Why is Lemmygrad hated in the wider space of Lemmy?
I've been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?
I've been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?
I can't speak about lemmygrad since the instances I'm on all defederate from it, but Hexbear users have a reputation for being generally aggressive, grating, and immature. It's like that kid in class who keeps interrupting the teacher because they think they're funny and clever. e.g., some were screaming at me that I can't be an anarchist and I know nothing about anarchism since I'm married, replying with third-grade tier memes for some confusing reason
Exactly this. They are not leftist, they are just a bunch of idiot trolls who use extreme left views as a means of pissing people off. Their views, according to their posts, are cartoonishly extremist. And that's why people don't like them.
I fully agree. The problem is when we point out that they're not leftist, they assume it's because we conflate leftism with liberalism, whereas this is not the case at all. I think they're not leftist because their antisocial/anti-human beliefs are antithetical to the concept of community and only serve to derail any chance we have to work together to create a new system. I can't imagine that anyone who legitimately seeks the goal of a stateless, classless society would behave as they do.
Thought I should add it was them informing me that certain countries banning same-sex marriage while endorsing heterosexual marriage is just fine, actually. They espoused an objectively homophobic belief, and when I referenced my own marriage, they switched to calling me ignorant about anarchism. There are anarchist texts exploring the issue and some of the potential problems with traditions like marriage, but it's not dogma. Nor do I view my own relationship as hierarchical.
TL;DR They were being objectively homophobic.
This has the energy of a white gay man in a marriage pointing at a trans polycule and calling them homophobic because they said he had a bad take about how bourgeois privileges are more important than positive rights for queer homeless people.
White gay men wielding their gayness as a cudgel against people who are queerer and more marginalized then them sure is a gross thing to see.
Your comment is a perfect example of the pants-shittingly off-topic LGBTphobic nonsense I was receiving in the other thread, so thanks for proving my point.
You ... you do realize that trans people and other "queerer" people than me engage in same-sex marriage too, right? And that it's objectively homophobic for a policy to exist forbidding same-sex marriage while permitting heterosexual marriage? And that not all trans people are poly? I know people that fit all of the above, and every one of them deserves validation, and it would be unfathomably LGBTphobic for me to arbitrarily determine which ones are "queer enough" to be part of the community. You don't see the problem with this line of thinking, with your entire statement? Of course you do, you're just being deliberately cruel for your own amusement.
There it is, folks. Exhibit A
Edit: That user is a moderator on !worldnews@lemmy.ml
I'm unsubscribing immediately! And I blocked and reported that user, too.
My love is for all the LGBT+ community, and for the straight cis community as well. I just want equity. For anyone who had to read that homophobic comment above, just know that I do care, and I'm here for you.
Yes!
Do you acknowledge that some countries like the US which allow gay marriage materially harm lgbt people more than some countries that have banned gay marriage? Or is it only homophobic when it impacts your middle class ass?
Do you acknowledge that many socialist countries are progressive and moving toward more rights, and just starting from a worse starting point because of violently enforced colonial attitudes from countries that now claim to be progressive?
Do you acknowledge that Cuba, a socialist nation that you'd accuse of being tankie, is the place where lgbt people have the most material rights?
Do you acknowledge that communists have led every single queer liberation movement that has forced concessions from ruling governments? Or do you want to whitewash the communists out of stonewall?
Yes, I'm one of them. And I'd happily give up my right to be married if it would erase queer homelessness, and erase conversion therapy camps, and erase the continual murder of black and indigenous trans women in our society.
Sounds like Hexbear to me
Do you want to hear the punchline? I caught a temp ban for expressing my plan to block their instance as soon as that is made possible for users. I will admit I was a bit harsh in that I said I wanted them to be "effectively silenced," but this was extremely mild compared to their comments to me.
Lemmygrad does have its heated gamer moments but overall they're waaaaay better than hexbear when it comes to post quality.
They are hardline Marxist-Leninists, something that is very rare in the western world even amongst those who identify as leftist or socialist. If their views make you uncomfortable, then you're not a ML, which is okay.
Left-wing politics is a very broad spectrum, and a lot of Lemmy users lean towards the more moderate end which brings them into conflict with the more radical communities that are Lemmygrad and Hexbear.
That's all there is to it.
That's it? Nothing about their notoriety for posting pictures of pigs pooping on their balls as part of their lively defense of MLism?
Political views aside, the way they promote their political views is unappealing.
Look through any of their popular threads. Everyone piles on any comment which doesn't align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Sounds like every popular community on Lemmy. The only difference is the "agreed perspective".
Not really.
In most communities you can at least entice some robust discussion, hexbear just seems sp aggressively intolerant of alternative views.
That's basically every political sub I've come across browsing in my instance
It's a question of degree.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
True, but leninists are not leftist in any significant sense either. They are more authoritarian/ totalitarian than they are left or right.
That's not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so "anti-racism" that they're racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that's what people have an issue with.
Holy shit you got them to brigade your comment. They might as well be bots, I think Chat GPT's "intelligence" outpaces them.
As is tradition! What's funny is that they're supposed to be defederated from my instance so I don't know why they even see my comments... Their admin even called my instance "sh.itsfullof.nazis" in their defederation message because they were angry that they were confronted to people who disagreed with them when they brigaded our administration communities...
