I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
They’re brainwashed and also fascists. They don’t stand for communism at all and never had.
Okay, if you define “communism” as “whatever the fuck the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is doing” then your statement is sound. However, most people around here (including myself) define the word to mean something like “a classless, stateless, moneyless society” and sometimes then regard the statement “The USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is communist” as an outright lie. They often assume that the person making the assumed-lie is ignorant, actively trying to infiltrate leftist spaces by pretending to be a leftist (the way tankies do), or are actively trying to smear leftist ideas.
I’d like to remind everyone that which words we choose to use to express our ideas are usually far less important than the ideas those words express. So long as we agree that the things the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. did/are doing are bad, acknowledge that capitalism has caused a great deal of strife, and seek to make the world kinder and more equitable, I think we should be able to agree and work together.
Can you name a country that is communist then?
I’m not trying to smear. However, I’m extremely skeptical of Communism
that’s like saying socialists are tied to national socialism…
when a power hungry group adopts a title that’s incongruous with it’s actions, like, DPRK, it’s always in an attempt to distract from their actions and policies.
Communism has quite the track record of being authoritarian. I don’t know of a single Democratic nation that is communist.
In theory no but in practice yes. The problem with communism is that it doesn’t provide incentives to drive industry. If something works ok then it will stay the same regardless if there is a better way. The other issue is that to be a part of communism society there needs to be forced conformity. You end up getting controlled by the state. In communism nations many people died from both starvation and because they failed to conform.
Tankies= Republicans
That’s all you gotta say. They love the orange fucker.
Eh, I think that only applies to Hexbear. The ml instances seem to hate anything US (or western, for that matter) without picking sides.
Tankies are very much not Republicans
Extreme left and extreme right are similar since they both embrace Authoritarianism and government oppression.
As an anarchist, I take issue with saying the “extreme left” embraces authoritarianism. But I get what you mean.
In to up vote you before someone cries
"hOrSeShOe tHeOrY! HoW dArE yOu CoMpArE aUtHoRiTaRiAnS tO aUtHoRiTaRiAnS! We’Re So OpEn AnD dEmOcRaTiC tHaT wE wIlL hAvE tO lOcK yOu Up Or KiLl YoU. FoR bEInG a ThReAt To ThE vAnGuArD bY dIsAgReEiNg!”
I agree with what you’re saying but I always downvote this obnoxious alternating case nonsense. Shit needs to die.
I have been calling this out since my first interactions with those instances. They are heavily infested with right wing trolls making “leftist” noises. And the ones who aren’t actually trolls are either so blinded by their disdain for liberalism, or just too young to notice.
Yeah. I’m genuinely curious how many of them are right wing trolls, how many are useful idiots, how many are normal trolls, how many are subject to mental illness and will sincerely believe anything and yell it at everyone else because of brain chemicals, how many are some other category, just what are the details of the real demographics there. I wish there was a way to know.
They are left wing
Just extremely far left (the farther you go the less sense it makes)
Nah, there are very obviously a whole bunch of Russian trolls in all of these spaces. They legit just parrot Russian narratives about the war and US politics. It’s extremely transparent.
They are not bots or trolls or foreign agents. Lemmy is already radicalised.
What you’re noticing I think is actually a pandemic in modern society. People cannot fathom nuance. I dunno if social media put the final nail in the coffin of a long-festering problem, or if social media and the ensuing collapse in discourse birthed the problem alone.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary. “You’re with me or you’re against me.” Or “information supports me or it’s rigged.” Extending that: “you’re my ideological enemy and whatever you think I think the opposite.” It doesn’t matter if it’s logical or it’s entirely contradictory. All that matters is getting to say “NO! You’re wrong and I’m right! You’re a [liberal, conservative, fascist, etc.]” Whatever serves their argument.
The complete inability to have logical discourse based in reality, is itself responsible for the larger systemic problems. When there’s no common ground because the ground is either “yours or mine,” and when it changes in every discussion, there’s just no hope to ever do anything about problems. And the problems are mounting. And the ownership class is capitalizing on this constant culture war bullshit—and I mean “culture war” in the sense of each “ideology” having its in group and everyone else belonging to the out group—to run wild on what’s left of this current paradigm.
It’s hard not to feel doom when realizing this foundational problem. It undercuts any kind of underclass solidarity, so the class war is really just an ever-worsening class slaughter.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary.
