Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them?

Let's tally up the replies to me from Hexbear users.

• One insult.
• One taunt.
• One helpful reply with a little pushback (which might be deserved).
• One reply expressing frustration with how Hexbear users are treated collectively.
• One troll.

So a minority of Hexbear users interacted reasonably, while the majority of Hexbear users did not.

I know you personally can't do much about your instance's users making a majority of posts in bad faith, but Hexbear as an instance has a bad reputation across the Fediverse right now because of their behavior.

The more I look the more I see a severe clash of values between Hexbear and SIJW (and most Lemmy instances). Most Hexbears act like spewing insults, trolling, and supporting murderous dictators are blows for righteousness. On the other side, those Hexbears come off as juvenile delinquents wearing Red Guard armbands as they spray graffiti, break windows, and take offense at being told off.

Until Hexbear culture quits sanctifying insults and trolling, a lot of doors are going to be slammed in your faces.

Fair enough. I think you're delusional if you believe that your users are accomplishing anything important in real life, due to their terminally online status and lack of social graces, but sure.

It's amazing to me that you don't recognize that the internet has become the most powerful tool for social control in human history, and any attempt to counter the prevailing narrative will inevitably have to incorporate a digital component in order to succeed. But sure, Lemmy is just where you take out your frustrations on the libs after a hard day's work ineffectively unionizing and canvassing for irrelevant leftist politicians. Good luck with that, you're really making a difference 👏

Lmao no they're not. Humans are a communal species, it's literally what we've evolved to be.

However acting as if behavioral (or even worse evolutionary) psychology can in any way give a definite answer on what is human nature and what is learnt behaviour, is ridiculous.
There are no factual answers to the question "what is human nature?"

Just because you're a terrible person doesn't mean everyone else is.

Absolutely fucking wild to go yeah the US Inspired the nazis and aparteid and segregation, but china has the belt and road so its basically the same

The fuck?!

usually how conversations go is this

1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect
3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"
4. we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith

perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"

additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.

no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.

honestly it's a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry

and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis

I'll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with "trickle down" effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are "liberal".

Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that's almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I'm from for example.

Hope I could help.

Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you're thinking of is the one in US politics where "Liberal" is synonymous with "Left'. This isn't how it's being used here though.

Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.

So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it's decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.

So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He's still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.

This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.

Is there anything confusing about that statement?