They have a community dedicated to organizing brigades so it's no surprise that they are brigading their comment
!the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net
The rules in the side bar are very telling
Of course the last time I mentioned it's existence with one of my alts I got a 2 week sitewide-ban so this comment probably won't last long
Edit: Spleling
Extremely accurate
I literally netted a 2 week sitewide-ban on one of my alts in this thread for a softer worded take than this
Don't know how I managed to escape consequences so far 😂
anyone complaining about "reverse racism" or "anti white racism" is a complete joke. like boo fucking hoo, someone called you a cracker on the internet, get over it.
Racism has a definition that's fairly easy to understand and yes people of all colors can be victims and even people of the same skin colour can be racists against one another because racism isn't necessarily about the color of your skin, it can be about your ethnicity.
Racism:
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.Ethnicity:
the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.If you had taken a crowd of anonymous Germans all dressed the same in 1935, how would you have told who was a Jew and who wasn't? You wouldn't have been able to because they were all just white people.
What do you call it when 100 years ago in a first world white country the population that speaks one official language has an infant mortality rate comparable to that of colonial Africa while the population that speaks the other official language and lives in the same cities has an infant mortality rate comparable to any other first world nation?
Was the Rwanda genocide not racism because it was two groups with the same skin colour? What about what happened in Yugoslavia?
My white friend who went to China to study had to sit through multiple explanations by many Chinese student of the levels of intelligence being affected by skin colour and ethnicity and guess what, whites weren't at the top! "All white people are dumber than Indians who are dumber than Koreans who are dumber than Chinese." Are you telling me that isn't racism against white people (and anyone that isn't Chinese)? Because I sure would hope someone would call me a racist if I was saying the same thing about people of another skin colour or ethnicity!
That isn't what they are talking about, hopefully. But if it is, I agree, a hearty "lol" is in order.
they replied confirming to me that what they were complaining about was in fact racism against white people, given that it seems to be a pretty common bit on lemmygrad to call people crackers and compare them to that kid who went onto fox news to complain about his face being photoshopped onto a picture of a ritz cracker by left wing students at his university that seems to be what they were complaining about
edit: i found a picture of the guy
Bad interpretation is bad
That's a liberal with no framework. No one denies genocides (pro-tip just because the western media says it's a genocide doesn't make it a genocide.) Being so anti-racist you are the real racist is the Liberal Democratic party who elected a hard-core segregationist as president, not a Marxist Leninist. No one except people like you give a fuck about personal attacks. lol.
The “Uyghur genocide” is bullshit Atlanticist propaganda, and English-language Wikipedia is basically NATOpedia in its slant on the topic, so yes we will deny it. It’s a product of the new Cold War propaganda campaign against China.
Here are some properties of any conspiracy theory worth it’s name:
Closed Ideological Systems: They provide an all-encompassing explanation for various events or states, with everything fitting into their worldview.
Immunity to Facts: Any contrary evidence is dismissed as false or considered part of the conspiracy.
Enemy Construction: They tend to draw a clear line between "us" (those who "know the truth") and "them" (the supposed conspirators).
Adaptability: Conspiracy narratives can change and incorporate new "evidence" or events to maintain their credibility.
It matches for QAnon and the MAGA crowd as well as the lemmygrad crowd.
I get why people would believe it like a decade ago when the facts were still kind of up in the air, but now even west media is like "yeaaah we looked into it and all of it is complete and utter bullshit" and yet you still have people confidently going on like it's still a thing.
Eventually you have to come to the grips with the fact that the only reason you believe in the Uyghur genocide is because you're racist.
Any politically focused space on the Internet, left or right, is a cesspool of toxic lies and hatred of anyone outside their sphere
British. Immediately discarded.
That's what we call racism
im british and i give them the g-word pass (gammon) to refer to british people in a derogatory way
Generally, they aren't marxists, they're "tankies". And even fairly extreme socialists tend to dislike that. That's lemmygrad.
Hexbear is just filled with trolls that federated specifically to troll and disrupt the rest of lemmy in the name of their beliefs.
On either, you can find individuals that are perfectly cool to talk to. But it's like rolling the dice where only snake eyes win. And, even when you win, you can't be certain that it isn't a long troll waiting to fuck with you because some of them do that too.
Sounds like Lemmy's version of r/atheism 10+ years ago. Atheism itself is fine, but the sub became an insufferable circle jerk.
“Tankie” is a term that’s applied to literally any communist. I’ve heard it used against Trotskyists and fucking social democrats.
So, what’s actually the problem with them? Are they Maoists? CPC apologists?
They like Stalin, Putin , Xi and Kim. And defend everything they do.
Like WTF? How can a communist defend putin!?
II hear this constantly, I have yet to see it one time ever by ANY communists on ANY website.
Visit a few Ukraine threads, it's one of the topics the fanatics pile on.
My point was that tankies are a "special" subset of communists.
I have. I’ve still never seen it. What I do constantly see in those threads is dehumanization of Russian people and calls for mass genocide of them, though. Calling them orcs and talking about how they all deserve to die.
I don’t believe you, to be honest. One can acknowledge Russian security concerns (like multiple U.S. military officials and many high members of the UN have) without praising Putin. And I’ve still never seen a single communist say anything good about Putin. On any website.
I've never seen what you're describing. Not about Russians anyway. I've seen far too many zionists saying that shit about Palestinians tho.
I’m glad for your sake. It’s pretty gross.
People who throw the word “tankie” around indiscriminately aren’t using it right. From what I’ve seen, it applies specifically to extreme communist fanboys who are apologists for communist militarism. For example, Tankies will say that the Tiananmen Square massacre was either justified or didn’t happen.
Just being a fan of communism doesn’t make someone a tankie.
