Awoo, 9 months ago

Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman

As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.

The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.

Civility, 9 months ago

🥰

Jesus, 9 months ago

That’s hard to believe when it’s basically almost the only thing (and other serious and aggressive trolling and not trolling.) I’ve not seen any calm reasonable and rational responses from hexbear users until this post threatening to get rid of them

Awoo, 9 months ago

Come chat to us more then. Jesus would have done the same as us, he chased the money lenders out of temple by beating them with a whip. jesus-cleanse

KevonLooney, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.

That’s not true at all. Look at any post about landlords or Zelenskyy or “bourgeoisie”. Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.

I’ve already personally blocked the whole instance because it’s not worth arguing with people over and over.

Edit: you can see from the comments below what I’m talking about. I don’t care who these people think “deserve” the label of “subhuman”. I don’t want to interact with people who talk like that or think like that. That’s why I block them all.

I don’t know if defederation is the answer, but this instance is clearly a haven for these people. So I have already taken action.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

killing someone does not remove their humanity

mashbooq, 9 months ago

The reason dehumanizing someone is evil is, among other things, because it makes it easier for non-psychopathic people to kill them. If you’re ok with killing people even without dehumanizing them, that suggests very troubling things about you.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

Oh boy, wait until you find out what the bourgeoisie and landlords are fine with doing to us.

mashbooq, 9 months ago

Oh look, another redfash debate jeenyus who can tell what their opponent knows without asking

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

I forgot your instance isn´t great with subtext. If you are aware that the landlords and bourgeoisie are killing people each and every day either indirectly or directly, as well as stealing from them, sexually assaulting them, and committing every other crime imaginable, I assumed you would also understand that a) killing is already on the table, and b) it is not only justified but necessary to end their actions.

also, redfash? read parenti.

mashbooq, 9 months ago

Imagine thinking you can know whether someone is good at subtext based on which instance they’re using. Now, given that you are already comfortable publicly stating that landlords and bourgeoisie deserve death, why are you so worried that people think you’re dehumanizing them?

I don’t need Parenti to know someone is redfash. If the shoe fits, as they say. Commanding me to read something is just a classic thought-terminating cliche.

MemesAreTheory, 9 months ago

Commanding me to read something is just a classic thought-terminating cliche.

It’s exactly the opposite actually. It’s suggesting a scholar who’s body of work directly engages with what you’re saying. It’s indicating where one might indeed do some thinking and learn more about the matter, instead of terminating all thinking with a pithy sounding nonsense statement. “It is what it is,” or, “That’s just human nature,” are thought terminating cliches. They sound informative or even profound, but if you think about them for more than 10 seconds they’re literally meaningless in contexts where they’re uttered or begging the question and terminating discussion.

I’m not trying to just do an “aha gotcha, you used a phrase wrong here!”, but thought terminating cliches are legitimately rampant in hegemonic media and liberal thought. It’s important to know what they are, and it’s more than a little painful to watch what should be a useful concept so thoroughly abused.

mashbooq, 9 months ago

No, if they meant it as other than a thought-terminating cliche, they would have specified specific works and sections along with a summary of why reading those would provide information unavailable elsewhere. Instead they chose the approach shared by other fascist groups, like christofash when they own you by saying “read the Bible.” It sounds informative or profound, but it’s meaningless and useless.

[Edited in light of the fact that this comment is by someone other than who I was originally talking to.]

MemesAreTheory, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Well good news for you and your infinitely inquisitive mind, it’s less obtuse than “read the Bible.” Parenti is a scholar with a specific specialty and body of work much more relevant to your directly quoted word choice. If you had said some other kind of drivel he might have recommended Antonio Gramsci or Michael Hudson or Naomi Klein or Jason Hickel or so on and so forth. Michael Parenti’s work and specialty area just so happen to debunk your moronic claim of “redfash.” I specifically recommend the book “black shirts and reds,” If you need to be walked right up to it.

Also, LOL. LMAO even. Over here complaining about thought terminating cliches while uttering that fucking nonsense.

mashbooq, 9 months ago

I don’t care about Parenti just because some redfash demands I read him. I was simply pointing out that the other commenter did, in fact, engage in a thought terminating cliche. If you think there’s a good argument why I shouldn’t call you redfash, you should be able to defend it with more than “go read this guy.” At least, you would be able to if you weren’t suffering dialectics-induced brainrot. ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯

MemesAreTheory, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Hey man, we’re all on this thread doing our best, but you are exhibit A for whom pig poop balls is intended for: aggressively uninquisitive, proud of it, and deserving of less than half the grace you’ll ever receive.

Do me a solid and imagine a hog with it’s own shit on its testicle, resting there like there’s no where else in universe it belongs more.

Then read theory and grow the fuck up, Jesus christ. Insufferable.

mashbooq, 9 months ago

Why should I read your garbage fascist theory? I have better things to do with my time.

Bongles, 9 months ago

Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.

To be fair, I see those memes about guillotines and “eat the rich” all over the Internet.

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

In addition to doing hate speech against protected minority groups such as landlords and factory owners we also discriminate against other minority groups such as: war criminals, slave owners, Nazis, and fascist paramilitaries

kristina, 9 months ago

dont forget about the most oppressed minority, gamers 😥

projectmoon, 9 months ago

Is there a way to block instances as a user now?

Bongles, 9 months ago

Soon™ It is being worked on.

projectmoon, 9 months ago

What’s the GitHub issue for it?

Bongles, 9 months ago

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397

KevonLooney, 9 months ago

On the Connect app there is

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

Awoo has already noted some important refutations, but I want to unpack something here.

Landlords and Bourgeoisie are class identities. Importantly, these are not the result of things outside of your control (i.e. ethnic origin, nation, etc.) but instead determined by actions in the world. While one can’t say that one is subhuman because of where they are from, isn’t being a landlord (and thus extracting rent from people for shelter) a behavior? A series of actions and choices? And can’t we characterize a behavior or action as evil/immoral? Basically, when I say “landlords are evil and deserve to die or surrender their assets to the collective” what I’m describing is a particular set of actions. It’s not different from having an opinion on if murderers deserve capital punishment.

Btw, I believe in rehabilitative punishment. However, if we’re going to talk about people who deserve to die, I think capitalists and landlords are up there. A person who kills someone else – either due to mental illness or a crime of passion – is far less damaging to our social fabric than people who, through institutions, contribute to the death of our world and the immiseration of many. For instance, how many unhoused people have gone hungry/died because of the executives at Starbucks who decide that food thrown out should be covered in coffee grounds to be inedible? We don’t have the numbers, but shouldn’t we call this behavior subhuman/evil? I think you’re missing the distinction between saying the executive who designed that policy deserves the gulag – a specific inhuman action that deserves a specific response – and calling all insert ethnicity/nationality here subhuman.

steltek, 9 months ago

This is highly offtopic flamebait that will trigger a protracted argument of little substance.

Further, how you’ve casually slipped into a debate about capital punishment for enormous swathes of population is disturbing and disgusting. This is the lack of self awareness that others have mentioned here.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

Clearly you missed the “or”? Or is the choice to redistribute resources (rather than having billionaires like Bezos accumulating wealth by theft) odious to you on the merits? I don’t mind if Bezos were to turn Amazon into a worker-collective, for instance, rather than accumulate wealth extracted from his workers. Indeed, I would prefer this outcome (and it is in fact the original Marxist approach - the dialectical aufhebung of capitalism into communism).

hypelightfly, 9 months ago

@sunaurus

Here is your proof of brigading. Off topic comments massively upvoted by hexbear users. They just can't help themselves.

steltek, 9 months ago

I personally wouldn’t call this brigading per se but I stand by it as evidence of the eagerness to derail things into wildly offtopic discussions that poison the well for everyone else. And no, just because someone says something first doesn’t mean you are compelled to respond until they concede or give up.

After more reading elsewhere, it also speaks to an all too comfortable relationship with political violence. “I’m not saying we put people up against the wall… But if we did, who would go first? The bankers or the factory owners?” The offtopic bit is destructive to community building but the absolute fascination of who dies for what reason is pretty damned concerning.

DrRatso, 9 months ago

Why are you still going on about this, it is so off-topic for the thread it hurts. You have completely deflected and warped the conversation, not even talking the OP, from which this is worlds apart but even from this single comment thread. And yet somehow you are +15 on upvotes despite this sort of behaviour being the reason this thread even exists.

Not brigading my ass.

This is why noone wants to interact with hexbear outside of your instance, this is why world got rid of you, this is why I block every single hexbear comm the second i see it in all and why I hope to god ml will have this conversation as well.

Catradora_Stalinism, 9 months ago

This is highly offtopic flamebait that will trigger a protracted argument of little substance.

lots of big words there sir that don’t really have relevance besides dictionary waving

Firemyth, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

This is the kind of thing I really hate to see. It’s the reason I’m going to be leaving. You guys make a blanket statement like all landlords are evil because they extract rent for shelter. You don’t give any further reasoning. I’m sure you’ve collectively decided that through some illogical conversations on your home instance but you fail to make a valid point in the wild.

For example:

where are you expecting people to live?

These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.

Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?

Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?

Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”

How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?

Why don’t you go build your own house? Why aren’t you giving these unfortunate souls your own place?

To cap it all- you follow each other around in groups and rather than actually discussing you strawman, point people to communist propaganda, and generally troll anyone who disagrees with you. No one wants to join your club, no one wants to read your Marxism books etc. If you have a point- state it. Don’t point elsewhere and act like you won because we arent interested in your echochamber

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Most of those questions are full of tacit assumptions, but I’d like to answer the general question “Why do you commies dislike landlords so much?” You may restate any of those questions or present new ones if you feel them to be relevant in response.

You complain about people citing Marxist literature, so let’s try citing the central figure of classical liberal economics, Adam Smith:

Wealth of Nations, Chpt 11 -- Excerpts>Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more. Whatever part of the produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of its price is over and above this share, he naturally endeavours to reserve to himself as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. Sometimes, indeed, the liberality, more frequently the ignorance, of the landlord, makes him accept of somewhat less than this portion; and sometimes too, though more rarely, the ignorance of the tenant makes him undertake to pay somewhat more, or to content himself with somewhat less than the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This portion, however, may still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent for which it is naturally meant that land should for the most part be let. > >The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions; for it can scarce ever be more than partly the case. The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. > >. . . >The rent of the land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.

Obviously, Smith here is discussing a different type of landlord here, one who rents land for farming (etc.) rather than just habitation, but this contrast is largely to the detriment of the modern landlord as they leave it up to the geographic location of the rented property (i.e. availability of jobs within commuting distance) rather than have the possibility of issuing improvements to the farmland or otherwise assuring that rent can be paid by that individual.

The apologetics around landlords would have a chance if not for the basic fact that they operate on the principle of monopoly, as all of the land has been “accounted for,” it is all publicly or privately owned, and there are extensive efforts to keep people from sleeping on public land. There’s often no camping in a tent, there are specific “public awareness” campaigns encouraging private citizens to report those for destruction, and the settlements that remain are at any time liable to be cleared out by a police squad for the crime of existing. Sleeping on benches, when the benches aren’t specifically designed to prevent this, is “loitering” or “trespassing” (many public sites are officially considered to be closed at night), and in any case is immensely dangerous even if one only considers things like precipitation. Landlords make their profit from the fact that renting land and buying land are the only possible options for someone who doesn’t want to die of exposure or state violence. If there was land open for grabs and it wasn’t being bought up by land sharks, there would be very few homeless because they could at least have little shacks on such land.

Without the power of monopoly, rent would be drastically less, in proportion to the actual maintenance and management labor performed by the owner (or their property manager). We communists have nothing against paying for maintenance or management, but merely owning a vital resource that is monopolized is not a job.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Did you just miss that the entire argument rests on unimproved land? By definition a home is on improved land.

Besides I really don’t care what smith or anyone else says- I’m not giving you the things I’ve paid for for free. If you want to use it- you can make an offer. But I’m not evil for not giving you something I worked for. You are for wanting it from me for free.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Did you just miss that the entire argument rests on unimproved land? By definition a home is on improved land.

Smith accounts for both, but says rent is not based on improvement of land but on the highest level of rent the tenant can sustain. Improvement of land would be expected to raise that amount, but unimproved land would still have a cost all the same. It’s not the main element, though I think it actually does bear some relevance to the issue of monopoly since one could rent unimproved land for the purpose of housing and get takers, as it would provide the “service” of protecting from a large part of police violence.

Besides I really don’t care what smith or anyone else says- I’m not giving you the things I’ve paid for for free. If you want to use it- you can make an offer. But I’m not evil for not giving you something I worked for. You are for wanting it from me for free.

I have already emphatically said that I’m speaking on a systemic level because hyper-individualized solutions to systemic problems simply aren’t useful, so bringing it back to personal incredulity and your land isn’t useful. I have no problem with you being compensated for the labor that you put in or even the labor that you can plausibly say you managed, you’re making many assumptions about my stance. The right to personally own the land itself, however, does not have so strong a basis in liberal philosophy (you can see Paine argue against this in many later works).

But really, pre-Covid the numbers were something like 600,000 homeless a night and 18,600,000 empty housing units. I don’t care to moralize about landlords, I just don’t want people to be homeless due to anything other than wanting to be homeless (which makes up a tiny minority, barring “itinerant” homeless who should also be sheltered). Maybe public funds buy your properties off of you, or maybe you are not directly affected because there are so many extra units that only a small proportion are relevant. I don’t care, I just don’t want people to die of exposure.

Naturally, if you don’t have your properties bought off to start with, that will drastically undercut the amount of rent you can ask for for your properties simply because there will already be a supply for people who need it, making your service more of a luxury because it no longer has the force of monopoly behind it, but you are all for voluntary agreements, so that shouldn’t represent a problem to you if people simply choose not to rent out your units and instead they sit empty, right?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I do happen to have my properties bought off and I don’t really care what the rent is as long as it’s making a return that makes sense.

If your issue is with the system- great I agree the system isn’t the best. If your issue is with people that happen to own a thing and rent it to people- get fucked.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Marxists are strongly and explicitly anti-moralist, our concerns are for strategy rather than deciding who is good and who is bad. You can see my description of what could be called a personal set of incentives in the previous comment which make no reference to anyone’s particular value or morality in general, simply a method of people getting along and subsisting. I want for people to be secure, not for punishment to be meted out for the sake of meting out punishment.

