My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
What do you expect, it’s HexBear. They make ML look like neoliberals.
I align more closely with hexbear politics than almost all non-hexbear users. IMO, their politics is not the problem – they’re just an astoundingly toxic community.
Elaborate!
I don’t really know how to do that other than to dig through replies from hexbear users pointing out how much vitriol they use. But in general, there’s a lot of name-calling (e.g. since you disagree with me, you must be a “white cracker,” “minstrel,” etc. – wtf kind of problem these guys have with minstrels I don’t understand); a lot of posting of flippant reaction images instead of actual responses, and so on. They’re clearly very angry about politics, which I get, but also have no interest in actually debating politics with any level of subtlety; even when I agree with someone in broad strokes but disagree about a particular item because I think it’s counter-productive to their own cause, I just get harshly told off. As a result, I can only assume they imagine everyone else is disingenuous.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show
That’s a pretty unhinged insult tbh.
Oh I see, didn’t realize this is what it was. Honestly that’s so much worse than what I was thinking.
The term by itself goes back further than that, and doesn’t mean that originally. So it’s very “clever” of them to appropriate the term in this particular context.
Every time I think of how fucked up things are now, I am glad we at least made some progress. Although recently, things seem to progress backwards with all the shit going on.
Ah yeah, even in that thread, there were people responding with images or immediately labeling me a liberal without explaining or knowing anything about my views except that I seemingly sided with Ukraine. One person was very angry and needlessly escalatory with their “go fuck yourself”. Another felt the need to comment on my post history and try to use me running an Epic Games community against me. There’s a lot of ad hominem and straw man type arguments, which is usually indicative of not having strong counterarguments on the main subject itself.
Yeah that’s basically my feelings too. I wonder why they are so defensive. (edit: /gen)
I don’t know if this is sarcasm. If it isn’t, it’s because they’re supposedly leftists, but they have also been told they need to support authoritarian regimes who often harm people they’re supposed to want to help, especially Russia invading another much smaller nation (and fighting them poorly). They can’t reconcile these two beliefs, so instead they can only attack others.
There’s a lot of ad hominem and straw man type arguments, which is usually indicative of not having strong counterarguments on the main subject itself.
That’s every internet discussion. You skipped over the constructive arguments and effortposts, didn’t address any of their valid criticism, and focused solely on the shitposts. If you’re not engaging in constructive discussion, mods can remove you at their discretion.
Are you serious? If anything, I ignored the angry comment, the low effort image comments, and the one outright denying the mass killing of millions of Ukrainians (which was my reason for reporting it), but I engaged at length with the people who were making more or less proper arguments. I could have engaged with the top one about Ukrainians praising Bandera and remind the person that they should have a perfect understanding of how that works, given that tankies (which was that user’s self-description) too praise the adversaries of their countries despite Stalin and Putin’s track records making Bandera’s pale in comparison, but I thought that would be way too triggering, so I didn’t post that draft.
No, that’s not it. I am not denying that there is constructive and high-effort activity on the instance. But the moment-to-moment conversation is superlatively hostile, (at least when I show up lol), and I’m making pretty tame comments – it’s not because of me. I don’t anywhere near that amount of venom in other instances.
Start making leftist (i.e. anti transphobia, pro worker, pro environment etc) comments on .world or .shit and you’ll experience a lot more vitriol. At least that’s been my experience and the reason I stay away from these cesspools.
Yeah, they’re the worst part of the worst periods of 4chan. I don’t think that’s where most of them come from, but it’s the same type of people.
The fact that they always support authoritarianism is just the cherry on top that makes them totally unreasonable.
Funny, I would’ve thought “the worst part of the worst periods of 4chan” would be all the bigotry, racism, transphobia, and that sort of thing.
It is at least bigotry.
Bigotry gets you banned from Hexbear fast.
Unless you wanna play the, “Saying Palestinians should have rights is antisemitic” card or something similar.
Removed by mod
Agreed, though I’m still not sure I’d defederate even after this incident. It may be best that we inform people of what Hexbear stands for and let them decide.
I think one encounter with hexbear is going to inform most users better than any third-party warning.
Yah, that’s why people call them tankies. Any criticism of the USSR, or even acknowledging why people criticize it, is a banable offense.
The term tankie get’s thrown around a lot, to the point of dilution, but the origin of it comes from western communist who defended the Soviet Union putting down the 1956 Hungarian revolution, notably using T-54/55 tanks. It later came to mean western communist that would ignore or downplay any criticism of the USSR, as “propaganda”. These days it could even be applied more broadly to “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies” IE people who defended Assad and Putin.
I think hexbear fits even a fairly narrow older definition. Which is why most major instances are defederated from them.
long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies
Man, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but Russia isn’t even opposed to the US, as long as the Christian white supremacist fascists are ruling things.
The sheer irony of people playing defense for a white supremacist fascist state and then accusing someone else of being a “fascist sympathizer”. Like dawg the call is coming from inside the house.
