Dirt_Possum

1. then why are you arguing with me? You're not arguing with the article because it's clear you didn't read it.
2. wut. If you're asking me to link it again, ok, here but it's the same link you can click on if you scroll up 4 comments above this one.

1. The message of the song, confirmed by the lyrics you pasted, is the title itself. Vote... or don't (because it doesn't matter).
2. It has nothing to do with "like-mindedness" it has everything to do with class interest. I thought you said you were a socialist. Do you know literally anything about Marxism? oh and no, the supposed "two" parties in the US both represent the same ruling class, you know, the fuckers that own the means of production under capitalism. You can call it "two" if you want, but you're only displaying your ignorance to the fact that it's just theater and both are two cogs in the same machine working in tandem to further the interests of the same class. Ever hear of the ratchet effect? Good cop/bad cop routine? Insert famous quote here:

"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."

• Julius Nyerere

Are you making these points as arguments with me or with the table of contents on the article I linked that you didn't read? Because I didn't make any claims, I just quoted the section titles to make it clear the link was directly answering the exact question you asked Cowbee.

1. And.... you think that is espousing a pro-voting message? k.
2. Yes, revolution is necessary to defeat fascism.
   and 3. (since your 2 contained multiple points) oh, and do you think what we have in the US (and other bourgeois dictatorships) isn't a one-party system? Yes, in genuine democracy where the means of production are not wholly owned by capitalists. You really need to learn what the difference between a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and a dictatorship of the proletariat is. China is far from perfect but the voice of the populace is vastly more powerful there and actually does steer the state. Considering the topic here was "voting out fascism" one obvious thing to note is that you won't find China or the DPRK ever led by actual straight up fascists as is the case openly right now in the US.

The following is not a perfect article, but it goes into quite a bit of detail answering that question.

https://leftistcritic.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/the-myth-of-the-kim-dynasty-the-reality-of-democracy-in-juche-korea/

Table of contents
There is democracy not “autocracy”
There is no “cult of personality”

Cool song you linked to, but if you think its message is pro-voting, and if you actually think doing so "would probably help get fascism out of the government" then you are painfully naive. It won't do that. It has never worked and it never will, not under capitalism ("liberal democracy") and this fact is baked into it. At best, it's a harmless waste of time. But there is valid argument to be made that the act of voting, useless as it may be to affect positive change let alone oust fascism, is still endorsing the bourgeois dictatorship, still a kind of tacit approval validating the very system that has allowed fascism to slide easily into power.

Great comment, I agree. It's been very sad watching this place decline after years of what felt like one of the few truly vibrant leftist spaces on the internet. I do have my own thoughts and opinions as far as a diagnosis for the decline, but I think they're right in line with what you're saying. The series of major struggle sessions where the moderators and admins were at odds with seemingly most of the users on the site were in my opinion what dealt the heaviest blows that this place never really recovered from. But what you're saying about how "left-signaling" has always been an issue here is at the root of those struggle sessions.

There was a comment that a lemmygrad user made almost a year ago that got to the heart of it and expressed the issue better than I could hope to. Here is just a small part of it.

Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is "in charge" at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people "in charge" keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.

This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently.

It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, and worth reading in full. It should be noted that the meaning of who is "in charge" isn't necessarily the mods and admins, but can just as easily be a nebulous group of frequent commenters who tend to set the mores of site culture. Incidentally, I think a lot of the problems have actually died down. Hexbear feels a lot less cliquish now then it did roughly a year ago. It is also significantly less active, but that's because of the damage that has already been done, and even if it's not as bad as it was, the problem never went away.

do you think i should learn more about marxist theory, and are there any websites that are easy to understand?

Looks like Cowbee is already in this thread, but it hasn't been mentioned yet that their theory reading list is a good place to start.

I'm not too concerned about what I can and can't say now regarding Luigi Mangione. I think we all at this point wouldn't bat an eye at anyone "lionizing" him as described in the rule announcement post. But I'd be lying if I said it doesn't still grate on me every time I'm reminded of it and that it technically is still a rule.

I don't mean to stir months old shit, but I still bring it up because I don't feel like it was ever rectified. Like one of those things all the involved (users and mods and admins) just tiptoed away from after it became more and more apparent how bad of a rule it was and how messed up some of the mod actions were around it (see below). It was a problem that never got addressed, and the rule is to my understanding technically still in place. I'll put a spoiler tag on the rest to make it easy to ignore for anyone who doesn't care and to not further derail OP's discussion of fedposting. But it still is important in my opinion to acknowledge what went down, and it does have actual relevance here where we're talking about potentially new rules on what constitutes fedposting.

​

I'm not sure how involved you were at the time, but there were plenty of people simply saying positive things about him, no worse than like "Luigi Rocks!" and getting their comments removed for it. You may have had a more understandable policy for how you enforced it, but the rule was made for silly reasons. The thing is, that rule was made for the purpose of removing posts and banning repeat offenders that held him up as a person who had done a good thing. But he is a person who did a good thing.

thirst-posting him while saying he's both innocent and being used as a scapegoat, I would say is free game.

Thirst posting is always removed, as it should be. But one of the mods, former now, who was also enforcing the anti-lionization rule was doing so because they believed, still do apparently, that he was innocent and being used as a scapegoat.

It is news to you that the rule still stands? Well I could be wrong but it would be news to me if it had been retracted.

Agreed but I never thought Hexbear would have done something as cringe as banning the "Lionization of Luigi". Not Hexbear's finest hour.
And that rule still stands.