I think this is a great example of how federation allows you to make an account somewhere else…
Just make an account in an instance that defederated hexbear. Even if an admin is an idiot they’ll know to take action if the user count begins to stagnate or fall.
They’re abrasive enough that they couldn’t even get along with lemmy.blahaj.zone, a dedicated LGBT friendly instance ran by several trans women, out of accusations of said admins being transphobic
I’m transfemme, and I was repeatedly misgendered as a “guy” and a “dude” by a user I warned the admins was transphobic. They ignored the problem completely.
I call women guy and dude in person all the time. I can understand why a trans person would be insecure about it, but by itself that isn’t exactly evidence of malicious intent.
196 is by far the main community on blåhaj, and their banner basically says “no hexbears.”
Also, trans hexbear users gave examples where they were bothered by chasers in 196, and felt not enough mod action was taken to control chasers there. I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.
I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.
This accusation always confuses me. Blahaj zone was around for half a year before the reddit migration, long before 196 was on lemmy and we did fine without them. They’re here not because they wield crazy power, but because they’re a queer lead community, with a strong queer user base. That means they have a home with us, because creating spaces for communities like that is the reason Blahaj Lemmy exists in the first place
The truth is, the hexbear admins asked me to talk to the 196 mod team and ask them to remove the “no tankies” rule, because hexbear users wanted to be part of 196. I told them to talk to the mods of the community directly, because I’m not going to force political opinions on a queer, trans fem lead community.
The 196 mods rejected the hexbear request, and like that, the hexbear narrative changed, and suddenly their users no longer wanted to join 196, claiming that it is transphobic and unsafe. So either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request.
Either way, part of their narrative change involved painting 196 as being both harmful and unassailable, with blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community.
From my perspective, the biggest harm to trans people in all of this isn’t a trans fem lead community with politics that run counter to hexbear, but rather, the ongoing demonising and dogpiling of specific trans folk and trans communities by the hexbear community.
I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat
This is also an interesting part of the ongoing narrative. It’s not a co-incidence that I’m being painted as naïve; well meaning but ultimately ill equipped to deal with moderating a large community. It allows people to attack me without attacking me.
The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.
You can disagree with my choices, but the narrative that they are naïve and ill informed is simply a tool to trigger an emotional response in people, to develop sympathy for the hexbear claims, to undermine my perceived competence, without them having to outright demonise me.
It’s a cheap tactic, and and a cheap tactic typically used to undermine women in positions of responsibility at that.
blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community
that was me speculating, bridging the gap between my main points of information: 1) that I had seen trans hexbear users discussing chaser messages they had gotten, and complaining that there were too many chasers in 196, 2) that I had seen posts from you where it was obvious to me that you care and consider chasers to be a problem, and 3) that 196 was a lifeboat community and is larger than the rest of blahaj.
If you’re happy with 196 how it is, then the three interpretations I see are 1) that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem, 2) that they have a lower tolerance for chaser behavior, or 3) that they have a lower threshold for what they deem to be chaser behavior — or some combination of the three.
either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request
Or it’s not all the same people, or their opinions changed. But I also think emotions were running high. I remember posts where hexbears were pretty upset that users on blahaj had accused them of pretending to be queer. There are also a lot of comments like that here, but I think it hurts a lot more coming from other queer people. Overall, I don’t think the situation brought the best out of anyone.
that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem
This is exactly what happened.
The two instances that I am aware of.
The first instance was a cis guy responding explicitly to a prompt from a trans person, talking about how their attraction to a non medically transitioned trans man wouldn’t work, precisely because he acknowledged that his attraction would be based on elements that would make the hypothetical trans man in question uncomfortable.
This was not a cis person volunteering an opinion to trans folk unasked for. It was a cis guy responding to an explicit question from a trans person, whilst respecting trans identities and acknowledging the reality of dysphoria.
The resulting discussion about that topic lead to a huge outbreak of transphobic commentary from external users. That lead to me making a post calling out the transphobia and aggressively banning anyone that crossed the line.
This all happened months before hexbear joined, and the post from me addressing the issue is still visible in 196.
It’s not an accident that this incident only became an issue for hexbear folk after the 196 mods refused to remove anti tankie political commentary at hexbear’s request.
