My answer:
When chapotraphouse was banned on reddit many mods and users came together to create a space on a link aggregator platform.
Choosing lemmy the original admin and developer team decided to fork it for various reasons. About a year ago, sustained effort was taken to upstream many of the forked features so that we could rebase with current version lemmy and federate.
Over the years hexbear has become a non-sectarian social media space for sharing news, memes, links, posts and comments with each other as the mods endeavour to make the space welcoming to marginalized people.
Terms of Service | Code of Conduct | Modlog | Allow-list | PPB
Hexbear is the only independent western social media platform that has been the subject of multiple libertarian think-tank pieces and likely CIA operations, and nearly one appearance on Australian national television.
a couple years ago we bullied a terf hard enough she threatened to talk about us on aussie tv
of course we just bullied her harder lolI see you cats a lot on c/all, and to be honest, I don’t understand a lot of what y’all talk about.
But bullying TERFs is unfathomably based.
We have all the news the mainstream media is too polite and beholden to money to talk about!
And unlike Fox we’re not lying about that!
lol really.
https://hexbear.net/post/56333
https://hexbear.net/post/184996
https://hexbear.net/post/631450
https://hexbear.net/post/80097
The first two are actually about the old chapotraphouse subreddit from which this place was born.
The giggle one is especially hilarious because we literally destroyed her entire platform and possibly her career.
We made it into a criminal justice professor's dissertation
The sharp rise in Violent/Aggressive Discourse in the Extreme Left is an artifact of the inclusion of Hexbear.net.
https://hexbear.net/post/261782
Maybe they should try listening to what people ask for before things escalate into violence, instead of provoking us and then complaining that we’re angry all the time.
Hexbear somethingsomething historical light itself I am very original.
- Show
Is it remotely reasonable that it could it be possible that such a thing could be...?
Hexbear is where you go when you finally realise the modern liberals have the same politics as Reagan and Thatcher did. IE, not remotely left.
It is more than a website. It is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The internet is too small for it.
Hexbear is a fan club for three podcasts
- CTH
- citations needed
I've been around since Chapo was on Reddit and I've only ever listened to the episodes with Connor O'Malley because I'm a huge Joe Pera fan. Are there any particular episodes of those podcast that I should check out? I've heard a lot about Citations Needed, but have only seen clips. They seem more up my wheelhouse than Chapo because I like my political podcasts on the drier side. Like if there are any episodes featuring the true nuclear dunks or just top tier comedy, I'm still down, but generally look for just super informative shit. Trying to get back into podcasts
The only podcast I ever listened to religiously was Marx Madness, a podcast that's essentially just synthesis of dense and/or hard to read academic works. Went over a lot of difficult pieces I read when I was doing high school debate and helped fill in my gaps of understanding. First season is Kapital. They add their own commentary and add modern context to show how certain ideas still hold up, but for the most part they're presenting the texts as they are. The most I remember them going off path with Kapital was addressing the discussion of anti-Semitic language in Marx's work. I stopped listening to them because time, but I listened to everything up to the history of W.E.B. DuBois and it's great. Strongly recommend to anybody who wants to get into literature that's too dense to read.
Also to say what they said about Marx and anti-Semitism. They don't handwave everything and dismiss it because some of the word choices are awful with modern context, but they also point out that anti-Semitism was so baked into culture over the past thousand years that many of the anti-semitic words were common colloquialism. Like a chef that calls their conical strainer a china cap or chinois (Chinese in French). Yes, it is a racist term, they may even understand that it's racist and still use it. If they call it a conical strainer on the recipe instead of a china cap, nobody is going to know what they're talking about. Marx's casual anti-semitic phrasing is more a reflection of thinkers of the era, how anti-Semitism had been so prevalent that it was barely even an idea yet, almost like air.
The Marx work most well known for this issue is "On The Jewish Question", an essay written in response to another Hegelian, Bruno Bauer. Bauer argues that the only way for Jewish emancipation to be achieved is for Jews to give up their religion because a secular state demands secularism. Marx was explicitly defending jewish religious freedom, using material analysis to say that liberalism likely wouldn't bring Jewish emancipation.
Citations Needed is the most “intellectual” of them all. Like, it’s still closer to entertainment than academia and that’s absolutely fine because it’s a podcast and not a peer reviewed journal but to set expectations.
They do go into history and they platform excellent guests, usually authors and academics so the quality is there.
I don’t know about any specific episode recommendations but I really enjoyed their most recent episode (188) which gave a good perspective on how substandard products are presented as innovation, eg they explored this recent wave of “mental health apps” that are really just a symptom of the complete failure of the health system but are presented as “providing access”. They then relate this to child labor debates in the past, and to the subtle shift in language from the Dems from “universal healthcare” to the profoundly more capitalist and pro-market “access to healthcare” position.
I wouldn’t say it’s one of their best, in fact I find their quality bar is very consistent so it’s hard to pick a best for me since there is a consistently high quality. But it’s an example of how they wind together a dive into history with media analysis with politics - and this combination is what makes them unique and powerful.
After a quick scan of their episodes I would also highlight ep 154 which describes how the American progressive left get conned and bamboozled into supporting American exceptionalism, and how their critique of liberalism gets disarmed.
also adam johnson's occasional rage fueled screeds are a spicy way to fuck with the npr formula
At times Adam channels Michael Parenti's righteous indignation and I love it.
Hexbear is more than a website. She is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself.
To me, Hexbear is a megathread where people shitpost and talk about wanting to die
It's piss jokes and mental health crisis all the way down
Peace Rasta
Hexbear is a big tent leftist instance that really has one main thing: Don't believe CIA or State Department lies about AES states. You can be an anarchist, you just also have to not believe everything that dribbles out of an anti-communist's mouth.
Also shitposting and irony.
Fuck these tankies man. I’m as leftist as they come and I HATE what these people are doing to the cause. We want healthcare and equal rights, and these loonies are dragging us all down with their fascination for those horrible fascist regimes (it takes 2 braincells to realize the CCP is 1984 incarnate).
I’m at the same time horrified and fascinated by them. I saw a comment that accused NATO of causing he war to “drag on”. When I brought up that Russia could just leave, I got people unironically replying that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war and that it was Ukraine committing genocide and attacks on civilians. I understand that I could be trapped in a western bubble… but really? I didn’t bother asking for a source because I’m sure the only source for that misinformation is the Kremlin. What’s crazy is that you would think the Russian shills would be spread out trying to infect other communities with disinformation, instead they all flock to this echo chamber apparently, so it seems likely that they genuinely believe this stuff.
It's just scratched libs screeching at straw men all the way down.
guffaw!
