only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.

in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.

Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?

The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.

I’m gonna gloss over the “genocide of westerners and white people” comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.

You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don’t find it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press

from the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

and from further down

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?

Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it’s questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!

America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America’s wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.

Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

And that’s not mentioning the fucking wars.

Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests

There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.

comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives

many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.

it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space

The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.

Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There’s no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.

That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.

I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is “shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I’m not reading that.” “Genocide denier” — or, even less accurate, “genocide supporter” — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you’re an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.

As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup’d by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.

I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.

The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it’s like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.

Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.

On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America’s real concern.

continued:

Here are the instances I’m aware of. There might be more, I just saw these posts ambiently while browsing hexbear. And I also don’t know if the ones mentioned on hexbear are the sum of all chaser experiences users have had.

(Scroll down, these are all comment links not post links)

https://hexbear.net/comment/3826339

https://hexbear.net/comment/3772050

https://hexbear.net/comment/3775110 (see screenshot)

the posts were often some variant of “John Brown did nothing wrong,” so, actual slave owners

blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community

that was me speculating, bridging the gap between my main points of information: 1) that I had seen trans hexbear users discussing chaser messages they had gotten, and complaining that there were too many chasers in 196, 2) that I had seen posts from you where it was obvious to me that you care and consider chasers to be a problem, and 3) that 196 was a lifeboat community and is larger than the rest of blahaj.

If you’re happy with 196 how it is, then the three interpretations I see are 1) that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem, 2) that they have a lower tolerance for chaser behavior, or 3) that they have a lower threshold for what they deem to be chaser behavior — or some combination of the three.

either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request

Or it’s not all the same people, or their opinions changed. But I also think emotions were running high. I remember posts where hexbears were pretty upset that users on blahaj had accused them of pretending to be queer. There are also a lot of comments like that here, but I think it hurts a lot more coming from other queer people. Overall, I don’t think the situation brought the best out of anyone.

196 is by far the main community on blåhaj, and their banner basically says “no hexbears.”

Also, trans hexbear users gave examples where they were bothered by chasers in 196, and felt not enough mod action was taken to control chasers there. I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.

you don’t have a point. your point is that we’re annoying and people don’t like us.

you’re making a lot of people hate socialism

That’s not how it works. Your beliefs are your own. You either want workers to control production, or you want owners to control production. You decide that based on your own moral convictions and understanding of the world.

It’s not a comparison, I am saying America is hostile to Cuba, and Cuba adopts authoritarian measures to counter American subversion. America has been trying to topple the Cuban government and starve the population for decades. You have reddit disease where you’re really condescending despite not knowing anything.

the ideological commitment of the Cuban government is to achieve the equality of human beings, by abolishing capitalism and fighting bigotry. America, just across the water, has made it necessary for them to adopt a degree of authoritarianism to protect themselves. It is actually fucking absurd to call them right wing. Take care, I don’t want to continue this.

I’m speechless tbh. I don’t know what I can say to someone who calls Cuba right wing. You are inventing your own language.

Is Cuba right wing? Yes or no. You dodged that question right at the start and changed the subject to China and Russia. Is Cuba right wing.

you’re dodging the point so blatantly here. Was it inherently right wing to use violence to force the confederates to free their slaves and disband their secessionist army, and then to use political repression to interfere, however ineffectively, with southern efforts to keep their way of life alive after the war. Was the authoritarian means they used – warfare and political repression — inherently right wing, even though the objective was to free enslaved people.

yes, I know that many in the union were racist too, and grant and sherman participated in the genocides of american indian tribes, and all of that. that’s not what we’re talking about though, we’re talking about authoritarianism, and whether authoritarianism specifically is what makes something right wing.

Was the Civil War far right? Was Reconstruction far right?

I was talking about far-right governments

you’re the one who came up with that reasoning. I said they are authoritarian to avoid being destroyed by capitalists.

“authoritarian ideals”

communists don’t want to be authoritarian, but the alternative is to die.

I also used to have a long comment showing that the user was lying, but it disappeared.

Since the mods don’t appear to have removed it, and it’s not in the modlog, I’m reposting it here:

5 day old thread where all of hexbear agrees they hate trump

older thread where all of hexbear celebrates trump getting covid

old thread where all of hexbear celebrates Rush Limbaugh’s death

I’m basically picking threads at random because the entire site is full of posts and comments expressing the direst hatred for right-wingers and fascists.