The symbol of the guillotine is – in essence – a threat to those who fight to preserve the old order. I think that society as has been observed typically runs better when people are compensated for socially useful labor, so there is no reason a petite bourgeois like yourself shouldn’t be compensated for the actual labor you put in just like everyone else, and there’s no reason that even an earnestly bourgeois person cannot be reformed. If you support the destruction of the system in which people lie in misery under the open sky due to poverty, then the threat does not apply to you.

You’ll get other people who think differently – in my experience this is mainly a subset of anarchists who moralize in a detrimental way – but I disagree with them.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Except in every other thread I’m also being thrown under the guillotine. So - you need to have an internal discussion so all of you are on the same page. You need to actually say what you mean rather than the buzzword salad you all spout. And most importantly you need to come up with a real solution rather than this hyper stupid and never gonna happen idea that people are going to just give away what they own.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

When you orient everything in terms of you personally imagining yourself being deprived vs those pesky homeless, that’s gonna happen. Even as we were speaking I had to keep saying “I’m not talking about individualized responses, I’m not talking about you and I” etc. to try to wrangle the conversation into staying on the level of systemic issues. If you instead say “Do I still get to be paid for the physical and managerial labor I put in?” I think you will get warmer responses, but the other thing about it is that Hexbear isn’t a monolith, it has a bunch of different ideologies, even though the one that I purport to offer some representation of – Marxism-Leninism – is the most prominent.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

As I’ve repeatedly stated- my argument is an individual argument. Yours is a misplaced blanket that attacks me personally.

I don’t have a problem with you guys wanting a system change. I have a problem with you guys not having a viable alternative and making personal attacks then getting upset when I object to said personal attack. You saying all landlords are evil is an Individual attack to which I take exception.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I’m pretty sure that I already covered the anti-moralism of Marxism. I don’t call you evil; I don’t really call anyone evil. I don’t think it’s a useful term.

you guys not having a viable alternative

There are many countries – mostly socialist but I think even the nordic states – that have a far superior right to housing than the US. Most of us – even the ones with whom I strongly disagree – don’t suggest anything in this respect except what has already been demonstrated for many years to work well.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Great- grand. wonderful. Make that argument then. Don’t call for death, evil, redistribution of personal wealth/investments. Those are silly go nowhere arguments. I lived in Austria myself for a number of years. I’ve lived in a number of countries- I totally agree there are alternatives. It’s the rabid frothing at the mouth blanket calls for violence and/or moralistic bs attacks on ALL LANDLORDS that I’m objecting to

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I think in general you would have a better time if you tried to help the people who are suffering and their allies rather than take the #NotAllLandlords route, just as you are probably better off being an ally to victimized women than to do #NotAllMen, etc. Whatever you might think of it, you’re mainly serving as a useful idiot to the institution of land monopolization.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I’m really not interested in your opinion on that.

I think you are a useful idiot for china/russia by buying and spreading useless divisive ideas. You’d be better served explaining how a system might be changed or pointing out systems that do work. I think calls for violence/moralistic bs that your community generally spouts only servs to induce hate on both sides.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I still renounce and denounce moralism and have mentioned that there are other systems even in capitalist states work well, though the best that I can remember offhand is actually in Venezuela.

People talk about divisiveness, but class antagonism does the dividing for you. There is no escaping the fundamentally antagonistic nature of class relations except by the eventual destruction of class relations. Every time you hike rent, you breed animosity. Every time you evict someone, you make an enemy. It’s not internet anarchists doing that. Either you can work to change the system or you can defend it along White Moderate-like lines of personal incredulity. I have no business saying which you have done or will do, but if everyone could just be friends, this problem would not exist.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Great. I agree with that in principle. Though I’d not point at Venezuela as a great place to live personally. And as soon as I hike rent I suppose it would make an enemy. And the first time I have to evict someone I guess it would make them mad. I mean I haven’t had that happen in over a decade but who knows what the future holds.

And as long as my tenants don’t destroy my property and can make payments that will not happen. So yeah- friends all around.

Get that message out to the slobbering meme posters and the rest of your community/idealists and I’d honestly have no issue at all with you.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Though I’d not point at Venezuela as a great place to live personally.

It’s not the housing policy causing that, it’s the sanctions and blockades. I could have said China, which has a policy that is worse but still vastly superior to the typical neolib country, but I think I’d just be setting myself up for an even more tangential response.

I literally do post about the moralism business. Do you want to be part of the problem by doing nothing and waiting until some sorry asshole like me personally makes sure than not even one in a million leftists will ever say something to hurt your feelings, or would you like to be part of the solution? Because just engaging with them without falling back on lolbertarian talking points would get you a lot farther with them than I could ever do for you.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Do you really think you are part of the solution? As of yet I’ve seen no valid or real argument on how to actually make things better.

Just some ideas that have no way to be implemented and rely on humanity being “good” and “equal” which of course is never going to happen.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Are you just never going to internalize the “anti-moralism” thing?

super_mario_69, 9 months ago

I think it’s time to throw in the towel, comrade. Extremely good posting, though.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I invite you to look at literally every other argument in these threads and come back to me. You alone sure- you’ve been decent. You I don’t necessarily have an issue with.

IzyaKatzmann, 9 months ago

I won’t argue, I will say that Adam Smith is a notable figure who predates Marx, Ricardo, Madison, Stuart Mill, Hayek and Friedman, etc. All of whom were important figures who have shaped our current economic system and form of liberalism.

Even if you don’t care it’s important to note the effect he’s had as it largely effects you even to this day. Warren Buffet, notable capitalist, said one of his two favourite books was Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Think of it like the Bible of economics. It’s where the phrase “invisible hand of the free market” comes from (wording might be off but I hope you get the idea!!)

IzyaKatzmann, 9 months ago

Hey comrade, I’m on Memmy and the excerpt from Adam Smith won’t render, might want to check that out. I’m guessing it’s the one about landlords seeking wealth from land which they never toiled or something like that? There were a couple times he talked about the problems of landlords and rentier capitalism.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I put it as a spoiler, so you should be able to see it by clicking on it, but anyway I took it from here:

www.marxists.org/reference/archive/…/ch11.htm

Paragraphs 1, 2, and 5. There are probably better passages to talk about, but that one was usable and tbh I was being a bit lazy.

IzyaKatzmann, 9 months ago

Ah thanks for the clarification.

No yeah it says literally after I click the spoiler “For some reason Memmy cannot render this” :/

a_talking_is2, 9 months ago

Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?

Amazing logic. I worked so hard to buy this minigun, surely it’s perfectly ok to unload it into a crowd. Don’t tell me what to do with MY money!

Firemyth, 9 months ago

This is the strawmanning I referenced earlier. Goodjob being true to your roots.

a_talking_is2, 9 months ago

It would be strawmanning if here was a point to make. But here was only only a bunch of cliches to make fun of.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

Your post is far better than mine comrade. Much funnier example.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

This is the following each other around bit.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

Yeah, I just had to give props though, it’s such a good example, way better than my lame one t.t

sweetviolentblush, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Should I accuse you of following lemm.ee users around when you respond to ones comment? This is such a weird take… there are a ton of hexbear users, and this thread is literally about them. Why wouldn’t they post here? Why wouldn’t they respond to each other? To accuse every hexbear user of brigadeering seems a bit over-the-top to me when they are the actual subject matter being discussed. Nowhere in the original post does it say hexbear comments are unwanted.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

What? I’m saing you guys just follow each other around upvoting/commenting purely on the basis of “comradeship” regardless of how stupid the take is. Literally the guy tried to strawman the discussion into somethig about shooting a mini gun into people and immediately there’s you guys up voting hum.

This is pretty classic hexbear and comrade community behavior in my short time on lemmy.

sweetviolentblush, 9 months ago

Why are you “you guys” ing me? Look again, I’m on sh.itjust.works. I’m not a hexbear. You seem like you need to chill, friend. You’re coming across less like your speaking in good faith and more like you have an agenda against hexbear honestly.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Because of what you said bud. Not to mention how dumb of a take the original guy took. It’s literally the point I was making.

You making an alt on another instance is not proof of anything.

sweetviolentblush, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Oh yeah I’m on my alt lol, where I post daily and regularly post and maintain my community? Yeah this is clearly my alt 🙄 You gotta chill with the paranoia, “bud”. Kinda proving me right with these assumptions you keep making

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Oh yeah Totally. No really.

sweetviolentblush, 9 months ago

Buddy, you have less activity on your account then I have had in half the time, and I’m not over here accusing you of being an explodingheads troll, ya big weirdo. But if eVeRyOnE i DoNt lIkE Is HeXbEaR is how you wanna spend your time on here, have at it. Keep letting them live rent free in your head. As far as I’m concerned, you’re being reactive and disingenuous, so were done chatting.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Uh. Ok. Point of pride for you I guess?

Literally no loss for me if you stop commenting.

alcoholicorn, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

This is the kind of thing I really hate to see. It’s the reason I’m going to be leaving

I’m sorry. I do hope you come around to at least tolerating leftist perspectives before you leave for an echo chamber. That all wealth is created by labor is one of the core leftist beliefs, you’ll find anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, etc all agree on that.

where are you expecting people to live?

In houses. There’s dozens of vacant homes for every homeless person. Just as capitalism requires some people be hungry to maximize profit of food, it requires some people be homeless to maximize profit of landlords.

These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.

The people who build houses deserve to be compensated for their labor. Owning a house on the other hand, is not labor.

Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?

Rent isn’t compensation for the construction of a home, otherwise the renter would own the home after 20 years of renting paid off the mortgage.

Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?

I’d categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it’s more complicated as we live under capitalism.

Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”

Are you talking about the description of the cultural revolution in that one province in China people post? In the context of generations of peasants seeing their children die of starvation-related disease or conscripted never to return, the people were more merciful and practical than just. It’s easy to criticize any change if you ignore the violence of the status quo. To quote Mark Twain:

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?

It’s not.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I’m not leaving for an echo chamber. I’m just leaving. It’s your echo chambers I’m exiting.

All these empty houses aren’t producing rent are they? You can go buy one and give it away if you want. Oh what’s that? You don’t want to do that?

What’s the difference if I hammered the nail myself to build the house or if I buy it from the guy who did the hammering. This is the insanity that permeates your argument. I’ve done both by the way- either way that home is owned by someone and rented to someone else.

When did I say rent was compensation for building a home? You say that- and you are wrong for bringing it up. I built a thing- someone wants to use said thing- we make an agreement that we both agree to.

I characterize this insane rationality as evil. You want a thing to be given away for free without compensation. It’s crazy to think this investment I’ve made is somehow going to magically fix something if I just transform it into some other thing you aren’t all brigading over. If it wasn’t a house- it’d be a restaurant, or a clothing business, or whatever. And you’d eventually get up in arms about that too. What you really want is others to give you an equal share even though you haven’t done anything to earn it and I fucking have.

alcoholicorn, 9 months ago

You want a thing to be given away for free without compensation.

Except I do want you to be compensated, for the labor of building the home. Everything beyond that is theft.

What you really want is others to give you an equal share even though you haven’t done anything to earn it and I fucking have.

You are the one expecting others to work for free. You are demanding a greater amount of wealth from the renter than you’ve produced.

To put it another way, construction and property management are forms of labor and deserve compensation for the wealth they’ve created. Landlord is not.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Cool- then buy my house and I’ll just reinvest in something else for profit- which you will then move on to claiming is for everyone. And the cycle will continue.

macabrett, 9 months ago

What you really want is others to give you an equal share even though you haven’t done anything to earn it and I fucking have.

A core belief most of us have is that workers are very literally not being given what they’ve earned. But we also believe that all humans deserve food, shelter, and care. If you think that’s evil, there’s not much more of a discussion to have.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

That’s fine. That’s not what you have been saying though. What you’ve been saying is take my stuff and redistributed because I’m evil.

Way more effective to actually say the things you mean because we didn’t all buy into your Marxism and discuss it internally- so we don’t know what that you mean y when you say x.

macabrett, 9 months ago

Okay.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

All these empty houses aren’t producing rent are they? You can go buy one and give it away if you want. Oh what’s that? You don’t want to do that?

Personal charity is not a solution to a systemic problem! This will not actually get rid of the problem, it will palliate it! Also, I literally can’t because I personally don’t have the money that would be needed to buy a rental property off of someone who can afford to leave such properties empty, since if we assume they are willing to sell, it’s a high price, but more likely they just won’t because an apartment on the fourth floor of an eight-floor complex being someone else’s property seems like a litigation nightmare if there’s literally any type of water damage or anything of the sort that occurs after the sale.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Right. So because you can’t afford it- it should be given to you for free? What have you bought recently? Am I entitled to that? How about you loan it to me for a set fee over time? Which makes more sense?

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

If I was monopolizing a resource people need to live, sure, repatriate it! I, uh, have a lot of books and I actually do like lending those to people – even ones I hardly know or somewhat dislike – so long as I think that I will get them back in good condition.

Part of the problem with your need to individualize everything is that we encounter class antagonism, i.e. people in different classes have different incentives. I am totally fine with the idea of virtually everything I own being held communally and living in a monastery – so long as there was enforcement against just trashing things. What matters to me is use, not profit, because I am not in a class that profits but one that subsists on labor and therefore am mainly seeking to ensure the easiest subsistence possible by the means I know. I also see that many people are in my same position and we can’t all subsist by lying at the top being fed grapes while being paid to own things, the viability of selling a commodity comes from people not having it. On that basis, since I don’t want to make enemies out of my fellows (enemies are dangerous) and I don’t want to be stuck under someone else’s corporate boot heel if I fail, it is more appealing to me that we collaborate rather than compete, so that our best interests lie in mutual benefit rather than scalping scarce resources.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I have no issue with any of what you said. My entire argument is about the Individual ownership and the attacks I receive from you guys.

Your arguments have not been the system is bad and it’s the mega billionaires etc… it’s all landlords are bad because they own something you feel should be given away for free.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I would like to try to explain something while avoiding reference to those liberal economists that you seemingly care just as little for as Marx and friends.

Person A owns a car. Person B steals the car and fences it to an unwitting Person C. Person C fixes up the car in various ways and then tries to sell it. The origin of the car is discovered and it seems like perhaps Person A should get their car back, but Person C has put in work on it and didn’t know it was stolen, and doesn’t want their labor value to be for nothing. What is to be done?

You might disagree on or not see the relevance, but humor me here.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Person b compensates person c. Person a gets their car back.

Person b goes to jail for theft.

Not seeing the connection here.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

What if person B doesn’t have the money to compensate person C? Many car thieves are poor, which is part of why they engage in a crime where it is so likely to get caught.

