We can assume how hexbear users feel about themselves. I’d be more interested in how local users feel.
Im a European left wing queer person, ive organised occupations, I've done door knocking and leaflet-ing detail, I've mocked many a liberal
Hexbear deny genocides, which is... pretty fucking bad. And they're fuckin everywhere, contributing nothing of value
Bin em
(But i will say, this instance seems way happier to defed from hexbear than from the racist, anti-trans exploding heads, which was apparently super controversial for some reason)
It's not just one guy saying it, there's more evidence than that.
Also fuck you on the Holodomor. That kind of shit is why people don't take you seriously.
first of all, props for organizing.
denying genocide
This is way too swift and easy a dismissal. Things are bad in Xinjiang, but there is undeniably also a lot of bullshit floating around on the topic. Even the UN concedes there is no mass killing or organ harvesting. A lot of claims come from known bullshitters like Adrien Zens, the folks at Radio Free Asia, the NED, and other sources connected to the US state department. Xinjiang is a complex topic and should be discussed in a complex way, not just "anyone who disputes any aspect of the prevailing western narrative is a genocide denying monster."
A million Iraqis died because Americans believed a fake story in 2003. More died in the 90s because Americans believed the Nayirah testimony. But if you had gone on an internet forum in 2003 and tried to debunk the Iraqi WMD reports, you would have looked like Charlie from IASIP with the red strings all over the wall.
There were forged documents showing Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. There was testimony from a fake Iraqi nuclear scientist named Khidir Hamza. There were accounts of stockpiles of chemical weapons in glass capsules. There were diagrams of mobile chemical weapons manufacturing systems. There were the aluminum tubes, alleged to be parts for uranium enrichment equipment. There were names and dates and purchasing records, interviews, witnesses, I mean the list goes on, I'm scratching the surface. And the politicians and the media for both parties all vouched for the information and relentlessly pushed the case.
It seems trivial now, but the story was persuasive at the time, and debunking it was no easy task. If America didn't drag multiple countries into an expensive war based on that story, the details never would have been scrutinized to such an extent, and we would probably still believe it.
But if you had gone on an internet forum in 2003 and tried to debunk the Iraqi WMD reports, you would have looked like Charlie from IASIP with the red strings all over the wall.I was there back then and people were calling bullshit. Heck, even Canada's Prime Minister called bullshit and found an excuse not to join the USA while not pissing them off by calling them liars.
similarly, there are people now, calling bullshit on the xinjiang organ harvesting narratives
And even a majority is Muslim nations calling bullshit! I can't say the majority of nations, because I am not sure of sources for this outside of UN votes
Two points: First, the US engaged in a war of aggression and probably not specifically genocide in Iraq. This is a real difference of kind. Still criminal state activity and of course the US got away with it free (mostly) just like how it gets away with all its crimes against humanity or whatever. A better example would be the US commiting genocide on the native population, which was one of the most intense and successful ethnic extermination campaigns in history.
Second, it was pretty obvious at the time that all that shit was made up. I called it hard and was right. So did many, many others. They were just afraid to say it out loud because the county was very, very rapidly being pushed toward turning into a fascist nightmare. (Seriously, people forget how fucked up it was.) After Colin Powell'a speech to the UN my father and i had a conversation and made a bet. If what Powell said turned out to be false then my father would leave the Republican party and stop supporting that kind of crap. If it turned out to be true i would join. Now i really didn't want to vote Republican, had no intention of doing so, but i knew i wasn't going to lose that bet. My father, for his part, stayed true to his word.
The point of the Iraq lie isn't simply a redirection that "the US also does it." it's that the empire is capable of widescale deception to manufacture consent when the need arises. you may have realized it was a crock, but enough people were fooled the wholesale destruction of multiple sovereign nations went off without a hitch. "Bush lied, people died" only became the majority opinion after they had gotten away with it. Even now the popular consensus is that "mistakes were made," not that there was a wilful deception for the sake of expanding US global military hegemony.
first, the US engaged in a war of aggression and probably not specifically a genocide in Iraq. This is a real difference of kind.
The other difference is that one actually happened and the other did not.
Also, if we were about to go to war with China, I bet it would suddenly become obvious to a lot of people that the US has been making shit up since the trade war started.
pretty obvious
iirc around 76% of Americans supported the Iraq war.
are you denying the genocide we just made up and paid news people to talk about to pretend its real? how dare you
Maybe I wasn't here yet, but I don't remember exploding-heads users coming by the dozen to insult and taunt us on posts on our own instance. That's the behavior that has people up in arms about Hexbear. If instead they just made the occasional post in support of genocide to "own" the USA, I think there would be a lot less support for defederation.
post in support of genocide
what the fuck? show me one comment or post fucking anywhere on hexbear that supports genocide
is it supporting Saddam nuking people to dispute that he ever had nuclear weapons?
