Dirt_Possum

Yeah, I read hexbear every day. I lurk the modlog. I skim for drama. Dbzero shite is simply not something that any hexbears think or care about outside of some few specific incidents where y'all really are just showing everyone your whole ass and thinking you're righteous. If hexbears had even the slightest fraction of seething towards dbzer0 that y'all have (a few specific mods and users, I think most dbzer0 users are probably fine) against hexbear, I really would be well aware of it. I'm not proud that I would be well aware, that's an admission on my part that I'm too online (though I do organize irl too). But I would be aware if hexbears ever "malded" about your little anti-tankie instance. Hexbears think you're embarrassing and worthy of a facepalm but not much else, so sometimes the most wince-worthy things you say get posted to the slop comm. But really none of us actually give a shit about yet another wannabe anarchist site that just ends up sheepdogging users back to liberalism. Not uncommon, sadly. Dime'a'dozen. Like, we have no problem with actual anarchitsts and many of our top posters are anarchists. Meanwhile, much of your reason for your very existence on lemmy is this left-punching, pathetic anti-tankie vendetta cringe. Hell, it's in your instance sign-up form! All the hollering about "bRiGaDiNg!" in this very thread is more testament to exactly that.

The amount of on display here is astounding. I lurk on hexbear all the time and I almost never see people there even mentioning your silly instance. I do remember one exception when a hb mod was calling for defederation, pointing out how much water you carry for rightwingers and fash with some of your anti-communist screeds, but not only was that like over a year ago, that mod isn't even around anymore, and I've seen no one on hexbear mention your instance once since then(it may happen from time to time but it is rare. However every time I see your name or unruffled pop up in my feed, it is always one of you whinging about those evil tankies on hexbear or the meanie tankes on .ml or how "authoritarian" the tankies on lemmygrad are.

I'm not one to "laugh out loud" when I'm reading usually, but your comment above actually made me chuckle a little. It's just so obviously backwards with reality, how can someone not be embarrassed to say that and so plainly demonstrate how much those ebil tankies live "rent free" in their head?

This came up in an unrelated thread recently so I'm just going to paste something I said last time this came up, with a couple edits:

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, the quoted part alone doesn't really get at the heart of it, so it's worth reading in full. The comment was removed for "dismissing legitimate issues as tokenization" (perfectly exmplifying the point) but another less campist or beligerant mod reinstated it fortunately. 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 significantly less cliquish now than 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 entirely went away.

May as well tag @purpleworm@hexbear.net since I was speaking to purplworm in the pasted comment, who had some important things to say that I was responding to.

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.

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