Removed by mod
what's your hexbear unpopular opinion?
Removed by modbonus points if you get banned for sharing it
i'll start: most "vote blue no matter who" liberals are actually good people (not including terminally online liberals as anyone who is terminally online is a bad person)
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There is a certain streak of anti-intellectualism here that sometimes comes out and must be combatted
That gets balanced out by the certain anti-anyone who lives in a rural area streak that sometimes comes out.
I live in a rural area, and part of my turn away from being a leftist that voted for democrats was their elitism about "flyover country". Some of us like it out in the boonies, and we aren't all bad.
Yeah, and we still get that shit from some people here on hexbear whenever the countryside gets brought up.
And I'll even extend that to any mention of manual labor in general. Apparently anyone who works with a screwdriver rather than a keyboard is an irredemable reactionary according to some people on here.
Manual labor workers in rural areas usually need the lefts help the most! That's why democrats never gain any ground there. They're too busy calling our home "flyover country" and calling our jobs archaic. Meanwhile, we have trump visiting my state this week in a cynical play to cut the legs out from under Biden because they knew he would be sleeping on a beach somewhere while the biggest labor strike in generations takes place. And liberals will still say "Joe Biden is the most union friendly president possibly ever!" and "what good would it do to go there? Republicans will just say he did it for a photo op". Motherfucker, it's not about owning the cons! It's about showing up for the workers you claim to support!
That's an odd position to have for a site that's supposed to be about supporting the workers.
I've lived in the sticks basically my entire life. I think there are some criticisms here that are valid concerning the subsidies and environmental aspect of sustaining rural life, but there is definitely some idealist takes about about reactionary opinions here that I think could do with some more nuance.
Maybe I'm too close to it. I've seen "main street" crumble for years, and seen this lil mining community poisoned with opioids. Everything closed, but the county jail got expanded.
This one is from a long time ago, but it was someone who barged into a discussion about Nietzsche saying that they would never read him because he was racist and misogynist but also people should take their opinions on his work seriously.
I've seen about a hundred circle-jerk discussions about Freud by people who have never read a word of Freud.
People calling teachers cops
People dismissing most/all philosophy, theory and art post-Marx as a CIA op
And frankly, just generally there are quite a few STEM-brained people who don't really have an understanding of the humanities or art writ large
I love all my comrades here, but some of y'all need to read a book that is not political theory
Teachers, outside of a small percentage of hyperchuds, are the only people that actually give a shit about kids and sacrifice a huge amount of their time to try and keep kids out of prison. The institution of public education is absolutely designed to fail in the US and many other "first-world" countries but that's not because of the teachers. Through strikes and contract negotiations they fight for better standards. The administration and think-tanks are the ones trying to cut costs and do the bare minimum needed to train perfect worker drones that never question authority. I have a friend who teaches that spends up to 5 hours after school helping people that are falling behind and have heard tons of stories of teachers similarly working for free.
Not to mention that in some cases teachers are the only healthy, secure adult relationships, that kids have. Some kids come from really fucked up abusive homes and having one teacher cheer that kid on can change their whole lives.
As a teacher I can tell you I am not paid nearly enough by the CIA to give a shit about rich kids. Gimme a solidified pile of untreated ADHD and poverty any day of the week if it prevents me from having to interact with Tanner’s insufferable stay-at-home mother.
To add to your unpopular opinion; I believe a big part of this is because people on Chapo don't actually read theory, but only get snippets and extrapolations from other people. Oppose Book Worship is a great piece of literature, but it also gives anti-intellectuals an intellectual justification for being ass backwards.
I also think a lot of it is held up by purity testing. I like Hexbear, but it's pretty much had the same reputation on Lemmy as Reddit because we got a lot of people who think they're better than everybody else because they listened to a podcast or watched a YouTuber.
If you see someone calling a teacher a cop, I assure you it's because they were given a detention or a phone call to mom earlier in the day.
People should be allowed to have problematic faves. Here's an unpopular opinion for you, maybe not as highbrow as Nietzsche: Rudyard Kipling was a brilliant poet. And George Orwell's take on him was absolute Reddit level jackassery full of deliberate misreading.
