Rowdy and very active left-leaning instance which recently rejoined the rest of lemmy. They tend to be very vocal in calling out racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry, which has made certain users very angry. On the other hand, some of them seem to be very tolerant of certain authoritarian countries, which makes a certain other group of users very uncomfortable.
Left leaning? Every post I saw from them before finally filtering the instance was heavily right leaning and filled with everything you just claimed they are against.
The left right thing sometimes feel more like a circle and if center was at one end of the circle then tankies and the alt-right would be at the other end pretty to close to one another. They both want to own the people that are closer to center, they both have a love affair with Russia, they both deny genocides, they both believe in authoritarianism...
Yup, horseshoe theory. At a certain point, it's hard to tell authoritarians apart. I.e. why do you hate LGBT folks?
Stalin - they're non-conformist, so to the Gulag with with!
Hitler - the people don't like them, so we can blame them for our problems
Different justifications, same net result. So on LGBT issues, I can't tell Stalin and Hitler apart. The same goes for a surprising number of other policies.
This is correct. They're way too the left of US liberals and are generally sick of the domination US liberals have in US politics. (The same can be said of the UK.)
FWIW i'm mostly with them on this. I'm an anarchist and also far left, though i didn't join their instance when i came to lemmy (obviously).
"Bros" are the people you are talking to, who are complaining that the hexbears call capitalists right wingers. The hexbears consider liberals right wing because they are.
The second is an example of something a hexbear might say that someone who doesn't know anything about politics might interpret as right wing thought.
This should be extremely clear to a reader who understands both the current discussion and underlying basic theory, unless they just assume anything they can't parse is an attack and lash out in attempted retaliation.
Consider requesting clarification in the future before you resort to personal attacks. Especially ones that say much about you, and not much about the person you are attacking.
They tend to be very vocal in calling out racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry
To me it seems more like creative interpretation of everything as those things if it doesn't fit with their groupthink. It's not "calling out" if they're abusing it as a general purpose weapon, that's just bullying.
But bigots should be bullied until they shut up. No one has a right to treat others as subhuman. I often see casual bigotry on lemmy and other forums, and this is probably the first time I'm seeing such an active resistance. Hexbears are definitely blind to bad things when they are done by certain people, but they are 100% right in pointing out bad things done by everyone else.
That's not what I was talking about though. From what I've seen it seems like the average hexbear user's definition of a bigot is everyone who disagrees with them. So this isn't about bullying bigots, it's about using the concept of a bigot as an excuse for bullying.
If you think calling out racism, sexism or homophobia is 'emphasizing social tension in democratic countries', then you should take a long, hard look at what sort of person you are. And who cares who they are; they are doing good work making bigots shuts up.
I completely support calling those thing out in an unbiased and constructive way. Hexbear does neither, it's intent is to create division, there is no shared vision of harmony.
Doesn't help that leftist intellectuals don't do their damn research and blame NATO for the Ukraine war. Popular intellectuals really sound dumb the second they step out of field. Like Richard Dawkins not understanding transgender people and trying to frame it as "just asking question."
China is a "successful" example of a "communist" state and for young people attracted to communism that's kinda all they've got. Not a good approach imo, China fucking sucks.
Eh, Cuba is a decent example, but they never seem to talk about it too much. China is absolutely not communist by any means. They can call it anything they want, but they have the 2nd most amount of billionaires in the world right behind the US. They are capitalist at this point with a few communist policies sprinkled in their government processes.
It's where the far right go to play dress up as LGBT and call everyone else a nazi/be ruzzian apologists and blame the failings of the communist ecosphere on white western liberals.
It's basically the opposite of a sincere environment.
Threatening to show your private parts to a person you don't know because they made a forum comment you didn't agree with is the most right wing shit I've ever seen.
I realize this won't matter, because you have a mental wall up against recognizing that anyone might have reasons to attack your beliefs from the left, but
I'm basically picking threads at random because the entire site is full of posts and comments expressing the direst hatred for right-wingers and fascists.
None of us support Trump, just as none of us support Putin. But there is a sort of overcompensation in reaction to naieve and simplistic liberal narratives that might make it seem like we do.
Leftists get frustrated with the worldview that imagines, to steal a phrase, that Trump is Voldemort and Biden is Harry Potter. Anti-capitalists oppose the Bourgeoisie and Trump and Biden are both in service to them. It isn’t even simply that they are both capitalists - they are both neoliberals, who enthusiastically pursue the goals of neoliberalism - the transfer of wealth and power from the working class to the bourgeoisie, the enforcement of Western imperialism on a global scale, the withering away of society through austerity and privatisation, etc.
Of course it’s fine to support the democrats with the aim of harm minimisation. But liberals are wilfully blind to the fact that the system itself is not ‘rotten’ but rather functioning as intended, and that the scale of change required to have any hope of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, the descent into fascism and so on, cannot come from within liberal ideology at all let alone from the democrat party.