Some of the top comments from the first link:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3839449

I would say 100% of Hexbear posters believe Trump should be immediately summarily executed. In the mean time, though, he’s a great comedic subject.

========

https://hexbear.net/comment/3843515

None of us support Trump, just as none of us support Putin. But there is a sort of overcompensation in reaction to naieve and simplistic liberal narratives that might make it seem like we do.

Leftists get frustrated with the worldview that imagines, to steal a phrase, that Trump is Voldemort and Biden is Harry Potter. Anti-capitalists oppose the Bourgeoisie and Trump and Biden are both in service to them. It isn’t even simply that they are both capitalists - they are both neoliberals, who enthusiastically pursue the goals of neoliberalism - the transfer of wealth and power from the working class to the bourgeoisie, the enforcement of Western imperialism on a global scale, the withering away of society through austerity and privatisation, etc.

Of course it’s fine to support the democrats with the aim of harm minimisation. But liberals are wilfully blind to the fact that the system itself is not ‘rotten’ but rather functioning as intended, and that the scale of change required to have any hope of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, the descent into fascism and so on, cannot come from within liberal ideology at all let alone from the democrat party. Trump is kind of funny too in the way that he infuriates liberals by openly unveiling reality. For example, no-one cared when Obama was putting children in concentration camps, because it was hidden away behind a bunch of shiny rhetoric about hope and change. But when Trump does the same thing and celebrates it, when he brings the racism and inhumanity of the US state into the light and declares fuck those kids, liberals are forced to see the true nature of their beloved country which their ideological fantasies would usually repress. The blatant hypocrisy of their rage is, from the perspective of cynical leftists, both amusing and bewildering.

========

https://hexbear.net/comment/3840542

This will echo what others have said: I think Trump was a horrible president, and him being of the capitalist class means I oppose him in a political economy sense. However, the stuff that he did that was bad was bog standard Republican shit: any other Republican would have also cut taxes, deregulated industry, and installed far right whack job judges. And I also think Democrats have done horrible shit; better/worse comparisons are mostly useless as they brush over specifics.

However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.

For liberals, it’s that he exposes the lie that elite education credentials stewed in urban culture must always produce socially progressive and competent technocrats, which is why they steadfastly insist he’s some Manchurian Candidate Russian plant because they need to see him as an abnormality and not reflective of the gross underbelly of the meritocracy. For conservatives, he exposes that for all their rhetoric they really love the idea of elites and hierarchy and being lessers to the titans of industry and the state. They just don’t want those titans to be brown, Jewish, or female. So they need to built a weird, cultish mythology around him as an ubermensch, anti-elite elite as to keep up the illusion of them being against hierarchy. All this neurosis is both highly illuminating, and really fucking funny.

authoritarian towards what purpose

towards being radically conservative and ultra-nationalist.

the claim was that far right = authoritarianism.

Cuba is authoritarian because they have to be. Allende’s Chile was not authoritarian, and guess what happened? The US coup’d Allende and installed a fascist dictator who threw socialists out of helicopters and tortured them to death in stadiums. The PKI under Aidit in Indonesia were a peaceful socialist movement. What happened? Aidit was killed, and over a million Indonesian socialists were rounded up and butchered with American backing.

As for the Russian Federation, yes, their government is right wing. Putin is a homophobic capitalist reactionary. If you say this on Hexbear, you will find that everyone agrees. Go try it if you doubt me.

As for China, the more you learn about China and its government the less you’ll want to give a simplistic take about China in a thread like this — but the short answer is no, they are not far right. They have some Confuscian cultural baggage but are increasingly progressive on social issues, and after decades of state-sanctioned capitalism to pull in foreign investment and evade the sort of economic warfare that hamstrung Cuba and the USSR, they are, at least ostensibly, adopting an increasingly anti-capitalist posture. As for Xinjiang, again, it’s a complicated topic and I’m not an expert, but I do know that a lot of the worst claims have been demonstrated to be bullshit, from sources like Adrien Zenz and Radio Free Asia. Even the UN concedes there is no program of mass killing or organ harvesting. It’s definitely still bad, but there’s enough bullshit that I really don’t want to wade into it here.