The second instance was a hexbear user reporting someone making chasery comments to them. I asked for details so I could ban the person in question. Before telling me who it was, the hexbear user asked me not to ban the account in question, because they looked like they were a newly out trans person that had taken a joke too far (they were calling people m’lady as a joke). In any case, I talked to the poster making the comments, and told them that it’s making people uncomfortable and they need to stop. They did (they already had before I messaged them)
And that’s the “endemic” of chasers. A trans person making an ill conceived joke, and a single cis person answering a direct question from months ago.
I can absolutely understand why some people would be uncomfortable with both of the events in question. But even allowing for that, what we have is two misrepresented events that were actively addressed at the time they occurred, one of which occurred months before hexbear even appeared on the scene.
Again, it’s not an accident that most of the chasers hexbear are concerned about apparently hang out in 196, a community that hexbear users wanted to join until they found out they couldn’t. Only then did the chasers and transphobia appear in their narrative.
Here are the instances I’m aware of. There might be more, I just saw these posts ambiently while browsing hexbear. And I also don’t know if the ones mentioned on hexbear are the sum of all chaser experiences users have had.
(Scroll down, these are all comment links not post links)
The two additional incidents linked in there (in post 1 and 3), were both actioned by a moderator, the user spoken to, and the behaviour hasn’t been repeated. The one in your third link was aimed at me directly, not a hexbear user, and occurred before hexbear federated with us.
So, 4 events in total, 2 of which involved hexbear users, and 2 of which occurred before hexbear federated with us. All 4 of which received a moderator response and communication with the user, which stopped the behaviour in question.
Notably, 3 of the users accused of being chasers are trans, gender diverse or gender questioning themselves. And I’m not going to kick a trans person to the kerb for behaviour that can be addressed by talking to them.
The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.
It shows. You’ve handled this saga admirably. As someone with none of that experience who has performed significantly worse in navigating this situation, I’m happy to know that there are people to lean on.
Hexbear voted strongly in favor of federating with us and their admins assured us they would be well behaved. They immediately brigaded our main community and disrupted all local discussion for about 48 hours by spamming our communities, and then defederated from us, citing absolutely no evidence of misbehavior by our users in the defederation announcement. They claim ableist slurs, but considering they think the word “crazy” is an ableist slur… it rings somewhat hollow.
It’s not even the politics that bothers me, despite the fact that they often take pointless, inflammatory positions. It honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space.
When they see a user from another server make a good point against their narrative, they swarm like white blood cells fighting an infection, hurling a combination of invective and irrelevancy to prevent the cold hand of logic from penetrating their bubble. The discrepancy between their treatment of their own users and users from any other server (barring lemmygrad) is remarkable to witness.
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I’m still very upset about this whole situation because I know chapos, I listened to the podcast, I frequented the subreddit. Back in 2016/7 I thought wow, the far left is making a bit of a comeback here in America, this could be the start of something.
Then eventually reddit banned the subreddit and it seems that was all it took to dismantle that budding source of leftist activism. I guess I’m partially to blame, because I’m one of the many voices of reason that didn’t bother putting in the effort of joining a different site. Clearly, the extremists were the only ones who cared enough, and the 3 year isolation surely solidified that fact. The only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
And now they actively sequester themselves from… pretty much everybody, comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives. It’s extremely frustrating to know that thousands of potential comrades have been neutralized, and in fact are potentially being wielded like a bludgeon against real western leftists to blunt our ability to effectively collaborate and find common ground.
Yeah, I feel that. I put a lot in to trying to federate with another instance that is strongly protective of its gender diverse members, and for it to end the way it did was a bit crushing…
There’s really no sage advice that anyone can offer in the wake of what is very apparently a major disappointment to you. They were just more insecure and… emphatic than was required for the job you entrusted to them. Looking back a decade, you’ll find people preaching for social changes that are now ubiquitous despite their champions’ entirely uncharismatic involvement.
The game’s not over, it just needs new players. I fucking despise hexbear now, but my opinion on socialism is largely unchanged, if that improves your mood in the least.