Trump is kind of funny too in the way that he infuriates liberals by openly unveiling reality. For example, no-one cared when Obama was putting children in concentration camps, because it was hidden away behind a bunch of shiny rhetoric about hope and change. But when Trump does the same thing and celebrates it, when he brings the racism and inhumanity of the US state into the light and declares fuck those kids, liberals are forced to see the true nature of their beloved country which their ideological fantasies would usually repress. The blatant hypocrisy of their rage is, from the perspective of cynical leftists, both amusing and bewildering.
This will echo what others have said: I think Trump was a horrible president, and him being of the capitalist class means I oppose him in a political economy sense. However, the stuff that he did that was bad was bog standard Republican shit: any other Republican would have also cut taxes, deregulated industry, and installed far right whack job judges. And I also think Democrats have done horrible shit; better/worse comparisons are mostly useless as they brush over specifics.
However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.
For liberals, it’s that he exposes the lie that elite education credentials stewed in urban culture must always produce socially progressive and competent technocrats, which is why they steadfastly insist he’s some Manchurian Candidate Russian plant because they need to see him as an abnormality and not reflective of the gross underbelly of the meritocracy. For conservatives, he exposes that for all their rhetoric they really love the idea of elites and hierarchy and being lessers to the titans of industry and the state. They just don’t want those titans to be brown, Jewish, or female. So they need to built a weird, cultish mythology around him as an ubermensch, anti-elite elite as to keep up the illusion of them being against hierarchy. All this neurosis is both highly illuminating, and really fucking funny.
How do you define far right? I usually think of it as pro authoritarian. And that seems to be commonly true on hexbear. Though they don't necessarily acknowledge that authoritarian regimes like Russia and North Korea are authoritarian.
Far right, as opposed to neoliberal, means fascist to me, where fascists:
Hold reactionary social views — are racist and sexist and homophobic, etc.
Support capitalism and despise socialists — see what happens to socialists under every fascist regime in human history. Hitler was in bed with big business, and some of the first people he put in concentration camps were socialists, communists, and labor organizers. In Indonesia, more than a million communists were murdered with US backing, a mass killing detailed in The Jakarta Method and a documentary called The Act of Killing. Socialists were also slaughtered in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, and Bolivia. This is incidentally why the US so often supports fascist regimes — they kill socialists.
And yes, are authoritarian, but being authoritarian is not what makes them fascist. What makes them fascist is that they use authoritarianism in service of the above positions.
They just passed the most comprehensive pro-LGBTQ rights package in history.
Cuba doesn't allow you to create a pro-capitalism party and start passing around leaflets saying "we should sell all our resources to American businesses," because if they allowed this, the CIA would spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year funding and training that party, installing agents into the leadership, co-opting local movements, publishing newsletters full of slander and propaganda, and doing who knows what else.
Cuba is authoritarian because they have to be. Allende's Chile was not authoritarian, and guess what happened? The US coup'd Allende and installed a fascist dictator who threw socialists out of helicopters and tortured them to death in stadiums. The PKI under Aidit in Indonesia were a peaceful socialist movement. What happened? Aidit was killed, and over a million Indonesian socialists were rounded up and butchered with American backing.
As for the Russian Federation, yes, their government is right wing. Putin is a homophobic capitalist reactionary. If you say this on Hexbear, you will find that everyone agrees. Go try it if you doubt me.
As for China, the more you learn about China and its government the less you'll want to give a simplistic take about China in a thread like this — but the short answer is no, they are not far right. They have some Confuscian cultural baggage but are increasingly progressive on social issues, and after decades of state-sanctioned capitalism to pull in foreign investment and evade the sort of economic warfare that hamstrung Cuba and the USSR, they are, at least ostensibly, adopting an increasingly anti-capitalist posture. As for Xinjiang, again, it's a complicated topic and I'm not an expert, but I do know that a lot of the worst claims have been demonstrated to be bullshit, from sources like Adrien Zenz and Radio Free Asia. Even the UN concedes there is no program of mass killing or organ harvesting. It's definitely still bad, but there's enough bullshit that I really don't want to wade into it here.
"Far-right politics, or right-wing extremism, refers to a spectrum of political thought that tends to be radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian,"
That's not how it works. Your beliefs are your own. You either want workers to control production, or you want owners to control production. You decide that based on your own moral convictions and understanding of the world.
I'm basically picking threads at random because the entire site is full of posts and comments expressing the direst hatred for right-wingers and fascists.
None of us support Trump, just as none of us support Putin. But there is a sort of overcompensation in reaction to naieve and simplistic liberal narratives that might make it seem like we do.
Leftists get frustrated with the worldview that imagines, to steal a phrase, that Trump is Voldemort and Biden is Harry Potter. Anti-capitalists oppose the Bourgeoisie and Trump and Biden are both in service to them. It isn’t even simply that they are both capitalists - they are both neoliberals, who enthusiastically pursue the goals of neoliberalism - the transfer of wealth and power from the working class to the bourgeoisie, the enforcement of Western imperialism on a global scale, the withering away of society through austerity and privatisation, etc.
Of course it’s fine to support the democrats with the aim of harm minimisation. But liberals are wilfully blind to the fact that the system itself is not ‘rotten’ but rather functioning as intended, and that the scale of change required to have any hope of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, the descent into fascism and so on, cannot come from within liberal ideology at all let alone from the democrat party.
