Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?

EABOD25@lemm.ee to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 8 points –

I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don't actually think everyone there is insane. I don't care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point

Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It's not going to scare me to take this down

526

You are viewing a single comment

If you've heard of Chapo Trap House that's them. If not, most of those kids/idiots/trolls are the type of terminally online fake leftists that give other leftist a bad image in general. They were so ridiculous Reddit got tired of their shit and banned them a couple years back.

They were banned when reddit cracked down on any leftist thought, not because they were especially bad from what I saw.

They were banned around the same time as The Donald because everyone was tired of the shit both groups were doing.

No, The Donald was encouraging political violence and was becoming a legal liability for Reddit to continue hosting. But they needed to ban a major left wing subreddit at the same time to do a "both sides bad" thing and preempt the fascist talking points about social media having a liberal bias.

They were banned while saying John Brown did nothing wrong and that slaveowners deserve to die.

Sounds pretty cool to me.

While true there was a lot more behind the decision than that final post. They had been fighting with the admins for a long time.

evidence? I see people say this but from what I remember the mod team was repeatedly stonewalled by the admins, or at least that was their claims, and I don't think the admins ever disputed that

Hardly, the mods kept refusing to do anything about the brigading of other subs. To the point the admins stepped in and removed a couple of them. Then afterward the sub decided they'd rather go private than comply. At this point most of back and forth is wiped out because the sub is locked. But there was far more going on for a while than their claim that one post shut them down immediately. They had already been in trouble for a couple months.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/bp39gb/chapotraphouse_gets_a_call_from_the_admins/

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fmfirtv1vndy21.png

I wasn't clear enough, what I meant wasn't that the admins literally never said anything to the mods, I meant they made it relatively unclear what exactly they needed to do to stop getting warnings and eventually getting banned. no conversation, just relatively vague commands from down high also, as you can see in the SRD thread it was never made clear if they were removed for anything besides the john brown posting. However, even this is more clear communication than I remembered so I'll admit fault on that at least.

funny thing I found browsing the thread is this comment about why chapo got banned, which mentions brigading, something people constantly accused/accuse hexbear users of doing:

...

The second aspect of this is that chapo is becoming so large that it is capable of effectively "brigading" threads without any direct co-ordination on the subreddit. By this I'm referring to stuff like the police dog situation, in which any meaningfully upvoted thread on /r/aww and other "cute" subreddits gets a shitload of "40%", "ACAB", and other anti-cop rhetoric. While screenshots of this often get posted to /r/chapotraphouse, the vast majority of the time this is AFTER the thread has already been "brigaded" by chapo users scrolling through /r/all or the specific "cute" subreddits. This behavior is not against the TOS, but it is incredibly annoying to /r/aww mods and therefore concerning to the admins, because the "cute" subreddits are the easiest to manage and please, and more importantly, the most advertiser friendly. When chapo users fuck that up, there's a problem.

...

sounds familiar doesn't it?

Yes. They moved here. Have done the same things. Pissed many people off. Thankfully this time they can be easily contained due to how Lemmy works. They could just grow up and not be an embarrassment to the left. But that's apparently too big an ask.

this is very strange reasoning to me, posting on a post you see scrolling through all is now bad because... other hexbears already got there first and you dont want to be annoying? what the hell?

There actually isn't any such logic presented for the decision. Mostly just allusions to celebrating violence, the only examples of which were the anti-slavery posts I referenced.

I do remember that, and I remember them half-assing the Donald by just letting them make a new sub (or overrun conspiracy irrc)

Yeah they immediately took over Conspiracy and consolidated the hold on Conservative. Made me really sad as conspiracy used to have some incredible rabbit hole posts. Then one day it was just TD all over again.

IIRC, the fun conspiracists moved to r/high_strangeness or something like that.

That sub is trash also. I think the whole conspiracy theorist subculture has been taken over by the alt right and is highly politicized at this point.

The days of mild and fun conspiracy theories are over. The entire community has been fully consumed with qanon/maga/antisemitism insanity. Their minds are irrevocably broken.

It's a shame. I grew up on xfiles and loved all the lore around the culture.

The_Donald was dead amd had migrated to a non-reddit forum a month before the ban. It was typical "both sides" bullshit from a dude who always uses the kiddy gloves with fascists while throwing the book at any leftists

The Donald had largely abandoned the sub well before it was banned though.

Largely because they moved to different subs.

