If so, what are some misconceptions or seldom known facts?
I’ll repeat a comment that I said once about hexbear:
I can feel a deep fire burning in almost all of Hexbear’s comments, quite different from most communities that just whine without purpose.
They are more of community than the rest of Lemmy.
I’m subscribed to their tech, gaming, and news communities. They’re fine, I don’t care to make an account on their instance but nothing wrong with the Hexbear communities I subscribe to.
that hexbear supports the entirety of russia. a lot of times i hear stuff like “they don’t actually care about queer people since they support russia”, which is a gross oversimplification of their views. they hate russia’s reactionary politics.
this misconception i think comes from the war in ukraine, in which if ukraine wins, they get to join nato. hexbear considers nato to be an imperialistic organisation that holds power towards a large portion of the world, and therefore, anything that opposes it should receive support, albeit critical.
God forbid a sovereign nation can choose its partners…
Always very annoying listening to dipshits for whom history began in 2022 lament on how Ukraine’s sovereignty was violated and they should be allowed to align themselves without interference. Just as long as they don’t align against the west in which case you perform a violent coup on the behalf of neo-nazis who begin campaigns of ethnic cleansing.
But that didn’t happen doesn’t matter.
There is no scenario where a country can unilaterally help themselves to the internationally recognized territory of another. That this simple truth is even in question to you entirely dismisses any point you are trying to make.
Russia has no claim in any way shape or form to any territory that is not currently internationally recognized as theirs, doesn’t matter if the country was in the SU, Warsaw pact, russian imperial sphere, has russians living there, has russia feel “encroached upon”, or any other imbecilic pretense apologists like to bring forward. It isn’t theirs.
Burgerland occupies Hawaii and part of Cuba just to name a couple of places, but sure it’s defending sovereignty of a nation where it overthrew the legitimate government in a violent coup. 🤡
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE STATES GUYS, THE STATES
Fuck them, i have no love for them either.
The states is literally running a proxy war against Russia using Ukraine, but yeah we’ll just ignore that important context because it doesn’t fit with the narrative you’re peddling right?
Your selective attention betrays your actual position
And what would that be? I think i was pretty clear. I want russia to stay within their borders, for all I care they can oppress each other until the end of days. Though I would, unsurprisingly, not shed a tear if the country collapses. Same goes for the states.
I also already gave you a reason why I don’t believe it a worthwhile use of my time to engage with this literal whataboutism on a serious level.
Usually when you post beneath a comment it’s understood to be a reply to that comment, which doesn’t seem to be the case here because you’re completely talking around everything I said in the comment above.
Speaking of imbecilic though, what’s your point at all? “You’re not allowed to do the thing you did fait accompli because it’s against the rules I made”
Baby brain.
That this simple truth is even in question to you entirely dismisses any point you are trying to make.
I don’t need to engage with you over this. We fundamentally disagree on a moral absolute.
Well can Eastern Ukraine?
Because as a “sovereign” nation, Ukraine is an amalgation nation of two bordering existing countries of which the partner organisation NATO’s sole existence in question is to be enemies with one of the two bordering countries and thus used deadly violence to suppress any dissent from its Eastern half.
This is in stark contrast to the US full-scale invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and further invasions of Libya, Syria and Palestine which WERE sovereign nations, where no such dilemma took place.
Bush’ full scale invasion of Iraq was based on lies.
Bush’ full scale Afghanistan invasion was based on searching a fugitive.
The full scale bombardment of Lybia was because the US did not like Lybia’s leader.
Same with Syria.
For Palestine, it’s Israel that wants to genocide the country.Don’t forget their unprovoked, full scale bombardment of Yemen
Right. I would not call it unprovoked, but the full scale bombardment is all to support Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
thus used deadly violence to suppress any dissent from its Eastern half.
The violence started when the Russian puppet president walked away from an EU trade deal that he literally campaigned on making, then cracked down on the resulting protests. Then an actual Russian created rebellion started. Calling that “suppressing dissent” is disingenuous as fuck.
“it’s not suppressing descent if you accuse the people you’re supressing of being Russian agents first”
Thank you for that insight, senator McCarthy.
Ukraine population: overwhelmingly supports trade with eu.
You: CIA backed color revolution!
Russian soldiers: taking geotagged selfies in Ukraine by the dozen, revealing overwhelming Russian military involvement in 2014.
You: Nuuu, putin wouwd nevewww 👉👈
Ukraine population: overwhelmingly supports trade with eu.
Reality is whatever I want it to be
It’s a really convenient narrative based on the fallacy of homogenizing Ukraine. Let’s take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
here’s how the election in 2004 went:
this is the 2010 election:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
Either you’re intentionally spreading misinformation here, or you’re far too ignorant to discuss the subject you’re attempting to debate here.
“Suppressing descent is fine if you claim the population ‘overwhelmingly supports’ you”
Why even bother with elections at that point? Just claim anybody who wouldn’t vote for you is a RuSsIaN AgEnT
Support for eu trade was high enough that yanukovych campaigned on it. Are you saying that’s not true?