I know it's rude to bring up a post from three years ago, but here you go. To Hexbear's collective credit, I couldn't quickly find someone on there supporting the Khmer Rouge.
Anyhow, the real problem is Hexbears' behavior. So many Hexbears spilled into our instance -- this is not your instance, it's our instance -- posting disgusting images and oversized emotes, screaming insults at anyone who doesn't toe their party line ("call outs"), and trolling left, right and center. And I don't think this is the first time, either. There is no reason to believe that the majority of visiting Hexbears are willing to make constructive posts, and that's cause for defederation..
Sure. KiaKaha wrote the whole post to argue that keeping the Uyghur nation in prison camps and banning their culture was the humane solution to keeping the Tarim Basin, conquered 250 years ago by the Manchus in a war against the Dzungar Mongols, from rebelling against the heirs of the heirs of the Manchus.
Banning their culture
Where? I'm not seeing it. Here's what @KiaKaha@hexbear.net wrote:
Approximately 50% of what you hear is outright propaganda, as we know the CIA’s affiliates churn out. We also see CIA assets pushing narratives on Reddit. The next 25% is poorly researched speculation by an evangelical end-timer, and the final 25% is an accurate description of the PRC’s response to far right, religious terrorism and separatism.
First, let’s just establish using safe, American sources that a bunch of Uyghur people went to fight with ISIS in Syria, then returned. Let’s also establish that there have been consistent terrorist attacks with significant casualties and that the CIA and CIA front-groups have funded and stoked Islamic extremism across the world for geopolitical gain.
Now, we need to consider potential responses.
The CPC could give up and surrender Xinjiang to ISIS. This option condemns millions of people to living under a fundamentalist Islamic State, including many non-Muslims and non-extreme Muslims. This option creates a CIA-aligned state on the border, and jeopardises a key part of the Belt and Road initiative, which is designed to connect landlocked countries for development and geopolitical positioning. This option also threatens the CPC’s legitimacy, as keeping China together is a historical signifier of the Mandate of Heaven.
The next option is the American option. Drone strike, black-site, or otherwise liquidate anyone who could be associated with Islamic extremism. Be liberal in doing so. Make children fear blue skies because of drones. When the orphaned young children grow up, do it all again. You can also throw a literal man-made famine in there if you want.
The final option is the Chinese option. Mass surveillance. Use AI to liberally target anyone who may be at risk of radicalisation for re-education. Teach them the lingua franca of China, Mandarin. Pump money into the region for development. When people finish their time in re-education, set them up with state jobs. Keep the surveillance up. Allow and even celebrate local religious customs, but make sure the leaders are on-side with the party.
Let’s take a moment to distinguish that last approach from that of Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany wanted to exterminate the undesirables. Initially it was internment in concentration camps with the outcome up in the air, with a vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar or palestine, but it later morphed into full extermination. All throughout, Nazi Germany was pushing strong rhetoric of antisemitism and stoking ethnic hatred in the public sphere.
There’s no evidence, including from leaked papers, that the goal of the deradicalisation programme is permanent internment or annihilation of Islam. In fact, the leaked papers have Xi explicitly saying Islam should not be annihilated from China:
Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.
“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”
As for permanent internment, we know from leaks that the minimum duration of detention is one year — though accounts from ex-detainees suggest that some are released sooner.
Unlike Nazi Germany, there’s no stoking of inter-ethnic hatred or elimination of a specific culture; the CPC actively censors footage from terrorist attacks in China to avoid such an outcome. Xi doesn’t go on TV calling any ethnicity rapists or murderers. Uighur culture is actively celebrated in the media and via tourism. Xinjiang has 24,400 mosques, one per 530 Muslims. That’s three mosques per capita more than their western peers.
Could China’s approach be done better? Almost certainly. Is it the most humane response to extremism we’ve seen so far? That’s for you to decide.
(Reposted from here )
No, that does meet the standard of genocide. Not the "killed them all and threw them in mass graves" version but that's not the only way it can come.
we are getting all sorts of shit leaking into hexbear from your instance, why do you think we're so hostile. How have so many nazis been hiding on your instance
This. The overwhelming majority of content from exploding heads remained on exploding heads. Not only that, but there aren't that many active users there, so you really didn't see much from them anyway.
Hexbear deny genocides
Everyone is a "genocide denier," unless you believe in "The Great Replacement" and white genocide, for instance. But there's a big difference between denying made up bullshit like that and denying well-documented genocides, which we do not do.
Would you prefer if they said "deny or ignore serious and well-sourced accusations of genocide"?