Edit: see below for an excellent example
Thank you!
Lemmygrad is filled with the American patriot version of communists. You will excuses for the Uighur genocide and acts of repression against ethnic minorities for the good of the nation as a whole. You also get into weird cases of trying to redefine words because the words don't match their narrative. For instance, I was in one discussion trying to argue that China was a democracy because the government worked for the people, even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.
Hexbear seems more geared towards being angry and bitter at liberals for not doing what they see as the right thing. There isn't any discussion on political theory, talk of political organization outside of violent revolution is frowned on, and the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.
If anything, solarpunk may be the healthier leftist sub because it is geared in part towards solutions instead of focusing on problems.
What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?
There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there's a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I've learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you're reading, you'll get engagement and answers. It's pretty cool.
Yes, we're communists. We aren't going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you're an actual leftist and not some "just vooooote" liberal, you'll probably enjoy hexbear.
Some form of vote. And this isn't an argument on which system is better or not, just a definition of democracy compared to other forms of government.
It is very little and it doesn't get upvoteed much. If you are going to see posts from all, it isn't there.
But Hexbear talks about liberals a lot, far more than any other political group. It comes across as a communal hate time for one group. It feels strange to focus on one half of the political systems typically represented in democracies and not the other.
I touched on this in my reply. There is little in terms of discussion for organization or action. It doesn't come across as a group wanting to make change, but complain. And the hostility to voting feels like it comes from not wanting to do anything in the political sphere that will actually affect change.
Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you're defining democracy as "a system in which people vote", then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don't think that's a great definition and I don't think China is a "liberal democracy" like the US is, but at this point, we're getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don't think now is exactly the time for that.)
Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the "all" feed aren't going to be the ones where we're talking theory, they're going to be the ones where we're dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That's true. It doesn't mean that theory posts don't exist, just that they aren't as contentious as dunking posts. That's an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.
Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It's probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say "libs suck", we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it's not that we ignore republicans, it's just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think "liberal" means "democrat". It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think "liberals" and "democrats" are synonyms.
And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn't mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It's to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It's fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make "communism" a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?
"Some form of vote"????????????
They...do vote??? There are elections??? Where are you pulling this??
vibes
And what the fuck are you doing here? Besides implying some magical "solarpunk solutions" to a planet being on fire and increasing choked with plastic (that probably don't involve abolishing capitalism because that would be a scary Hexbear thing to do) without specifying what those supposed "solutions" are what are you doing here besides complaining about Hexbear?
People do vote in China. You know that, right? Xi is not elected directly by popular vote but is essentially voted on by politicians who were voted in, something closer to a parliamentary style organization rather than the US system. If Xi was unpopular, the people could vote out the people supporting him in favor of challengers who support someone else for President.
Leftist unity, but only for the authoritarian left. Hexbears either intentionally ignore or are not aware of the academic case for democratic socialism or other moderate/libertarian left ideas. You just redefine them as liberalism because actually acknowledging that these ideas might liberate workers faster than the often failed journey through autocracy, is very inconvenient for campism.
This is the most "Portland Antifa Bookstore" thing I've read all week. You're not more "principled" or "balanced," you just want certain things to replace other things, (solarpunk lol), and you're fully committed to avoiding the easy solution at all costs. Comfy Americans who want to stay comfy with no tough moral decisions ever make the worst kinds of leftists.
Nobody other than one single man claims there is a Uyghur genocide
Then why do so many people talk about how they are voting for
? Admittedly that's mostly on Hexbear, but if anything I think we have too much electoralism and too many 
s.
We are watching an actual genocide unfold in Gaza right now and it is impossible for Israel to hide it from the world. When will we finally get a single image from China depicting this so called Uyghur genocide? There's not one image of death camps, mass graves, or dead bodies. How on earth is that possible? Internet access is extremely widespread in China.
Genocide doesn't have too mean death.
"Just voooooooote for le green energy broooooo this time it will work broooooooo just vooooooote broooooooo"
I'd say more, but then you'd call me a debate pervert.
By all means please go on, don't let me stop you from making a fool of yourself.
And they would be correct.
there;s currently an ongoing bell hooks reading group, we just finished the wretched of the earth reading group, the daily megathread comes with a list of recomended works of anarchist and marxist theory, there are pretty frequent requests in the askchapo comm for works of theory on specific topics, the matrix room has its own pretty active theory discussion page, one of the recurring site taglines is a command telling the reader to read theory with a link to where to see it, and if you spend anytime at all active on the site someone will yell at you to read Settlers (ive actually seen people recomend this one so much that i actually know the url from the top of my head), The Jakarta Method, Blackshirts and Reds or Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue
::: spoiler edit while refreshing the page for an example of the tagline's telling the reader to go read theory coming up i saw this that you might find funny
ok, here are some actual ones telling the reader to read theory:
\
Are you seriously still on that shit?? After everything that has come out??? Also I give solarpunk like a month tops before it goes ecofash.
Ok, I'll bite. What is "everything that has come out"?
A bunch of journalists actually went to China to see the abuse for themselves and didn't walk away with anything to support that narrative. Best they could say to defend their case was "China is hiding the truth, that's why we didn't see anything" Over time, all the claims the right made about the "genocide" were slowly being deconfirmed to the point that it was becoming clear it was all made up. Is there a chance that some of the stuff actually was right? Maybe, but when you know it came from a place of bad faith you don't exactly need to waste energy debunking each and every claim from the likes of faith healers and flat earthers when they have a rich history of flat out lying to drive a narrative.