The Chapo crew didn't want to calm down with all the threats of violence and other ridiculous antics. So they left completely.

Threats of violence against confederate slave owners.

TIL Reddit admins were confederate slavers

When the sub was put on probation, the post Reddit cited was justifying violence against slave owners. As far as I can tell, you just made up that they threatened Reddit admins.

Seeing the ban coming, they financed and suffered alpha and beta of the Lemmy platform we all enjoy. Then, they chose to become the most GLBTQ+ friendly destination on the internet.

As it's always been, they cope with the horrible events with satirical, sarcastic humor. And, in the middle of that will be a well-reasoned, nuanced, and quite serious post.

But, perhaps the part I like most is the struggle sessions. The entire community will heavily focus on a current topic, then hash it out with good faith discussion.

Their shit isn't convenient or comfortable. It's not easy to understand. And, I fucking love them for it.

edit: Lazy coders need choose a randomized target value and timing or be a moderator to avoid detection by the user. Perceiving is easy when your code is trash. Ask for help from an industrial engineer.

Their supposed support of LGBTQ+ is all for naught when they openly fawn after Stalin

Honestly what is with the comrade/them shit they do about? I thought it was ironic like they were making fun of neopronouns or they were the 4chan people who popularised them in the first place

There's much to learn from Stalin. But, advocating his authoritarian means is a bannable offense there just as they are in any meritable leftist forum. They tolerate a minority of revolutionaries ideologically leading the lumpen as it's a historically very well-supoorted position. But, that doesn't extend to physical force as that's also a historically very well supported position.

It's much easier, convenient, and comfortable to demonized them than understand them. They even provided proactive assistance when many were deciding if they should defederate. They voted internally for defederation to defend their community from the medicrity of the masses.

If not enjoying the image posts of young Stalin as some sort of brilliant maverick is mediocrity, well, so be it. They are clowns, and their beliefs structure is just like trump claiming he "loves the gays"

Young Stalin is where the good stuff is. It's his implementation of those idealistic principles that's unethical.

The rest of what you've said is strawman. Most important is the implying that they're all of one mind. Diversity of ideology is perhaps their greatest strength.

As it's always been, they cope with the horrible events with satirical, sarcastic humor. And, in the middle of that will be a well-reasoned, nuanced, and quite serious post.

Oh yes, they are so funny, misunderstood, thoughtful and nuanced thinkers.

F them and f you for defending them.

This ~1800 comment thread about whether lemm.ee should defederate with them is all you need for some eye opening, in case anyone needs that.

https://lemm.ee/post/4543536

Above screenshot is from said thread.

The comrade in it actually suggests that there is a time and place for such rhetoric, it is just not right here, right now. you have to think politically and wait for your moment!

Yes, please read what the .ee admin says about where the bigoted users originate and the actions of the hexbear mods in response. It certainly speaks for itself.

The comrade in it actually suggests that there is a time and place for such rhetoric

Perhaps now is the time.

The kulaks were not an ethnic minority persecuted by the bolsheviks as a scapegoat for society's ills. They were the economic class directly responsible for many of those ills. They were the capitalists of the peasantry, enclosing land and claiming ownership over what should have been the common means of production, precisely the kind of group that communists the world over want to destroy in order to liberate the majority of people.

When it was written that the kulaks were to be "liquidated", it did not mean that they were to be mass executed, it meant that their private property was to be moved into public ownership, ending the existence of the kulak class and making them into regular workers.

As is the case in every single campaign of economic or social justice, the privileged class fought back with everything they had. Kulaks contributed to the Soviet Famine of 1930-1933 by mass slaughtering their cattle and burning their fields. Kulaks hoarded grain, took the wealth that they had stolen from their neighbors and fled the country, plotted sabotage and insurrection against the workers' movement. And for those crimes, many Kulaks were caught and executed.

So if the original commenter's great grandparents were kulaks who "suffered at the hands of the soviet union," they deserved it.

Perhaps now is the time.

No, Time for condoning class war and murder is never and nowhere.

Go back to hexbear, you poor, uneducated, lying, bolshevik piece of shit.

But thank you for showing anyone who may have not had an experience with you before what type of people you are.

One can always count on that, you morons just can't help yourself.

If you don't condone class war, then you are by necessity endorsing the current system. The current system which kills far, far more innocent people than any class war ever could, you lying, capitalist piece of shit.

