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this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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askchapo
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I am glad that someone sort of hears me. It's still like this as of today and IMO, it will never, ever change as long as there are people moderating this instance who believe that even a slight variation from any one of their beliefs must be resolutely banned or brigaded lest it metasticize and grow into a counter-movement.
oh word, which slight variations have you seen being banned?
Someone dared to insinuate that North Korea is perhaps not totally awesome after all.
if only more people had the courage to speak up and chime in with all capitalist media to give license to 75 years of genocidal occupation
This child I keep punching in the face has some personality traits I think are maladaptive
And I'm brave enough to say it
i'm sympathetic to this but genuinely, if we don't critique on account of the overwhelming imperialist information network, but also largely discount/reject the imperialist narrative, how do we arrive at a real perspective? the opposite of the west's narrative cannot be true in all cases
if someone is going to come in with a critique it's going to have to at least acknowledge all of the stuff that is usually elided by capitalist media, because that's the ocean we all exist in and unfortunately it's necessary to distinguish yourself from the mass delusion to be taken seriously.
it's not great and we're on the other side of this sometimes, like when liberals accuse Hillary detractors of misogyny and you have to first establish your feminist bona fides to have any hope with someone steeped in that defense
EDIT: now that I think about it it's way worse because a sizable portion of mass media was anti-Hillary. there is no mass media that favors DPRK or even deviates from the crazy hermit kingdom narrative
this just feels like a dead end in this context, intellectually i get where you're coming from but how this interaction went was: user explains hesitance to post because of they're afraid of getting piled on-->someone baits an example out-->dogpile
rhetorically i think the conversation's just been terminated or forced into a confrontation instead of something educational. and sort of proved their point.
idk where im going with this because i totally get not wanting to coddle liberals and the desire to dunk---but i also see how it sucks to have to exonerate yourself of holding water for imperialists just to begin a conversation about DPRK or some other AES
yeah I hear you, I knew that was a risk. I just don't know if there's any real gain to outsiders for a left critique of DPRK until the occupation ends, I mean they are still at war even.
I guess it's hard for me to keep my mouth shut when someone whines that they get pushback for being negative about a country that's vilified in literally every piece of western mass media. how can anyone expect not to in that environment? and now that I think of it it doesn't even map to Hillary because there was plenty of mass media shitting on Hillary
EDIT: I wasn't trying to be an asshole in my initial comment, I hoped my tone was more mild and mostly sarcastic. but I am a little wasted rn so if I misjudged things I apologize
Let's not give them too much credit
They were being condescending and hyperbolic. It wasn't some uwu smol bean talking about their concern over the cult of personality, problems with the special economic zone, reactionary messaging from state outlets, or any number of other real criticisms that you can easily enough offer and get at least thoughtful replies, if not broad agreement on. It was none of that, it was "radical free-thinker dares to wrongthink against absurd dogma."
Like, I disagree with plenty of hexbears -- I've had you blocked for a long time and had to remove it to reply to your comment here. There's a difference between that and being a patronizing piece of shit over it, so assuming that jackass had something worthwhile to say instead of the same absolute horseshit that 99% of the anglophone world would offer on the topic is silly.
CC @emizeko@hexbear.net
idk I think whatever you did that bothered me you stopped doing, since I always forget that you're blocked when I'm reading this site while logged out (which isn't true of most of the other people on that list). For what it's worth, you're off the list now
There's no real way to get anything close to a real perspective if you only know English. That's the reality. To approach a real perspective, the bare minimum is learning the relevant language and engaging primary sources written or spoken in that language. English is the tongue of Western imperialism, so the vast majority of material in English will support the Western imperialist line and the majority of material in English that don't either come from state actors who have the resources to hire English translators or independent content creators who completely rely on those same state sources.
There's plenty of nuanced discourse on North Korean defector who fled to South Korea. And they're all going to be in Korean. For English, it's either the DPRK line that they're doing it largely for economic reasons or the US/ROK line that they're doing it for freedom^TM^ and democracy^TM^.
that functions well enough as an excuse to keep your mouth shut but it's quite in conflict with the idea of study. there hasn't been a socialist country that spoke english, it's ridiculous to circumscribe looking into how actual socialism was implemented/is without learning 2+ more languages. i assume most yankees here didn't get to go to private schools that offer russian or korean
What was the specific content of their statement? Do you remember or could you link it?
I have to agree with this. I have some opinions that slightly deviate from the more sanguine attitudes on foreign policy I've seen others express here and I've been reluctant to voice that.
What do you mean by "brigaded"? I think the in the way it's commonly used, that term means: when one community (traditionally a subreddit, but here on lemmy, an instance) goes into another community they normally would not participate in to mass-downvote or comment-spam that second community, usually as an organized effort. If someone were to post something on hexbear, hexbear couldn't brigade that post, by definition.
Do you just mean dogpile? Where a bunch of people all jump on and criticize someone who said something they didn't like? Because that definitely happens here, sometimes for good reason, other times not (which I realize is somewhat subjective). It especially sucks when it is due to something seemingly minor to the person getting dogpiled but the people doing the dogpiling treat it like the infraction was this terrible crime. Or worse, when it is all due to a misunderstanding but the person getting dogpiled feels hounded out of the thread. Hexbear can be really bad about this. It has happened to me and it is one hundred percent the reason I don't post more and it's part of the reason that by default I use rotating alts. Asshole trolls and reactionaries deserve it, that's one thing everyone on hexbear I think agrees, so it has been strongly reinforced in the community here. Also because on the wider internet it's almost always the reactionaries doing the dogpiling and drowning out the reasonable voices, whereas hexbear is more or less a safe pace for more vulnerable groups who are usually the brunt of it. It's no fun to be on the receiving end of a dogpile and I do think that hexbear sometimes gets way too overzealous about it to the detriment of the community and outside participation. If that's what you mean, I think that's a completely valid criticism and one I agree with.
The main reason I point out the distinction between "brigade" and "dogpile" is that when federation was new, hexbear got constantly accused of "brigading" by certain users on other instances just because hexbear is so active and would comment on posts they saw pop up in their feed, which is a good and normal thing to do. That is not brigading. It got very tiresome very quickly for me to be accused of brigading just because I commented in a thread where other hexbears were also commenting. It was used as an excuse by some instances to defederate from us even though it was obvious they only defederated because they didn't want to have to deal with dissenting voices. This was especially galling because we can't downvote, only upvote. This is not a valid criticism of hexbear.
I know this is already an old thread but I still think it's an important difference that should be kept in mind.