When people actively invested in finding out fucked up shit can't find any fucked up shit, it's a pretty good sign it's not happening.
EDIT: Doesn't help that a lot of the people making the biggest fuss about the Uighurs are all siding with Israel in their genocide. One of the big key things that genocide deniers do is make a big stink about fake genocides that they made up on the spot (Fx: the great replacement)
Do you have a source for this? Last I looked into the Uighur genocide, it was being reported by well-respected outlets (not faith healers and flat earthers) and had photos of people being marched into camps.
So for it to suddenly be "all made up" sounds rather far-fetched to me.
I believe it was the AP who did a report on it.
Can you provide a link to the report?
CBA, it's not going to change anyone's mind anyway.
How convenient.
🙄 Don't act like you were actually going to look at it, nobody who asks for sources on the internet actually gives a shit about the source, they're just doing it to waste the other person's time and/or respond with some variety of "that's a bad source" or "I'm still not convinced"
It's like a tic, liberals will go "Source??" whenever they see something they don't agree with, but then will guzzle down nazi propaganda like it's a fact because it aligns with what they already believe. I have literally never seen them actually respect the time put into finding the source.
I asked for it because I knew it was bullshit you couldn't back up with a source that didn't exist. Before I commented, I searched for AP articles about it and found nothing, because it doesn't exist.
Lemmygrad I can't comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I'm not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven't seen them out in any of the threads I've been on.
Hexbear I've enjoyed honestly. They've got nice hobby communities and it's all I'm here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don't share their views. People screaming "tankie!" just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.
The only good take on China
Yes, it has nothing to do with their inability to follow other instances' rules and constant need to "dunk" on "shit libs" mostly by posting the same image of a pig pooping on itself. /S
Such discourse. Much Praxis. So brave.
If this is your vibe normally I wouldn't want to engage and would just post a troll image as well, it's rancid.
Liberals hate communists more than they hate fascists
Sorry for my ignorance, but I think liberal means something else in my part of the world. Can you please tell me what's your definition?
Edit: As I thought - you guys mean Neoliberalism. Even in the links below it's mentioned that there was a split in terms. Language matters! Liberalism - a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights and civil liberties (the opposite in the political spectrum from authoritarianism).
they're not using liberal in the american sense of liberal meaning gay blue haired woman with pronouns and vegan lattes that conservatives get mad at (in general theres a lot of queer vegan women with pronouns and colourful hair on hexbear); they're defining liberal in the marxist sense in that its people who support capitalism but arent currently fascists, so this includes conservatives, neoliberals, social democrats, and all sorts in it. Their comment seems to be applying more specifically to the ideologically committed liberals as opposed to mostly apolitical people who just say, "oh yeah i guess i;ll vote democrat this time" once every 4 years and have that be the extent of their politcal consciousness
It's nonsense statements like this that should provide the answer to OP's question. When push came to shove in WW2, liberalism in the US, UK, and elsewhere sided with communism against fascism.
Did they now?
Just take a look at this question, all of the answers are from lemmygrad and hexbear users. You are not going to get a good answer from them because they're the people you're asking the question about.
They are not hated they're just annoying, no one really cares about their opinions the problem is is that they try and push their opinions on everybody else.
Yeah, they have a very alternative interpretation of geopolitics and they're loud about it. If there was a flat earth instance with users that spammed every physics thread there would be some grumbling just the same.
Hexbear also weaponizes accusations of transphobia the same way Israel weaponizes accusations of anti-semitism.
Now Hexbear hasn't done any genocide yet, but it does loove to talk about executing people, many and frequently.
The hexbear and lemmygrad users/posts I run across in All mostly remind me of those street corner preachers. I don’t care one way or another about their ideologies but it’s tiring that they always feel the need to shout it in your face.
I don’t hate them but find them to be obnoxious and mostly cult-like.
Very much like a cult actually. Often times the opinions they are espousing don't actually make much sense even within their own ideology, mostly because their kids and they don't actually understand what they're talking about.
It's not communist ideology to claim that Tinnamon Square didn't happen, it's just China's propaganda. It's not the same thing.
Equally criticizing China is not the same as criticizing communism as a concept. It's perfectly acceptable to think that communism is good but what China did is bad, but these idiots won't allow you to say that. If they actually understood what they were talking about they'd realized that, but they don't because as you say they're in a cult.
Well, when I see a .ml user from here on out I'm not sure I'll be able to give them the same sort of leeway.
I had one of their users confirm they were racist. Then I saw that only the parts where our conversation was removed by mods, and not shit canning the user.
You want people to like you, don’t lie down with racists.
I concur about .ml. It's been eye opening being on the receiving end of a homophobic rant by a moderator of their world news community implying I'm not queer enough. It wouldn't surprise me that they're racist, too. Bigots tend to subscribe to more than one strain of bigotry.
I know it shouldn't matter what people like that think, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not disappointed and dismayed. I've survived so many things and had a long hard road to self-acceptance. It's disgusting to be invalidated by someone who likely has more than I've ever had.
I used to be confused when right wing nutjobs would say that the left is Racist, or Homophobic, or bigoted in general, it would make me confused as that wasn't my experience and it's not baked into left wing ideology. Hell, I didn't really see it on reddit when I was there (the hate was from right wingers or gatekeepers).
Then I came here. Nice place in general. Waaaay better users than reddit as a whole. But now I know where the RWNJs got the idea.