If nothing else, the past week has reinforced my confidence in the local users of sh.itjust.works. Hexbear has been a massive disappointment, but SJW has, as always, provided an abundance of good takes.
I’m not cashing in my chips, I’m just realizing that I need to raise my level going forward. Hexbear is like the level 1 boss that we need to defeat to reach the next stage of Lemmy’s growth. They have a bombastic opening attack, but upon closer analysis they also have gaping vulnerabilities.
To me this is kind of a life lesson on extremes.
As in, adding opposing extremists into the mix doesn’t really balance things out, you’re just stuck with more extremists of a different cult.
If we ever refederate, a whitelist rather than a banlist may do some good. SJW simply lacks the moderator capacity to filter the mix of culture shock and bad faith users. Granted, a whitelist would be a huge undertaking in and of itself, but I can’t see any other way forward between our two instances.
comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives
many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.
it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space
The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.
Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There’s no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.
That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.
I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is “shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I’m not reading that.” “Genocide denier” — or, even less accurate, “genocide supporter” — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you’re an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.
As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup’d by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.
I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.
The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it’s like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.
Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.
On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America’s real concern.
only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.
Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I’m gonna gloss over the “genocide of westerners and white people” comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.
You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don’t find it.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press
from the abstract:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
and from further down
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?
Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it’s questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!
America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America’s wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
OK, first time I've seen the dread Hexbear brigading in action. So, thanks, I guess?
Now I understand why they warrant defederation. I'm glad on on a Lemmy instance that defederated them, and suppose I'l have to find a kbin instance that does as well (apparently this one doesn't defederate them if I'm reading this correctly?)
The irony is that, although I've been in the fediverse a while, today I literally made my first kbin account.
What’s insulting about “struggle session”? I will concede that it was dismissive, because I was dismissing demands for immediate defederation, which contradicts our decision making process.
Ehhh… I’ll try to assume the best here and just quote what Wikipedia has to say on struggle sessions.
If you read that and still think that’s an apt choice of words, then… idk? yikes?
Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being “class enemies” were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, “students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents”. Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution.
Regardless of where one stands on this particular topic, I don’t think this is a term we should ever want associated with anything, let alone our vote discussion threads?
The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
Dismissal, and implying the discussion is a sham, coming from someone in a position of power… I mean yea, that’s kind of insulting? — not to me, but to the ideals of this place and the agora.
I can’t really know your intent, and while I prefer to assume the best, it’s not really a good look.
I apologize. I acquired that term from hexbear users within the past month and I hoped to send them some kind of signal that our server was receptive to their users and not immediately hostile. Unfortunately, they still chose to be immediately hostile, so that didn’t work out. I was not aware of the derivation of the term, I thought it was just a zoomer term for a thread where people were flaming each other.
It actually gives me great relief to know that there is a reason why people were so upset about that term, and yet it also makes me ashamed of myself.
The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
I completely agree. My assumption at the time was that the discussion was yet to unfold, and the thread I was linking was merely a flame war with no productive outcome. Which is technically true.
I shouldn’t have used that term without researching what it means, and I probably shouldn’t have agreed to federate with hexbear in the first place. But I wanted to give them a chance, because I believe in leftist ideals and I hoped they could help us.
Honestly at this point I feel like just leaving Lemmy entirely, because I’m trying to guide this community and it’s just an uphill battle that I will never win. Things have gotten distinctly more tedious in the past month, and I was hoping hexbear could inject new life into the rest of Lemmy. Now, I worry about whether there even is a viable path to relevancy for us.
I appreciate the fact that at least you gave me the benefit of the doubt, unlike many others.
You should think over a federation policy and baseline behavior policy/ToS (and possibly disable sign-ups if you think you can’t handle that right now) and discuss it with the members.
You should probably investigate what all these different groups are, and learn to recognize the signs of dishonest argumentation, like the most frequent styles of whataboutism, poisoning the well, brigading (even the non-argumentative variants which can also be called a Sybil attack), pretending to be the victim (usually using dogwhistles), etc.
If you recognize malicious tactics you’re in a much better position to call bullshit on trolls (and also remember sometimes both sides on a conflict is wrong, so beware of taking sides before you know what’s going on).
I think you’re an alright person fwiw and being a mod is a very ungrateful job.
