Went through this as millenials in the early/mid/late 10s too.

The caveat here is that once you bounce back in your late 20s and early 30s, when you have financial stability and disposable income, how much the allure of liberalism will stick with you even as your mind and experience know that capitalism is inherently exploitative and destructive on an individual and planetary scale.

removed by cod

That post was so bizarre.

ZL gave the impression that she spearheaded this controversy of forcing the comm changes, insulting and humiliating the entire user base, and then hid behind Carcosa.

Can you expand on the monetary policy part with Biden cutting interest rates?

Oh nevermind you did in another thread. ty anyway!

I remember regular implosions back when I was in a Runescape clan a long time ago.

The leadership team were 17-20 year olds. At a young age, and paraphrasing Rick & Morty's Beth, a 17 year old to a 14 year old is like an 18 year old to a 30 year old. These people were our progenitors, leaders, friends, guidance counselors, and tutors.

The clan fell apart - still extant in Runescape from what I remember, though greatly diminished - several times. From infighting, to "corruption", to personal relationships falling out, to officer bloat, etc etc. Dynamics of different people converging and not having the maturity and patience to form a coherent and reliable leadership is perfectly reasonable for teenagers.

Like those Runescape clan officers, admins and moderators are all volunteers here. Unlike that Runescape clan, I trust most of the users are adults here.

I've been here since the offboarding from r/cth and when this was called chapo.chat. I was @Zodiark.

Probably just the occassional insight, leftist safe space, and good vibes all around. A general permissiveness and acceptance, even anonymized, to be who you wish to be. I did like to comment and post, but this space was a genuine thought refuge when 10/7 happened.

Apparently Sangria's Alaskaball's alt lol.

Looks like Sangria's gone.

So...

Just trying to summarize for myself what to make of this.

In summation:

• It's over. For now.
• Adjustments to renaming the mockery forums.
• Adjustments to code of conduct and new filters to eliminate but not limited to misogynistic/sexist/transphobic slurs.
• Instead of forcing people to effort post in both forums, they'll be separated to encourage effort post in one and low effort mockery material in another.

I think there's left over unresolved feelings from this struggle session:

• anonymous moderators statement in Carcosa's initial announcement was filled with direct and indirect verbal abuse and belligerent hostility to the user base.
• Unilateral decisions being imposed upon the user base by a clique of moderators who appear to have contempt for their comms.

Is there anything else?

Dolores Umbridge was more hated among the Harry Potter fanbase than Voldemort.

What makes the distinction between mockery of public officials and petty trolls on the internet (twitter, reddit, lemmy) is that often our fellow proleterians are also our tormentors. In the news, Israeli football vandals picked fights, defaced properties, and chanted genocidal and racist rants. This behavior is echoed on the bottom of Israeli society and validated by the top; this behavior (not just Israeli racism but bigotry/oppression in general) is also echoed in Western states by core constituencies of its dominant population, and validated through willful ignorance and patronizing liberalism.

I think our problem here is that we've seen a lot of this content. So much so that it also gets grating.

But not everything is for everyone.

I would also like to see more effort posts instead of reddit tier screenshots and gotchas. I'd like to know - have it spelled out for me, rather - how to discuss and process why liberal and reactionary talking points and axioms are false and ineffective. but I think understanding the criticisms against liberals and reactionaries doesn't come from internet posts or youtube essays, but from reading and learning.

And then coming to the site to share that common understanding of reality via the leftist lens, and then exercise levity over that reality as we face our spectrum of competency and power(lessness) in that reality.

I've learned that the catharsis is the point. It's a necessary intellectual cultivation of enduring in reality and acting upon reality.

It'd be fair to say that you, I, and perhaps all of us would like to see that catharsis go somewhere. Yet we just won't see it go from Hexbear -> ??? - > socialist activism, community organizing, volunteering, etc.

The unknown factor are the material conditions and motivations of people to put their time and energy in the material world; the levity gleaned here is the point of the site, and as a community this is what its members make of it. It isn't inherently a bad thing.

Let people have their fun. It isn't meaningless, fruitless, or useless just because it does not interest you or I.

I like Hexbear over Chapo.chat

Europe, especially the imperial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were and are a community of vampires, ghouls, jackals, demons, serial killers, and thieves.

The most telling part of the conflict was that despite Austria-Hungary initiating the conflict, Germany took most of the "blame" and was maid to payout reparations and had its colonies and industrial sectors and provinces swallowed up by the other European powers.

The causes stated by Lenin, in Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism were:

Imperial expansion & imperial competition - a need to acquire new markets, materials, colonies, and growth. These empires were driven by monopolies and capital accumulation/centralization created existential rivalries among the European powers. Especially between Germany and Great Britain. These two powers considered themselves existential enemies since Germany had quickly industrialized and become on par with British industry in a short time, creating fierce competition in the market. These competitions justified and necessitated the need for new territories, raw materials, etc.

I can't remember much about Lenin's understanding of how finance capital's contribution to WW1, just that it was fuel to the fire of the overwhelming tinder that the need for new markets and resources made.

WWI as viewed by Lenin was an inevitability of crisis that capitalism produces. There needed to be periodic wars or catastrophic events that opened up new markets and populations open for domination, labor and resource extraction, and dominance of capital. I think the last great event like this was the dissolution of the USSR and the shock and awe policies that plagued Russia in the 90s that saw its industrial sectors siphoned and sold off.