Also are you saying contracted Russian soldiers weren’t in luhansk and donetsk in 2014 and onward?
Why would you lie about something that’s well documented, this isn’t reddit.
The greatest lie the west ever convinced itself is that trump is a Russian puppet, how many levels of American bureaucracy has to be compromised to even allow for this? Hahaha
Yanukovych. Try to keep up.
Like it or not, the reality is that regions in the East of Ukraine were very much on record as supporting Yakunovych, and closer relations with Russia, for decades. There’s only one reason the Minsk agreements fell through, and it’s because they did not want to give eastern regions autonomous votes.
If the other half of your country coup’d your president, half-outlawed your language and ignored the political will of your half of the country, you might have a right to be upset and label that suppression.
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You can leave out the ‘puppet’ in your statement, but keep Russian. Again, Ukraine is half-Russian, half-Polish. To say that a Ukrainian president is a puppet of either country is like saying that an Australian president is a British puppet, with the difference being that Australia is a settler colony while Ukraine is/was a border dispute solution.
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Yanukovich walked away from the deal because the EU made too many demands that would have resulted in millions of job losses. It was a bad trade deal and so he walked away from it hoping for renegotiations of a deal that would not completely ruin his country.
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“cracked down”. What does that even mean? Who gets to decide a protest has been “cracked down”? Has anybody ever written about protests being “cracked down” during the Palestine liberation protests? Covid protests? Jan 6 2020 protests?
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The insurgency, let’s just use the teminology used when it happens in an Anglo nation shall we?, consisted of terrorist attacks by snipers that shot Ukrainian police officers dead and civilian protesters, who wanted their country to go into financial ruin, dead.
People that have come forward saying they were the instigators of this violence were neither part of the Ukrainian law enforcement, nor part of the protest groups, but foreign mercenaries who got paid or part of ultra-right factions. It’s a more believable story than what the other side claims, where police officers who are trained to uphold stability mow down their own colleagues and civilians for stability’s sake without refusal. It’s more believable as the first story doesn’t have snipers shooting their own snipers dead just to create chaos. That wouldn’t make any sense. People do not tend to kill people of their own group, not just because those are their friends they can rely on, but also puts them in an extremely vulnerable paranoid position of themselves being next. How would you know when to stop? How would you know you’re not on the list? Would you be killed from orders of their higher ups? Collaegues out for revenge of their friends? -
And all of this doesn’t change the fact that Ukraine was banning all things related Russia after the coup and mowing down indepedence voters at the ballot station in the Donbass region.
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I think that has a good chunk of libs that see “Critical Support” and think that you support that soo much that is doing double damage…
A lot of people have a purist attitude to politics. “Critical support” is a vital part in understanding these positions of Hexbear and others, that one can support a side of a conflict and still be critical of it. Geo-politics isn’t a simple binary. No two groups will perfectly align, but that doesn’t mean they can’t see mutual lines of benefit despite their disagreement. For example, just because someone supports Ukraine doesn’t mean they have to defend everything their government does, such as supporting the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. It would be absurd to assert that! Similarly, it would be absurd to tell the communists still crying about 1989 that they support the entirety of the capitalist Russian Federation, the same RF that destroyed many of the gains the USSR made for both countries by enabling oligarchs to loot the place and plummet life expectancy.
They don’t have purist politics, though. They support NATO and Genocide Joe. They have a xenophobic imperialist politics.
Just lurk there for a while. IMO, biggest misconception is that they’re omnicidal lunatics. They have a lot of in-jokes and bits that seem incomprehensible and border on unhinged to an outsider, and sometimes they kinda lean in to the perception. But if you spend enough time there you realise they’re very intelligent and deeply empathetic people. The “unlimited genocide on the first world” rhetoric is an expression of frustration rather than actual intent.
Literally something I’d say like 12 years ago.
Removed by mod
Browse the news mega or other serious threads. Not everything is a joke post, though there are many of those.
As far back as I can recall, there have been at least two types of internet forums.
There are ones where dumb people go to pretend to be smart, and there are ones where smart people go to pretend to be dumb.
The problem with the ones where smart people pretend to be dumb is that eventually it attracts actual dumb people. Then the forum dies.
Which one is .ml?
Yes.
If they’re deeply empathetic people, then why do so many of them support the Ukraine invasion and want them to roll over and give their country away to Putin?
Because Ukraine isn’t part of the first world, they do still want unlimited genocide against the second and third world.
This is covered in another thread on this post if you actually want to know. I suspect you don’t, and just want to post gotcha arguments in bad faith.
gotcha arguments in bad faith.
Pretty much sums up all of hexbear here.