It’s easy to see the stuff you wanna see and tell yourself you can just ignore the more extreme stuff.
But that’s dangerously insidious.
I’m somewhat of a leftist myself, at least in today’s Overton window, but I like my socialism to be bound by democracy rather than wielded as a weapon by authoritarians. I think what they’re doing, especially here, is not really in good faith.
They honestly give off a lot of the same vibes as the alt-right, and it kinda reminds me of the_donald, except they’re authoritarian leftists. I will always distrust authoritarians, even those I could otherwise agree with.
There’s a lot of othering, a lot of brigading, a lot of populism and nationalism and very cultist vibe.
When I came here, I enjoyed the smaller communities (than reddit) and people more talking with each other and less at each other. A more human interaction, so to speak, certainly more nuanced.
Some of that is bound to degrade as the feddiverse grows in numbers, but hexbears have definitely not been a positive in that regard these last few days, certainly not the loud ones who come here.
Please don’t feel ashamed… Intent matters a lot, and I see you and the mod team trying your ass off to do right by our community. You made a good faith effort to connect with a bad faith community and you honestly deserve props for trying.
At hexbear, anger, conspiracy, and disrespect for everyone else is the primary focus, and leftism is nothing more than the vehicle they choose to deliver it. They actively encourage trolling and discourage philisophical deviation beyond tokenism. They actually believe the CIA is out to get them. Anyone who’s not with them is a dirty liberal, Nazi, going to the gulag, etc. It’s exactly the same vocabulary and mindset as the conservative extremists, or even any religious cult. At best, they believe they need to fight fire with fire, when the better answer is to smother the fire with a blanket.
They could remake the world exactly the way they claim to want, but they’d still be dickheads. We’re better off without them; I get the sense they’re happier without us as well.
Thanks for trying, seriously. You make this instance a better place.
Pretty disappointing that @iamaqtpie is active on hexbear and says things like:
Please direct any seething that you may wish to do to the struggle session that’s well underway over here.
which reddit considered hate speech 🙄
Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.
It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?
Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.
When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People’s Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.
But in the U.S., which touts itself as a global beacon of democracy, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy. And just over three-quarters of respondents, 76%, said democracy was important.
The average chinese citizen doesnt recognize feminism or talk about Tiananmen. The average chinese citizen relies on their Baidu feed to tell them everything about the world because the internet is heavily censored. The average chinese dreams of coming to europe to escape china. The average chinese person doesnt evem have access to clean running water. The average chinese doesnt even recognize cantonese as a language because CCP involvement. I dont think anyone should care about what an average chinese citizen thinks.
I pulled all of this out of my ass. Ive lived in china briefly, i wouldnt call it a democracy in any sense. Its a democratic socialist dream(heavy on the socialist).
The citation wasn’t the state, it was the people, or are you going to take such an immensely condescending attitude towards the approximately 1 billion people represented in that survey as believing they live in a democracy?
Oh man if only we could interact with these 1 billion people. If only there wasn’t a firewall keeping them all contained where all their media is run by the state.
That’s a bit of a non-sequitur in this instance don’t you think? We’re not talking about what the name of a place is, but rather how the two countries’ citizenry feel about their respective governments.
Well, let’s just say it wouldn’t have surprised me. But I wasn’t expecting you to just readily concede that the US’s “level of freedom” is no better than that of China. Especially right after you just used that as a reason why China was “bad,” specifically when compared to the US. But if you really are able to see that now, congrats, for real.
Is the US freer? Yes, unmistakably, you can criticise officials and you have more expression. But are you safe, will you be cared for? No. Is it as free as most wealthy nations? No, not quite.
Ok, well that is something. I think that’s good that you recognize the freedom for the average working class person in China to live as healthy of a life as possible without concern for how much money they have or without concern for becoming homeless (like people constantly do in the US). But that you think that is less free than the US, which is “unmistakably freer” because in China there’s a possibility you could get reprimanded for criticizing the state… well I think that speaks to some really fucked up priorities. But ok.
Except the State can take anything and everything away from you whenever they want, which happens in China, quite regularly if you’re an activist. In the US, they can also do this, true, but at the risk of causing mass civil disobedience, rioting, and protesting.