Pretty sure
would agree. Maybe also 
Kipling's Just So Stories, problematic content aside, are some of the best and purest children's stories ever. Also the story behind them is incredibly sweet and sad
If someone wants to complain about Nietzsche and why he sucks all day long they can, but they'd at least better read him first. You're not a better person if you choose to remain ignorant about something because of your preconceived notions about it. Whoever your intellectual hero is, they spent a lot of time reading stuff they didn't like or agree with, because that's the price of being able to speak authoritatively about a topic.
And if you don't want to that's fine too, as long as you admit you don't know about it. There's tons of stuff I'll never read for a variety of reasons. But I'm not like actually I'm super cool because I decided not to to do the work of reading it.
Nietzchie really is an amazing writer. Ayn Rand is meanwhile Nietzche, but somehow more of a psycho and one of the worst writers I have ever read.
I agree with all of this, but as someone who taught, I was absolutely a cop in many contexts. Like, being a teacher as in , person who helps people learn is cool and good. Teacher as a profession that includes grading, assigning detention, enforcing truancy laws, controlling behavior and even bodily functions, that's absolutely about social control.
I've written out and deleted several versions of a reply, but I'll just say that the kind of social control exercised when I give a grade and when the police murder someone in the street with the full backing of the state are of a rather different character and I'd appreciate I'd you didn't conflate them
Yeah, fair. I definitely want to see dramatic school reform that gets rid of truancy laws and grades, but I think you're right that calling teachers cops is too much. It's more in line with social work, where the cops are always close, but not always present.
someone who barged into a discussion about Nietzsche saying that they would never read him because he was racist and misogynist but also people should take their opinions on his work seriously.
a writer being reactionary doesn't preclude them from having insightful things to say and hopefully more hexbears start to understand this. my example for this that stuck with me is when i studied nozick in undergrad philosophy, and i personally found his 'experience machine' critique of hedonism pretty cool despite disagreeing with the rest of his body of work (obviously).
I love all my comrades here, but some of y'all need to read a book that is not political theory
new site tagline?
The proper response is a sort of Feyerabendian intellectual anti-intellectualism.
Yes. Super annoying. I wish there was more actual content here and not just "obsession of the day" posts.
I've always said, ban posting, and double ban it if the people posting are having fun
OgdenTO has been added as a moderator to !chapotraphouse3@hexbear.net
I have a bias because I never liked Breaking Bad, but I'll agree with you anyway. It's a stale joke.
i think @BirdBrained@hexbear.net is talking about the trend posts on c/chapotraphouse that are all the same sentence with various puns in them
not enough hexbears notice an obvious bait post from a 2 day old account trying to stir drama 🤔
though paranoia is a hobby of mine
When done properly, an unpopular opinion thread can help hash out contradictory takes without the memes and dogpiling of a normal thread or the vitriol of a struggle session.
It'd be pretty funny, though, if a wrecker inadvertently made a good thread
When the wrecker tries to shame someone for bringing up that they're a brand new (or long dormant) account, that's when the ableist concern trolling happens and they show their whole ass, though.
Joining a lib/socdem group like DSA is still better than sitting inside on your computer.
The DSA is an actual, existing organization that holds political offices and is by far the closest thing in size to a mass socialist movement in the U.S. All the
criticism along the lines of "libertarian socialists support all revolutions but the ones that succeed" could be rewritten as "libs support all socialist orgs but the ones that grow large enough to matter."yeah, the hell of it with a lot of this stuff is that numbers are king most of the time with the way American politics work
That's how politics work everywhere. You have to have a lot of people on your side to get anything done. The whole astroturfing of the mass conservative movement is itself evidence of this -- even the bourgeois need popular support.
Admins simultaneously treat hexbear as a super serious space that necessitates adherence to a party line or face the banhammer. But they also treat it like a pet project in which it's not a big deal to be arbitrary about their decisions. There's no real recourse or way to defend against these decisions as bringing it up is "re-igniting" struggle sessions. We can never learn from it because all the posts in question get deleted. This makes it so nothing but what the admins believe represents the true story even gets to be remembered.
