Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.

Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.

Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.

So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    In Australia, at least, our "Liberal" party is OG Liberal, but in the US Liberal has come to mean a sort of coastal consensus. Just throwing darts at the board, it's a cagey alliance of progressives, Hollywood, Seattle, and New York, with varying opinions on "property rights" and capital.

    Based on my fairly cursory reading, this split in the usage of the word "liberal" comes from the influence of liberal scholars in the US like Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, who didn't have the same clout in Europe or the UK. Their emancipatory theory, accept it or not, was whether minorities (e.g. Black people, women, indigenous people) could potentially have access to Capital, assuming it was accessible at all. You can still see echoes of this today in the "Margaret Thatcher girlboss" meme. If you want a short primer of "Liberals vs Conservatives" in the US context, you could say its a competition between current capital owners and potential capital owners, though obviously there's a lot of cultural signifiers, political inertia, and alliances that in the short term go against that.

    Leftist is an even more nebulous term. A lot of libs (in the US sense) consider themselves on the left, earnestly so. It could be defined as anti-capitalist in the modern context, but that would be the speaker declaring such a thing to their audience more than any cultural definition with any power. Obviously, the original reference to the French parliament, where more or less aristocratic parties were arranged from right to left, no longer has much relevance. Liberalism has subsumed aristocracy; the only aristocrats with much power do so within the context of Liberalism. It's hard to say if vanguardism vs direct worker democracy is more or less left, I think the dichotomy breaks down at some point, partly motivated by the equivocation of "left" meaning "more good".

    I think its worthwhile to consciously avoid getting caught up in these games, especially at the behest of a bunch of online nerds. Take stock of yourself and the needs of your (real life) communities, advocate for their interests but also help them to improve. What else can one truly do?

    (I am rather drunk right now, not in a fighty mood)