I did come across someone’s explanation that they think Putin isn’t a bad guy just because he invaded Ukraine but that argument doesn’t really hold any water with me. I suppose the last hexbear users that i interacted with who wished death upon me for once again pointing out their lies and disinformation were also extremely empathetic? They’ve been defederated from most of lemmy because they’re super empathetic people too? Do you think people actually believe this stuff?
the least propagnadized lemm.ee lib has logged on everybody
They have empathy for people outside the usa empire. Its not something a western supremacist like you would understand. Did you, for example, know that the people outside the usa empire are real humans? Because when I was a liberal, I didn’t.
Wholesome “every single motherfucking one of you should fucking die in a meat grinder because I’m very upset at what Rachael Maddow told me in 2016” moment
Here’s an idea! If you have so much empathy for them, take their place! Spare someone kidnapped off the street against their will the horrible death you want them to suffer on your behalf! You’re the one braying for blood, you go spill it.
This is not what “so many of them support” and I know you cannot source a popular post to prove otherwise because it doesn’t exist.
Hexbear oppose Putin, they just also recognise Ukraine and NATO also behave very shittily, sometimes moreso. There’s a recognition that the west have gleefully egged on this war at the expense of innocent Ukrainian/DPR/LPR/Russian civilian lives.
I am not joking when I say that I have seen evidence of the Ukrainian government wanting to destroy the Russian Federation than I have seen evidence of the Kremlin wanting to destroy Ukraine.
I accidentally subscribed to one and it was filled with tankies acting like they were the true and righteous moral bastions of society while espousing blatantly ableist ideas and pure wishful thinking rewrites of history. I left and blocked that community.
Ableist ideas? Where? Report those, ableism is a bannable offense on Hexbear. Yea, there are a lot of Communists on Hexbear, same with a lot of Lemmy, so that makes sense.
I do browse. I agree with them on many political issues, and yet I can’t seem to get along with any of them. Why does it seem like they are all such assholes?
Huh. First time I saw this post, I figured it was bait. I’m pretty sure I was subbed to a couple communities on hexbear. Occurred to me today when I encountered this post again that I’d not seen any hexbear content for a while. Turns out my instance has it blocked. Not sure if it’s for technical reasons or moderation reasons. Does that go in the mod log or somewhere?
My instance also blocks both Lemmygrad and hexbear, even though Lemmygrad doesn’t really do trolling
I had a burner account back years ago before it was federated with the rest of Lemmy.
I’d already well-passed the stage where I was spending more time online than doing actual movement building on the ground so the low-content and causal comms are too chatty for me to even bother. There’s also some underlying abusive moderation (at least there was a couple of years ago), but that’s something I’ve seen on everywhere from .world to .ml, this is volunteer work and beggars usually can’t be choosers, there’s nearly always someone on a staff team who just deletes things they don’t like. Purging that behavior is tough without a healthy mod culture and mods who care enough to start a fight.
On the other hand, there’s some good comms among the slop and they keep liberals from coming in every minute with dumb questions they could have checked with a single web search or just reading an FAQ, so that’s a huge plus (tourists can go to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml with any good-faith questions). Their dev work is commendable. For the place that it is, it’s done alright for itself, there’s a decent foundation from what I can tell, which is especially hard for a big-tent socialist site to build given the conflicting worldviews and values that arise.
If so, what are some misconceptions or seldom known facts?
It’s pretty hilarious how many of them seem repulsed by /leftypol/. They’re remarkably similar cultures, just less PDFs and “read a fucking book” culture, less catgirls and no ironic slurs.
I have an account on Hexbear, I also mod their !parenting@hexbear.net community, which has been growing steadily. It’s always wild to me to read what people think goes on at the site because, in my engagement with folks, it’s clear that everyone is just someone trying to get by in this crazy world we live in. All this talk about “tankies” or whatever, is pretty “online” behavior, and Hexbear often appears to me the least online by comparison. Sure, we’re active on the site, but I don’t get the sense that many people are wildly active outside the site, many people have negative views on most social media and have no interest in it.
The other thing that people never seem to notice is just how active our !mutual_aid@hexbear.net community is, and just how generous the users can be. There is a real sense of community on Hexbear that I struggle to find on the wider internet. That probably has a lot to do with the relative size of the user base.
The term “tankie” exists independently and prior to the popularization of the internet
The resurgent use of the word “tankie” is a very online anti-communist pejorative, akin to “commie,” “pinko,” etc. I have heard the word “tankie” maybe once in real life.
I love hexbear, have an account there too. They are nice and I’ve never had a problem.
i used to. they’re terrible. i couldn’t stand the infighting and dumbassery.
They’re just fine. Our views don’t always align but I’ve found suspending disbelief is very different from believing.
I have a Hexbear alt. I use it, ironically, when I don’t want to talk politics, or if I want to keep up with the news, as the News mega is very useful.
A lot of people hold contradictory views about it, or think it’s some hyper-toxic space, but in my experience its less toxic than most other instances on Lemmy and gets into far fewer arguments. I love using the games comm and other hobby comms.
I also run a Capital weekly reading thread there, though momentum was hurt by the debacle a few months back regarding domain name.
I think they’re fine except for their more ridiculous vegan coms
they’re pretty fun and very queer (both strange and rainbow)