Most people come to hexbear through memes and personal experience and so all of their intellectual development is capped at that. This causes people to understand communism only so far as confirming their dislike of capitalism/authority. This means that Hexbear will always be a cesspool of very cool but fucking stupid lib-brains and as such doom this site to permanently being a shitpost.
Hexbear users largely decide what's true or not based on the posts vibes. Basically, a less morally horrendous version of "The Card Says Moops" thing.
Some hexbear people are cry-bullies who will happily wade into controversial waters but act distressed if they get flack from one person. If posting is legitimately causing you that much stress, you shouldn't be posting about controversial topics.
Hexbear users have better opinions but are shittier people on average than the general population. I would join a organization with most of you but I'd be fucked if I invited you shitheads to my apartment.
You can get away with a lot of racism, sexism, and homophobia if you couch it in a half-ironic tone.
Well I think that's been a good run for this account.
This causes people to understand communism only so far as confirming their dislike of capitalism/authority
Yeah, and it leads to takes like "bedtimes/homework/school whatever I don't like at this point in time is authoritarian"
This describes every Western anarchist I've ever met lmao
You have also basically described the CTH podcast at this point. I still listen occasionally, and they do have some good takes once in a while, but it's basically edgier SNL now. They read the news or talk about current events, and make pithy comments that can border on sexism, ableism etc all cloaked in "irony". It's basically one huge shit post of a pod, and I know a lot of old school users here cut their teeth on CTH in 2016ish like I did, and it shaped our movement whether you like it or not. We all owe the so called "dirtbag left" a debt for making leftism mainstream online, and bringing in a while generation. Every 20 something I know complains about capitalism. That's progress!
As for the original thoughts point you made, I also agree. There have been a lot of times where someone made a post about something fake, and everyone here gobbled it up because it fit the vibe we are trying to cultivate. It usually gets called out and corrected, but that just brings us back to "nobody is immune to propaganda".
I'm torn on the CW stuff. On the one hand, how do these people handle living if there's cheese everywhere? When we're driving, there's billboards with cheeseburgers everywhere. Shopping as a vegetarian is great, cause I get to walk past butchered animal carcasses to get my yogurt or whatever. I just ignore it. On the other hand, I know how what it feels like when there's nowhere you can go for a little respite from those things, and it's not that hard to just be polite and follow the rules for people you claim to be allies with. It's what a friend would do. You can think it's dumb or whatever, but it's just the way it is.
I'm torn on the CW stuff. On the one hand, how do these people handle living if there's cheese everywhere? When we're driving, there's billboards with cheeseburgers everywhere.
At least twice (when this has come up in past struggle sessions) I've seen comments that say "of course seeing cheese is not actually distressing to me, but the object of the CW is to make animal products more taboo." I don't think that's an appropriate reason to use CWs, and I don't think we should entertain that type of dishonest argument from comrades.
The status quo is fine, but this was a miss.
I get the "casual cruelty can be exhausting" sentiment. I bet everyone here is exhausted at times over capitalist cruelty being presented uncritically.
What got frustrating about the prior struggle sessions was people claiming the type of acute distress that warrants CWs, but occasionally backing off when the "what do you do when you see a billboard" point was raised, then no recognition of the dishonesty that exchange implied.
Some hexbear people are cry-bullies who will happily wade into controversial waters but act distressed if they get flack from one person.
Praise be the block function.
I think Dark Souls and the other Soulslike games are very overrated. Not bad games, but not god-like as some people hold them to be. Not to mention the fandom around them is toxic and barely understands what the games were about in the first place and solely enjoy them for the online griefing portion.
I find them fun, but then I get frustrated and leave them be for a while before picking them up again. I like watching people play them way more than I enjoy actually playing them.
I beat DS1 and I really wasn't moved by it, like I said, good game otherwise but the hype is pretty overblown imo
I agree. They never should have reopened main at all
Ok, so this is probably REALLY gonna divide the site. I've been keeping it in for the years I've been around, but fuck it, here we go:
spoiler
I love you all and you're the best.