Your portrayal of them just being made into regular peasants seems to me viewing the whole affair with more than rose colored glasses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]
Those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police. Those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property. Those to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.

By most people's reckoning in most of planet earth they stole the lawfully earned property of kulaks and either murdered them or otherwise destroyed their lives. Treating them worse than most developed nations treat burglars and thieves.

If someone shot your grandpa and your uncle, send half your people to Siberia to die out there, and sent the other half to prison locally of course you would flee with whatever you could carry and of course you would at that point be an enemy of the regime that destroyed your life.

So if the original commenter’s great grandparents were kulaks who “suffered at the hands of the soviet union,” they deserved it.

I don't understand your justification for what is ultimately pretty horrific treatment foisted on people ultimately just participating lawfully in society up until that point.

All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]

Source four on this wikipedia article is Robert Conquest, an antihistorical Cold Warrior if there ever was one - and most of the rest of that article doesn't even do the courtesy of citing a hack. It's just section after section of "this section has no sources", who wrote this garbage?

If someone shot your grandpa and your uncle

Some brave Vietnamese soldier did exactly that, and my uncle frankly deserved it for signing up to go murder people on the other side of the world in the name of American Imperialism.

I don’t understand your justification for what is ultimately pretty horrific treatment foisted on people ultimately just participating lawfully in society up until that point.

Slaveowners were "just participating lawfully in society" too. Society sanctions a lot of incredibly damaging and amoral behavior, and when the repressed take power there is no reason why they should be expected to give their oppressors a pass just because it was legal at the time.

America didn't go from legally sanctioning a behavior to murdering the people today who were behaving lawfully yesterday even if they were immoral fucks. If you don't understand that then you don't understand how normal societies run.

Tell me, how did Reconstruction go? Were the former slaves elevated to the status of citizens equal to their former masters?

No. The great post-Civil War failure of America was its failure to defend the gains made by the freed slave population, allowing the previous ruling class to swoop back in and reassert their power in a nearly-identical form to how it had been before. Sharecropping instead of slavery. This failure demonstrates quite succinctly why any social or economic justice movement cannot simply win the war - it must also continue to defend itself after the war, and that defense will by necessity take the form of repressing those members of the former ruling class who cannot accept the new status quo.

🤭

You guys don't even hide it anymore. You're openly advocating for brutal police regimes. The jokes write themselves. Convenient.

You don't get to call directing state power against the petite bourgeoisie a brutal police regime when your government is supporting the most brutal dictatorships in Africa, whose violence is directed at the working class.

Yeah I get to do that, because that's what happened factually, sorry. No amount of whataboutism will change that. I don't care about Western imperialists, fuck them too.

The vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It's not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.

Would you say it's constructive for an Israeli to be critical of gay rights in Palestine? Of course not, because divorced of context, it only carries water for imperialism

The problem is the violence of the totalitarian regimes you defend harms innocents too, which is why serious communists shouldn't advocate for that kind of power abuse any more than they should advocate for Western imperialism. It's not that hard.

Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia contextualizes the scale of and how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than "communism bad Stalin evil, that's why you can't ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state".

A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method

That's precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn't justify the means. Apologism is not OK.

It's OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.

the end doesn’t justify the means

Suppression of the right was necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.

Whether that can be considered justification or apologia isn't constructive IMO. Personally though, I just consider it an error in the way it was carried out.

Similar issues (and resulting sentiments) are observed in the wake of Mao giving villages the freedom to set up their own courts and try landlords and others.

It’s [...] vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.

We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.

Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.

By using the kind of the repression they used on the public, they proved they were no better than the capitalists they despise so much.

Someone that actually cares about left-wing politics cares a lot more about the outcomes than which faction comes ahead. Politics aren't a game of Risk. Actions have consequences, and humanity as a whole loses when innocents get killed by brainwashed idiots.

If stalinist Russia is what utopia is supposed to be, I'm not interested, thank you.

5 more...
5 more...
5 more...
5 more...
5 more...
5 more...
5 more...
5 more...

Equality has never in the history of our species been given freely by the ruling class to the workers. It has always been taken after violent struggle, and after the initial struggle is over the working class must be willing to defend their gains else they will lose them.

I acknowledge that. But what "struggle" means is not an unimportant detail. And I disagree with the Stalinist approach viscerally, and it isn't in accordance with leftist values by any stretch of the imagination.

5 more...
5 more...
5 more...

