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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)
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.
The two genders of Hexbear
"Oh, you plowed a field once? You're literally Hitler"
Can you give some examples?
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.
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).
new site tagline?
tldr: too many city folk round here
The proper response is a sort of Feyerabendian intellectual anti-intellectualism.