Hey thanks for the input! I'd like to say that we users on hexbear can get rude or rowdy and that can seem jarring to some people. I understand how that crassness can be off-putting.
To those people I'd encourage that they take a step back and observe what that rudeness comes in response to. To me many of you are just as rude, if not much more. I've yet to see hexbears mistreat anyone that disagrees in good faith. It's a website with a low tolerance for debatebros and smuglords, so if you behave in that way, yes you will be treated with derision.
In other words: What goes around comes around.
To the users that feel offended I ask you this: Do you not think civility is a two-way street? If you initiate discussion with a smug gotcha, why do you feel you deserve to be met with anything but the same attitude? If your response to a well-thought out post is "smh Kremlin propaganda", why do you feel as though you deserve to be treated with respect?
I disagree with plenty of hexbear users on many issues, yet it has never been an issue. To me it is you that have a hostile site culture. It is nigh impossible to just ask a question or dissent. Asking for sources to claims gets me nothing or at the very best a link to Wikipedia after hounding one of you for ANYTHING that can move a discussion forward in good faith.
I hate tankies but quoting the black book of communism and calling people degenerates for disagreeing with you just makes you sound fashy more than anything
Hmmm, those are a lot of numbers with zero citations. Probably because they are from the black book of communism, which has been thoroughly debunked. They count Nazi deaths in WW2 as “victims of communism”. Get out of here with your fascist rhetoric.
Looks like your shift is over soon, Ivan. Maybe you can get back to your favorite pastime of stacking river rocks, or would your regime not even allow that?
Your regime’s suppression of outdoor cats is disgusting! Do you know how many outdoor cats we have to accept as refugees here? So many that we are forced to hold them in detainment facilities and separate them from their families. It’s sad but you know, our leaders are doing their best and the old administration was definitely much worse. Just don’t ask me to prove that
Excuse me, I believe you mean temporary cat overflow holding facilities. And if you dont like them then you'd better vote blue jack, cause the other guy's way worse!
^ That’s me after being scratched by your dad’s sharp dick. We were both liberals before that, but you know what they say, “jerk off a liberal and a fascist cums”
Is that supposed to be me? Real mature. Admin of the year over here claiming I’m having a breakdown. I’ll show you a breakdown. Your dads car is gonna have thousands of dollars in damages and I’m going to convince him you did it while lashing out against your stepmom
I don't have, like, weird hang-ups with sex being mentioned on the internet, so I'm not sure what you're going for here. Like I get it's supposed to be an insult, but you can really do better. I believe in you!
Is it insulting that I sucked your dads dick? Are you saying your dad can do so much better than me? I know I’ll never be your real mother but I’m trying to make him happy! I’m sorry that’s not enough. I hope we can have a civil conversation about this one day
Go ahead, call your volcel police, their jurisdiction doesn’t hold weight here!
I'm going to try give this nonsense a serious response, even though it's not worth it. That's actually one of the times hexbear is the most inactive. Our userbase is majority American, and is more active during daytime in the US.
I know this because I've used hexbear in the mornings in my timezone (CAT) which is usually an hour behind MSK, and the website is completely dead. Only a few European users active.
Fuckin hit the nail on the head with this one. I run in a lot of leftist communities there are always tankies, but honest to God that shit doesn't come up unless you seek it out.
Hexbear is a whole ass community of people not some kind of weird ideological monolith populated with people who spend their whole day harassing others.
On top of that I haven't even seen them do anything that wild?? There is NO WAY that this whole drama could possibly be in good faith. The outrage FAR outweighs any evidence of foul play.
Like it's the internet if you go into a discussion about politics expect it to get fuckin heated and don't run crying about defederating bc someone hurt your feelings.
No one is seeking you out and making you spill your politics publicly so they can bully you for not being a marxist-lenninist-maoist-purist I fuckin promise dude.
The level of pearl clutching I've been seeing about hexbear since I joined Lemmy is ASTOUNDING and mad counter productive if we're trying to make the fediverse work.
I had some conversations here. They were saying that north Korea is a lovely democracy, Russia is totally justified in Ukraine, and China isn't doing anything to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Sure those are only ideological differences, but they are really big ones.
China isn't doing anything to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Not anymore no. They were running re-education centres that had mandatory stayover Mon-Fri, return home on weekends. Those all closed literally 2 years ago now but liberals still scream about it.
They were saying that north Korea is a lovely democracy
DPRK positions are generally quite critical and measured when it's socialists discussing with other socialists. However when a liberal comes in with all their propaganda and brainworms though you get the unironic stanning because it's practically a waste of time having the conversation. If you wanted the measured and mature conversation about it you'd first have to demonstrate genuine willingness to learn and engage with intent to learn, most liberals are incapable of this and want to talk about haircuts or how the entire country is somehow one big play pretend show put on purely for white western liberals and actually things are so bad because they unironically believe the propaganda from defectors making up absurd stories like they have to push the trains because you lot actively want to believe anything you're told.
I'd have the measured conversation about it, but I seriously do not think your response to this will be mature or academic enough for it.
Sure those are only ideological differences, but they are really big ones.
Socialists are much further away from you than you are away from republicans. We know this. We point it out regularly.
I will say it's interesting once you notice how wild the story version of North Korea is and how many of those stories get debunked, the media has no desire to tell the truth they're just desperate for a shock piece.