Fact remains is that these are both deeply flawed countries where it’s wealth over health. In your opinion, what’s a good country we should all strive to be like?
Not according to the people I’ve known from China who have told me that the state almost never does anything like that to individuals (excepting billionaires who used their money to harm people) but will crack down on corporations, and that is just the opposite of what the US does. Look at the founding members of the BLM movement in Ferguson. Murdered. Wasn’t one ruled a suicide who had two shots to the back of their skull with their car set on fire while they were in it? Or Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers who was shot to death in his hotel room bed by cops? I think you have it a little backwards. But yes, both countries are flawed (one much more than the other if you’re just a regular person and not a billionaire).
Fred Hampton’s murder is common knowledge, you can just google it (and keep in mind the US propaganda machine bias with that, but it’s even still not in question the cops just bust down the door and blew him away in bed). As for the BLM founders, a quick search also brought up theguardian.com/…/ferguson-protest-leader-darren-… and rollingstone.com/…/ferguson-death-mystery-black-l…There’s also Obama setting the precedent for having US citizens accused of being terrorists murdered without trial in drone strikes. And consider whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange, the latter will almost certainly be killed if extradited back to the US and has already been tortured severely. Look into even just the stuff the CIA has itself admitted to, it’s heinous.
It was probably state or local cops who murdered the BLM founders, but it was clearly coordinated assassinations. But no offense, you’re still being a bit naive if you think those kinds of targeted assassinations don’t happen, sometimes (if not most of the time) with the go-ahead from the very top. Even when it’s not from the top, it’s still US government killings.
I don’t trust western sources on China because they have a very strong vested interest in demonizing China now. Some of the things I’ve seen come from the nytimes in particular is straight up lies. I also wouldn’t trust Chinese state media reporting on how the US did everything it could to downplay Covid and get people back to work even as there were more waves of death from it. (I wouldn’t trust China if they were the ones telling me that, but I know it’s true because I lived through it.)
I would bet China does do some nefarious shit at times too, but they are open about it when they take down billionaires, which the US would never do in the first place. I flat do not believe anything the nytimes or the BBC says about China, though. I’ve seen too much unabashed propaganda from those outlets on things not even having to do with China. No way I’ll believe they’re telling the truth about their ideological and economic enemy.
To get down to the basis of what I think, yes, China probably does some pretty bad shit sometimes, but I don’t think it does anywhere near as bad as what the largest global super power, the bully on the world stage, the US does all the damn time. I hands down believe the US does far far worse, even if there is no country in the world that doesn’t have some blood on its own hands.
Willing to engage? wtf I never stopped engaging. And the sources I sent aren’t from one country that’s making claims about their enemy. In case you didn’t notice, the Guardian and RollingStone are not from China. lol On top of that, they aren’t “my” sources, I literally just showed you something you could have googled for yourself and found out from American sources.
What a disappointment. I thought you might be a reasonable person for a while there, but that last comment just shows how obtuse you’re choosing to be, and how unwilling to recognize bias when it doesn’t suit you to do so. Typical, but still disappointing. Whatever, enjoy whatever picture you have in your head for how the world is as told to you by the apparatus that has power over you, I won’t try to challenge it. I’m going to bed anyway. bye.
of course, why would we ever take those asiatic bugpeople at their word, they could never know what democracy is. I’m sad that they will never experience TRUE democracy, where 9 unelected appointed-for-life justices make life-altering decisions with 0 citizen input, THATs the path to Freedom freedom-and-democracy
More democratic than the US. The US has an electoral college system explicitly designed to make electing a president undemocratic. In Korea they vote for each equivalent of a cabinet position instead of letting the president just appoint all of them. www.ncnk.org/…/DPRK constitution (2019).pdf
If this shocks you, remember that Americans are the most propagandized people in the history of the world
To the degree that Korea isn’t free, it’s is because they’ve spent their entire existence at war with the largest and most powerful global empire in history and have been cut off from international trade.
The US isn’t free because it’s a fascist state. The Korean peninsula isn’t free also because the US is a fascist state.
