(The title you see below mine is the wording chosen by the OP of the full post - I hope I do not cause offense, but I cannot control it showing up here as it is linked.)
They hit the nail on the head, there.
There was an asklemmy thread asking something like “what change would you like to see on Lemmy”, and I answered that I’d like to see the communists be nicer. I tried to be gentle to not upset them, but I guess they just have a victim mentality and some of them decided to defend their shit attitude. It went about how I expected.
I was just glad I didn’t get banned, but that’s more of a problem with lemmy.ml (I’m not privy to how things are handled on hexbear).
I don’t even mind the hostility. I get the hostility. It’s the dogmatic black-and-white views that irk me. Like, sorry that international politics doesn’t fit into your pseudoreligious slots of absolute good and evil?
I mean, when it’s not the issue of playing apologia for atrocities and totalitarianism. That gets my dander up in a hurry too.
There are a lot of things I dislike about them. But aggression? Nah, I get that.
Could you help me wrinkle my brain a bit today? I feel like I should know why you say you understand the aggression, but I don’t, and I really want to
Edit: And I hope this doesn’t come off like false naïveté, I am being sincere, please assume Chris Pratt “I’m scared to ask” intentions here
Sure thing. Essentially, the world is mega-fucked. I contend that it is less fucked than it was in the past, but it is still deeply unjust and needlessly ruinous. Being angry with that? Being angry with the people you see as the defenders of that? I get it. Legitimately, I do. And they’re not always wrong - hell, playing nice with people whose views are fucked normalizes those views. There’s only so far you can go with “Agree to disagree” as a core principle until you’re politely shaking hands with a Nazi.
So I get than they’re pissed, and I get that they’re right to be pissed, for that matter. I get that you have to go on the attack, and I get that giving someone asspats for defending oppression because they’re doing it politely is no way to effect change in your communities. And this goes for just about anyone who isn’t a fascist or a conservative (in the literal sense, not necessarily capitalist sense) with 0 imagination - you have to believe in your cause, and if your cause is important enough to fight for, you have to do it with all you’ve got.
BUT.
Tankies have a number of problems, and I won’t get into the whole bit about policies where they’re fascists painted red, because I could go on all day about that. Speaking from a purely strategic point of view, their idea of “No compromise” in some kind of weird accelerationist fantasy, where the liberal left losing means the socialist left will gain is just… not even close to connected to reality.
They’re not wrong to distrust liberals - there are no friends in politics - but they are wrong to oppose cooperation in all circumstances. And make no mistake, whatever their claims, it’s all circumstances. Any time an issue arises, pretty invariably the tankies will be on the wrong side of it, because cooperation is ‘supporting the system’. That would be fair if they were, I don’t know, performing a revolution. But they’re not. So all they’re doing in refusing cooperation is sitting on their asses and helping conservatives win, because it makes them feel smug.
Furthermore, they have the weirdest black-and-white view of the world, where they are more than willing to simp for regimes that are diametrically opposed to their values because “West Bad™”. I had a tankie on here a few months ago defending Iran’s clerical crony-fascism as some kind of noble blow against capitalism, and not a reversion to bureaucratic feudalism (or early European oligarchic mercantilism, if one prefers) of the kind that prevailed in pre-republic China.
Let’s not even get started on the weird China worship when it’s deformed into a pretty blatantly capitalist state, or the fact that they champion Russia as ‘anti-imperialist’ because it’s anti-West. As soon as someone is opposed to one of their pet issues (capitalism, the USA, liberals), and in support of none of the mentioned, nearly anything becomes justified or justifiable - from genocide to autocracy.
So, yeah. I get they’re pissed. I get going on the offensive, and I get not being nice about it. It rubs some people the wrong way, and you may not agree with it as a strategic decision, but that aggression against injustice the least objectionable thing about tankies.
Thank you. This pretty well sums up my perspective on them as well.
Thank you, more than my post can possibly communicate, for that explanation
Yeah I’m a communist and I agree. Like, dude even just tactically nobody wants to agree with people who act like that. I get that it’s frustrating when people disagree with things you believe to be fundamental moral issues, but also don’t be a dick to people who do agree or want to know more.