Drives me nuts that there's basically no community where common sense regarding religion is actually observed. Religion is invalid from the outset. Saying you believe in a god should get you treated the way you would be treated if you said you think unicorns and bigfoot are out there. Like, no need to be malicious about it or anything, but you're just wrong.
Saying you believe in a god should get you treated the way you would be treated if you said you think unicorns and bigfoot are out there
I'm an atheist, but that is a completely ridiculous statement. For better or worse (and I tend to think worse), religion is part of the fabric of most societies, it's not comparable to stuff like bigfoot.
Alternate universe where everyone believes in bigfoot and only fringe weirdos believe in gods:
I'm an asasquatcher, but that is a completely ridiculous statement. For better or worse (and I tend to think worse), bigfoot is part of the fabric of most societies, it's not comparable to stuff like gods.
Well we do not live in that universe, we live in the universe where religion and spirituality has played a key part in the human experience, since the beginning, and has evolved alongside us. Every culture on every part of the planet had some kind of spiritual belief system at some point..That's the point I'm trying to make. It's here now, and it's not going to disappear. Even if people abandon religion as a belief, they will not be abandoning the spiritual traditions that they grew up with (see how many atheists still celebrate Christmas for instance). The influence of religion will continue to exist long after we die, even if the majority of the world is not religious/atheist/agnostic by then.
Religion and spirituality plays absolutely no part in my human experience and doesn't need to play any part in anyone else's either.
Hunger has played a key part in the human experience since the beginning but we'd like to eradicate hunger.
It's here now, and it's not going to disappear
You could say the same about capitalism with just as much evidence.
Even if people abandon religion as a belief, they will not be abandoning the spiritual traditions that they grew up with (see how many atheists still celebrate Christmas for instance)
Celebrating holidays does not necessarily have anything to do with religion or spirituality, regardless of where those holidays originated. I'm saying people should not be taken seriously when they state that they believe in the supernatural, and you retort by saying, "But it's not bad when people get drunk and throw a party on a specific calendar day! Curious!
" It's a complete non-sequitur.
Religion is ritual first and belief second. It's only Christianity that flipped this around to place an emphasis on belief over ritual. That's how some dude who only goes to church on Christmas can get away with calling themselves a Christian if he believe in Jesus when this is completely untrue for every other religion. For almost every other religion in world history, religion is more about what you do than what you believe in.
You can tell the posters railing against religion in its entirety would never have been able to gain ground in the global south, let alone their own neighborhood.
kill the redditor in your head.
there are religious marxists, it doesnt invalidate any of their leftist stances.
Religion is often the only remaining space for a shared sense of community and culture, in a world that is increasingly being reduced to crass market relations.
The USA has a particularly abhorrent strain of Christianity, please don't judge all of religion for it.
I am genuinely confused as to why defending it seems to be the most popular stance here
a) not harassing the few religious users
b) imagining a targeted minority on the end of every criticism, instead of the prosecutors. like it's technically correct that 'christian' is a characteristic shared between MLK and a baptist minister calling for lgbt genocide from the pullpit, but it's a bit dishonest to act like socialists are talking about the former types when yelling about christians.
c) sometimes people say incorrect things in criticism of christianity, and we've a heady collection of pedants that dunk on that. i don't think it really counts as 'defense', but anyway
I mean that sincerely, I am genuinely confused as to why defending it seems to be the most popular stance here. I can not understand that
As a fellow religion hater for the exact same reasons as you, it might help to seek out a different perspective and talk to people from different walks of life. There are plenty of Christian gay/queer people, there are plenty of people who lived under colonialism and neocolonialism that are Christian. They managed to square the circle in a different way to us religion haters, and it's worth listening to their perspective.
there is no way to square that circle without lying to yourself and having cognitive dissonance,
Yeah for you and me, that is true. For them, it is not. Otherwise they'd also leave their religion like us. That's what I mean by listening to other people's perspectives. Openly Christian gay people clearly think there is nothing in their religion that requires them to discriminate against themselves, and it's interesting to listen to why they believe that. Maybe they believe certain bible verses are taken out of context, that old testament laws don't matter anymore, or who knows, maybe something else. I don't know because I'm not religious.