Ain't that the truth! I will say during my tenure on reddit, I heard of CTH and thought to myself, "I ultimately support a similar vision for our future, how bad can it be?" I was shocked to find one of the most exclusionary, bigoted dens of filth I'd seen outside of places like r/T_D
Ableist and bigoted language abounded, it was impossible to engage because they'd immediately bristle when anyone they perceived as beneath them wandered in.
I see a lot of the same things here. It's really disappointing to us leftists who actually want to effect change. No one will listen to people like that. Hopefully they're just kids who grow out of ... whatever this is.
Middle class white gay men could use their privilege to help out the rest of the lgbtq community instead of being right wingers, but then that would require examining their privileges, and we can't have that.
So pointing out those privileges and how different rights affect different subsections of the community differently because of those privileges is homophobic./s
Fuck off.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are cool. IDK why you wouldn't like them if you're a leftist.
Hexbear in particular has been annoying in the past with nonsense comments from users there, and so many unhelpful replies that are just a tiny animated image and nothing else. I'm not even sure they actually are leftist as much as just trolls a lot of times, so I've blocked the instance in general so that serious leftist conversations aren't being drowned out by that nonsense.
If it looks like someone from hexbear (such as yourself here) is making a real contribution then I'll reveal that comment and engage. It's a shame there are so many goofballs on that instance, apparently. Maybe their moderation has improved though?
I think there was a culture shock when federation first hit. We had a ton of 'engagement' from people who were using ableist, racist, and transphobic slurs, which brought out strong reactions from our community because we believe its important to shut that stuff down on solidarity with our comrades. And as things got heated I think our willingness to believe people wanted good faith debate eroded.
We do love a good dunking though, and I think overall the community has a lower threshold for going full pig poop balls on people than I would prefer.
Valid criticisms tbh (I even could say the same as a day 0 account lol)
Moderation isn't going to "improve" because they generally are fine with everyone being goofballs, so I wouldn't expect that.
Some people have the cascade of shitposting and useless emojis coming with their crappy views, but I don't think our instance is great at propaganda or ROE, which is unfortunate. Would love to see what we could do with a little discipline.
Also the emojis on every other instance and all mobile apps look more obnoxious because they don't downscale to their intended resolution.
Here on kbin I don't even see that, just text links with names like "pig poop balls".
How did you manage to block the instance individually? I thought that feature wasn't released yet...?
I'm using Connect which has the feature to block instances. It shows comments from all users on a blocked instance collapsed behind a spoiler of sorts that can be clicked to reveal if desired.
Not to mention that before federating, hexbear always had a soft aura of antisemitism floating around it. They've cleared house of it since but I remember wondering why they were so disproportionally vitriolic about Trotsky until I learned he was Jewish, then it all started to click.
Honestly I wouldn't even be remotely surprised if I found out in a couple decades that website was run as controlled opposition. Feels like everything there is designed to either placate or turn people away from communism rather than push them towards understanding it. Compare it to Lemmygrad where they'll reach a hand out to help reactionaries be less reactionary but on hexbear they just post a picture of a pig shitting on its balls and hurl harassing comments their way as if that's somehow going to make them any less anticommunist. (and as a fine bonus, all those comments boosts their reactionary bullshit to the top of the federation for everyone to see)
Opposing a settler colonial, apartheid State, which has been ethnically cleansing for three generations and is committing genocide as we speak, is not a “soft aura of antisemitism”.
Obviously not, i'm talking about the people there who were using the leftist environment to shield their actual antisemitism. That shit's been since wiped off the platform but that wasn't the case back when I was there.
You know the kind. The ones who would call them "Jews" rather than "Zionists" where if it was posted on reddit nobody would have trouble seeing the antisemitism for what it was but because it was hexbear it obfuscated their actual intentions. Outright antisemitism would get punished pretty hard which is why it's a soft aura, since it just kinda hung around in the background seeing how much it could get away with. The mods/admins tendency to just ban people who went against the grain resulted in that shit being passively protected for years until the federation forced them to be at least somewhat accountable where blatantly silencing criticism wasn't going to fly anymore.
Oh, thanks. I’m glad I got to the party late then!
Yeah, you guys get the cool hexbear.
I'm a leftist that doesn't like hanging with racists and totalitarians, that's why I don't like them.
Michael Parenti: Left anti-communism: The Unkindest Cut
You're on itjustworks, you're not a leftist, you're a social fascist.
You realise that the instance has open registration that doesn't require a specific political allegiance? I'm on it because it's local, I would have chosen any other local instance if it wasn't this one.
Your gaslighting tactics aren't going to work here.
You need to learn what gaslighting means before using the word.
Lemmygrad isn't "hated" by most of the wider lemmyverse. There's just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren't used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.
It's no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about "those mean tankies at lemmygrad" (and hexbear too) made by people who can't take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don't think most people care enough except to think "oh yeah that's that instance with those radical lefties, they're weird but they do make some great memes sometimes."
There's a difference between challenging other people's opinions and calling them fascists or Nazis just because they're not at the extreme left.
Even worse, in this very thread I've been called a fascist for the sole reason that my instance is sh.itjust.works, one of the bigger instances and one where your political opinion isn't a criteria to subscribe (especially not when I subscribed, they didn't even ask for an email!)
Yeah, I only joined shitjust works because that's where the cdda Lemmy is and that's the first thing I used it for, didn't even know people think it's a political instance. Though I guess with the hexbears and lemmygrads everything's political somehow. That's why I generally avoid dealing with them anyway.