There’s a reason I don’t tell most people I’m a communist, they have bad opinions of us. I instead say what I believe and often they’re open to it. Some even agree. They can learn that that’s communism later
The big 3 - lemmgrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml, and now reportedly add midwest.social as far as this matter is concerned (though that one still differs in other matters, as regardless of the behavior of its admins, most users seem to just see the word “midwest” and think “I’m kind-of left-leaning myself so…”) - are extremely well-known for banning people at the drop of a hat. Much (exactly) like conservatives, authoritarianism is totally okay, so long as it occurs by their preferred, blessed places/people - it is only those “other” people, especially those who don’t agree hard enough, that derive the most ire from them.
There’s nothing that’s bestof material here.
There’s a famous quote that I like by Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head, when everyone around you is losing theirs…
This comment, offering calmness amongst the storm, intrigued me.
The comment is far less calm than you would have us believe. I think it just resonated with your own frustrations. That doesn’t make it good in any way.
I see it as a call for people to be able to discuss things calmly and rationally. Certain facts within the statement e.g. “get called an idiot shitlib and told to read some theory” are definitely emotionally provocative (as are terms such as “everything” and “nothing”), but indeed that happens sometimes, i.e. everything is relative.
The man who can keep his head when everyone around him is losing theirs, has found who to blame for the fuckup
Do you mean himself? Indeed he is the only one who can control the situation, e.g. by blocking them. On the other hand, OP (of the OP I mean, not the commenter promoted here) was a new member of Lemmy, so was shocked to see this behavior, and wanted reassurance and a community of like-minded people to stand with them.
I mean its best of lemmy.
Seems like these people have a “but I can save them” relationship with hexbear. It’s gonna end in tears for one of them and it’s not gonna be the hard-core communist
I would argue that the belief of communism is besides the point here - even if certain people really truly did know better than certain other people, about whatever matter, then that is all the more reason to be particularly convincing with sound argumentation espousing rational behavior, rather than trolling and brigading and banning tactics. And if not… then they may feel as free as they like to complain, as people who refuse to do otherwise go ahead and block them, and warn others about what they are likely to encounter if they go into those echo chambers.
Yes, agreed. It’s absolutely not about the communism, but it’s about the brigading and the general assholery
Fuck hexbear, they are all, and I’m not generalizing I’m being factual, all a bunch of neurodivergent anti-social, ignorant, dipshit, troglodyte morons who have never left the comfort of their homes or kept a stable job or have anyonein thier pathetic lives that love them. They are all burdens to the societies they happen to live in, and have become shut-in losers.
If you’re a hexbear moderator reading this: fuck you, ban me.
I wouldn’t put it so aggressively, but I stopped arguing with one of them recently, because I realized that I was punching down. I’m not going to try and diagnose, but some sort of neurodivergence that leads to hyperfocusing on irrelevant details, and black and white thinking.
I don’t think the answer is insulting them, that just validates their ingroup/outgroup mentality. The best thing to do is to just encourage them to keep on trying to improve themselves, and try to work on their maturity for when they become adults.
Hot take: sometimes it’s okay to punch down.
If they can learn more to live in the world, like to have discussions politely, then they can learn much over the years.
While if they must remain constrained to the spaces that will tolerate them… then they may, probably even, not.
Even if that were true - and it’s objectively not - sinking to that level does nobody any good.
Take care of yourself, and don’t worry overmuch about people on the internet being wrong, would be my take:-). (Also, they cannot ban you here - hexbear.net is an entire instance, and BestOfLemmy is not a community that resides on it, but rather Lemmy.World)
I’m just kidding, I love hexbear and their counter culture. They essentially exist to lure the crazies and unhinged and deserve to continue
Go tell em yourself instead of sticking to your safe space, big man
“Hello Hexbear, I would just like to tell you that I disagree–”
You have been banned for sinophobia
Already have. Been banned from another account, little guy
I did not create this community so that users would have community-on-community drama. I’m not necessarily against politics, nor do I wish to demean the discussion of servers. But its not helpful to Lemmy overall to keep this post here. As such, I’m locking this topic.
I do expect various communities to have more discussions about each other as Lemmy matures. And there needs to be a place for community (or even server-wide) discussion. But this “BestOfLemmy” community is not the location for that.
I realize that by locking this topic, meta-discussion is somewhat hampered. If you want to continue to discuss, please use the “Welcome Thread”. Or otherwise direct message me and I’m sure we can work something out.