No, because then they'd be lying. What I'd prefer is that they actually provide sources for whatever "well-sourced" genocides we're alleged to deny.
EH had 10 people, only two of which were actively posting outside of their instance
So you don't even deny that you won't defed from an admittedly anti-trans racist instance? And you want to try to tell me your community isn't cool with racists (which makes you racist)
I think the issue with EH was that at that point registration was still free for all and Lemmygrad was already defederated so there were more right wing users that figured the place was open to them..,
Also the decision process wasn't established yet...
But you can be sure that HB will come in droves to hijack the discussion when it gets created...
Do you have any good resources for neighborhood detail? Or would it be very area / demographic / community specific?
Disclaimer: I'm not a SIJW local, but wanted to pop my 2¢ in the discussion.
I see Hexbear as a hard left instance, with a very unique culture derived from their political views, downvotes being disabled, and the 1000s of custom emojis at their fingertips.
Their popular posts seem to be mostly jokey and unserious (comparable to our memes communities) however comments are usually a different story, where we're text first and they're emoji-first. Where us on the tiddeRverse mostly have the ability to downvote unconstructive takes and upvote others challenging them, Hexbear usually leans towards commenting emojis, and there being lots of them, what would usually just be upvotes/downvotes on a text post turn into a very visual personification of how they feel about your perspective.
Politics - this is probably the only thing I don't like. We know that quite a few things boil down to politics, but it can get tiring when almost every post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml and similar communities have similar variations of the same comment loads of times. It makes it difficult to discuss the actual news article itself when most comments are taking the country leadership to the metaphorical laundromat.
Ukraine stance - From what I've observed, most are in support of the war being stopped. If you dig into the weeds and see what sides people are on, it varies.
Dunking. The political dunking can get tiring. But do you know what I can absolutely get behind? Calling out people who are intolerant of queer individuals. I was absolutely pleased to see a user (who tried to push their intolerant line of thinking) get absolutely dunked on by Hexbear, without a single ppb too. Usually our mods just delete LGBT intolerant comments and move on, which gives way to persistent trolls creating alts on other instances to annoy mods (a story shown in the modlog over and over).
Occasionally I've run into some really nice discussion threads on /all and not even realised it was a Hexbear community. This actually leads me on to something else - some discussions on lemmy.world to tend to have a very hexbear-like passionate attitude about politics, one thread recently made me double check what instance the comm was on, because it felt very hexbeary despite literally being defederated from them. Discoveries like that make me laugh when I see how each side calls out the other without realising perhaps they're both human, and the difference is a cultural and communication barrier of sorts.
Brigading. I think the root cause of this is the tendency for Hexbear posts to link directly to our discussion threads, instead of just posting a screenshot (common courtesy on the tiddeRverse as far as I'm aware, to prevent this very issue) which encourages the Hexbear discussion to shift to the linked thread, rather than stay on Hexbear. It's a bit of a problem as it can drown out local perspectives, considering Hexbear's sizable and mostly unified userbase.
My opinion of Hexbear is mostly neutral. They are vocal, vibrant, and their culture may not fit in everywhere, especially if you're on one of the lemmy.ml news communities where they tend to get politically active. I block a lot of politics comms so it's likely I'm not seeing the worst of it.
Their users appear extremely varied looking at discussions, although overall more unified. It's possible an extremely vocal subgroup is painting a picture for the whole instance though when we look at the types of tiddeRverse posts that attract their attention.
To wrap up, I've noticed some hexbear culture is starting to leak over into the tiddeRverse, but it's not the everything-is-politics stuff so I'm mostly fine with this personally - just an interesting observation if anything
PPB is a shock image of a pig that's shit on its own testicles, typically used when the other party has shown they're not worth engaging with. tiddeRverse I'm guessing is is a play on reddit/fediverse
I'm not happy to learn any of this but thank you for answering my question.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/doxxed-the-truth-behind-piggy-poop-balls
Tankie trolls. The equivalent of The_Donald in behaviour and toxicity, with an MO of deliberate brigading and trolling, especially on smaller instances.
They are a net negative to the entire concept of lemmy.
They are big with the trolling. While their own communities in their instance are unpolitical they move everywhere else to smear their shit on every other instance. One user called me a Holocaust denier for believing Russia invaded Poland first. On Blahaj.zone the Admin was called a genocide enabler because one hexbear user wasn't allowed to bring politics to every thread.
While their own communities in their instance are unpolitical
First of all, how dare you.
This is the first time I have ever seen Hexbear accused of being unpolitical and tbh it kinda cuts deeper than any of the other accusations that get thrown at us.
You claim that we have no movements, but if that's true then how do you explain this?
I think you'll agree that I've provided you with clear evidence of a movement.