Don’t worry, there’s a connection.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Too bad. Person b will work off the debt. He’s just made life harder for himself and he reaps that reward.

That’s why there are systems in place to verify ownership and this is part of the risk of buying from shady characters.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Person B is dead and has no earthly possessions left behind (or none that can be tracked and recovered). Now from where does person C receive compensation?

This actually brings the analogy closer to my intention, so don’t worry

Firemyth, 9 months ago

He doesn’t. Part of the risk of making shady deals.

Just fyi I think I know where you are going and you are going to be disappointed with the result.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I appreciate the fair warning. Tell me, what is the basis for the ownership of a plot of completely unimproved land?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Did you buy it legally from someone who also legally owns it. That’s the basis.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I believed you when you said you knew where this was going. I still do, so feel free to include multiple steps in your response. Do you believe that this exchange of property goes back infinitely? If not, what was the basis for the first instance of such ownership? Not in the concrete historical sense, since we’re talking about land in the abstract, but more generally. How did land become something that people owned?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

It became a thing people owned when the legitimate government that owns the land decided to sell it to a private citizen/gift it/however it was legally acquired.

Where you are going with this results in tribalism, nomadic cultures, and anarchy. It results in survival of the fittest. The idea that everyone contributes equally is a great IDEA. It’s NEVER in the history of the world been practiced. There’s always someone who tries to game the system either through manipulation, laziness, or personal power gain. People are not all the same and have varying abilities. Some of those abilities are rarer/more valuable than others and have always will always be rewarded thusly. Going your route just puts us right back here eventually.

ennemi, 9 months ago

This is a good post, but I think the person you’re replying to is trying to bait a ton of belief statements out of you so that they can then piss you off by contradicting each one with effortless status-quo normalizing, and use that as a justification to defederate Hexbear. That, or they’re just going to dig their heels in and you’ll have wasted your time.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Buddy I’m replying to the things he’s saying. If it hurts your brain that I’m detailing why the things he say make no sense that’s on you. If hexbear is all people like you- that’s on them.

I am new to lemmy and would prefer actual discussion- if certain groups brigade and shitpost in lieu of discussing- that’s on them.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

Please respect hexbear user pronouns

Ironically an issue of pronouns, since you’re directly replying to a he/him but it’s unclear who the antecedent in the first sentence is. I’m gonna trust that you’re not intentionally doing it tho, thanks.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Him/her/whatever.

Misgender me all you want- I know who I am and don’t require you to know innate things or particular responses.

But if you really need it: I didn’t mean to misgender anyone.

ennemi, 9 months ago

I could give you the benefice of the doubt. However, this is the calibre of argument you’re throwing at us :

Did you pay half the down payment? Did you pay half the mortgage and interest to the bank? Did you pay half the property taxes? Did you pay half the maintenance?

The obvious answer is that yes, the tenant pays for all these things, because that’s why the landlord charges rent to begin with. This is such an obvious thing, irrespective of any political beliefs, that the mere fact of you having asked it makes you suspect. I’m not even trying to be mean to you here, I’m just describing the situation as I see it.

Firemyth, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Uh- he literally didn’t. The owner did these things. He paid the agreed upon amount to live in the house that he doesn’t own and doesn’t improve or repair or pay taxes for.

I pay taxes - does that mean I own some percent of the road? Schools? Emergency service? Of course not. Do I get to utilize these things that I didn’t build but do pay a fee for over time? Yes.

That you can’t see this makes you quite a bit more than suspect.

ennemi, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The money does not disappear when it changes hands, nor is it laundered. Most landlords cannot afford any of these things if the houses that they own are not occupied by paying tenants.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

If they can’t afford the empty house… either it is rented or they sell it. Do you think people are sitting on houses they can’t afford and also intentionally keep empty? What point are you trying to make here?

ennemi, 9 months ago

The point is that renters pay for home equity. They just don’t earn home equity. Landlords retain 100% of that and 100% of the value gained by the asset. You are catastrophically wrong about that.

Whether or not you think that’s ethical, it’s still a fact.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

No you.

Renters pay for a place to live.

Homeowners pay for equity.

Facts are facts sorry you don’t like it.

The moment a renter pays taxes, repairs, mortgage, and all the other miscellaneous items a homeowner pays for AND there was an agreement that it’s a rent-to-own situation- THEN you have an argument t.

ennemi, 9 months ago

Yeah sure the money flows like this : renter -> mystery black hole -> landlord -> bank

I was right not to take you seriously

Firemyth, 9 months ago

More like

Bank - > landlord

Landlord -> bank

Landlord -> property taxes, maintenance, improvements, insurance, pest control, etc

Renter -> landlord

You not taking these simple facts of life seriously really highlights why Noone in reality takes you serious But hey- who am I to interfere with your obviously well-educated and experienced self.

ennemi, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

You’re no longer saying “owner”, we’re making progress.

Now do tell us : if the combined revenue and appreciation of assets are not greater in value than the expenses (eg mortgages, services, taxes, opportunity cost), what point is there to being a landlord?

(This is a trick question, by the way)

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Landlord/owner whatever. They are synonyms. That you think it significant is concerning.

provide a place for people who can’t afford them

If the value of the home and the income from rents is the same as your expenses it’s a bad investment and should be sold. Doesn’t have to be necessarily if it’s not costing anything but it’s just not a good investment.

ennemi, 9 months ago

Actually, you could rent out at a deficit, and still come out winning. I’m sorry but that was a trick question.

Tank the loss using personal income. Do this for a couple of years, and you have built enough equity on your homes to act as security for another mortgage. Now you have two renters paying you every month. Rinse, repeat.

Real estate is the safest investment, bar none. Do you want me to walk you through the implications of that?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Sure please do. I’d love to see when it becomes evil. So far I’m not seeing it.

ennemi, 9 months ago

I was mostly trying to point out that you’re not as well informed as you think you are. Landlords being “evil” isn’t something I’m interested in demonstrating because there’s nothing materialist about that analysis. It’s just cathartic maoposting.

I can spend some time explaining why rent-seeking is unethical and a net loss for society. When I get back home and if I’m not too drunk.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Great- I readily admit to not having read much Marxism or communism as the basics of it don’t make sense to me. And from the interactions I’ve had with your community I’ve no desire to ever pursue it. If you people are the example I know what I need to know already.

If you can explain why rentseeking is unethical without devolving to “I have a philosophical disagreement” I’d be happy to hear it. Even better if you have a real alternative for people that doesn’t involve stealing people’s property.

ennemi, 9 months ago

Frankly, you seem like a decent enough person. I see no point in being condescending anymore. But before we seriously talk about housing, we have at least two hard problems to solve. The first being :

without devolving to “I have a philosophical disagreement”

It may very well lead to that. If I believe that not only housing but also housing security are inalienable human rights, and you instead believe that these things should be earned, then what we have there is a hard contradiction. If you and I agree on that, and you happen to believe that capitalism with well implemented reforms is the best way to achieve that goal, then we could get somewhere.

Even better if you have a real alternative for people that doesn’t involve stealing people’s property.

This also poisons the well a little bit. When the French overthrew their monarchy, they effectively “stole” land from the royal family and privatized it. Was that going too far, in a nation where serfdom was practiced? In other words, are property rights more important to you than human rights?

Conversely, when the soviet union collapsed, how do you think all that land was de-collectivized? Did they go back in time to 1917 and retrieve all the deeds of long-since-dead people, trace their descendants and just give the land to them? What if those descendants did not exist? No, what happened was : gangs armed with AKs and armored vehicles roamed the streets and enforced their claims. The Russia we know of today is the product of that period of time.

They are not unique in that way. In the western world, probably every single inch of private land was at some point under the dominion of a now-extinct polity and taken by force of arm. Is there a statute of limitations on “stealing” land? It’s kind of a big question right now, since we’re re-litigating the status of native Americans and all that stuff.

Now, if I argue that our economies should serve humanity rather than the other way around, are we in agreement?

If I argue that the simultaneous existence of empty houses and unhoused people on its own should be interpreted as a massive failure of our economic system, are we in agreement?

I suggested earlier that repeating strong and succinct messages was far more effective at shattering axioms than any form of long-winded debate. You interpreted that as promoting demagogy, and I can’t really blame you. Still, we can argue if we are comrades. Otherwise we’re in conflict. Does that make more sense now?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

I believed in a perfect world everyone should have everything they need. I also believe we do not live in a perfect world.

Do I believe the current system is broken? Yes. Do I believe reform would work? Yes. Do I believe I’ve seen any kind of plan or actionable theory of how to change it? No.

Do I believe empty houses while people are homeless is wrong? Morally, yes. Realistically- not my fault and not my problem. Can’t fix that but I can do what I am doing.

Ideally yes governments and economies would serve humanity- again we don’t live in an ideal world and the human condition will always prevent that.

We probably won’t get anywhere because:

I also believe that if these things were to be done it would involve the government- not me- providing these things. In this ideal situation I would also be allowed to buy property(or whatever thing) and rent it to those who can’t afford it themselves. This means more taxes and excluding lobbying, gerrymandering, corruption in general. I believe every system fails to corruption because that’s just the human condition.

Yes that’s sort of what happened when ussr collapsed- not entirely. A lot of the apartments went to the current residents… like alot alot. There’s a reason I know this. However what you mentioned also happened. And it sucks. It’s not fair. But there’s no way to be fair about it. Now the legitimate (uncontested) government has control of things and that’s just where we go from now. Going back through history is pointless.

I also disagree that shouting at people is effective. Especially when you appear to be shouting x when you really mean y.

I’m much more willing to listen to someone who lays out a well constructed argument rather than some rhetoric that on its own makes no sense.

ennemi, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I believed in a perfect world everyone should have everything they need. I also believe we do not live in a perfect world.

That’s intellectually lazy. I described something that is both easy to conceive of and (in my opinion) completely achievable with modern means. At this point we should be talking about implementation details and not acting like “housing humans” is a pie-in-the-sky idea. You are the outlier if you think it is. You have to defend that abnormal belief.

Do I believe the current system is broken? Yes. Do I believe reform would work? Yes. Do I believe I’ve seen any kind of plan or actionable theory of how to change it? No.

I am trying to get there. First, admit that it’s both a possibility and a worthwhile goal. Otherwise we have nothing to discuss.

Ideally yes governments and economies would serve humanity- again we don’t live in an ideal world and the human condition will always prevent that.

Again, this is intellectually lazy, and completely without substance. If you truly believe that, then just don’t have opinions. Don’t question the credibility of others. Be a consoomer and live your life never thinking of injustice.

We both know that’s not how humans work. The human condition is incredibly malleable. We built modern civilization on moral education. We should in theory only get better at that, so long as we can see people’s material needs fulfilled. Historical progress is synonymous with the adoption of shared principles for the greater good of the collective.

I also believe that if these things were to be done it would involve the government- not me- providing these things. In this ideal situation I would also be allowed to buy property(or whatever thing) and rent it to those who can’t afford it themselves. This means more taxes and excluding lobbying, gerrymandering, corruption in general. I believe every system fails to corruption because that’s just the human condition.

I despise this idea liberals have that humans are necessarily greedy or corrupt or what-have-you, but if that really is the case, then why would you design your system purely around self-interest? Why would you allow slumlords to run rampant with no accountability? Why not remove greed from the equation and collectivize housing?

Yes that’s sort of what happened when ussr collapsed- not entirely. A lot of the apartments went to the current residents… like alot alot. There’s a reason I know this. However what you mentioned also happened. And it sucks. It’s not fair. But there’s no way to be fair about it. Now the legitimate (uncontested) government has control of things and that’s just where we go from now. Going back through history is pointless.

Then there is nothing to enforce its legitimacy other than violence. In other words, the state is legitimate, until it is overthrown with violence. I’m glad we agree on that. Lenin had the right idea.

I also disagree that shouting at people is effective. Especially when you appear to be shouting x when you really mean y.

I’m not talking about shouting. I’m talking about appearing cooler and smarter than your opposition. Yes, it’s fucking stupid. Yes, it works. Welcome to modern politics.

I’m much more willing to listen to someone who lays out a well constructed argument rather than some rhetoric that on its own makes no sense.

You’ve given me pretty much nothing but prevarication, so I frankly doubt that.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Well that civility was short lived…

No, you.

You are lazy for not looking at how humans have worked since the dawn of time

You are lazy for thinking you’ve given some actionable plan when you’ve literally done nothing more than “can’t we all just get along.” Saying just give houses to the needy is stupid. Noone is ever going to do that. Petition governments to provide increased housing- sure. Create an initiative to build homes for free- great I’m all for you doing that. Do x thing that helps: sure. You do that. Telling people you need to just give up your stuff and return to monke- not a solution.

You are… lazy.

Worse- you think you are smart because you read a book on Marx and try to use ridiculously unnecessary words.

Why use an extraneous amount of verbiage and syllables when a diminutive amount suffices?

Pseudo intellectual is the worst kind of intellect .

ennemi, 9 months ago

It’s not difficult for me to write like this. It takes very little effort. It’s also a bit sad that it intimidates you so much.

There are solutions we can talk about. Rent-to-own, central housing commissions, urban planning reforms. We are not getting there because you are dodging the vital question, which is “are you a shitty person or not”

I should have trusted my instinct. You are completely unserious. Hope you grow out of it.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Yeah- well not sorry to see you go.

Hope you grow up someday yourself kiddo.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Oh ninja editing will get you nowhere sweetie.

We could talk.about those ideas and they would be solutions. I’ve mentioned them myself numerous times.

I’ll just answer your rhetorical question with another:

Are you a moralistic antagonistic piece of shit?

ennemi, 9 months ago

My brother in Christ, we have reached a conclusion. Human beings are bad by nature. Better things aren’t possible.

Sure, whatever. You’re right. Just go and do your thing. Appeal-to-nature your away out of every dilemma that’s presented to you. I’m not going to spend any effort on you for the same reason I wouldn’t spend any effort on a crazy QAnon person.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Ok. I mean I personally believe with application of reforms and laws you can incrementally get things better. And it’s more about fighting corruption than trusting in the integrity of humanity.

But hey sure if thats your take away. Probably would have saved a lot of time by not going through all those insane hoops and just starting here right? Almost like half thought analogies and pure rhetoric isn’t an effective arguing tactic.

I mean I really haven’t taken you seriously from the start for the previously mentioned reasons so I’m glad youve come an understanding of some sort at last.

ennemi, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Ok. I mean I personally believe with application of reforms and laws you can incrementally get things better. And it’s more about fighting corruption than trusting in the integrity of humanity.