Religion is often the only remaining space for a shared sense of community and culture
And our goal is to create a new world, where that isn't the case. Not to try to cling to whatever pre-capitalist fragments we can.
this isn't exactly unique to the USA and it isn't unique to Christianity either, let alone the USA prosperity flavour of it
More importantly, POC tend to be more religious than white people. In the US at least, only Asian Americans are less religious than white people. Every other ethnic group is more religious than white people. We do not need to make Hexbear even whiter than it already is.
militant atheists are not a good vibe that's for damn sure. having an aversion to religion is fair. I've seen my white friends struggle with shit that I just do not understand with their weird white church stuff. I don't really get it, but I try. still wanting to exterminate all religion kinda seems like an overreaction?
my Latino upbringing was nothing like that. when I quit being christian I hopped naturally from the ambient curanderismo I grew up with right into trying to find my way into nahua spirituality. 🤷🏾♀️ not to say that religion can't be harmful or that there's something inherently good about my spiritual practice. state religion? probably always going to end up fucking people up. i don't disagree there.
Religious evangelical POC are rewriting the chilean constitution to ban abortion and were a factor in the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazil a few years ago.
There is a growing religion fever around here and its being mobilized to attack anyone who is not a cishet man
Edit: Im not anti religion on hexbear perse but I totally understand why marginalized people would be
Lmao imagine making a site more
because you pushed for absolute atheism.
societal environment
I live in the deep south, atheism is not only not socially acceptable here, it wasn't even understood throughout my childhood. Nobody would say "wow not believing in god is evil you're a bad person you're going to hell" they'd say "what? you dont believe in god? that doesnt even make any sense, ive never heard of that"
None of this made it "common sense" to believe in any gods. Common sense remains that believing in things without evidence is foolish.
idk i think effective organizing is about carefully determining what specifically actually matters, some universalizing variable, and using that to unify and align the infinitely-complex diversity of human experiences.
so like, for leftism, that universalizing variable is broadly being working class. and i'm willing to tolerate an incredible amount of things i disagree with and even things that are directly harmful to myself if it means furthering leftist / working class interests.
if i'm gonna exclude someone from a movement based on any given variable, believing in a higher power is most definitely not it. organizing in a rural area as a queer person, i regularly encounter some vile/dangerous shit, religion isn't even on the radar (in and of itself).
And here I thought "I still believe in a major religion and practice it regularly" was going to be my unpopular opinion.
I think that most people are doing their best and a gentle correction is probably good enough most times rather than an absolute all out dogpile.
Now when you call someone out and they double down and start reaching for the isms then the kid gloves should come off. But I really do think it's healthier for everyone to get a chance to learn first.
Anyway feel free to dogpile me for not upholding TC69 thought. I know what I'm saying so a gentle correction won't suffice
people forget that TC69 thought was in response to a series of struggle sessions and wreckers as well as the site's culture failing to change from "nicer" tactics. also was that before or after the admin got doxxed?
in other words, it was a war-time strategy that isn't necessarily the best for all situations
I think I have a contextual understanding but some deep lore would be helpful. (especially because I just learned "Chuffed" is a good thing not a state of disappointment)
Thanks for saying this, it's really been bothering me about federation.
DSA is a fraudulent capture org and wasting everyone's time, money, and energy propping up a warmongering, increasingly
Does Not Care, justified in court, 
corporation.I don't know about fraudulent, but an org that primarily focuses on national US politics is not being particularly strategic.
There's this idea you see a lot with the Democrats, and it has leaked into some left wing spaces too. Liberals think that: 1) You rally your base. 2) You grow your support, convincing people with messaging and Good Arguments. 3) Electoral victory.
But that's not how this game is really played. Here's the real order of operations: 1) You rally your base. 2) You try to convince people where and when it is strategic to do so because... 3) if you win, that is where you actually grow your support; by enacting policies that improve people's lives.
Democrats and Republicans have to swap control of national chambers every few cycles because their policies don't improve people's lives, they just grease the gears of capital. But that's okay, 'cus it's not like there's any chance of someone breaking through into national politics. Federal elections are over-determined -- there's too much capital and too much private media for any sort of grassroots movement to establish itself, let alone win and secure policy victories.