I think the current Russian leadership has this detached fantasy of what America’s far right are like, this idea that they’re homebody rural folks who just want to keep to them selves and that if they’re in charge the US will disengage it’s self from the rest of the world, leaving Russia to treat Eastern Europe as a playground for their imperialism.
But the thing is, it ignores the agency of the eastern Europe to oppose them, and it ignores the fact that the the US far right is fundamentally narcissistic and egomaniacal. Ultimately the far right of the US will stay engaged in eastern Europe because they will perceive Russia telling them to get out as an insult and a humiliation. The only way the far right would disengage would be if they could frame it as them “winning” and that framing would be perceived as an insult and humiliation to the Russian leadership, so they won’t allow it.
So they will come to genuinely hate each other. I don’t think this will lead to the US far right suddenly deciding they care deeply about the well being of eastern Europe, but they also aren’t going to disengage completely.
“People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies”
I could never understand that. I mean I understand that for someone completely dissatisfied with the government in a Western country, it’s a lot easier to just switch sides and join a community of like-minded people with a large state-funded network of information behind it, but the morality of that is just beneath me. Besides, you won’t be completely alone even if you oppose or harshly criticize both the West and the likes of Russia or China.
I mean, I think a big part of it is foreign influence efforts landing very strongly with dissenting groups in the US. Then forging influence networks using the extant distrust for the US’s government to dismiss nuance that would paint their patrons in a bad light.
Good thing the US world never spread propaganda and that you’re immune to propoganda yourself.
A lot of people seem to believe “if you are for one thing I’m for then you must be perfect - anytime it is proved otherwise it was a small one time thing so I’ll ignore it.” It is really hard to admit someone you don’t like does do good things, or someone you like does bad things.
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IE people who defended Assad
I don’t think y’all get to use that talking point anymore after 1500 people upvoted a .world post calling the only realistic alternative to Assad, “a known terrorist.”
Seems like most people on here hold the position that the US shouldn’t have even lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, let alone given him weapons and supplies. And not wanting to give al-Sharaa weapons and supplies is what you’re describing here as “supporting Assad,” is it not?
Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.
And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.
Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.
More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.
The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.
Oh, ok, so tell me, what’s your vision for Syria, exactly? Have Turkey and Israel annex the whole thing? Or maybe create a power vacuum in ISIS’s backyard? Practically speaking, one of those two assholes was going to end up in power, and if they didn’t, the situation was going to be even worse.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if our side was the one calling for active support of one side. You’ve got it completely backwards. My alleged “support” for Assad was always just, “I don’t think either side is worth supporting, so we should leave them alone.” Which is, you know, the proper “null” position when looking at any conflict. But the “null” position of anti-tankies seems to be, “Whatever the news says.” So rather than neutrality being the zero point, it’s seen as “supporting” the opposing side. So much so that you don’t even seem to realize how much your argument is shooting yourself in the foot.
Your side, the side that labels us as “tankies” and “Assadists” and so on and so forth every time we advocate non-interventionism, is the side that “defends one asshole because you like the other less.” In virtually every foreign policy debate, it’s not between which of two sides should be supported, it’s between supporting one side or not supporting either. If you want to convince me to adopt a position of interventionism when both sides are flawed, then you need to argue the exact opposite of what you just said.
putin sympathizes with elon nazi musk. I wonder what they think about him.
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*comrade putin
That’s the funniest thing. Like, if you were an original Hungary-era tankie, at least you could say “the Soviet Union is the leader of the worldwide Communist movement, I believe what the SU says about itself.” But Putin’s Russia is explicitly not Communist or Socialist in any way. Putin’s ideology is inconsistent but his public statements are all basically imperial or “blood and soil” nationalism. How do they twist this guy into being a “comrade?”
Watching .world libs talk about Hexbear is always entertaining because it’s like a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire swapping stories, with the bear growing 5 ft taller with each retelling.
You want to know why they think Putin’s a communist? You know you can just go there and ask them. They’ll tell you 1) they don’t, 2) what they do think about Putin, and 3) why they think what they do. It’s not hard, it’s not like it’s some big secret.
But I want you to bear with me and embark on a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you’re a full on MAGA chud, like, you believe George Soros is the communist CEO of Antifa aiming to kill all white people. But then you’re like, “Maybe I should try talking to these people so I can understand why it is that they want to kill all white people,” and you leave your bubble and seek out communists and antifascists all over the place and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspectives (regardless of what you think of it), and then you come back to Truth Social or whatever and try to share what you learned. How do you think that’ll be received? It’ll be received very poorly. They’ll say you’re a communist trying to spread lies or that you were duped by them and what they actually believe is what they’re said to believe, in the MAGA lore. If, on the other hand, you just repeat what everyone else in the community is saying about Antifa, putting no effort into understanding the actual beliefs of the people you’re talking about, you’ll receive praise and agreement, and those oh so precious upvotes. This is how their collective fiction is maintained, growing ever more divorced from reality.