Nope, not possible. Human sucks. I’m sorry you believe in fairy tales like that. You’re going to try and “reform” and it won’t work because of human nature. Please take this seriously. Please be logical.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Oh dang your right. If we all just give everything away and trust in the goodness of humanity everything will be great!

Lol.

ennemi, 9 months ago

No, that would also fail, because of human nature. You have cracked the code my man. There is no need to make any further use of your brain.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

oh man no you have it all wrong humans are good and you’re just intellectually lazy. we can all just get along. read this book by that guy. don’t think about how it’s never actually happened just believe that it can. oh let me get my comrades to come make insane nonsense and be insulting. look at al the upvoted i have. i’ basically live in a community of like minded people that all just sit around wanking each other off to fantasy. it’s great. join us.

ennemi, 9 months ago

There is no need to read any books, you have given me the blueprint to always be instantly right.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

of course- because my books are the only books and any other books are imperialist, bourgeois, evil landlord scum that needs to die. i’m glad you’ve accepted my viewpoint.

Flaps, 9 months ago

You ain’t seeing anything with your head so far up your own ass

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Right back at ya "comrade "

wintermute_oregon, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

why not just stay mute all year?

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

At the end of the day ‘evil’ is not a particularly valuable analytical framing if we are being proper social scientists (since, of course, “the capitalist becomes capital personified”, e.g., their actual personality traits don’t matter and they needn’t be sociopathic to do horrible things. Though a disproportionate of landlords are horrible people ofc). On a social media site, however, there’s nothing wrong with using emotive language like ‘evil’ and using venting memes like the guillotine pictures and I guess there is a disconnect in how it’s perceived to the ‘materialist’ mode of analysis that does not focus on individual personality traits + does not see the individual as the supreme and singular unit of analysis.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

My partner and I should have a 50 percent equity in the apartment she rented for 10 years. Instead we were unceremoniously kicked out last year because the landlord’s son wanted to make more money.

I’d categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it’s more complicated as we live under capitalism.

I accept this nuanced revision to my more angry framing. I have a personal vendetta, and this is actually the correct take.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

What in the world makes you think you deserve 50% equity? Did you pay half the down payment? Did you pay half the mortgage and interest to the bank? Did you pay half the property taxes? Did you pay half the maintenance? Did you make any agreement woth the owner up front that this is what you would get? No? Did someone mention communism to you and you haven’t thought twice since?

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

The amount it appreciated while we were paying the rent that whole time is how I got that 50 percent. Also, the property actually tripled in value 100k to 300k.

The total maintenance the owner did over the entire time we were there was 1000 dollars. One month’s rent. Add painting and new carpet, ok, that’s like 5k? We paid more than 100k in rent over that time.

It was pure profit extraction. The owner actually sent us the numbers to justify kicking us out. , His mother made more than him because of property tax, but after reassessing property taxes, he would have _only_been making 300 a month profit off of us. That’s pure profit after everything. He was mad he couldn’t raise our rent by 500 dollars all at once and instead had to do it yearly.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

And? What makes you think you deserve any of that? If you’d wanted to rent-to-own that’s a thing. It’s something you should have talked about . Of course that appreciation you mentioned would still be a thing and your payments would have gone up to the point you couldn’t afford it and null the contract… so… what point are you making?

Paying rent is NOT buying… buying is buying. And you are free to go give that a whirl. I guarantee you will pay more over the same time frame as a homeowner vs as a renters.

I genuinely don’t see how you feel entitled to something no one ever agreed to.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

I feel entitled to a place to live as such. The system and its facilitators that make it precarious is the thing I take issue with.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Great. i don’t owe it to you. And I M not evil for not giving it to you. Make your case actually about the things you want- not some proxy bullshit that makes no sense and attacks me (and people like me)needlessly.

If you want to do something different- go do it. Go buy a place. Get a loan. Petition your senators. Give your house out as an example, etc. If you aren’t willing to do anything no one will do anything for you.

alcoholicorn, 9 months ago

Just for the record, nobody thinks you need to individually give up your houses. These are systemic critiques, the contradictions of capitalism aren’t solvable by capitalists and landlords being more generous.

If the owners did all decide to be more generous, they’d eventually get out-competed more effective capitalists as the tendency for the rate of profit to decline squeezes them tighter.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Maybe say what you mean then rather than you’re evil for being you.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

If someone’s living in their own home, I don’t have a problem with that at all. The problem is purchasing a home just to extract rents and profits.

And btw, I think all those things should be collectivized and socially available. Landlords contribute no value (as shown by their unwillingness to do maintenance/repairs), and merely extract. After all, what really is the benefit, to society, of a landlord? They serve no purpose (hell, even a CEO has more purpose than a landlord, and they – as Elon shows – don’t really contribute much either). It’s entirely extractive. Your “why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves” is because of how they’re using it. Just like how if you own a gun and defend your home, we consider that moral, but if you own a gun and shoot a person on the street, we consider it immoral. If you build a house and live in it, that’s moral and fine(though, in a perfect world, this would be produced through the government/taxes rather than individual accumulation, but we’re not talking about utopia, we’re talking about moral judgments on our world as it exists). If you build a house or purchase a house, then use it to extract ever-increasing rents from people for a thing we require to live (shelter), that’s immoral.

I think it’s a pretty simple distinction actually.

To return to the starbucks example, the company “produced” that material. Is it “moral” of them to throw it away rather than donate it? After all, they made it - just like your example of houses.

Finally, I’ll just note, the very idea of private property when applied to land, etc. is odious to me on philosophical grounds.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

So your argument clearly states that we are living in capitalism… and at the same time states that your moral problem is one of idealism/communism. Your argument cannot exist in one and then transmute half way through to make it fit your narrative.

We live in capitalism. I have worked and saved to buy off my house which I now rent out at market (below market actually) and provide a home that my tenants could not afford to buy on their own. I haven’t increased rent since I started renting.

You are now blanket yelling I should be stripped of my investment. My effort. My money that I’ve worked for. And these other slack-jaws are frothing at the mouth because they can’t conceive of a difference between me and the multibillion dollar company who is actually doing what you are saying.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

a home that my tenants could not afford to buy on their own

What I’m saying is there shouldn’t be a situation like this in the first place. Your tenants shouldn’t have to come to you to rent, housing should be freely available to all.

It’s a difference of degree, not of kind. And the goal is to change the relationship to society/production/the state such that this relationship no longer needs to exist. After all, investing in housing/real estate is the one “safe” thing to do under capitalism if you have surplus money. I doubt you’re a true “capitalist” in the sense of having true economic leverage, and the question for you is ultimately, would you side with the workers, your tenants, etc. and willingly join in the socialization of basic human needs? Or will you ally with the capitalists above you and protect private property at all costs.

A difference in degree but not in kind exists historically. Guatemala. The operations of the United Fruit company through exploitation were very profitable. They “built” them. The new government offered to either buy them out at the rate they had claimed on their taxes or reassess their taxes to redistribute their profits more equitably. Instead, the CIA coup’d them.

The question for you ultimately is, if given the chance to exit from the exploitative relationship imposed upon you by capitalism, will you? Would you let the government buy you out or raise your taxes to fund collective housing? Or will you instead employ the forces of reaction?

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Then fucking say THAT. Not all landlords are evil. I’d be willing to bet 90% of these frothing loons don’t realize why you are trying to accomplish and are just riding the hate train.

He’ll yeah I’m all for more taxes to pay for healthcare/education/collective housing. Hell no am I ok with just giving my shit away because you happen to think I should. Sure- pay me for my investments at fair market value- and I’ll just go an reinvest in something else that you guys will inevitably think should belong to all.

So no- I’m not going to ever stand with you because you will always want something from me. Do I think things can and should change. Yes- but your way is a ridiculous way of going about it.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

I did note later in another thread, a comrade had a good revision. The relationship is evil, not the actual person. Here’s what was said:

I’d categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it’s more complicated as we live under capitalism.

Again, I’ve got some salt because my landlord kicked me out last year just because he couldn’t extract enough profit from me. Needless to say, his anger at basic tenant protections has stuck in my craw ever since. I’m earnestly glad you’re for social housing/education/etc as well.

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

where are you expecting people to live?

Houses and apartments. Like they do now.

These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.

Nope. Not worked/paid/built themselves. The vast majority of homes are made by people paying others to build homes for them. Labor is the source of value, not investors. This is like billionaires claiming to be job creators. You’re extracting the value of their labor to make your investment property. You’re paying them a fraction of what it is worth to you because you happen to live in a society where that is normal. Your lack of imagination beyond your current circumstances is not my problem.

Oh yeah, and even if you happen to build the house with your own hands, it is owned by someone, the bank where you got your construction loan.

Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?

Why do you think people who work and toil away should pay your mortgage on an investment property and then some?

Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?

Because helping themselves comes at the cost of someone else, and everyone else.

Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”

You can say what you want about the rest of Hexbear but I can actually explain myself. Yeah, I’m one of those who have actually thought about stuff. In fact, I know more about real estate investing than you do.

How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?

It’s not. They all belong to those who actually made them, the workers.

Why don’t you go build your own house? Why aren’t you giving these unfortunate souls your own place?

I can’t. Investors have inflated the cost of construction and increased the barrier to entry. They snuff out competition. Capitalism is built on lies. They don’t actually like competition. The whole idea is to consolidate and monopolize. If I did try to build low income housing I’d be ran off by all the investors who own everything. Housing poor people next to their investments lowers the value. This is multi-family 101 kiddo. Read a book.

To cap it all- you follow each other around in groups and rather than actually discussing you strawman, point people to communist propaganda, and generally troll anyone who disagrees with you. No one wants to join your club, no one wants to read your Marxism books etc. If you have a point- state it. Don’t point elsewhere and act like you won because we arent interested in your echochamber

The arrow of history disagrees. You probably should study the past sometime. Capitalism creates the conditions that make people want to join our club. It’s pretty much a law of human society.

Firemyth, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yes worked/built/paid for themselves. Why does it matter if I personally hammered the nail or paid someone else for the house that he hammered the nail into? Work was done and value exchanged hands. Your mode of thinking means you don’t deserve any thing you didn’t create yourself. I own most of my houses outright as I have mentioned I worked my ass off to pay for them. So yeah…

Oh I’d love to hear all of your education on real estate investing. I bet that’d be fun for everyone. Especially since you’ve already stated you can’t seem to buy any place on your own…

Stating a thing does not make it so- helping myself does not harm anyone else. If anything it helps people like yourself who can’t afford to buy the place to still live in the place.

How do you even begin to think something is owned by the workers when they are not the ones paying for any of it. If those workers were the ones getting the loans, paying the taxes, filing the permits, getting the required certificate, marketing, selling, delivering, etc… you might have the start of a point. As it is- they are the ones receiving a wage to work the land. Physical labor does not equal ownership. Again this mode of thinking means you aren’t entitled to anything you didn’t build yourself. You like that burger? Did you raise that cow? Did you slaughter it? Feed it? Work the soil to make the feed? Etc etc etc.

I think people should pay to use my property that I’m providing for a fee. There’s really nothing more to it. We could transmute that house to a restaurant, a store, a farm and it all means the same thing. I built it. Or bought it. You didn’t. Now you can use it if you want- for a fee. Under no circumstances do you own any part of it unless you and I come to some agreement about it. You are welcome to buy it- or try to make a rent to own deal…

Oh that’s funny because somehow I did manage to do just that… and I didn’t come from money or any special background. I applied for the scholarships, the loans, put in the work, forgo eating out for decades, looked for opportunities, leveraged my meager earnings into extra payments until I finally paid off my first house. Made sure I didn’t make a baby or get into massive credit card debt etc. I went and lived in the low cost areas no one cares to go to. I made the required sacrifices to eventually get to a better position.

So yeah in conclusion- you just said a bunch of rhetoric with no backing and also no solution. Fairly typical if less vitriolic than normal… oh you dropped this ‘kiddo’

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

Why does it matter if I personally hammered the nail or paid someone else for the house that he hammered the nail into?

Because that’s the definition of building it yourself.

helping myself does not harm anyone else.

Stating a thing does not make it so. Just stating you’re doing no harm doesn’t make it true. I can explain why you’re doing harm but you can’t explain why you’re not. Explanatory might makes right. We’re talking about the science of society, not vibes.

How do you even begin to think something is owned by the workers when they are not the ones paying for any of it.

Value comes from labor. A forest is nothing without the lumberjacks. A pile a logs is nothing without the workers of the saw mill. A pile of lumber is nothing without framers. A frame is nothing without drywallers, roofers, plumbers, electricians. The ownership you claim is just a piece of paper given by the state based on historical premises of property rights. It’s not a default state of nature nor a universal truth.

Wages are specifically designed to not pay them the full value of their labor. If you own a horseshoe factory that produces each horseshoe for $1, then you can’t pay a person $100 an hour to make 100 horseshoes in that hour. You wouldn’t make any money as the factory owner. So you must pay them less than the value they’re producing. It’s how businesses work. Likewise you can’t rent a house for profit without charging more than its worth. You can’t afford to build all those investment properties unless you pay the people who actually built them a fraction of what the house is worth. You exploited the people who built the house so you can sit on your ass and exploit workers who need a place to live. It’s quite simple.

Oh that’s funny because somehow I did manage to do just that… and I didn’t come from money or any special background. I applied for the scholarships, the loans, put in the work, forgo eating out for decades, looked for opportunities, leveraged my meager earnings into extra payments until I finally paid off my first house. Made sure I didn’t make a baby or get into massive credit card debt etc. I went and lived in the low cost areas no one cares to go to. I made the required sacrifices to eventually get to a better position.

There’s two ways to build wealth under capitalism. One is to get a bunch of people to work for you and pay them less than their labor is actually worth. The other is to leverage your capital, buy property and then become a rent-seeker and/or lender. That’s what you did. You were fortunate enough to be able to get loans and leverage your debt and get scholarships. Most people don’t get all that. The people you rent to don’t get that.

I said a bunch of arguments against yours. You can’t demand an argument from everyone and then when someone gives you wave it off as mere rhetoric. Yes it’s rhetoric. That’s what the word means. I think you’re just saying stuff based on vibes. You don’t actually know what words mean or have any real sense of your own position. You just know that you feel a certain way and want that to be as valid as my rational argument. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

It’s also funny how you think not eating fast food and living in a place nobody wants to go is some grand sacrifice and the reason for what you have. Dude millions of people live without McDonald’s or a suburban home in the nice part of town. They also don’t get loans and scholarships. Their prostrations before capital go unnoticed.