I’ve started to notice that this particular brain rot is becoming more and more common among Democrats as well. To a distressing number of people I’ve encountered on the Internet, be it here, Reddit, or elsewhere, Democrats ran a perfect political campaign and their candidates and policy were flawless and above question, so it’s entirely the fault of the voters that we got Trump again. Never mind that Democrats actively facilitated a genocide and largely ignored their base in favor of appealing to moderate Republicans who were never going to vote for them anyway.
The number of people in this country who are just incapable of seeing (much less understanding) any kind of nuance is dropping rapidly, even among demographics who should be aware of this trend.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a boundless problem. It happens with left wingers as well. It’s a disease in the way people think and engage with the world around them. Ideologies are badges now. They’re uniforms people wear. Similar to mental disorders on TikTok, Instagram, or, previously, on tumblr. That’s why I think the common link is social media. I know tribalism isnt a new phenomenon whatsoever, but widespread, more foundational tribalism on every single topic, kind of is.
People are arguing about reality. As soon as the right drifted away into fantasy politics, the bottom dropped out on discourse altogether. When about half the people are just straight up questioning long-known facts, the reality we all shared and could agree on suddenly became much more shaky and full of holes. Not that reality has changed, obviously, but when the discourse surrounding what we consider facts is questioned on this kind of scale, arguing that facts do, actually, exist just opens a sinkhole. And it’s not getting smaller. Because what are facts to everyday people if not something that we discuss and generally agree upon?
And the fact that this kind of magical thinking is spreading is more than troubling. It’s straight up doomsday shit.
So in a world where all of this is true and people invent an entirely new version of themselves to put online (and then lie to themselves that it’s actually them), pinning the “I’M A PROUD [democrat, Republican, communist, etc.]” to their chest is step one before they actually learn shit. They pick an identity and then look at every issue through that lens. Because they’ve found people online that belong to it and they choose that identity. Instead of learning and then realizing their ideology, they choose a team and then learn usually as little as possible to appear as if they belong. And get defensive and argue online with the “other” side, with wholly incomplete and usually inaccurate information that they looked up specifically to belong to an ideological group.
Fuckin crazy. You see problems like this, look at the state of discourse and really wonder…is there any coming back from this? How do we even start? Well, education. Obviously. But we all know that’s not gonna happen. We’re moving in the opposite direction as fast as we possibly can. (Because that serves the ownership class).
Tankies are the alt-right fabricating an alt-left. Tankies are a deliberate disinfo campaign most likely out of st petersburg. Remember the russian troll farms? See how easily they penetrated the right wing in america? The left are free thinkers and are a harder nut to crack. Their best shot at this is to cosplay far left and push liberals further left. Tough to foment a civil war when only one side is fighting. TLDR; Hexbear is most likely 90% mother russia phoning home.
The left are free thinkers
Idk, there are a lot of leftist echo chambers. Please avoid anything close to the “we’re right and everyone else is wrong” argument.
But yes, agree with much of the rest. I also think there are a lot of trolls from China in the mix as well.
You make it sound as if the “left” in the US is as left as it should be and pushing it further is a bad thing. The “left” in the US are full on capitalism appreciators, even under the Obama admin which liberals look upon fondly large mergers and consolidation of power were allowed to happen. This country is lost if we act like one side is doing its job (doing things in the interest of the populace and not corporations).
In the United States being on ‘the left’ is arbitrarily just being ‘left of far-right’.
The ‘Radical Far Left’ is anything that isn’t devoted to capitalism. This isn’t a Republican talking point but the central prerequisite to American politics that thinks Bernie Sanders would’ve had executions in central park.
That’s certainly part of it, is my guess. But it can’t be all of it, just a whole community of Russian trolls talking to each other. How many useful idiots are there?
And Dessalines likes Hexbear. Presumably he’s not a Russian troll. How many others are there, and how did they come to their decisions? I believed a bunch of dumb stuff when I was young. How much of it is that?
This is false. They’re not alt-right or agents out of russia.
Horseshoe theory is just always correct
Saying shit no one has ever heard of like “horseshoe theory” and trying to make the regular people who never heard of it out to be stupid or abnormal is exactly what outs you as a Russian bot.
Check this guy’s post history. It’s pretty clear which team he plays for.
Tons of people have heard of horseshoe theory which is the notion that the extremes of the political binary have an overlap and that a fascist and an authoritarian communist are not all that different. It’s a bullshit creation from the mind of a journalist and IRL does not seem to be true.