I mentioned to a different commenter, but I'll copy here. I guess justified might be stretching it, since some people were saying morality and justice were useless to try and apply to nations. I guess that would be defending the amorality of Russia?
I think morality is just not a very useful metric for discussing what states do because none of them are moral, ever. "We're doing [thing] for justice!" is 100% propaganda 100% of the time. It was propaganda when the US said it about invading Iraq and it's propaganda when warhawks say it about Ukraine defending itself. Their real motivations of american policy makers are throwing ukrainian people into a meat grinder because they want to see russia harmed for global competition reasons.
If we want to talk morality. The only moral thing to advocate for is the shortest possible path to the lowest possible number of lives lost. The quickest end to the war. The liberals claim Russia want to genocide all of ukraine because they know that if they drop this claim they have no way to continue the war, because continuing the war by keeping them armed only costs lives for an unwinnable meatgrinder.
Advocating for the continuation of the war is immoral. It will cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more lives, will not be won, and for what? Lines on a map? We're socialists, we don't care about which bourgeoise state exploits the people, we care about the people. Choosing to advocate for an action that continues the war is just nationalism, the act of defending a bourgeois-state at the cost of lives. We don't want to spend those lives. We're not cheerleaders for one group of billionaires (the west) or another group of billionaire capitalists (russia) having their rule over the ukrainian people or russian people. We ultimately want them both gone and want the people to no longer be exploited. In the meantime we want the least harm. The least harm in a war is the shortest end to that war, not dragging it out as long as possible for the highest number of deaths possible.
And that's it really. That's what I think about any argument over "morality" in this war. I think we have the morality position, liberals and fascists advocate for a nationalist position, they care about states and lines on maps more than people. We are going over exactly the same moral contradictions that the internationalists vs the nationalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s went over. The nationalist position led to ww1 and ww2, then everyone lost their taste for nationalism, until now a few generations later the cultural scars caused by nationalism have waned, particularly in america where they've never had scars from nationalism.
I think the moral position is to advocate to minimize the number of lives lost and injustice done over all, not just the number of lives lost during the war. But I agree all other things being equal, a less life costly war is better.
Russia does pretty aggressive demographic reshaping to areas they've conquered. Like in Crimea, they moved much of the local population and replaced them with people more loyal to Russia. It isn't just to move people around like that, uprooting peoples lives for more favorable demographics. Plus the stress of being forced to move to somewhere unfamiliar is also quite difficult, causing some shorter lifespan. If Russia conquers more territory, they'll likely do the same there. That will lead to increased distress and death. So that needs to be weighed against the cost of war.
The bigger concern though is the longer term outlook of Russia. If Russia is able to start more wars, that will kill many many people. So we do not want an outcome of this war that will permit more wars to result. If Russia is right and Western support for Ukraine just dries up and they can take territory and people, Russia will be more inclined to try it again other places in the future. This invasion was based off of their successful invasions of Crimea and Georgia (sorry brain slip) for example.
I would like a quick end to the war, but not one that sacrifices many civilians or leads to more war in the future. So I support giving Ukraine as much aid as is reasonable to quickly win the war to minimize loss of life.
Why just war theory matters is because the public still influences policy in democratic countries. If a war is unjust, the public is more likely to be against it, which is bad for reelection chances of those involved. I agree we shouldn't take the government's justification at face value, but instead form an opinion based on our moral framework. So it's still useful to critique the government since they need to listen at least a bit.
Edit: also, the death of civilization, especially children is usually more unjust than the death of willing combatants. This effect isn't huge, but minimizing civilian casualties is better than minimizing military casualties.
Oh hey! You never got back to me on whether you felt that the discussion we had exposed some more nuance on the subject of the war in Ukraine, I assumed you must have gone to sleep or something. But I was really enjoying our discussion and was genuinely curious if you felt it had been productive. Maybe you just wanted to argue with other people more, but it seemed like we were making progress.
For what it's worth, I didn't say Russia was justified, I said the war was bad and the US made decisions that lead to this situation. I'd appreciate it if you would represent me fairly. I certainly hope you're representing everyone else fairly too, I didn't really read the other discussions you were having.
I blocked all hexbear communities after last night, sorry for not getting back to you. There were just to many conversations going on at once.
Yeah I don't think yours were the most wrong takes on Russia out there. I can't see them now though since I blocked the community. I guess justified might be stretching it, since some people were saying morality and justice were useless to try and apply to nations. I guess that would be defending the amorality of Russia?
You didn't actually say any of my takes were wrong, you asked clarifying questions or moved from what we were talking about to another related issue that bothered you. It's truly unfortunate that you've blocked the community and can't go back to see the context, I felt like we were getting somewhere. I'm sure you had your reasons though.
Yeah there were some good ones in there. But I got sucked into answering and asking several hundred questions for 6 hours and didn't think it would be a good thing to do regularly.
I've seen plenty misbehaving, but I have seen a lot more complaining about them. I'll see a heavily upvoted comment like "wow the hexbear tankies are out in force today" and I'll scour the thread to find one heavily dowmvoted comment of that pig picture emote. The whining has gotten far more irritating.
I wouldn't take that as representative of the site as a whole. My guess is that they were just ironically "misbehaving" since the person they were replying to said they haven't seen a Hexbear user misbehaving, but I could be wrong since we're not a monolith in our thought processes or posting habits.