Rather than demanding we disprove your views maybe you should spend some time thinking about why you believe them beyond “I’m a hard worker.” Like do you really think you’re the only person who has ever worked hard? Do you think that the reason why most people don’t have rental properties is because they’re not hard working? Imagine the hubris to think something like that.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Bla bla bla- no you.

That’s what you just did. Which is fine but doesn’t explain any of the original points being made.

Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest… wait a minute… they won’t do it unless someone pays them??? Really? But they will own the lumber… oh they don’t need that lumber? Oh man. I guess no one owns that lumber and no one is gonna cut it down then. If only there were some way to get those guys who are experts at cutting down trees to cut them down. Then wed have lumber to build houses… but wait- the guys that know how to build house wont build them? But since they don’t wanna do it I guess there’s nothing to be done. Since… ya know… paying people for their work is not valuable and apparently inherently worthless.

Guess it’s just up to each member of society to learn all the things and do all the work themselves. Because paying each other for things means you don’t own it and only making yourself means anything.

Also curious how I’m paying these wildly inflated housing costs but also somehow paying the people who build them wildly below the worth of their work… Man your mind just works in mysterious ways I guess.

Yeah it really is too bad that not everyone can go apply for those scholarships… the millions in unclaimed scholarships, welfare, etc just… too bad not anyone can file the paperwork.

Yeah I know it’s also hard not to build credit card debt, have families with no viable plan for the future, not buy the things you want but are too expensive etc… your right- literally everyone is doing that.

Oh mustnt forget the hubris of thinking people aren’t slaves to where they start and COULD choose things like joining the military for the literal free education it gives, or contracting their particular expertise out… but I guess that involves being paid for labor… so that’s out…

What a quandary.

BelieveRevolt, 9 months ago

joining the military for the literal free education it gives

”This education is free! Except for all the civilians I had to kill for it.”

Firemyth, 9 months ago

insert tangentially related counter strawman

commiewithoutorgans, 9 months ago

It’s not tangential, it’s the primary function of the military of the US at this point. Kill at the periphery in order to expand the markets to cheap labour once that war is over and project the threat of violence everywhere else to maintain that position (like coast guard and military in allied countries). The free education is, once again, because the war profits are much higher than even the exploited soldiers produce for the empire. That doesn’t make it ok, but it’s good to clearly understand that the soldiers are exploited for the “value” captured from wars through the expropriation of the lands at war (look at theft of oil in Syria and Iraq for the easiest examples). Soldiers could, theoretically, be paid much more if capitalists didn’t primarily take the value taken. The whole process is horrific and everyone involved guilty for the horrors. That’s how soldiers get free education, though, by being exploited for their “work” of theft through expropriation

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Insert unsourced counter rhetoric without any actual research into the topic

commiewithoutorgans, 9 months ago

“without any actual research into the topic” I’d give some recommendations for some heavy or light reading which I’ve done to come to this conclusion, but with this part of your comment, I don’t think it matters to you at all and isn’t worth me collecting links for.

Instead, and in order to maintain a bit of order in this thread not intended for such long tangents, I suggest we do this: would you like to explain to me how you see being a soldier of the US or European armies functioning in local and global socio-economic processes? Let’s start a thread wherever you would prefer to have a good discussion on this. I can’t do anything but throw a bunch of sources at you without better understanding what you think yourself. If you can start this thread, I’ll take you seriously and collect the sources to help you understand this conclusion, and hopefully some comrades with a bit more knowledge than I have will also come and match your level of respect that you project there.

Firemyth, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Yeah of courze.it doesn’t matter that less than 10% of us military personnel have ever seen any form of combat- giving you a 90% chance you’ll never fire a weapon outside of a range… of course joining means you get to go kill civilians.

Bro- you wandered in to a tangent about how people arent slaves and can make choices to a guy equating that to shooting civilians.

Lol of course I don’t respect you. Nor do I feel the need to point counter point with you. Get bent.

insert further unsourced, undocumented counter rhetoric to previous argument

commiewithoutorgans, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

You brought up the military and it’s emblematic of how you misunderstand the way exploitation and expropriation work by individualizing everything and lacking knowledge about the concepts of rent-seeking and exploitation generally. That’s why it was quoted.

I agree it’s a tangent at this point and that’s why I would like to stop discussing it here, but I think it’d be fruitful to understand how these concepts are related in a thread dedicated to such. It wasn’t a tangent when you used it as an example for “getting ahead” because it’s genuinely how you understand people could get ahead or avoid pitfalls of poverty. That’s why you used it.

It is a genuine way to avoid poverty for some (for others they end up homeless anyways because war is traumatic, even for the oppressors), but this getting ahead (usually by having some capital built up to let your “money work for you”) is always done by profiting off of others through rent-seeking, exploitation (paying less than the value produced), or expropriation (plain theft or contribution to global theft from imperialism). Working hard is something we love and encourage people to do to help their countries and themselves as much as they want or can, but that’s not what you’re really describing here, or you’re discounting the labor which is terrible and hard which doesn’t get the priveleges we got (think of any country in the Global South where miners work at least 10 times as hard as us and get almost nothing for it, or even the cleaners who are almost always POC in America who get underpaid under the table but work harder than us).

I assume much of this rubs you the wrong way because these seem unrelated and terrible mischaracterizations. to you. But I assure you, these ideas are founded in hundreds of years of theories, data, and experiences which we’ve read about to conclude this. Maybe you disagree even after understanding it completely, fine, but it’s fairly obvious to those of us who’ve read both liberal philosophers and economists and Marxists that you don’t understand what us leftists are saying.

I also did not say that everyone has to see combat, I actually disagree with that as well as the original poster. The point is that an active military which isn’t doing that is still the threat at all those places. Threats of violence are violence in themselves, and it helps a lot in the expropriation to have 90% not active while *the military as a whole is still killing lots. (Edited to specify that it’s the military as a whole, not the 90% outside of any active fighting because it was unclear for readers)

Now I’ll leave the discussion and disengage because you don’t want me here. You can reply if you want and I’ll stay quiet or start a thread where I’ll contribute.

Firemyth, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

See there’s a few actually relevant points there.

i brought up military as a single way to change your lot in life. there are plenty of others, i even mentioned as much in the original post. Is it perfect? Nope- is it a viable avenue? yep. Is it morally right- meh. Your views rely on the thought that what is morally right is how things should go- at the same time you try to say your ideology isn’t based on morals but materialistic and critical evaluation of how things actually are… while completely disregarding the reality of how things actually are and instead focus on what is morally the correct way to approach things… it’s mindboggling to see the dissonance.

You are right that I disagree with the ideal and tenants of communism/marxism at a base level- those are great ideas that never can be realized as people aren’t going to abide by the concepts in reality. Someone will always attempt to manipulate the system through avarice, laziness, whatever. So working for the appropriate value won’t ever actually work. On top of that - people are going to always disagree on what a particular unit of work is valued at. There is no way to make a unit of work equal a particular value- doing so results in experts in their craft being paid the same as novices in their craft. This also results in no one being able to own anything unless you built it yourself from the materials you produced yourself.

Going your route will simply result in mediocrity everywhere and everyone not getting enough of what they need. You ultimately wind up right back in the same situation with some slob running things and taking more than his fair share and simply writing a tenet or law up to cover his butt.

as to the last half of your comment. what you said is absolutely saying everyone has to go kill civilians for their free education. Did you mean to say that? maybe not- but it’s what you said. So to that i’ll just say you should probably say what you mean rather than relying on the insane rhetoric that it actually is. We don’t all live in lemmygrad/hexbear/comradeship and we don’t know the inner talking points you guys have spun up. Nor do we want to. Because traditionally you aren’t in here for real discussion but for the lulz and memes and to own the west/imperials/bourgeoise

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

also, fuck off landlord. Mao was right.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Yeah- that didn’t take much. Goodluck reconciling your future with your halfassery.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

what halfassery? I wasn’t the initial person speaking,

Firemyth, 9 months ago

We had houses before we had money, dumbass.

Oh that half assery.

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest… wait a minute… they won’t do it unless someone pays them??? Really?

Humans are a productive species and have produced many things necessary for survival long before capitalism or English property rights ever existed. You’re doing that thing again where you don’t know anything about history but you feel very strongly about defining the boundaries of human nature to be 17th century commerce. People don’t need money to produce things.

People also have shared responsibilities and duties. Nobody learns every single aspect of everything else. Some people are farmers, some are not. Some people build houses, some don’t.

Also paying for things is not unique to capitalism. Commerce has existed long before capitalism. It’s not like before 1800 everyone just traded chickens for everything.

You do, in fact, think people are slaves. You think they should work for a fraction of the value they create and then come home to pay you 2x the amount in rent. That way you get to pay off your mortgage and then keep collecting rent once your original investment is paid off. I guess that part is different from providing a necessary service, right? You just want to provide homes and get a huge return on investment. How pure are your motives?

I’m sure you’re clever enough to buy a farm and rent the fields to the workers and then rent them housing too. They give you a portion of their grain, it’s a fair trade after all, you own the farm. They should pay you for the privilege of working to keep you fed and housed. You should just chill and collect a check and bushel of grain every fall because you worked really hard to own that property. Totally not slavery.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Hey that’s all you bud. I mean the numbers are made up and the facts don’t matter apparently. But cool story.

Meanwhile I’m still going to go with providing homes at a reasonable price. You do what you do and I’ll do what I do- curious which of us gets something done.

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

If you provided them at a reasonable price you wouldn’t make any money. Kinda telling on yourself there. The only way your business works is if you charge more than your mortgage. The bank is charging you for borrowing money so even they’re marking it up. The reasonable price would be the price without the bank’s markup and yours.

But hey you’re the Donald Trump of lemm.ee, so don’t let anyone ever tell you how da business goes. You grab your copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad and you solve the housing crisis by doing credit checks and marking up rents.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Oh man you got me. Yeah I do charge more than my mortgage… I mean any amount is greater than 0… so oof yeah… you totally got me.

I totally mark up rent too- definitely. Have done it 0 times. Man. Got me there too.

I’m horrible for making my rent a couple hundred below market value too. Oowee.

I did happen to read rich dad poor dad. It’s does have some solid advice on pretty basic principles of building wealth and avoiding debt. Oh man so bad of me.

Tell me more about myself mystic of the commune.

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

If your goal was to house people then you could just charge the amount of property tax since your mortgage is $0. So, oof, yeah I do totally got you. Your investment is paid off, since the house is paid off. The only thing left is just wanting people to pay you for nothing.

Embrace what you are. Stop trying to abstract it behind being a saint or appeals to the market.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Akshually, I’d have to charge for maintenance, property taxes, pest control, property manager fees etc. But yeah I COULD do that

Yeah I’m renting the place out- yeah because I own it and don’t live there anymore I came up with a better idea. Sure I could just sell it I suppose- but I’m just gonna go reinvest that money elsewhere and you’ll have an equal problem with that.

That’s not my goal. Never said it was. I’m building wealth for myself and family. I don’t plan to work forever and this is my way to retirement.

Not a saint- never claimed it. I have some news for you- you aren’t either. Else you’d be at a food kitchen feeding the hungry. Or working the local shelter. Or even better providing your place as a shelter. But man oh man am I willing to bet you aren’t housing anyone for free either.

Embrace what you are rather than trying and failing to claim some moral high ground and simultaneously proclaiming your ideology isn’t about morals.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

Go get those lumberjacks to cut down that forest… wait a minute… they won’t do it unless someone pays them??? Really? But they will own the lumber… oh they don’t need that lumber? Oh man. I guess no one owns that lumber and no one is gonna cut it down then. If only there were some way to get those guys who are experts at cutting down trees to cut them down. Then wed have lumber to build houses… but wait- the guys that know how to build house wont build them? But since they don’t wanna do it I guess there’s nothing to be done. Since… ya know… paying people for their work is not valuable and apparently inherently worthless.

We had houses before we had money, dumbass.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Yeah… we so were tribal nomads without society at all… so I guess that’s what you want?

betelgeuse, 9 months ago

Wait, just so we’re clear on the timeline of human development. There were tribes and no society. Then there was the industrial revolution, English Common law, and then now?

You really, really, need to study history. You’re missing a few thousand years there. That’s probably why you’re confused. You really do think humans were savage tribes before 1492.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Again this is apparently your story. Just making things up because you don’t have a relevant point I guess is what we are doing now?

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

When Rome was established, city walls built, aqueducts constructed, complex trade networks established, no one was being paid a wage, but that was certainly a society. They eventually got money and used it, but it wasn’t essential to running a society and still isn’t.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Uh… I think you might want to reevaluate that particular analogy. Maybe look at HOW Rome was built… also WHEN money was a thing.

I mean unless you are advocating literal slavery as a means to build things.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

“when” is irrelevant, it wasn’t in use in the city until later. The general point was that labor is done for reasons beside wages, and you’re deluded by modern capitalism into thinking that they aren’t

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Uh… yeah generally labor was done by slaves… I think you may not understand how thing work.

You are right about delusion- just the whom and what of it are misplaced.

PersnickityPenguin, 9 months ago

Well the Communist argument is that the government will provide all of the infrastructure and services. In real life, a good chunk of infrastructure are provided by the government. However, as far as services are concerned… It can be a pretty mixed bag depending on how functional your government is.

When I was young, edgy and anti-business I used to believe that government was absolutely the answer to all of our problems. Did I voted for something like 15 tax increases and saw my quality of life and the city itself just go down the drain. Wait no, it became a dumpster fire. Cost of living has skyrocketed about 500%, crime and homelessness are up 300 to 1,000%, and there hasn’t actually been enough housing constructed to house people. We still don’t have a social safety net and medical prices are astronomically high as well.

The fact is that the world is a complex place and whenever there is a disproportionate amount of economic disparity between classes, it doesn’t matter who’s running the show but there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Sure. That’d be great. Just curious why that hasn’t been implemented yet.

ennemi, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I don’t think you make a bad point, but it takes years to develop a leftist, collectivist, anti-imperialist world view. Vulgarizing leftist theory to anyone who will listen is a colossal waste of time when 95% of you are not interested in interacting in good faith to begin with. As much as loaded political slogans, easy gotchas and plain old derision suck from a debate-fan point of view, they are too useful to ignore. Even more importantly, you are doing the exact same thing when you talk about “kremlin propaganda” like there’s ever any substance or truth behind that accusation.