Now let’s hear your next vapid quip that’s supposed to mean more than objective facts and inarguable history, redditor. I don’t want you to lose even a bit of steam acting like you’re the smartest person in the room while displaying no knowledge about anything.
Original brainchild for Lebensraum explicitly points to Manifest Destiny: encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/…/lebensraum. You can slap “lebensraum” and “manifest destiny” into google and also see the results for yourself. I admit say I’m not a well of primary nazi sources if that doesn’t satisfy you.
This would have the content of an actually valuable conversation if you could figure out how to ask questions without making their purpose to come off as incredulous and incurious as you are right now.
It’s literally in Mein Kampf. Lebensraum is explicitly intended to be a mirroring of the US doing westward expansion into land held by native tribes. In his writings he made the comparison all the time. It’s not a secret unless you had an American education.
They even had illustrated children’s books writing a new national mythos along the same lines as cowboys and indians. The United States is Nazi Germany 200 years after Hitler won the war.
You’re welcome to join hexbear, where this federation decision was voted on and we tried to make a space for people who are tired of the fediverse too.
Hexbear is a Lemmy server that was created about 3 years ago as a new home for the former users of r/chapotraphouse. CTH was banned from reddit because they were openly calling for the deaths of slave owners, which reddit considered hate speech 🙄
Why would you take this out of context, and what is your issue with the whole quote?
The quote was to establish that the admins personal feelings are involved about the instance.
It is an objective fact that the sub was banned on Reddit for hate speech. The rolling eyes emoji establishes the admins personal feelings on the subject.
Whether the ban is justified or not is irrelevant to my point that SJW does not care to understand what its user base may want.
Whether or not the eye roll is justified is in question when the quote is supposed to emblematic of the admin’s opinions of the instance. Some of our staunchest detractors can admin that “kill slave owners” is not hate speech because “slave owner” is not a protected class. Do you think dismissal of this logic is so outlandish that it must be emblematic of support for our instance? Because I don’t see any other reason to include it.
What are their standards for calling someone a slaveowner? Because if they’re the types I think they are they would include people who clearly don’t belong in that category
technically we were just expressing our support for US military action in the civil war and the song John Brown’s body. Which was an official song of the US army at one point.
We were kicked off for our American patriotism if you think about it
That’s a highly suspicious use of a ban that I would like admin feedback on.
While your take about decision making is slightly wrong…
We’re federating with everything by default and use blocklists. Hexbear is fedetating with nobody by default and uses allowlists.
Basically, no action has been made by local admins for this new federation to happen.
We never had to defederate them before because they weren’t fedetating with us.
The next step would be discussion then vote in the agora. I expect defederation to take a bit more than a week if the process hasn’t changed too much since last time.
That said, your comment isn’t anywhere near ban worthy and is a really bad optics on whichever mod was involved in that.
It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?
Make your own instance then, or move to another. That’s the lemmy solution.
Lemmy isn’t about having each instance be its own democracy, lemmy is about having lots and lots and lots of instances forming one massive network. These will always be privately owned by the people hosting them, so it’s ultimately up to them how they run their shop. However, the barrier to entry is relatively low, so you can quite easily host your own and be on exactly the same footing.
If you want to talk about community, then that’s literally what lemmy has instead of subreddits. That’s where the users make the rules. Granted, there aren’t sufficient mod tools to properly deal with anything - maybe when they introduce user-level instance blocking (coming soon ^TM ) they’ll also give us community-level instance blocking.
You’re the one engaging with me. If we can even call it that, all you’ve done is be insulting - which is why I think you have no value and appreciate you leaving.
Opinion of one of the admins regarding hexbear, just so you guys know where they stand:
In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they’ve also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered ver extreme by the average person.
Weird, simply saying that trans people that are finished transitioning aren’t trans… because they’re done transitioning… as in they’re now just a man or woman… got me called a bigot…
Like straight up, told that I’m a bigot and should not even think of speaking about trans people.
Some people over there also claimed that diseases didn’t kill native Americans. They claimed it’s “revisionist history” and they refered to the settlers as “shock troops”.
I’m just glad these people probably don’t go outside very much.
I can see why people call you a troll. You have to realize how abrasive your responses are. If the goal is to convince people of your stances on gender and politics, then you are actively undermining how willing anybody is to listen.