As it's always been, they cope with the horrible events with satirical, sarcastic humor. And, in the middle of that will be a well-reasoned, nuanced, and quite serious post.

It's just tankie 4chan

Hello, low effort neolib troll. Thanks for the opportunity to continue to speak truth.

There's a cultural similarity to what 4-chan was prior to the LOIC. But, they're definitely not tankies. Sincere expressions of authoritarian means are soundly defeated and usually result in permabans. The principle and practice is consistent for MAGA, neolibs, and other authoritarians.

Definitely not a neolib, but I'm glad we agree about the similarities of Nazbear with 4chan

Definitely not a neolib

Language analysis of your post history says differently. If you're not a neolib troll then perhaps you should stop presenting as such.

I call BS. My post history has mostly been shitting on LLMs lately, mainly for the consequences they have on the environment, which I think is mostly a left-wing concern.

Making shit up, how nice 🤭

Edit you haven't read much, I suppose because My 5th-ish last post was arguing against the liberal appeal to civility, which is definitely not a "neolib" talking point 🤷‍♀️

Did I fault your content or your presentation of it?

Nice strawman. You just can't help yourself.

Yeah they kept being able to back the most ridiculous claims and then suddenly I was like "oh no they were right all along" and got radicalized 🤷

Coming up with theory in an echo chamber isn't hard.

and how they kept being able to back it up?

That's the whole point of an echo chamber yes. You can say whatever you want without being challenged by other viewpoints and make anything seem plausible.

but they are linking a lot of outside sources. That's what I mean by "backing their claims up", studies about covid, about the ukraine war, about Israel, it's not just someone making a claim and then everyone is nodding along.

What I am saying is they were able to completely upend the way I see the world and you just can't do that by claiming thengs and linking to some other claims you make.

What you're not accounting for is how they curate who is allowed to post in the first place.

I was on lemm.ee when I got radicalized, all my life Ive been exposed to people claiming all sorts of things. I was a pro-NATO pro-Ukraine anti-ussr anti-china average reddit lib that they were able to convince otherwise.

i don't think they really helped with the financing of lemmy, although their coders did/do make many valuable contributions to lemmy's code base. out of curiosity, do you have an account on another instance? I'm surprised to see a sympathetic comment like this from an account on an instance that has them defederated

I don't think they really helped with the financing

All the computational resources the users tested the code base on must've been free.

I'm surprised to see a sympathetic comment like this from an account on an instance that has them defederated

Identity politics from .ml?

If you're surprised at such small acts of individual praxis, you'd be amazed at what we've accomplished in groups.

All the computational resources the users tested the code base on must’ve been free.

fair enough I just think of direct monetary donations or something when I see financing like that but looking at like that isn't incorrect

Identity politics from .ml?

I mean kinda? I normally expect people who hold sympathies towards hexbear to use an account on like lemm.ee so they don't have to use more than one account to browse everything they want to see

when I see financing like that but looking at like that isn't incorrect

None of the devs got paid. There are no other expenses.

I normally expect people who hold sympathies towards hexbear to use an account on like lemm.ee so they don't have to use more than one account to browse everything they want to see

You expect the convenient implementation of MLK's white moderate. But, my content should give no indication of that stereotype.

I'll answer your previous question: I've personal accounts on world, ee, ml, and hexbear. The fediverse doesn't limit viewing content from multiple accounts concurrently. One must only choose an account to post. The only obstacle to such a tool is a means to avoid burdening the fediverse with duplicate responses to content requests. We solved that problem in a few hours.

If you want actual insight communicated properly then you should ask in the correct venue. For example, I'd have no issue explaining in nuance on hexbear because the majority has a strong understanding or conversion of theory to praxis. I'm not even needed. Others would adequately explain on my behalf.

I think my comments have been too ambiguous then, I didn't mean for anything I've said to come across as hostile in any way, I apologize. I'm a lemmygrad user, made this account because I browse through .ml at work and been meaning to make one so i can comment while there.

I've perceived only good faith from your posts. I apologize if I've not demonstrated that in my responses. It's difficult to do here.

all good no worries, tone can be very hard to show through text 😅

Based on this interaction I've realized my perception of lemmygrad is hypocritical: My experience indicates that our shallow, automated and wide scope language analysis likely isn't human truth. I've decided to spend more time there.

Thank you for risking good faith engagement when it's not popular or politic. Iron sharpens iron.

5 more...
5 more...