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.
apologies, we have pronoun tags on Hexbear so that we don't have to assume, we can just know.
democracy is when most of your country disapproves of their elected representatives and authoritarianism is when most of your country approves of their elected representatives and yes, there are in fact elections in China and even (hold on to your hat for this one) North Korea!
Is democracy is the mere condition of being able to choose from two awful choices, or is it instead the condition of having a competent government of which most of the population approves of?
Could you see how it would be incredibly easy to create an authoritarian government if you decided to have effectively the same party swap power every couple terms, so long as you defined "democracy" as "the ability to vote for what party rules over your state"? Could you see how it would be much more difficult to fulfil the latter definition without actually addressing the concerns of the populace, which bad authoritarian states would have a hard time doing?
"authoritarianism" is the condition of one person, or group of people, having coercive or even violent power over another. all governments are authoritarian, obviously, and most are very authoritarian. Lenin's definition of the state as the means for the outnumbered class (the rich, the elite, the bourgeoisie, whatever) to exert control over the working class is the most sensible and applicable definition I've ever found, and by that definition, and by the fact that people all around the world have to labor for the rich regularly to not starve or become homeless, all countries are generally pretty comparable in "authoritarian-ness", making it an awful way of defining countries at all.