It’s the same with the rest of the hexgoons. Their community should have died when chapostraphouse got nuked. God only knows how far they’ve set trans awareness back.
I get it, I get it. I talk like a nonbinary person who has opinions. And that’s not what the patriarchy has conditioned people to expect, so there’s a reaction of fear and uncertainty from people used to living in the patriarchy.
You’re welcome to join hexbear. We had a big ol vote about this and are trying to create communities for the people that want a respite from federated posts and content!
Yeah, garbage post. I expect we’ll see discussion/vote for defederation soon, though. I’d like to hear from TheDude as his stance made a lot more sense when we were defederating from exploding-heads.
Why would you vote on whether or not Hexbear decides to federate?
SJW federates with everyone and then defederates from things that are a problem. SJW isn’t the one taking any action here, it is Hexbears decision to turn on federation, SJW has changed nothing that required voting on.
But more seriously, this wasn’t a vote for us to have. We hadn’t actually defederated from them in the first place. Their instance is one of the few set to whitelist only. Instead of federating with everyone by default and defederating by adding URLs to a blacklist, they exclusively select instances to federate with by their admins manually adding them to their allow list.
So it was their instance that decided to add us to their list of instances they’ll interact with. No change was made at sh.itjust.works without local user consultation. If you have concerns with this there is a recent discussion post at the !agora
Sucks for you guys. They caused nothing but trouble when they were still federated with Blahaj.
After so many of us complained about how they were being dicks and many on the instance weren’t feeling comfortable, hexbear decided to defederate from us first since they somehow said it wasn’t safe for their LGBT members to be on it.
Funny enough a few days later a new account started posting across different lemmy instances for days about how the Blahaj instance was anti trans and that the admin was too. Our Admin is openly trans :/
The whole argument started because the user said everything had to be political and wouldn’t stop insulting others who said they didn’t want to have every post on Blahaj to turn political.
It was just too perfect timing how a few days after hexbear defedarated for somehow saying the pro LGBT instance was anti-LGBT, that we got a brand new account attacking trans members while sayin they were anti-trans.
Hey, you’re talking about me! Yes, I was repeatedly misgendered by a user who claimed to be apolitical. Yes, I warned the admins that this user was going to be transphobic and they did nothing. Yes, I believe that trans people are capable of transphobia, because not every trans person knows every single thing in the universe about being trans.
Yeah the Blahaj admin they accused of being anti-trans was trans. They knew this too. The admin has talked to them in the original post that started it all and told the troll they were trans.
The user 100% did it on purpose to insult the Blahaj admin and to then go across all of Lemmy and post how they were anti trans.
I also saw that same user tag a Lemmy.world admin to tell them to ban a trans Blahaj user for being a chaser. Then the Blahaj user got banned even though nobody was commenting on a lemmy.world post. If you wanna read that long story then click this link to my other comment here. The 2nd half of my comment there is that long story.
Is there a straightforward way to go through and block all communities on hexbear? I browse All but would like to avoid accidentally commenting on any of their posts.
I’m interested what shape instance blocking will take, and if different people have different expectations.
The simplest and most likely implementation will just be a block of all communities from an instance. If you blocked hexbear, you wouldn’t see posts from any hexbear communities, but you still might bump into hexbear users on communities from other instances. You would then have to block users to remove them as well.
However I think many people are hoping to be able to block all users from an instance as well. These people could easily end up disappointed.
Then there’s mod tools - obviously the mod tools currently are very lacking, but at the end of the day a user-created community should be under the control of its founder/mod team (within the rules of the instance), and ultimately if they want to block and entire instance’s users that should be their perogative. If the users don’t like that, then it’s on the users as a group to create and move to another community without such a rule. However I won’t be holding my breath for mod tools.
Seems like a good option for mobile users. I don’t do social media stuff on mobile though, so I guess I’m stuck just blocking them as I see them for now.
Don’t you think their behaviour in this very thread is very clear evidence that your beliefs that they are a “positive for this society” is completely unfounded?
Of course. I simply figured that in order to decide whether or not we want to be federated, we would first have to experience what federation was like. That appears to be a very controversial assumption, but I stand by it.
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