There are people who called the main lemmy.ml instance a community of tankies, so I'd take a lot of these claims with a grain of salt.
I'm pretty left/lean socialist. The tankies that annoy me from those instances are pro authoritarian communists who say shit like "Stalin did nothing wrong" with no irony whatsoever. It's not really about bickering over ideological purity past a certain point, some of that shit makes a good case for the horseshoe theory
Hahahahahaha
Because the majority of Ledditors are either liberals or full blown reactionaries and the ones who are not range from some cringey techno-libertarian who think FOSS will usher in socialism to some radlib cruise-missile socialist who strangely never deviates from the US state department. The very few who could legitimately be considered socialists are some kind of anarchist. They certainly aren't Marxist.
Outside of those two, I won't hold my breath. The easiest litmus test in the world is how they're responding to the genocide at Gaza. There's very few places where you'll get complete support for the Palestinian liberation struggle and not whining about the imaginary babies Hamas allegedly beheaded or trying to equate the conduct of a genocidal nuclear power to a paramilitary fighting for national liberation.
What's your opinion on killing civilians attending a festival?
just a heads up that they cant see your comment and wont be able to respond because according to the hexbear modlog you were banned from hexbear 3 months ago for transphobia and mocking non binary hexbear users for using alternative pronouns
Ahh, what actually happened is I said they behave like alt-right, and their neo-pronouns look more like a mockery of trans people than being genuinely trans-inclusive in ways that matter in real life.
Which, I'm still open to an explanation of how they are advancing trans right irl, and taking the L and admitting I was wrong. Their response was to sexually harass me instead. I'm not mad, but if I accuse you of behaving like alt-right and you dig your heels in deeper to behave like alt-right, that's on you man.
Thank you for the heads up though.
** Edit: as a sidenote, for all the lip-service Hexbear gives trans people, they still cannot tell the difference between men and people with penises.
as a trans person reading some of the comments they cite as the reason you're banned they seem pretty transphobic, just because you preface one of them with an 'im not transphobic, but...' comment it doesnt make it not transphobic to mock people for using neopronouns
Yeah I was a complete asshole. Not an excuse, but this was after about 2-dozen people sexually harassed me, so I was not at my best. And I will apologize any time for anyone who is hurt or offended.
That said, I was also speaking to people who started out as rape apologists in the context of Russian soldiers and Ukrainians families. If you're pretty cool with kids getting raped by soldiers, but you're offended that someone didn't memorize 4 different neo-pronouns, that is 100% a place of privilege. Am I wrong on that?
Edit: also, as you are a trans person, recognizing that you are in a world where your safety is often a razor-thin line, anything I said that you felt unsafe around, I do deeply apologize.
looking at the original thread through the modlog on their side they were actually talking about food security in china and not r*pe apologia. Even if they had been saying how great SA is, the transphobia you showed in that thread entirely unprompted wouldnt have been justified because they were doing something that was also bad
Also gonna bug you again because I am so thirsty for conversation around this.
I am not trans, but from what I've seen and experienced from people close to me, especially in the midwest, living as a trans person is difficult and dangerous. There's so much work to put in to be perceived a certain way, which bathroom is it safe to use, getting medical care, getting hormones and transitioning, who is it safe to come out to.
But then you can have over here a super privileged white man, who decides he now goes by neo-pronouns, puts no work or risk in and retains every privilege in society of being a white man.
This looks to me in absolutely no way comparable to what it's like to be trans.
I would say something like, I feel like neo-pronoun people have culturally appropriated the struggle of trans people. You can pick up some neo-pronouns and get all the leftist points, without actually putting yourself on the line the way trans people put themselves on the line.
I'll take the L again and say the above is coming from a place of personal ignorance. I am an ignorant asshole. I'm very interesting in learning different and even better perspectives.
Since you're either unable or unwilling to engage in any further, I'll tell you what it looks like right now:
Any rational well-adjusted person will be pro-trans rights. Therefore it doesn't make a good enough loyalty check for a rather high-key cultish group. The neo-pronouns are the loyalty check. Neo-pronouns have nothing to do with being trans, everything to do with checking to see if someone fits into the cult.
Hexbear weaponizes accusations of transphobia the exact way Israel weaponizes accusations of antisemitism. It's nothing to do with trans people or Jewish people, and everything to do with the cult. You are either with the cult, or you're against it.
At the end of the day, Israel is bad for Jews, and will happily sacrifice the rights of Jewish people around the world, I think Hexbear is bad for trans rights, and will happily sacrifice the rights and safety of trans people anywhere in the world to achieve its own political goals. For example, Dems in the US might be trash, but they are also the only change trans people have right now. I think Hexbear would throw trans people in the US in front of a train if it meant a geopolitical win for them.
So call me whatever you want; when it comes to afab and amab people who want to be identified as a brother, a sister, or a sibling, they have always had my unwavering support. When it comes to Hexbear and the neo-pronouns, that is demonstrably the real transphobia, and trans exploitation. And I am still waiting to hear otherwise.
i literally just wasnt looking at lemmy, i didnt see your three comments until now, i wasnt like evading you or anything. i'll just like read what you said fully now
edit: having actually read it the like whole stereotype of like a privileged white person changing their pronouns for attention and so they can feel oppressed is largely a transphobic trope that gives cover for putting down trans people. to some degree i agree that like queer white people can use their queerness as a weapon against racial minorities as a putdown (i've seen this happen myself personally) and solely refer to violence against trans people without mentioning that the majority of transphobic murders and sexual assaults that happen are against black trans people so even though all trans people are under threat, black queer people are at the meeting point of queerness and blackness where violence against them is considered the most acceptable by frothing conservatives - but this is like a discussion to be had between queer and POC people, not white cishet people.
the majority of people who like use neopronouns mainly do it in queer exclusive spaces because like there's a risk of having conservatives get really mad at them over it, that's why its not really visible to cishet people outside of the internet because most cishets arent privy to the spaces where queer people do it, it's not just a thing people do to seem special (for instance Leslie Feinberg, a very well known trans liberationist activist used neopronouns "I am a human being who would rather not be addressed as Ms. or Mr., ma’am or sir. I prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns like sie (pronounced like “see””) and hir (pronouncedlike “here”) to describe myself. I am a person who faces almost insurmountable difficulty when instructed to check off an “F” or an “M” box on identification papers.").