Now, if you step away from lemmy.world and go to hexbear.net and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspective, and then come back to your community and try to share what you learned, how do you think that will be received? As opposed to just repeating what everyone in your community says? It’s the same shit, it’s the exact same social dynamic at play. If you want upvotes on .world/truth social, you have to accept the collective fiction about hexbear/Antifa and then develop and expand upon that fiction. Saying the truth will only earn you scorn, exclusion, and downvotes (see: this comment’s ratio, soon).
But like, at least internally, you should have the self-awareness to realize that obviously there isn’t any logical rationale for why someone would think Putin is a communist, in the same way that there is no logical rationale for why Antifa would want to kill all white people. Because it’s not based on any real thing that people believe, it’s a strawman created as part of a collective fiction that you’re not allowed to challenge if you want to be a part of a particular in-group.
Watching .world libs talk about Hexbear
Are the .world libs in the room with us right now? Because they’re not in the thread you replied to.
Yeah, they’re in the broader thread.
Besides, being a .world lib is like being a boomer, it’s really more of a state of mind 😉
They fucking hate both, Putin because he’s a liberal and Musk because he’s a deeply unserious shithead.
It sounds like you finally learned about hexbear firsthand and don’t have to rely on others’ reports on their behavior.
Well, now you know why sensible admins defederate from this trash. I’d suggest using an app that allows you to block instances from your side and ignore them.
You don’t need an app, it’s a native Lemmy feature.
Only since 0.19.1, many instances haven’t updated yet.
That’s a year and a half. If you’re on an instance that is that outdated, you should consider migrating.
Hexbear tankies really are something incredible. I’ve been around left-wing politics most of my life and in the real world I’ve met like one or two people actually like them. Difficult to understand where they all came from. I’m thinking maybe it’s a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
I think they’re just the people who’ve gorged themselves on the most propaganda
I call them the MAGA of the left, they hate it, but they’re just as big of zealots for their own beliefs as MAGA is, they defend tyrants who’s values appear to align with theirs on paper and don’t understand the concept of nuance.
They believe in only black and white and the idea that gray exists, and the thought they could be (are) morally gray, along side almost everyone else, is intolerable to them, they have to be “Good”, no shades of gray allowed and the way they prove it to themselves is by constant virtue signaling and purging to stay on top of the imagined “morally pure” pyramid they’ve convinced themselves exist - a lot of them are ableist and don’t consider disabled people in their grand schemes
Life is messy, people are imperfect, they’re almost never a completely correct option that serves everyone equally. They want logic, which is simply making something internally consistent, context is irrelevant, they do not want philosophy which strives to incorporate as much context as possible in order to come to a conclusion
how can i remove hexbear, grad and ml from my lemmy? i use boost app. thx
In the app you can mute posts from instances, to also get rid of the users you need to use the webpage as someone else mentioned.
To mute the instance in the boost app go on the profile icon, lower right, settings (upper right), “Filters & blocks”, there you should see the option “mute instances”, type in the instance handle and posts from that instance shouldn’t show up anymore.
You can block posts from different instancs, but you cannot block comments.
I’d recommend you switch to a server that blocks them, like lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz or discuss.online or use a different software like piefed which supports proper blocking (piefed.social).
Getting banned from hexbear is your initiation into the broader world of lemmy. It happens to everyone who isn’t a tankie at some point. Wear it with pride
Do yourself a favor and just block the entire instance from your profile settings. It’s irredeemable.
…but tankies are fascists.
The “red” part of “red fascist” is a fairly important distinction so you don’t give libertarians free ammo in their rhetorical war to claim all fascists are socialists.
Oh, I one up them by self identifying as a socialist libertarian.
Before they know what hit them I’ve already explained why pretty much all constitutions need a rewrite to be understood by the common man, why energy companies and hospitals should be cooperatives with stock ownership divvied up to the local populace and why Montesquieu’s decentralization principle should apply to both law, capital and that it hasn’t gone far enough for military or police.
I destroy their tiny little minds and they don’t know what to do with themselves. Seize the means of capital, my brother. Usurp the system from the inside.
yeah duh, thats why we block the redfash triad
Some people there post burning flags of other countries and want the total destruction of them… “Death to country XY” being upvoted is as normal there as using toothpaste… Mods seem to support that and ban people who criticize it.
If we had only those people on the planet, there would be nothing but war.
I think you’ve just made a completely unwarranted assumption about how often those people are brushing their teeth.
If we had only those people on the planet,
there would be nothing but war.we’d have a stateless, classless, moneyless society. If only.
Humans have a natural urge to rebel and question authority.
If your response to that is to be a authoritian dipshit and beat them into submission, you might be a facist and causing more harm than good.
See you’re pushing back against my point so you might be a fascist and causing more harm than good (this is how dumb your argument sounds. Update your definition of fascism)
After reviewing the thread, it looks like you reported a comment that was just contradicting you.
Yes, they assumed the community wasn’t ML and that anything genocide was grounds for comment removal
They themselves mentioned holodomor, no idea why though
Probably wouldn’t have been banned if they argued instead of reporting
Sounds about right for them. Sorry you had to go through that.