Btw,
On Blahaj.zone the Admin was called a genocide enabler because one hexbear user wasn't allowed to bring politics to every thread.
I always love seeing claims like this with no link because it's fun to guess what actually happened that's being wildly distorted. Like this definitely never happened.
“I think I’m going to read about watering cans today. Let’s check out c/wateringcans. Hmm, this post has 1200 comments, must be a lot of discussion about watering cans. Wow, that’s a lot of politics in the watering can community.”
They chilled a bit since the defederations but they still come on strong.
If we release all of our pet cats, they will accelerate the rate of ecological collapse and we can finally abandon this disgusting flesh they foisted upon us in the womb. Cat apocalypse/Ron Paul 2024.
These comments read like you're all spoiled little children that don't want an iota of information contrary to your viewpoint in your feed.
Just defederate and be done with it
Oh wow I was completely unaware.
Please hurry up and defederate :)
Looking at their collective behavior in https://sh.itjust.works/post/4188546 I'm for defederating. The sheer enthusiasm for brigading and spewing insults shown there makes me think the instance should be blocked except for a whitelist (or, to be politically correct, allowlist) of permitted users who have shown the ability to contribute more than insults.
Edit: https://sh.itjust.works/post/4245984 as well, where a Hexbear calls an image mocking Xi Jinping personally "racist".
Found another one for the pro-racism tally. Starting to see a trend tbqh
I just can't wait for full instance blocking. I haven't seen them offer anything but vitriol, just horribly toxic, seems like an instance of trolls. I block their communities when they pop up. I don't really want to advocate for defederating but I'll definitely be blocking their instance personally.
Nah defederate and done, they would put gigantic strain on the mods otherwise. I know this whole "we don't want to defederate others because some people might want it" but 1. Thats not worth it and leaving the problems to our mods 2. If people want it they can make a account there.
Dude you are the absolute child when it comes to being called out. You threw a literal tantrum not too long ago.
Yeh y'know I've changed my mind. If it comes to a vote for defederation I'll be an aye. Seems everyone has the same experience with them. And they'll push new users away.
How many large, active communities do we really host? Have any of their mods chimed in?
If you're a mobile user Connect, Sync, and probably others have already added this.
After my crime of calling some of them "obnoxious", I'm over it.
Very little good can come from interacting, as the majority are not at all interested in civility or good-faith discussion.
It is a troll instance! That's not a joke!
mods are literally removing the comments giving context to your bullshit, fuck you SJW
I see a lot of good faith attempts to point out their issues from Hexbear.
You feeled "obnoxious" because you are a cryptofascist. Just like the majority of users here.
Other than shilling for genocidal regimes I've seen them brigade such posts after they refederated recently. This kind of behavior is unacceptable in my book regardless of what ideology you subscribe to.
Regular users subscribe to communities they like and occasionally browses "All" to explore what else there is, knowing 99% will be irrelevant to their interests.
You and Lemmygrad people openly talk interfering with other instances so don't play coy. Your astroturfing attempts are transparent to anyone with a pair of eyes or a screen reader.
we talk of dunking the libs, we really just don't give a shit about you. Don't be obtuse or bigoted, and we will be fine with you.
Your astroturfing attempts are transparent to anyone with a pair of eyes or a screen reader.
I love the inclusive language.
Conflating inclusion of people regardless of their inborn traits / social status and inclusion of people regardless of their shilling for genocidal regimes is par for the course for people making mockery of the left.
Man you guys raid posts on other communitys. Thats called brigading.
And the amount of BS you post is called Spam.
Please please please defederate ASAP! Today I got lots of hexbear posts in my feed, and a lot of them mocked the """ultra-liberals""" on sh.itjust.works. Even communities, which at first glance don't seem to be about politics, just post anti-literally-anyone-who-is-not-a-tankie content. I especially love how apparently the Uyghur genocide is a media lie.
It is currently not a feature in lemmy, unless you want to manually block thousands of users one at a time
I especially love how apparently the Uyghur genocide is a media lie
the US government has already admitted that this is the case dumbass
Death to America
this is funny as fuck but we are so getting defederated lol
They're fine; maybe a bit too focused on politics. I'm generally happy to be federated with them, though.
One of the reasons I stuck around the lemmyverse is the diversity of political leanings, with a pleasant lack of fascists. I think my own political leanings have become more left since I've been here, and some threads make me question long held beliefs. I see this as a good thing.
As is the case with most online communities, there is a very vocal minority. Users can block/ignore other users and I think that is a better option than defederating.
I hadn't heard of them before today. After today, I want them defederated as soon as possible. They are exhausting at the best of times, and those times are few and far between.
alright you got us there
