this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Brigading is a made-up reddit thing. It used to be normal for forums to "raid" other forums, and if you couldn't deal with that, it was on you. However we are not "raiding" there is no organised movement to go somewhere and post on it. We see the same posts pop up in "all", and we have a large and active userbase, that's all that's happening.
Yeah, that bug is getting worked on.
Yeah that's the story, but it's not really what I've been observing. Plenty of people that disagree with the hexbear userbase have had nice discussions. Generally I see users from other instances post condescending "gotchas" which then, rightly, get dogpiled on. They then cry "foul" as if they didn't themselves initiate the interaction on those terms. Either that or they will be met by a user willing to engage in good-faith discussion, but they instead choose to continue with condescention. I see a lot of "I'm not reading all that" and "lmao you really believe that?" in response to well-thought out responses, not to mention the many accusations of being a bot. These users are then treated as condescending dickheads, because hexbear has had a lot of issues with wreckers, so there's a pretty low tolerance for that kinda stuff. Hexbear generally has a hostile culture to bad-faith debatebro tactics.
Disagreements are common, so it's not really that. It's just a question of wether they're engaging in good faith or not. I see plenty of users post about stuff that's well outside the general culture, that then have a nice discussion.
Regarding being "wrong about lib" I'm gonna disagree again. I think you have a different definition of what that is. Oftentimes we think of ourselves as being "leftists" or whatever, but by our words and actions we support the current (neo-liberal) system. Then it does not matter what we identify as, if we're still furthering something else. If you're interested in that kinda stuff you might want to read Combat Liberalism. It's pretty short, so it's a nice and quick primer.
You realise we can access hexbear.net and see the local posts? It's absolutely coordinated behaviour. Hexbear users post links to a given thread from another instance in chat or chapo or wherever with a suitably inflammatory title along with a call to arms along the lines of "Look at this terrible liberal take, OMG the entire cookie baking community is full of bigots and transphobes. Cookie bakers are bourgeois as hell!". Cue your entire community piling in to the cookie baking community to completely destroy all discussion of baking cookies until they get bored and move on.
You spend a lot of time talking about good faith discussions but from my perspective it's the hexbear community that isn't acting in good faith in most instances.
I accept this, and I am guilty of this to the extreme. I was extremely politically active in my late teens and early 20's, and active in the labor movement. I have the criminal record as proof. I'm old as fuck now, and I have several people that depend on me NOT being in jail, and to continue pretending to be a functional member of our neo-liberal society to keep them from starving in the street.
I hate that the entirety of my time and energy is now exhausted on enriching "investors". I saw the system for what it is from a young age and fell into all of the traps anyway. The traps are effective, but that does not mean that my political ideology is in alignment with the system that sets them. Still, I acknowledge your point that things cannot change without action, and most times that means violent and illegal action. The system is built to protect itself.
As for your link... Mao Tse-tung killed, brutalised and starved to death more human beings than any other person that has ever lived. MILLIONS dead. If the society you seek to build is based on that same, tired old philosophy then I will fight you every step of the way. It's a very strange person that looks at the history of China over the last 100 years and decides they'd like to repeat it.
Yeah, who would ever want to repeat this:
Famines were extremely common in China before the communists came to power and the Chinese people were among the poorest in the world. Mao certainly made mistakes, but these specific, dramatic events have been exaggerated to the point of obscuring the more general trend towards food security and poverty alleviation. Likewise, rural Chinese had no access whatsoever to modern medicine like vaccines, meaning that they were plagued by horrible, preventable diseases. But for some reason my history books neglected to mention things like the wildly successful Barefoot Doctors program, which drastically improved Chinese life expectancy and quality of life. I suppose stuff like that isn't all that exciting since we take it for granted, but the fact is that no country has ever lifted more people out of poverty and extreme poverty in so short a time as the PRC. And it certainly wasn't going to happen under the nationalists.
Right, so riding the coattails of industrialization along with every single other country that was involved in WW2 is the direct result of Maoist thought and brutal fake-communist rule? You need to check a map, I think you are lost.
China's industrialization and rise in life expectancy did not require Mao Zedong thought, but it did require someone who was interested in doing it, and the nationalists weren't, nor were the invading Japanese, nor were the various warlord factions following the collapse of the Qing, nor were the Qing, nor were the European colonizers. Every one of those factions only wanted to loot the country for the short term benefit of their ruling elite. Any one of them could have accomplished a similar miracle, but they chose not to. Obviously, it was industrialization that brought about the bulk of the benefits, but there are reasons why China had not previously achieved its potential on that front. It would've been better if China had been led by someone who didn't have big brained ideas like killing all the sparrows, but like I said, despite these mistakes the general trend is clearly positive.
Not every country experienced the same rise in life expectancy or industrialization after WWII, no. Even today, many parts of the world experience food insecurity and over 700 million people live in extreme poverty, so I have no idea what you're on about. Of course, the idea that China would've experienced the same level of growth without the CPC is an unfalsifiable counterfactual, but we can plainly see the trend of a lack of growth prior to communist control in the graph I posted.
Here's what the infamous communist propaganda rag The World Bank has to say:
Let me put it another way: how would the world look different to you if China was successful in alleviating poverty vs if it wasn't? How much information about the life of an average rural Chinese person actually makes its way to your feed? That's not an accusation or anything, there's lots of stuff happening everywhere around the world and no one can be expected to keep track of everything. It's just an observation that there are a lot of people, not just in China but all around the world, whose perspectives don't get proportionate representation in Western media or high school textbooks. It might be worthwhile to consider whether there are important details that have been omitted or deemphasized in the narrative you were taught.
Oh wait you're just a condescending dickhead, should have guessed when you complained about brigading and the prevalence of dunks.
Yeah being a debatebro does result in you being treated as such, if this is how you choose to interact with users you disagree with I can understand why you believe hexbears are innately hostile.
Several users engaged with you in a clear and concise and polite manner, providing well-thought out arguments, yet this is how you choose to respond?