Trump is kind of funny too in the way that he infuriates liberals by openly unveiling reality. For example, no-one cared when Obama was putting children in concentration camps, because it was hidden away behind a bunch of shiny rhetoric about hope and change. But when Trump does the same thing and celebrates it, when he brings the racism and inhumanity of the US state into the light and declares fuck those kids, liberals are forced to see the true nature of their beloved country which their ideological fantasies would usually repress. The blatant hypocrisy of their rage is, from the perspective of cynical leftists, both amusing and bewildering.
This will echo what others have said: I think Trump was a horrible president, and him being of the capitalist class means I oppose him in a political economy sense. However, the stuff that he did that was bad was bog standard Republican shit: any other Republican would have also cut taxes, deregulated industry, and installed far right whack job judges. And I also think Democrats have done horrible shit; better/worse comparisons are mostly useless as they brush over specifics.
However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.
For liberals, it’s that he exposes the lie that elite education credentials stewed in urban culture must always produce socially progressive and competent technocrats, which is why they steadfastly insist he’s some Manchurian Candidate Russian plant because they need to see him as an abnormality and not reflective of the gross underbelly of the meritocracy. For conservatives, he exposes that for all their rhetoric they really love the idea of elites and hierarchy and being lessers to the titans of industry and the state. They just don’t want those titans to be brown, Jewish, or female. So they need to built a weird, cultish mythology around him as an ubermensch, anti-elite elite as to keep up the illusion of them being against hierarchy. All this neurosis is both highly illuminating, and really fucking funny.
My big comment debunking yours is gone and there's nothing in the modlog, what the hell? It's even gone from my comment history. It had votes, it was definitely successfully posted and appeared for a while
*Found it in the lemmy.world modlog, which makes no sense, because I am not a lemmy.world user and this is not a lemmy.world thread, so they shouldn't have the ability to remove a comment from my comment history
I happened to still have it open in a tab I never refreshed, here's what it said:
I realize this won't matter, because you have a mental wall up against recognizing that anyone might have reasons to attack your beliefs from the left, but
I'm basically picking threads at random because the entire site is full of posts and comments expressing the direst hatred for right-wingers and fascists.
None of us support Trump, just as none of us support Putin. But there is a sort of overcompensation in reaction to naieve and simplistic liberal narratives that might make it seem like we do.
Leftists get frustrated with the worldview that imagines, to steal a phrase, that Trump is Voldemort and Biden is Harry Potter. Anti-capitalists oppose the Bourgeoisie and Trump and Biden are both in service to them. It isn’t even simply that they are both capitalists - they are both neoliberals, who enthusiastically pursue the goals of neoliberalism - the transfer of wealth and power from the working class to the bourgeoisie, the enforcement of Western imperialism on a global scale, the withering away of society through austerity and privatisation, etc.
Of course it’s fine to support the democrats with the aim of harm minimisation. But liberals are wilfully blind to the fact that the system itself is not ‘rotten’ but rather functioning as intended, and that the scale of change required to have any hope of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, the descent into fascism and so on, cannot come from within liberal ideology at all let alone from the democrat party.
Trump is kind of funny too in the way that he infuriates liberals by openly unveiling reality. For example, no-one cared when Obama was putting children in concentration camps, because it was hidden away behind a bunch of shiny rhetoric about hope and change. But when Trump does the same thing and celebrates it, when he brings the racism and inhumanity of the US state into the light and declares fuck those kids, liberals are forced to see the true nature of their beloved country which their ideological fantasies would usually repress. The blatant hypocrisy of their rage is, from the perspective of cynical leftists, both amusing and bewildering.
This will echo what others have said: I think Trump was a horrible president, and him being of the capitalist class means I oppose him in a political economy sense. However, the stuff that he did that was bad was bog standard Republican shit: any other Republican would have also cut taxes, deregulated industry, and installed far right whack job judges. And I also think Democrats have done horrible shit; better/worse comparisons are mostly useless as they brush over specifics.
However, I do think he’s fascinating, both in that he may be the perfect reflection of the American political body, and because he highlights fundamental contradictions in nominal American liberal and conservative politics that causes both his detractors and supporters to be extremely neurotic about him. He represents what liberals profess to be the ideal (coastal, urban, private school educated, Ivy League grad, made his money in NYC real estate; shit, any big money Dem donor clicks at least three of those boxes), and what conservatives profess to hate (urban, non-religious, elitist, arrogance), yet the former hate him and the latter love him.
For liberals, it’s that he exposes the lie that elite education credentials stewed in urban culture must always produce socially progressive and competent technocrats, which is why they steadfastly insist he’s some Manchurian Candidate Russian plant because they need to see him as an abnormality and not reflective of the gross underbelly of the meritocracy. For conservatives, he exposes that for all their rhetoric they really love the idea of elites and hierarchy and being lessers to the titans of industry and the state. They just don’t want those titans to be brown, Jewish, or female. So they need to built a weird, cultish mythology around him as an ubermensch, anti-elite elite as to keep up the illusion of them being against hierarchy. All this neurosis is both highly illuminating, and really fucking funny.