privately owned corporations owning the means of production, while the authoritarian left believes in state ownership of the means of production. (Which, IMO, is slightly worse than corporate ownership, as you have no higher authority to whom you can appeal.) The anti-authoritarian left believes that the people themselves should directly control the means of production, without an intermediary like the state.
The problem is they don’t under leninism. Not in any actual sense. The vanguard party does. Everyone else are disposable proletariat. To be imprisoned or slaughtered should the vanguard party feel threatened.
Modern Russian oligarchs were given their wealth and position by the vanguard. Not by the proletariat. China is a similar story. Leninism/maoism has never, and will never work. It’s just a system that creates the same wealthy ruling class via slightly different means. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The problem is they don’t under leninism.
Not all of leftists are Leninists though. Certainly some are, maybe most. But Leninism is only one form of leftist belief. I’m personally much closer to an anarchist than a Leninist. (…And I’m very, very aware that anarchists end up getting executed as soon as leftist coalitions take power.) I also recognize that a truly non-hierarchical society is functionally unworkable at anything larger than a tribal level, and that there’s a strong tendency for non-hierarchical socialist societies to devolve into authoritarianism at the slightest provocation.
I don’t think that I ever implied that they were. Because that would be really silly me being a left anarchist/libertarian. I have no problem with leftists or knowing what leftists are. I just have problem with authoritarians whether they pretend to be left or right.
And yes hierarchies are not completely avoidable. But they should be as local and as granular as possible. And we can have a really vociferous and act of debate on that. But National level organizations have always been one of the biggest problems.
But National level organizations have always been one of the biggest problems
I agree with that 100%. No matter how good the local group is, it can quickly be poisoned by the national org. I understand wanting to organize nationally, because that’s how you start to wield real power, buuuuuuuttttttt…
Good lord, this is the second post I’ve read today that consists of this user bitching about Tankies. The block function is a wonderful thing…
The block function is a wonderful thing
This is a dedicated place to bitch about them. What do you expect?
It’s not bitching, it’s fascination. I don’t need a large dose of it, but a little every now and then is pretty interesting to me to observe.