In regards to the "hexbear is like israel" thing, i disagree with quite a lot that they say but to compare them to a country currently doing a genocide is a bit out of hand. I disagree with their whole "Dont vote" shit but like i can understand where its coming from, in my own country (Britain) there's a sense that like the labour party is stripping away the pro queer stance that they had under corbyn while platforming transphobes and cynically using queer rights to promote the actual Israel. The conservatives would be so much worse than the labour party and are currently basically teeing themselves up to be like american republicans were a few years ago but i get the urge to just burn it all down, when it comes to the vote i'll be going to vote and cursing starmer's name while i do it, but i'll probably still be voting for him
So maybe you can help me out with this bit:
Where I'm at right now, I feel like trans inclusivity means, that regardless of being born afab or amab, if you want to be perceived and treated by he/him pronouns, she/her pronouns, or they/them pronouns, you deserve that recognition and treatment.
That is currently where I am at for trans inclusivity.
I support that, in my workplace and in my community.
Am I falling short here? Am I not reaching far enough to be trans inclusive?
Edit: SA was a different thread, it's somewhere way back there in my history.
Gonna give you my honest two cents.
You come across as a cunt whenever you police who can use neo pronouns based on how they look or act.
Pronouns are something people should be free to explore.
Hopefully being able to look into the topic without prejudice will allow people to discover their own queerness and/or empathise with people that do use them.
Neverind that that is bad faith to argue that hexbear enforces neo pronouns, trad pronouns or anonymous can be used.
Do you mean the civilians at the festival that the IDF admitted to killing on the 6th?
I believe you've answered your own question.
Lemmy isn't Marxist-only. The majority of Lemmy users are what the more vocal Lemmygrad and Hexbear users deride as "libs." As a thought experiment, imagine that you are one of us for a moment and then browse Local on one of those.
Thought experiment; Don't be a lib.
Exhibit #1 why Hexbear/Lemmygrad are unpopular: this guy
Even better - don't be a tankie
Define tankie.
[fart noise]
As an anarchist, I've been called a tankie so many times basically for expressing views left of Ronald Reagan. Why should one not be a tankie?
Don't be a useful idiot of the State Department
Thought experiment; shut the fuck up.
I haven't seen or maybe haven't noticed much of lemmygrad. But hex bear has a culture of spamming the same handful of images, using them like punctuation in their posts. And they show up huge in my reader at least (I just found out they look small to them.) So it's like you're trying to have a discussion and someone comes parading through with like five crappy drawings that take up all the space. Also I don't mind having Marxists around but they tend to want to steer every discussion toward it, regardless of its relevance. Can't wait to be able to block the instance.
They're both good instances. People have been heavily propagandized to hate communists. You could make the kindest most welcoming space on the internet and if you put the label "communist" on it, it will be hated.
Haven't seen any lemmygrad users in a while, but honestly the vitriol towards Hexbear is overblown. They're fine. Bit trolly, and they shitpost a lot, but it's kinda fun.
You are lucky you said "its kinda fun" because I was this 👌 close to trolling you with shit posts.
I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.
I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.
I am interested in the physics divination bot. How's it work?
There's a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.
The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That's amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It's not a 'safe' way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.
Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D
Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.
I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.
I can't imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we'll talk about it :P
Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I'll gently beat it into submission so it works again.
Liberals.
Because they are populated by some of the dumbest people on the planet.
So, as others mentioned, they're tankies. They circle jerk about how "the west" is entirely responsible for every bad thing that ever happened. They blame the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the West, they deny the oppression of the Uyghur people as pure western propaganda...
Any time you cite something horrible Russia or Iran or China or North Korea does, they say "the west is just as bad," draw some false equivalencies, and then proceed to explain why that means that the West is the only bad thing and there's nothing at all wrong with Russia or China.
And... they're so aggressive about it. It's not just that their opinions are so detestable, but that they brigade other threads and insist that everybody who isn't actively bombing US government buildings is evil.
They're annoying. On the fediverse, that might be the highest sin.
God yeah. Even if they had some interesting ideas they've been lost to all the circle jerking that there's no way of seeing how any of them can be taken seriously.
Well it's because they are Marxist.
In the Lemmy culture Marxism has a very bad name because almost religious overtones of its adherents.
Which is of ironically very much what Marx was warning against. But that's how it works right now.
Leninism is antithetical to Marxism. As you said. If they were Marxist there wouldn't be a big issue. They're Leninist as an angry 13 year old can be. Combined with the fact that people in the West, the US especially, have no idea what either one is. And that's the problem.