State and local elections offer a far better stage for growth. Yes, the steaks are much smaller. But they are also achievable. Local politics is predominantly dominated by the funding of small-holding, regional capitalists. Much more manageable for a grassroots organization to analyze and strategize against. It's easier to coordinate working class people when you aren't juggling the variety of material conditions that exist across a broad geography; when you all live in the same timezone, when you have a shared sense of place to build from.
And if you do win, you now have a clearer understanding of the local conditions, and some knowledge for what policies you need to improve them. It's far far easier to grow political support when you can tie yourself to genuine concrete improvements in people's lives.
Treat discourse on hexbear is some of the most hypocritical and pointless stuff I've seen on the internet. It basically goes like this: if someone likes a certain "treat" they'll ignore everything that's bad/problematic about it and somehow link the treat to the advancement of leftism/socialism. If they dislike a certain treat, they'll go out of their way to find reasons why said treat is bad/problematic, and link the treat to right wing politics. It's literally looking for external reasons to justify ones like or dislike of a product/entertainment piece.
I'll give credit to UlyssesT for hating all treats equally though.
I'll give credit to UlyssesT for hating all treats equally though.
looks at Gambo
I do?
looks at Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
... I do?
Or implying that someone is uncultured/racist/sexist for liking something and then getting upset when other people push back on that
It basically goes like this: if someone likes a certain "treat" they'll ignore everything that's bad/problematic about it and somehow link the treat to the advancement of leftism/socialism.
Remember when you had to wade through "Avatar is anti-imperialist acktually because people in the Global South liked it" for two fucking weeks.
I also remember "Gambo is leftist actually because it shows bad people being bad in a vague mock-up of feudalism. Presenting people that try to improve society somewhat
as naive or worse is actually just grown-ass mature adult reality. I am very leftist."
the day that someone criticises ulysses for liking anime is the day that the servers spontaneously implode
Leftists should vote and participate in “democracy” whenever it’s possible to do so without causing further harm. Yeah I know it won’t prevent fascism from taking over but anything that will delay it even slightly is a good thing. And I’m immediately suspicious of anybody who pushes not voting as part of an op.
If voting does absolutely nothing else, it shuts down libs who shut off their brain if you tell them you don't vote. Shit, at least lie about voting.
Agreed. Especially local politics. Is voting a joke? Yes. But Trump's election brought a new wave of right-wing extremists that are far more dangerous. Not voting seems accelerationist. Modern republicans are actively trying to subvert democracy in clear ways like kicking out reps. The Republicans wouldn't be playing the game if it weren't worth playing.
Also, as much as I don't really believe in electoralism, I do think it makes a difference locally. Do they cheat too? Probably. Will they just keep running the same damn millage or referendum over and over until it passes? Probably. We got shafted on that in my county with a big, dumb civic center that nobody uses.
I go vote because it's easy. I also get to write in whoever I want if I don't like my options.
Totally vouching for this. Wisconsin wasn't too far off from a High Speed rail until scotty fucked everything to hell. He got voted out in place of a milquetoast Democrat and things have really been steadily getting better in some areas.
The peaceful development of nuclear energy is not only good and safer than other energy sources but probably the only path to the least shit level of climate change possible without some kind of eco-Thatcherist nightmare
Nuclear energy doesn't make sense in capitalism because doing it right isn't profitable
My only qualm with it is it's always trusted to people who I wouldn't trust to take my dog out for a poo.
It would be nice if we could have such facilities run by scientists in lab coats with clip boards, but in real life, it's Homer Simpson
That's an unpopular opinion? The development and praise of nuclear power is extremely popular on Hexbear. It for example always gets brought up that Germany closed them down as proof of its foolishness.
Anyway, I disagree. We should not be striving towards a society with consistently increasing energy consumption and switch to renewables as much as possible and focus on bringing balance to the world's ecosystems after capitalism threw them away for profit. A labor intensive energy source based on mining of rare earths is hardly the future, and yes I am aware that renewables also have issues - it is the tragedy of industrial society after all.
Nonetheless nuclear is definitely a lesser evil to many other forms of fossil fuels, so a useful stopgap where applicable.
