I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about but every time I poke my head into that instance you guys are "dunking" every other instance with language nobody else understands. It's very alienating.
you guys are also like, just huge dicks without provocation. like all the fucken time. 99% of what i see from hexbear users is either condescension or outright hostility.
honestly it's a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry
and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis
Really? cause when I look through comment sections it's always liberals spewing the same fucking lines, and acting like everyone they disagree with can't possibly also be from marginalized groups. (In fact most seem to take the fact that you disagree with them as prima facie evidence that you can't be from a marginalized group!)
The amount of casual misogyny, racism, and generally sickening comments I've seen has shot through the roof since we federated, and it's exclusively been coming from lemmitors.
I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect
they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"
we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith
perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"
additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.
no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.
Hexbear - "that's true, I see how our culture can be hard to decipher"
Lemmylib - "you guys are huge dicks without provocation"
Hexbear - oh well fuck you then :)
Lemmylib - "see, so hostile!"
If we respond to people being needlessly aggro with quip derision it's "so uncivil!"
If we respond to people in good faith by trying to explain our differing views it's "wow im not going to read that!"
Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it's tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we're broadly familiar with.
If you're more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he's pretty approachable.
Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.
I'll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with "trickle down" effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are "liberal".
Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that's almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I'm from for example.
This isn't a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.
If you're going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that's too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.
Americans can call the sky green as much as they want. In the rest of the world, Liberalism = Liberalism, not "democrat".
Liberals are people that believe in liberalism, which can be summed up as "everyone has the individual right to be an asshole, even if it fucks everyone else over".
Socialism is when the government does stuff and the more the government does, the socialister it is, and if the government does a whole lot if stuff, it's communism!
Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you're thinking of is the one in US politics where "Liberal" is synonymous with "Left'. This isn't how it's being used here though.
Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.
So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it's decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.
So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He's still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.
This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.
To be clear in the dunking threads folks are not usually engaging in good faith with us. When I was on another server and replied with actual questions to stuff everyone was incredibly nice to me and explained stuff super well. Can agree though that folks can see dunking as alientating. I promise though if you can get past that it's one of the friendliest communities I've found on the web.
I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about but every time I poke my head into that instance you guys are "dunking" every other instance with language nobody else understands. It's very alienating.
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you guys are also like, just huge dicks without provocation. like all the fucken time. 99% of what i see from hexbear users is either condescension or outright hostility.
honestly it's a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry
and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis
Oh, so you understand how everyone else feels about you then.
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:smuglord:
Yeah, cognitive dissonance hurts, so you respond aggressively, perfectly understandable, if disappointing.
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Really? cause when I look through comment sections it's always liberals spewing the same fucking lines, and acting like everyone they disagree with can't possibly also be from marginalized groups. (In fact most seem to take the fact that you disagree with them as prima facie evidence that you can't be from a marginalized group!)
The amount of casual misogyny, racism, and generally sickening comments I've seen has shot through the roof since we federated, and it's exclusively been coming from lemmitors.
Give me an example of a user from Hexbear being racist/transphobic/homophobic etc.
Just one. Please.
we'd 'brigade' ourselves if he even found one lol
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Now that's a lie if I ever saw one lmao
"All the they/thems in this thread are bigots, they're actually right-wingers!" - WTF is this take
usually how conversations go is this
I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect
they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"
we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith
perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"
additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.
no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.
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Hexbear - "that's true, I see how our culture can be hard to decipher"
Lemmylib - "you guys are huge dicks without provocation"
Hexbear - oh well fuck you then :)
Lemmylib - "see, so hostile!"
If we respond to people being needlessly aggro with quip derision it's "so uncivil!" If we respond to people in good faith by trying to explain our differing views it's "wow im not going to read that!"
So what should we do?
You have a very strange idea of "without provocation"
Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it's tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we're broadly familiar with.
If you're more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he's pretty approachable.
Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/channel/UCGog4JPn5-W3_XIKccENysg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
We're literally just communists. Read any introductory text to communism and 99% of what we say will make sense in context.
"Donald Trump is a liberal"
Break this down.
I'll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with "trickle down" effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are "liberal".
Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that's almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I'm from for example.
Hope I could help.
"The colloquialisms from the place I am directly talking about don't matter as much as this one I am using, everyone who disagrees is propagandized"
This is what I'm seeing when I read your comment. I can call the sky green all damn day, that doesn't make it green, you dip.
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You reap what you sow. I figured a tankie would know about planting things but I suppose I was wrong again.
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Most civil and good faith lemmylib.
Exactly the same as a chud saying college biology is fake pseudoscience because of the biology they were taught in 5th grade.
In any decent political science education in the states you will also see these definitions. You can stop having a tantrum about it.
Really? I see them answering the question you asked.
Let me oversimplify even more. Donald Trump upholds the American Revolution which turned British America into a liberal republic.
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This isn't a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.
If you're going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that's too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.
Americans can call the sky green as much as they want. In the rest of the world, Liberalism = Liberalism, not "democrat".
Liberals are people that believe in liberalism, which can be summed up as "everyone has the individual right to be an asshole, even if it fucks everyone else over".
Locke was a classical liberal. Trump is a neoliberal. This is very simple.
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Socialism is when the government does stuff and the more the government does, the socialister it is, and if the government does a whole lot if stuff, it's communism!
Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you're thinking of is the one in US politics where "Liberal" is synonymous with "Left'. This isn't how it's being used here though.
Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.
So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it's decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.
So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He's still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.
This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.
liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. donald trump is a capitalist. donald trump is a liberal. easy.
Is there anything confusing about that statement?
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Uh, I think I was right to be suspicious of their good faith.
Maybe, maybe not. But that statement is going to be deeply confusing to the average American for whom "liberal" is synonymous with "left".
Well, I'd be more than happy to have a good faith discussion with you. No dunking, I promise 🙏
You've caught me going into a busy Labor Day weekend but sure, I'll think up some questions to ask.
If you ask good faith questions and give context for why "Hey, I'm a liberal and I don't understand X could you explain what you mean?"
You WILL get excellent engagement and people will give you very good answers
its easy, and if you genuinely want to learn give it a shot
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To be clear in the dunking threads folks are not usually engaging in good faith with us. When I was on another server and replied with actual questions to stuff everyone was incredibly nice to me and explained stuff super well. Can agree though that folks can see dunking as alientating. I promise though if you can get past that it's one of the friendliest communities I've found on the web.