Im not in alot of communities but I've never seen the heavy handed claims everyone makes about seemingly any lemmy user to the left of Biden. I've seen occasional snark, but nothing out of line for standard internet snark/trolling that those same people never mind when the right does it. 🤷
It's a bunch of Ledditor liberals saying that. Lemmygrad can be a little sectarian, but otherwise it is perfectly fine.
I could tell you, but the last time I responded to a thread like this I got banned for a couple weeks because toxic political personalities aren't very tolerant.
....shit
My DMs are open
Nah that's about it. The majority of active users are disingenuous in any real way to anyone outside of thier toxic insider joke club. The whole "my personality is based on this political view" is a tiresome trope, regardless of what that view they actually have IRL.
Tell everyone here what you said. Do it, coward.
ITT: offended lennygrad and hexbear users giving good examples to answer the OP
Strange question. Nothing's wrong with them? Nobody's hating on them. Just people...
Some people are to hypothetical conversation what a boulder is to the wind.
chapo.chat is great
False.
I wouldn't be a fan of a nazi or islamist instance either. One for communists is hardly any different as far I'm concerned. They're all groups of extremists that I don't want anything to do with. Just look at the modlog of this instance for example. Exhibit B is the fact that this message will get deleted in couple hours and I'll likely be banned.
Tankies are not communists
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51f
For the same reason people hate the Nazi trolls. Extreme left or right does not matter. Normal people don't want that garbage.
there are no good Marxist instances
Karl Marx had some great ideas. It's too bad everyone who identifies as a Marxist has such a twisted worldview.
Please don't speak of Marxism without understanding it
Because liberals and other right wingers hate when they find out they're not actually "as left as you can get" and coming here and having that black mirror reflection is always a shock
It should probably be a hint of sorts - while the idea might be tolerable, once people enter the mix - it all goes to shit.
Just like literally every other system ever devised or imagined. Ideas never work perfectly when people are involved, best never make the effort right?
I've seen the effort, seen the results. Thank you, no thank you.
What a coincidence, that's how I see the abject social failure that is capitalism. I've seen the results, thank you, no thank you.
Have you seen the results of communism?
No? No one has, except for some very isolated cases on the small scale. One of the downsides of a system which has never been tried at the large scale.
I have seen the effects of capitalism though: the concentration of resources in the hands of a few, homelessness, environmental destruction, neo-colonialism and third world exploitation.
Additionally, I have seen the effects of state capitalism pretending to be socialism, and even that brief period of apparent socialism elevated the impoverished, fed the hungry, housed the homeless, and literally rocketed a nation of peasant farmers to a world superpower in like 50 years. As everyone knows, that period soon gave way to to the corrupting influences of capitalism. Toward the end of the the USSR, and shortly after its collapse, the forces of capitalism again ravaged the region, and looted communal resources for personal enrichment.
You're making things up. The hungry were hidden, the disabled were shamed, the homeless were turned to thieves, no reason was needed to send anyone to siberia. And sent they were. russia has not been just a nation of peasant farmers for a very long time.
Yeah, state capitalism is horrible just like every other form of capitalism. That's precisely what I said.
Now do capitalism, I'll wait. Not too long though, since capitalism is turning our planet into a hellscape at the hands of the robber baron 1%.
Profile pic checks out
Far-left echo chamber that from my experience really hates Jews.
Hating the settler colonial, apartheid State of Israel, which has been ethnically cleansing for three generations and is committing genocide as we speak, is not antisemitism.
Not just Jews. They also hate any LGBT+ people they deem not queer or marginalized enough.
tankies are not bastions of logical and rational thought. hexbear is way, way out there - about as divorced from reality as is humanly possible
I bet you call yourself a "Deep thinker"
Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we're all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as "simply how things are." Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.
I pretty much enjoy most of what I see from hexbear, but I have blocked a bunch of stuff from lemmygrad.
I get blocking hexbear, I get blocking grad and hexbear, but blocking grad but not hexbear? Why?
It's been awhile since I did the blocking. I just remember being annoyed.
Between them and all the goons over at Hexbear…. They’re basically the r/the_donald of the left.
I’m convinced that it began as a big troll/joke amongst them, and that we’re just about at the point where all the dumbasses begin to take it seriously.
Funnily enough Hexbear's origins come from when Chapo traphouse was banned on Reddit for the behavior that has them hated now across the fediverse
I agree though, they're basically r/the_donald at this point
Because it has grad in the name. grad= Leningrad. Leningrad= Russia. Russia= Russians. Russians= scum. Lemmygrad users are fucking scum
Russians are not scum, Putin is
A lot of it is McCarthyism, though i've personally had my problems with hexbear and you should probably stay away from them.
There’s a lot of anger at communism as a result of all the lives it’s taken over the last century.
With how much anticommunism goes down in the federation I sometimes wish the developers would hide some code that would kick people who do this off the entire federation. Don't use a fucking communist platform to get away from the failing capitalist one and then spend all your time being McCarthy's left nutsack. I know that's never going to happen because that goes against the developer's values, but god damn would it be justified as fuck if it happened, and it would stop like 99.9999% of the toxicity and CSAM that gets posted here.
Who said this is a communist platform?
It was literally created to be reddit without the capitalism. You didn't think what the implications of that meant?
It's a federated platform... it can be whatever the instance hosts want it to be.
Not how FOSS works. If devs tried that, lemmy forks and splits, basically defederating but more steps and more pain/forced defederating as people choose between two camps.
Hope this isn't a Tankie instance.
edit: godammit
ML absolutely is.
Into the woodchipper.
Comedy gold.
There is a specter haunting
, the specter of 
I am a Communist