Firemyth, 9 months ago

Here’s the trolling/bad faith.

My response to this ‘argument’:

“No, you”

What the fuck are you on about Kremlin propaganda?

ennemi, 9 months ago

I can definitely see why you would want to be protected from us

PersnickityPenguin, 9 months ago

On topic, but I’ve actually had a couple of good landlords over the years. One guy would stop by once a month to check on the house and do landscaping. We used to have really good conversations when I saw him, and we would talk about how the neighborhood was doing, any issues with the house and so on and so forth. Whenever I had a maintenance issue, he would be there within a few days to handle it. He even kept rent increases to below inflation.

On the other hand, I’ve also heard people denigrate architects, lawyers, engineers, and tech support people. But landlords and lawyers in particular make great punching bags.

ChestRockwell, 9 months ago

I mean ironically, the guy who kicked us out’s mother was totally fine. Just an old lady who needed the rent to supplement her fixed income. When she died, 6 months later the “I’m selling the place, you need to be out by X day” email came.

epicspongee, 9 months ago

That’s not true at all. Look at any post about landlords or Zelenskyy or “bourgeoisie”. Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.

This is like a children’s picture book-level of understanding of the differences between these. This same group of people are responsible for getting you things like healthcare, or the 8 hour work week, or fucking paid vacation. Maybe listen to them and read a little more before posting dumbass takes like this.

420blazeit69, 9 months ago

Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.

With varying degrees of seriousness, people call for violence against others all the time all over the internet. Go on any pro-Ukraine thread and you’ll find tons of bloodthirsty comments calling for the killing of Russian soldiers (you’ll often find variations of horrible stuff like “any Russian who isn’t in open revolt is a fair target,” too).

So first, what you are describing is not unique to Hexbear, and is in fact common. Second, if your response to my comparison is “well they’re talking about a war!”, so are we: every year capitalists wage war on the poor, killing millions by profit-driven deprivation of housing, food, medical care, etc. (see social murder).

Jesus, 9 months ago

It is pretty unique to hexbear and .ml on Lemmy from what I’ve seen. Even if what you just said was true (it’s not) that doesn’t excuse it

420blazeit69, 9 months ago

Go on any pro-Ukraine thread and you’ll find tons of bloodthirsty comments calling for the killing of Russian soldiers (you’ll often find variations of horrible stuff like “any Russian who isn’t in open revolt is a fair target,” too).

Do you disagree with this? Have you not seen all the pro-Ukraine threads on reddit and here the last few years?

And when a type of conduct is common but punished selectively, that’s a sign that the ones swinging the hammer don’t care about the conduct so much as they care about harassing the target. It’s like the War on Drugs.

swagforpigeons, 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Historical_General, 9 months ago

stinky

should have spanked you

🤮

edit: Less than a day old account I see.

420blazeit69, 9 months ago

“Your parents should have beat you” – classy

Awoo, 9 months ago

There is a difference between calling someone subhuman which is the rhetoric of people that believe that various races of humanity are more human than others(fascist master race rhetoric) vs calls to eat the rich through the use of guillotine memes. The latter is just radical and militant activism. The former is fascist rhetoric. The latter also has a place in mainstream society already as something that is regularly the centerpiece of art.

NuPNuA, 9 months ago

The fact that you’re here in our meta thread for our users to discuss the situation arguing the really doesn’t help with the image of Hexbear users brigading other communities.

Kuori, 9 months ago

there’s no such thing as brigading on lemmy, this post pops up at the top of our feed by default

Lols, 9 months ago

there have been half a dozen hex users in this comment section so this accusation doesnt feel warranted

Historical_General, 9 months ago

Lols, people will literally think you’re one of them too mate. You have your pronouns there. I was confused for a second when I saw your complaint.

Lols, 9 months ago

i liked the initiative and reasoning and wouldnt mind it being normalised on the fediverse at large, as opposed to just hexbear

AOCapitulator, 9 months ago

there are more of us and we post more than you, thats it

It’s like moving to hawaii and being surprised to run into so many beaches

You should see how we are when we’re at each others throats, then you’d know how mellow this turnout is comparatively

sweetviolentblush, 9 months ago

But its a post about them and there’s no request in the post for hexbear users to refrain from commenting, why shouldn’t they comment?

Lols, 9 months ago

this comment was made yesterday, when there actually was only half a dozen hex users commenting

at this point hex users massively outnumber lemm.ee users in this comment section, and while i dont think users are actively brigading lemm.ee the way they were brigading blahaj, its extremely overwhelming regardless and i see why folks want to defederate from them

i dont blame them for responding, but i also dont blame other folks for being entirely exhausted with a dozen of them being ready to respond to any comment, especially because of how widespread of a phenomenon its been and how hostile hex users have been in some of the posts theyve overwhelmed

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

This is on the front page of chapo.chat/Hexbear.net. Isn’t the whole deal w/ federation that the communities merge their posts and their commenters? I apologise if I am misunderstanding. Personally I just comment on whatever things I think are worth commenting on regardless of what community it’s on as I think my comments never violate any particular rules anyhow. It’s not brigading it’s just people wanting to comment on what’s in front of them and directly referring to them, IMO. I understand how it would feel that way when it has come so suddenly, though. It’s just what happens when an old and active group suddenly joins a bunch of smaller and/or less active ones (or, at least, larger to a small enough extent that the new commenters are still noticeable).

Awoo, 9 months ago

I was already having a conversation with Sun over PM when he made the post. Which is why I was one of the first here. We’ve been talking for several days and generally having a nice time.

jackmarxist, 9 months ago

I can literally see the post on my feed. It’s not brigading. https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/b9d1810c-f167-45f9-bc29-e0a7f6b5c24b.png

Also the admin hasn’t said that this is an exclusive thread for lemm.ee users so we have the right to defend ourselves against accusations some of which are false.

I would be upset if people in our instance started spamming random shit here with no intention to engage in a conversation and agree that they should be reprimanded by the servers admins/mods.

AOCapitulator, 9 months ago

It said in the post to read the admins whole message, and to only participate earnestly/ not be rude and stay on topic

So, we are. Why is that an issue?

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Did you mean to post that one comment level higher?

AOCapitulator, 9 months ago

Probably

oregoncom, 9 months ago

If you’re going to cry about “brigading” like a redditor then you don’t understand what federation is and should go back to reddit.

oce, 9 months ago

It appears posting memes about assassinating people for ideology is something that both extreme left and extreme right tend to do, and that’s something that non-extreme people, unsurprisingly, don’t seem to be fond of.

kneel_before_yakub, 9 months ago

Don’t liberals love to joke about wanting political assassination? See any comment section about Putin for example.

oce, 9 months ago

In the case of Putin it would be in the hope of stopping its invasion war. It’s similar to wanting to assassinate Hitler during WWII, I don’t think you would oppose that.
If you mean assassinating or letting die the lower classes, that would a very small percentage of liberal extremists, similarly to right and left extremists.
Not everyone is extreme in their ideology, most people doubt and are ready to discuss with other moderate people to build compromises.

kneel_before_yakub, 9 months ago

Ehh, people also were calling to nuke Moscow. I’m simply saying that centrist ideology doesn’t make someone not call for killing

oce, 9 months ago

I don’t believe the average moderate person would call to nuke Moscow.

Awoo, 9 months ago

What are you talking about? Liberals post about the people they want to die all the time, you’ve just normalised them. Go mention homeless people in the San Francisco subreddit and watch all the liberals turn into hitler in seconds. Don’t get me started on what happens when you mention Roma people to european liberals. Or what happens in literally every single thread on China.

Besides, we’re not talking about assassinating people. We’ll put the billionaires through our courts beforehand just like you guys put poor people through your courts don’t worry.

JackBruh, 9 months ago

Landlords/Bourgeoisie are not ethnicities.

And Guillotines are not even Socialist references, they reference perhaps the most important part in late medieval European history.

Putins head should be stuck inside one and saying that doesn’t dehumanise anyone.

Thymos, 9 months ago

Guillotines […] reference perhaps the most important part in late medieval European history

The guillotine is best known for its use in France, particularly during the French Revolution. The French revolution was late 18th century, long after the Middle Ages had ended.

Outdoor_Catgirl, 9 months ago

Agreeing with something a ukraine flag pfp says? Truly the world has gone mad.

AOCapitulator, 9 months ago

This isn’t appropriate for this post, the OP asked that conversation stays on topic

kristina, 9 months ago

Putins head should be stuck inside one and saying that doesn’t dehumanise anyone.

spoilerputin-wink get-in gui-trans

oce, 9 months ago

And Guillotines are not even Socialist references, they reference perhaps the most important part in late medieval European history.

Not only are you wrong on calling it medieval as stated by others, but you’re also wrong about saying it has nothing to do with Socialism. The French Revolution, the Paris Commune (name rings a bell?) and Robespierre are major references of the European left culture.

Starmina, 9 months ago

Well written. We’re luck to have you.

SpamCamel, 9 months ago

Thank you for the very well thought out and detailed post!

julianh, 9 months ago

I generally agree. I thought hexbear was fine until I saw some of the spam/trolling you mentioned, and then the genocide denial… That got me to start blocking communities there.

With that said I think exploding heads is probably just as bad, if not worse since the mods aren’t against the content posted there. I know you said you didn’t want to defederate and I kind of understand why, but at least keeping a close eye on the users there would be appreciated.

torknorggren, 9 months ago

Thanks for that very thoughtful statement. I am fine with keeping them federated and letting individual users block what they don’t want to see. I find it interesting to see what different communities have to say, even if I find it abhorrent.

jmf, 9 months ago

Statement I was looking for!

MrMonkey, 9 months ago

Until they have the native tools to let me, as a user, block the entire instance I’m with you. Until then defederation is the only way to make “All” even bearable.

Should I stop contributing, leave, and come back in a few months to see if those tools have been made? Because that’s a much preferable alternative than wading through so much shitposting blocking one community or user at a time. And I still see the effect of their votes.

If this is going to drive away people who have been here what do you think it’ll do to newcomers? Do you think people will really want to join somewhere where every top post is full of tankies?

Besides it’s not like they’re posting in good faith. They’re not there for an honest conversation. They are ChapoTrapHouse and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They are 100% trolls.

TheAndrewBrown, 9 months ago

Is your All really that clogged? I think I’ve blocked 2 or 3 Hexbear communities and now I can’t remember the last time I saw a hexbear post in All.

If it’s that harmful to your experience, I’m sure there are other instances that have already defederated. You could make an account there to start using and even switch back later once the ability to block instances has been added. The point of federation is you have the ability to curate your own experience and there’s less chance for a centralized force to curate your experience for you. Trying to get a large instance to defederate from an instance you disagree is you trying to curate the experience for thousands upon thousands of users.

Personally, I don’t think any instance should defederate from another instance unless the admins of that instance are supportive of hate speech or dangerous language. It seems from this post that the Hexbears admins not only don’t support it but are actively trying to curtail it. Defederating with them will just isolate them and make it easier for that vocal minority to gain control and keep it.

WarmSoda, 9 months ago

You probably want to join a different instance, mate. You seem to be extremely affected by them. They are instances that defeded from hex you can join.

trinitrotoluene, 9 months ago

And that should be golden rule. We’re not kindergarten anymore.

PoliticalAgitator, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Should it?

The overwhelming majority of mass shooters currently plaguing America are young, male and far-right. They didn’t just wake up one morning as extremists.

The story always reads basically the same. Loneliness, frustration and/or disillusionment made them vulnerable, they stumbled upon the far-right claiming they had answers and were lead down the path of extremism by memes, algorithms and social media groups.

Given that, why should they be platformed at all? Why make the default “if you don’t like it, just block it” rather than “if you want to read it, join their shithole servers”?

While we might not be “kindergarten” any more, there’s definitely users who are in early highschool and users who are vulnerable to cults.

That said, I don’t see hexbear being nearly as dangerous because unlike neo-nazis, state violence isn’t the goal.

Take the murder and enslavement out of modern Nazism and there’s nothing left, because murder and enslavement was the point. Take the murder out of communism and socialism and you’ve got a fairer, less exploitative society because a fairer, less exploitative society was the point.

shootwhatsmyname, 9 months ago

“if you don’t like it, block it” gives each of us a choice. Defederating takes away that choice for all 20k people on this general-purpose instance. We shouldn’t be censoring based on opinion of content alone

PoliticalAgitator, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

That instance is still out there for you to go and join, if you choose to do so. You could even join another “general purpose” instance that had lost its mind and decided that “advocating genocide to fix the problems of straight white men” was somehow general purpose.

It’s just as easy to argue that you are forcing hate groups on to people because you would rather individually block them.

To put it bluntly, I find it difficult to believe that people advocating “just block it” aren’t just doing the usual far-right thing of trying to manipulate people into platforming them.

At best, they haven’t thought through how inadequate a “just opt out” strategy is.

Should we all start messaging you daily photos of our hairy assholes? You can just block the accounts if you don’t want to see them. That way, users who do want daily hairy asshole pics aren’t impacted by a “don’t send explicit photos to unconsenting people” policy, which apparently makes the platform better.

shootwhatsmyname, 9 months ago

I see what you’re saying, but I think you missed the point. I am not advocating for hexbear or their views at all. I simply don’t think defederation is the solution to this problem in the long term.

Step back and look at the big picture:

Right now, admins are removing or blocking communities/users/instances that are manipulating the platform (vote manipulation, multiple accounts, automated posting), targeting hate towards individuals or groups, and more. It has not been based on the actual content or views expressed alone (unless that content is illegal in the country where lemm.ee is hosted).

If we now start blocking entire instances based on opinion of the content or views expressed, then lemm.ee moves away from being a general-purpose instance. We will need to define exactly what opinions lemm.ee will allow or remove, what the criteria is for a user/community removal or defederation, and if we should defederate from NSFW instances too.

We both agree there is a problem here. You think defederation is the way to solve it. All I am saying is that I don’t think defederation is the way to solve it.

Catradora_Stalinism, 9 months ago

state violence is the goal, but for the purpose of ending state violence

Outdoor_Catgirl, 9 months ago

And we are very much not straight white men. User survey said it’s like 1/3 trans people which is more than any non exclusivly trans space I’ve seen.

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

I agree that deplatforming is good against Nazis and the like, ‘debate’ as a sacred virtue is just not how you defeat these sorts of awful belief systems (and people acting upon them, more importantly). I think studies have shown repeatedly that deplatforming does work + that debating them just boosts their message.