WW1 is shocking in its cataclysmic damage and depraved indifference to the huge loss of life, but such a conflict was all but inevitable given that these were conflicts that capital needed to accomplish to break through to acquire new wealth and profits. The modes of imperialism that Europe had practiced were on this trajectory.

Ultimately the war weakened European powers, set itself up for WW2, and let the US readapt and manage the way these powers extract wealth and capital from its former colonial subjects and other states in the developing world.

Something by Rosa Luxemburg:

The Imperialism of all countries knows no “understanding,” it knows only one right – capital’s profits: it knows only one language – the sword: it knows only one method – violence. And if it is now talking in all countries, in yours as well ours, about the “League of Nations,” “disarmament,” “rights of small nations,” “self-determination of the peoples,” it is merely using the customary lying phrases of the rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep the watchfulness of the proletariat.

The situation appears to be an attempt to redirect the narrative away from Israeli football fans being provocative. The counternarrative being presented is that these incidents are indicators that Europeans, the Dutch, and the residential Arab & Muslim populations of Europe are hostile to Jewish people.

Promoting the notion of Zionism that Jewish people are inherently unsafe in Europe, and that any current "bigotry" is not really European but an import of MENA immigrants, and ultimately the price of tolerance by these liberal democracies.

There's plenty of video evidence denying the narrative there, but that doesn't let the press stop them.

I think this post underlies the capitalist dynamic to adapt to new economic realities, especially given that Western economies are sustained by economic extraction, exploitation, and subjugation of the nations of the Global South. The diminished profitability that these states now find themselves in can be amended by increased rentier extraction - what we see in subscriptions in the developed world - for the use of intellectual and material properties in its sustained usage.

These properties that we extract rent from are coerced through complex financial instruments and state sponsored sanctions for non-compliance; in fact, Musk here is mocking the inability for Canada to properly exploit its subjects, cannibalize its internal public institutions, and coerce trading partners for better deals.

The futility of Musk's argument is that, as you explained in this post - I think you're quoting Marx - , the extraction can only go so far. There is a diminishing rate of profitability because the capacity to extract and exploit is limited by the scope other states, internal communities, and political power dynamics are willing to to accept.

Well elucidated, Thordos.

I apologize for any offense given. I was speaking broadly because political change has little precedent being spearheaded by the digital and virtual, although I did not mean to admonish or shame any persons who are unable to express or act beyond as such.

I think you're right about this site being one of the few (perhaps some lemmy sites) sites that you can shitpost and find political theoretical analysis. I recall that was true of r/cth and its derivative, r/moretankiechapo.

I was referring to the development of intellectual will to explain, to persons in reality and online, why reactionary thought is not only misanthropic but materially, feasibly, logistically, and morally wrong/evil. (e.g, being able to explain why r/collapses obsession with Malthusian solutions and explanations are evil and erroneous.)

I was speaking generally; there are always exceptions and apologize if I've given offense.

I agree with you. I was just describing the situation as I saw it.

(I'm just annoyed when people communicate or reply to me in these riddles and intuitions like I have the same common understanding of their thoughts extant in their mind. I can't read minds and sometimes context is lost on me .I can only conjecture someone's intent and meaning when someone's being vague and mysterious [ which comes off to me as aloof and arrogant ].)

Starting to think that the real issue is that large portions of the admin team do not view themselves as users of the site who have stepped into a community role, but rather as managers and who have contempt for the unruly, unwashed masses they are forced to oversee.

That's what the site culture was when Hexbear was still chapo chat; I think since the site gained new members, the user base were also trying to make something new instead of being a lifeboat for chapotraphouse. If I remember correctly, TC69 mass banned the transphobes and other brocialists/anti-vegans because they were reactionaries, and n order to cultivate this site as a safe haven from those people.

I think the moderators are just burned out from seeing the same reddit tier posts within the dunk tank/dredge tank, because those were the posts and comms that dominated the front page. (Look at the front page now without it. Nonsense, but also nothing inciting, no harassment to other federated users, redditors, or x-posters).

I suspect the moderators and admins are trying to infuse a culture in this site that can cultivate meaningful praxis. A leftist safe space site that features shitposting, not a shitposting site that features leftist safe spaces.

https://x.com/WVanwagenen/status/1855366838437150767

YNet says Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir are waiting for the hostages to die. The issue of the hostages in Gaza will be solved 'naturally and tragically.'

They will then use these deaths as further pretext to permanently occupy and establish Jewish settlements in Gaza, YNet says.

Netanyahu's cabinet has always wanted the hostages dead after the plan to kill them all with helicopters before they reached Gaza on 7 October was not entirely successful.

I've referenced the self-referential and axiomatic nature of the rhetoric and discourse among this website and its users before, which is why I understand the frustration of the termination of two sub-forums that communicates memes and forces the brain to respond in memes.

From what I gathered among this thread is the primary grievance is that this decision was a unilateral decision made by anonymous moderators who diminished the userbase as being brocialists who like slop as denigrating to marginalized persons, and did it so suddenly, without warning, and so abruptly, without consultation.

I apologize for the patronizing tone, but would you expand on that statement instead of having me try to intuit the meaning?