As you say, I think equating socialists (even revolutionary socialists) with Nazis and fascists is completely wrong though, for certain. It’s unfortunately too common these days in certain areas of the internet.

lily33, 9 months ago

There’s can, and should, be exceptions - but lemm.ee has a federation policy where the standard for defederation is “directly harming lemm.ee users” and I think that should be the standard, as opposed to “users dislike the content, and there’s a lot of it”. (Hexbear is a big instance, there will be a lot of content.)

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I was about to say, Hexbear is very against stochastic violence, which on the left is called “Propaganda of the Deed” after a failed activist “experiment” to do just that. We reject it as a type of adventurism, i.e. doing something for kicks that isn’t actually politically useful (and in fact is usually wildly detrimental).

Civility, 9 months ago

🥰

epicspongee, 9 months ago

Hexbear is very against stochastic violence, which on the left is called “Propaganda of the Deed”

I thought propaganda of the deed was that anarchist thing where they’d do soup kitchens or do cool shit in hopes that the people they help out would become leftists eventually lol

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I think it was a number of different things but if you are organized enough to run a soup kitchen, you are probably above the critique that I mentioned.

Matt_Glan, 9 months ago

First of all I would like to offer my support to Sunaurus for this post. I thank him for raising this issue to our instance and for continuing to be discussion led and transparent. I also ask that we discuss this so we are best informed on the Hexbear subject.

I also agree what Sunaurus is saying but would add;

We try to encourage people to engage in a healthy way here on Lemm.ee. Also looking throughout the Fediverse which is growing at the moment we look to encourage that same engagement. This will ensure it’s long term success and resilience. I believe that healthy discussion promotes new ideas, innovation and learning. I do not believe that any abuse, victimisation, harassment or active discrimination has a place.

In the recent days I have seen increased reports coming from content or comments made by Hexbear users. However from what I am seeing although there is a lot, mostly they do not cross the line for significant action although a minority do. So at this time from what I have seen Defederation is not obvious a decision to me. I am expecting the behaviour and style of comments to calm once the excitement of Federating passes. I am also encouraged by the positive steps of the Hexbear admins.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

We try to encourage people to engage in a healthy way here on Lemm.ee

hexbear users, if you look at their post/comment histories, the mod logs, etc., show they have zero interest in that.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

genetic fallacy.

Matt_Glan, 9 months ago

I see quite a few of their comments and posts especially of late. It is a mix really between healthy and unhealthy. However if I compare to other instances I would agree more with your point.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

my biggest concern is not only their individual behavior, but their tendency to brigade posts. I’ve seen hexbear users get into a disagreement with another user then, suddenly, 5 or 10 more appear, vote-manipulate, and dogpile troll the person into submission. it’s pretty ugly and shocking to see. then they make a post on their own communities to celebrate “owning libs”… it’s so gross.

look, I appreciate that you guys are trying to use defederation as a last resort, but… c’mon, do you really see these users all suddenly changing their toxic behaviors? and why should this whole instance suffer the consequences with individual users here being left to fend for ourselves, having to spend half our time here blocking hundred and hundreds of users every time one of them gets “upset” and instigates a brigade and cavalcade of trolls?

edit 23 hours later: oh, look, I was right about everything. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

It’s more so that stuff just appears on the hexbear.net front page and people comment on it (like this one). I don’t even know what Lemmy really is so I just comment on whatever’s there! There is no organised brigading effort as such, it’s just how Lemmy works combined with the unexpected introduction of an active community changing the pre-existing community balances.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

explaining the means and methods of the brigading doesn’t change what it is nor its negative effects on the communities being brigaded. if anything, you’ve simply illustrated how hexbear facilitates brigading by design.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

Begging the Question. Anecdotal.

autismdragon, 9 months ago

Maaaaaan come ooooooon this is literally just how the platform works what the hell?

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

bullying and trollspam is how Hexbear works. that’s why so many people want to defederate from you

oregoncom, 9 months ago

genetic fallacy. bandwagon.

autismdragon, 9 months ago

No the person just described how lemmy works and how people find posts and you’re still treating it like a conspiracy to brigade. Where on our platform are there calls to action to “brigade” this post or any other? Hexbear’s algorithm doesn’t work any different from any other instance.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

if anything, you’ve simply illustrated how hexbear facilitates brigading by design.

That’s Lemmy in general, not Hexbear specifically

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

That’s Lemmy in general, not Hexbear specifically

“Lemmy in general” is capable of behaving itself. Hexbear isn’t.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Your inference doesn’t follow unless you are now making a new argument.

The user talked about a feature most instances have, you said it’s “hexbear facilitating brigading by design,” but for it to be true that that’s what that feature does, it would need to be true that Lemmy instances in general facilitate brigading by design, even if you simultaneously assert that no other instance does it. For it to be a behavioral problem brings it back around to there not being a unique design malus in Hexbear.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

and here we go again with the convoluted logical fallacies and deflections. it’s just impossible to have a discussion in good faith, as it just devolves into this kind of flawed-premise straw man troll bait game of twisting words and deflecting blame.

I refuse to engage further.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I haven’t twisted any words. I hope that you reflect on errors that you understandably don’t feel comfortable admitting to someone you despise as much as you apparently despise me.

Catradora_Stalinism, 9 months ago

convoluted logical fallacies and deflections

dude he just asked for you to prove your point

oregoncom, 9 months ago

Special Pleading. https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f2f5f342-752c-40b2-96d9-04dde5518a7a.jpeg

oregoncom, 9 months ago

No true scotsman. Cherrypicking.

Catradora_Stalinism, 9 months ago

okay we have provided evidence against any brigading effort time and time again, can you stop being disingenuous

Snowpix, 9 months ago

I’ve been dogpiled by them for calling them out before. Apparently my opinion doesn’t matter because I’m a “Canuck”

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

give it a few minutes. they’ll come here and troll bait you with some ridiculous logically-fallacious argument denying it and then blame your for your own victimhood.

Snowpix, 9 months ago

Quite a shame I won’t be able to see it, because my instance made the smart decision to defederate from them for this exact behaviour.

quartz242, 9 months ago

kbin-scoped

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/9058d802-1bb1-47dd-b0b1-7fdbb80ce4c9.png

oregoncom, 9 months ago

People from other instances commenting on your posts is the whole point of federation. If you care about redditorisms like “brigading” so much then reddit is a better place for you than lemmy.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

People from other instances commenting on your posts is the whole point of federation

no, the point of federation is to avoid centralized control of the platform, not to be forced to endure bullies and trolls— it’s also to allow defederation from troll farm instances like yours.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

The point of federation is so I can defederate while acting high and mighty

also ad hominem. false dichotomy.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

my biggest concern is not only their individual behavior, but their tendency to brigade posts. I’ve seen hexbear users get into a disagreement with another user then, suddenly, 5 or 10 more appear, vote-manipulate, and dogpile troll the person into submission.

This is a misrepresentation. The majority of the time (there have been maybe two exceptions to this that I know of) a post gets to the front of Active on Hexbear and our much-more-active userbase encounters it purely by incident. There’s no need to get into conspiracy theories without evidence when the counterproposal – that our instance is just the more active one – is verifiably true and accounts for observations with many fewer assumptions.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

accusing a person of “misrepresentation” and dismissing someone’s argument as “conspiracy theory” simply because your experience is different is pretty insulting, especially when you happen to then admit to exactly what I just described.

it’s one thing to disagree, but it’s quite another to be hostile, insulting, and combative about it.

this is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

Burden of proof.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Are you not familiar with what “brigading” means? It’s a coordinated push, not a bunch of people happening to see a thread presented to them by the “Active” sort

it’s one thing to disagree, but it’s quite another to be hostile, insulting, and combative about it.

this is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about.

You are accusing us of vote manipulating and brigading – literally conspiring – and then get upset when I say that this is false and call your theory that we participate in conspiracies a “conspiracy theory.” I probably should have said “distortion” rather than “misrepresentation” to be more neutral on intent. To be clear, I don’t think you are lying, I just think you’re wrong, so “misrepresentation,” which carries the connotation of being deliberate, was incorrect. I am sorry about that.

For the sake of completeness, I will add that the “dog-piling” characterization, unlike the other things you said, is completely fair.

I think a lot (not all, probably not even most) of the conflict between HB people and others is that those others don’t seriously consider the severity of the accusations that they make, and think that they are just being perfectly benign, perhaps because they haven’t spent much time interacting with the people who are on the receiving end of such accusations. For the record, I think that that would be just normal enculturation at play and I don’t particularly blame anyone for it. How you respond to that being challenged is another thing.

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

this doesn’t help your position one tiny bit— it just proves m point about your hostile, combative, and uncivil behavior, and why, even when hexbear users come to a forum under the direct viewership and consideration of lemm.ee admins, you will still behave in this manner.

Civility, 9 months ago

😤

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

So you don’t think there is any hostility to be seen in your initial comment?

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

and here come the deflections and logical fallacies, a trademark of hexbear trolls.

this is exactly the type of reflexive, toxic trolling I’m talking about: trying to blame me for your own behavior.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I asked you a simple question, because your initial indignation rested on the assertion that you were being falsely accused. Whether or not my accusation was false (with my later amendment) is necessarily relevant to evaluating your claim. Do you dispute this?

OkToBeTakei, 9 months ago

I refuse to engage in your obviously bad-faith attempt to bait an argument.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I regret that we could not get past you baselessly accusing me, as you have just done again. I tried to go through things methodically in good faith and just got more attacks.

MemesAreTheory, 9 months ago

Which, to the outside and reasonable observer reading this thread, is why we post ppb. Just look at the word counts - how much more effort does it take for us to bend over backwards and try to coddle someone obstinate and obviously wrong? If they’re at least trying and in good faith we can put up with bad ideas, but if they’re going to be petulant from the get go, we treat them with equal respect. You mess with the bear, you get the hog.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

strawman, ad hominem.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

ad hominem. genetic fallacy. strawman.

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/876546ee-220e-41f3-9855-f7086efa6fcd.jpeg

oregoncom, 9 months ago

Circular reasoning. Appeal to authority.

Zeus, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

personally, i chose lemm.ee for, amongst other reasons, the federation policy. at the time i joined, l.e had blocked the fewest instances that i could find, i think it was only burggit.moe. i would choose to continue in this vein. i’m a big boy, and i can curate my own online experience - i’d rather do that than have someone do it for me

i have never had any problems with hexbear users (in fact, the few i’ve seen seem to be perfectly nice). it’s possible that i’ve just missed it, but it’s also possible that a lot of people are caught up in the hype of “the hexbears are nazis, let’s all block them”. i think if you browse subscribed: just don’t subscribe to hexbear communities; and if you browse all: you have to be prepared to block some users/communities.

this is assuming this is possible: i think it would be considerably preferable for lemm.ee to block individual users and communities, rather than defederating a whole instance

i think if people want an instance that blocks instances they don’t like, they should make they’re own rather than pestering you about it (this isn’t a “if you don’t like it, go make you’re own” - it’s more “everyone has their own list of things they want to block, and i think people would find it easier to block exactly what they want on their own instance”). i personally would rather lemm.ee blocked every mastodon instance so i wouldn’t get the twitter experience in my link aggregator, but i’m not going to request it because that would be selfish

slight tangent:> Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like: i can understand your problems with this. and though i would be disappointed; as you’re a volunteer, i would understand if you defederated on personal grounds

JackBruh, 9 months ago

Defederation is not really important. People can just make an account on any other instance if they want to brigade. Right now, hexbear users have a sense of shared responsibility regarding posting in other instances, defederation will remove that. It’s best to keep hexbear in their own thing.

ME5SENGER_24, 9 months ago

I completely agree with you on this. You mentioned early in your post that the ability to block instances is coming soon. As a Lemmy user that came over during the Redd-exit, there was a lot of “noise” on the All feed that has taken me some time to sift through and cater to my personal preference.

It’s for this reason why I too am, currently, against defederation. If there’s a community I don’t want to hear from, I block them. If there’s a user I don’t want to hear from, I block them. In the near future, when there are instances I don’t want to hear from, I will block them too.

While I might not want to hear from some people, their right to exist within the Fediverse should not be questioned, unless they break the rules. In which case, the user is banned/post locked or removed and we carry on living our lives.

Pinkletits, 9 months ago

I agree that defederation should be a last resort. With the ability for individual users to block other users, communities, and even instances (currently dependant on the app you use) this really seems like it should fall on the individual to tailor their feeds. Of course no one should give a platform to bigoted speech. However, this can come from any instance and from what you’ve said about the admins of hexbear it would seem they are putting in a good faith effort to moderate. Overall, I’m against defederation at this time.

GBU_28, 9 months ago

Glad to read this.

Appreciate your approach.

Personally I’ve seen a lot of hexbear commenters out for blood, seemingly very ready to argue and name-call. Also I’ve seen many comments and some posts suggesting lemm.ee is for racists.

I assume that is just the “wreckers” someone mentioned.

I don’t believe this instance is racist and I don’t believe hexbear is all propagandists and lunatics, but I must admit I’ve been readily blocking subs of theirs. They honestly just seem quite angry with the world and the west. Sometimes for good reason, but sometimes so reflexively it comes off as Russian or Chinese bot posting.

I could be wrong with my personal reflex, but that engagement isn’t why I’m on Lemmy at all.

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

some posts suggesting lemm.ee is for racists.

This feeling has kind of permeated hexbear since early on in our federation we had several lemm.ee users seek out hexbear purposely to start shit with in various cases:

CW for general bigotrydefending the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then outright saying that Japanese lives were worth less than American lives, repeatedly insulting non binary users for their pronouns and calling them all mentally ill basement dwellers, defending whermacht war criminals, repeatedly insulting users for being from the second world, using ableist slurs against the users, defending WW2 Nazi collaborators who killed thousands of Jews, insisting that all the non binary and trans people in the instance (including me) are lying about being trans and are actually far right people doing an extended bit in order to mock trans people, etcetera, etcetera

Basically we just had the worst pieces of shit from lemm.ee seek out hexbear and this soured a lot of the userbase against it. Rn I’m of the opinion that the moderation here is far too lax, but I’m realising it’s not the cesspool of bigotry it came off as based on the users from lemm.ee who have been coming into our instance in these first few days of federation

sunaurus, 9 months ago

I just want to clear up that lemm.ee admins do not receive any reports about lemm.ee users made by hexbear users on non-lemm.ee communities. It’s a serious shortcoming in Lemmy right now, and a huge struggle for us.

If somebody signs up on lemm.ee, and only posts garbage on other instances while managing to remain unreported by any lemm.ee user, then it’s basically invisible to our own admins. Hopefully this is something that can be improved in future versions of Lemmy.

hypelightfly, 9 months ago

Oh, that's interesting. I was under the impression that when you report a comment the report goes to 3 places. The community moderator(s), the instance admin(s) of the community, and the instance admin(s) of the reported user.

Is this a current bug or was I just totally wrong and it never went to the instance admin(s) of the reported user?

sunaurus, 9 months ago

It does indeed go to three places, but the third one is kind of useless in most cases:

1. The community moderator(s)
2. the instance admin(s) of the community
3. the instance admin(s) of the reporter

GBU_28, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

It doesn’t matter really what people say, but more how they are dealt with. Are those users still posting from lemm.ee?

Every instance has assholes, I’m not apologizing for them, but pointing out that it’s the process of removal that really matters.

Back to my words though,

Nothing “racist” brought me to lemm.ee, and I can’t find any sort of manifestos that would attract alt right or racist folks. I saw a big list during the reddit migration, saw the size and a few sentences about lemm.ee, and saw it was taking signups.

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

Idk, my point wasn’t that your instance was inherently bad, I was just explaining why so many hexbears consider it to be a hive of bigots; we just extrapolated, mostly incorrectly, from the small sample size of users who came looking for us specifically to start shit

Like hexbear is moderated far more strictly than lemm.ee is and so I think there’s more wriggle room for bigots to exist here without getting instabanned, but I don’t think this is like a mega bigotry instance like it seemed to be at first

GBU_28, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Seems we are seeing a pain point for federation.

I “experience” super toxic, boiling hot angry hexbear users OFF hexbear instances. So much so that I can generally guess ahead of opening their profile.

But those users would be banned or curbed by the mod in the instance they are commenting in right? So maybe it’s a general issue of “home is well managed, but away is the wild west”

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

Yeah, I think it’ll gradually settle down over time as hexbear finds it’s place in the wider lemmy ecosystem,

aleph, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don’t have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.

This was why my eyebrows raised when I saw the Hexbear admin response when they claim that “Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods”. Kremlin propaganda is rife in communities like chapotraphouse, and it certainly seems like the mods there let anything slide as long as it is isn’t outright incitement to violence.

I challenged claims made in a couple of different anti-Ukraine posts and despite the fact there were maybe one or two users whose responses were thoughtful, the majority were outright calling me an idiot and a retarded liberal (edit: correction; dumb fuck)

So far, my impression of HB’s userbase is pretty negative because the posts on there that make the front page here tend to be the more shit-posty ones.

That said, I appreciate @sunaurus for the stance he’s taking. There is some positive and thoughtful content on HB - you just have to block the noisier and more idiotic communities so it doesn’t get drowned out.

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

tbf it seems like the majority of people there replying to you are replying in good faith, though it is obviously not good even when a significant minority of people are mean/rude. I do agree with you in part with what you were saying on there (not in full as I do not feel generous towards the US motivation towards its support for Ukraine) and honestly I’ve never been receiving hostility for my position when I’ve talked about it on here (see my recent post history if you want proof). I guess people are seeing the new @lemmy people commenting and getting jumpy unjustifiably and thus being more harsh. I hope that sort of thing goes away when they’re more used to seeing other lemmys in their communities but I don’t blame you for feeling not great about it (even if plenty were also engaging in good faith that doesn’t get rid of the bad faith ones). I hope it changes.

AlexisFR, 9 months ago

Yeah, and Russian propaganda is one thing, but he hasn’t mentioned Chinese PC one, and I noticed a lot of hexbear users being in support of them, which to me, is as much an anathema to the left as the Kremlin is.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

Chinese PC

Is that PC “Parti Communiste”? As an FYI that is admittedly slightly off-topic, the official name in English is the Communist Party of China or CPC. A lot of anglophones call it the CCP to connect it to the USSR (CCCP in Russian) or just because they are repeating what anglophone journos call it uncritically.

AlexisFR, 9 months ago

I initially meant PCC, but yeah the proper one is CPC.

KurtVonnegut, 9 months ago

I noticed a lot of hexbear users being in support of them, which to me, is as much an anathema to the left as the Kremlin is.

To be accurate, I don’t think anyone on Hexbear thinks modern-day Russia is a communist, socialist, or leftist state. Generally, we believe Russia is a capitalist state, led by profit-seeking oligarchs, and that Putin is just the leader of those oligarchs. No one on Hexbear actually thinks Putin is personally a good human being. The reason Hexbear appears “pro-Russia” is because we refute the claim that Putin launched the war against Ukraine because he is ontologically evil, a demon, a crazy man who has lost his mind, literally Hitler, etc. We recognize the complexity of the situation Putin was put in and see his launch of the war as a semi-logical response to decades of past history. Would it be better if the war never happened? Yes. But did the war just come out of nowhere? No. It’s complicated. It’s not a Hollywood movie. There are no action heroes.

Also, I don’t think anyone on Hexbear thinks modern-day China is a fully communist or socialist state right now. We are more hopeful that it will BECOME a fully socialist state in the next generation or two than most are. This is mainly because of the long list of actions that Xi has taken that are in line with orthodox Marxist philosophy. For fuck’s sake, Xi has a PhD in Marxism. That is not a joke - the president of China went back to school in his 30s and got a university degree in Marxist studies. Compare that to any US presidential candidate, who probably has never read a single page of Marx. It’s a stark difference. Hundreds of years of European propaganda about “Oriental Despotism” makes many in the west think that China is, by definition, evil. Heaxbear generally believes the situation to be more complex and nuanced. I mean, Obama literally ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen (along with thousands of foreigners in the middle east) and yet most Americans think of the Chinese government as “more authoritarian” than America. Sure, okay. The numbers don’t add up.

But overall I think the discussion on foreign policy can be respectful and productive. Few will be convinced, but the debate can sharpen both sides. I appreciate any instance that has the patience to deal with Hexbear and our neurotic, overly-detailed diatribes!

SeborrheicDermatitis, 9 months ago

I vehemently disagree with Hexbear’s support of the modern CPC but I don’t think that makes them bots or indoctrinated or whatever, they just have a different viewpoint on the matter and it doesn’t take much prodding to get past the shitposting and to get a fairly detailed/nuanced understanding of why from a lot of users on the site. Same with their thoughts about Russia and Ukraine and such. Again, I disagree w/ the majority of people on Hexbear on this issue, but you wont get attacked if you engage in good faith (at least, I don’t) and people are more than willing to explain themselves.

I fundamentally disagree w/ the notion that there is any significant amount of actual “Kremlin bots” or “CPC bots”-I mean this community has been its own isolated thing, a dwindling relic of an old Subreddit, for 3 years before federation happened, what’d be the strategic value anyhow? They all show their humanness if you give them the time and the good faith, so to speak.

AlexisFR, 9 months ago

That’s interesting to hear, I understand it better now.

Civility, 9 months ago

🥰

AcidSmiley, 9 months ago

it certainly seems like the mods there let anything slide as long as it is isn’t outright incitement to violence

Our mods tolerate a lot of things that would get you banned on reddit, such as calling for the death of nazis as long as it’s not what we call “fedposting” (actionable threats of violence that would also work as an FBI honeypot). On the other hand, our moderation team is probably the most hardline one on the entire internet when it comes to punishing transphobia and other queerphobic sentiments, and we do not take kindly to other forms of bigottry on there, either. For example, using the r-slur or other ableist language will reliably get your post deleted. If you have a habit of calling people you disagree with autistic or schizophrenic, you can prepare for getting banned from our instance. We look out for our neurodivergent comrades. Then there’s the entire culture against hornyposting that we have. Hexbear is very different from the rest of the internet when it comes to sexualizing and objectifying people. We’re not a sex-negative instance, but we’re hentai free and don’t want things to get creepy and uncomfortable in our place. We have a fairly elaborate culture of what goes into a content warning, too. We’re most definitely not an “anything goes” free speech absolutist instance. We’re a staunchly leftist, intersectional, antifascist community and we actively fight to keep it that way so that all marginalized people can feel safe around us.

kameecoding, 9 months ago

anti-fascists except for the Kremlin propaganda that’s coming from the fascist regime in Russia?

but I guess at least people can’t use the R-word, just heavily insinuate that Ukraine deserves to be invaded and that both side suck in that conflict.

aleph, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

That’s fair. When I spoke earlier, I didn’t mean to give the impression that HB is your typical fReE sPeEch zone that permits slurs against minorities.

That said, personal and vitriolic attacks against non-radical-leftists who disagree with or challenge the anti-NATO, anti-Ukraine, anti-West status quo in anyway seem to be absolutely okay, as far as I can see. And I say this as someone who considers themself to be a social democrat on many issues and agrees with most progressive causes in general.

Civility, 9 months ago

😔

NovaPrime, 9 months ago

This has been my experience as well. There are a lot of great things they’re discussing over there and in general I do like the fact that they challenge the Western-driven beliefs on politics/economics, however, the vitriol against anyone else less hardlined left and not anti-NATO/anti-West is disappointing and a put off. While I agree that capitalism is an immoral and abhorrent system, and have many qualms with the IMFand military driven western hegemony, I don’t see anything I the Russian or Chinese leadership that suggests either of those are any better. They’re oppression in a different coat. But saying that on the instance gets you labeled as someone who’s still sucking down western propaganda, without an ounce of irony re: CPC and Russian propaganda systems

Catradora_Stalinism, 9 months ago

okay but communists have been yelling at communists for not being communist enough since before marx put pen to paper

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

and a removed liberal

We didn’t call you that because there is an incredibly strong site culture against using ableist slurs and anybody who comes into our instance and says that slur is banned on the spot. I literally can’t even see it because the hexbear instance automatically changes it to say removed instead. I would encourage you not to sling around ableist slurs in future.

GreenTeaRedFlag, 9 months ago

removed liberal

I don’t know what word is supposed to be there, but we can’t have called you that because it is literally not allowed by our instance.

MrMonkey, 9 months ago

Your instance has replaced

“removed (by the people who moderate this sub)” with “removed liberal”

Which is sad and pathetic.

aleph, 9 months ago

I was paraphrasing, but yes you’re right.

On review, the actual phrase they used was “dumb fuck”.

oregoncom, 9 months ago

So you use slurs that are banned on our instance and act like we’re the ones not being civil? Real self aware you are.

420blazeit69, 9 months ago

I’ve seen that or worse thrown around on pretty much every internet community I’ve ever seen. The only difference is whether it is popular/ever removed by mods. On literally every internet community I’ve seen or heard of, there are insults that crop up with the same amount of intended impact, even if they are less profane (think of all the snarky comments or outright diatribes you’ve seen about how ignorant or wrong someone is). And profanity is not some exceptional line, either.

Draces, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I appreciate your perspective on this. I think something weird is going on there in the past couple of days. I was pretty unaware of them until literally yesterday I found myself in the comment section with some of the most bafflingly insane opinions I’ve seen (imo anyway). I strongly suspect they’re being astroturfed hard by Russia right now. There’s no way to mark their community suspicious or something in our feeds? Lemmy needs more instance to instance controls than than just severing ties.

Imo I would give it a few days and then defederate if they continue to be problematic. It would be great if someone occasionally reviewed defederated instance because that’s going to fragment the fediverse so badly

Edit: also staying federated gives us the opportunity/responsibility to downvote and confront propaganda when we see it which I don’t see happening much

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

I strongly suspect they’re being astroturfed hard by Russia right now.

On what basis? What makes that more likely than (to just posit another hypothesis) the community is a magnet for cranks? I am not particularly interested in arguing about Russia, but it is really frustrating seeing people decide that people who disagree with them must be getting paid to say that or whatever. We don’t think any of you are getting paid (maybe some of us do, but they will meet opposition from the rest of us for saying so). Can’t it be possible that fellow human beings have their own circumstances in which, on the basis of what they have experienced being different from what you have experienced, they have come to different conclusions?

Draces, 9 months ago

Because, like I said, I’ve noticed totally irrational arguments in the last few days. No I don’t think ignoring facts and contradicting yourself is just a matter of differing opinion. It’s the extreme opinions mixed with inconsistent logic that screams astroturfing to me.

robinn2, 9 months ago

Show me these irrational arguments

Draces, 9 months ago

lemm.ee/comment/2391902

robinn2, 9 months ago

What the fuck do you even think my complaint is? it’s the rollback of covid precautions at a federal level, cutting the aid they were giving out, ending mask mandate. You shitheads acted like vaccines were a magic bullet because it was a convenient lie to tell everyone try to get ‘back to normal’. Instead you abdicate responsibility and act like it’s the most anyone could done.

Fye post, your harm reduction is a lie

OctopusKurwa, 9 months ago

If we defederate then I probably wouldn’t be against it but I lean more towards having individual users block individual communities.

I myself have blocked a whole bunch of hexbear communities because I’m mainly a comments section guy and I find their style of posting to be really annoying even though I occupy the same end of the political spectrum.

However as annoying as I find many of their users, I haven’t really seen anything that would warrant defederation. Sure you’ll see some tankie propaganda but you’ll see that over other Lemmy instances too.

On an unrelated note, I joined Lemm.ee to ease the burden on the larger instances but I’m very happy to have found this place being led by an extremely level headed person. Thank you

Master, 9 months ago

The weird sticker posting thing has caused me to block quite a few people / communities. I just find it obnoxious.

GarbageShoot, 9 months ago

It’s a problem with formatting between instances that the devs are working on fixing.

MBM, 9 months ago

Even with the proper size, messages full of stickers kind of disrupt serious discussions. Personal preference, though.

HornyOnMain, 9 months ago

At first hexbear users were unaware that our emojis were giant in other instances due to the glitch with the emoji resizing that the hexbear devs are apparently working on fixing currently

for instance, look at this emoji on your instance then view it on mineim-vegan

In the meantime we’ve taken up the habit of spoilering the emojis we know are massive when we’re in communities in other instances (like I just did with the I’m vegan emoji above) until the bug gets fixed

Kroxx, 9 months ago

Prior to this post I was of the mind that hexbear should be deferderated, however you made some very salient points that I had never considered. I agree with your approach to leave deferderation as an absolute last resort, and to try to work things out though the hexbear admin team. I would also like to add that it really speaks volumes of you as a person to have been exposed to such abuse as being called subhuman and still try to work federation out without allowing a seemingly minority of users to goad you into an emotional decision!