My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
That’s why we add all tankie instances to our block lists.
…but tankies are fascists.
The “red” part of “red fascist” is a fairly important distinction so you don’t give libertarians free ammo in their rhetorical war to claim all fascists are socialists.
It sounds like you finally learned about hexbear firsthand and don’t have to rely on others’ reports on their behavior.
Putin needs more zealots like you.
It will be a great day when the fediverse defederates from all the tankie instances.
Hexbear tankies really are something incredible. I’ve been around left-wing politics most of my life and in the real world I’ve met like one or two people actually like them. Difficult to understand where they all came from. I’m thinking maybe it’s a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
They came from the response to rising right wing authoritarianism
No I do not condone or endorse tankies, just telling you why there are so many of them now
Reactionaries, in a nutshell
r/chapostraphouse, if that subreddit rings any bells. Lemmy was the place they came for refuge after getting nuked off of Reddit for brigading (shocking, I know).
I don’t remember such aggressive Russian and Chinese propaganda on that sub
I think that the nature of the community has changed, whatever it was before certainly doesn’t reflect who they are now — aside from the brigading.
I think they’re just the people who’ve gorged themselves on the most propaganda
I call them the MAGA of the left, they hate it, but they’re just as big of zealots for their own beliefs as MAGA is, they defend tyrants who’s values appear to align with theirs on paper and don’t understand the concept of nuance.
They believe in only black and white and the idea that gray exists, and the thought they could be (are) morally gray, along side almost everyone else, is intolerable to them, they have to be “Good”, no shades of gray allowed and the way they prove it to themselves is by constant virtue signaling and purging to stay on top of the imagined “morally pure” pyramid they’ve convinced themselves exist - a lot of them are ableist and don’t consider disabled people in their grand schemes
Life is messy, people are imperfect, they’re almost never a completely correct option that serves everyone equally. They want logic, which is simply making something internally consistent, context is irrelevant, they do not want philosophy which strives to incorporate as much context as possible in order to come to a conclusion
I agree, most of the tankies we’re plagued with online simply don’t exist in irl leftist spaces, because no one likes them and most people in irl spaces understand that you don’t get to call yourself a leftist and support authoritarianism in the same sentence.
If a tankie ever went public in the Baltics countries and said that shit out loud they would immediately get a well deserved beating. From some perspectives they’re equivalent to nazi sympathizers because thats what they basically are.
I know. I was fuming watching some halfwitt useful idiot propagandist saying that the animosity many Polish people have for Rusisia is a product of propaganda and not, y’iknow, the USSR’s horrendous treatment of their country in the 20th century.
I’m thinking maybe it’s a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
I know. The same thing happened with The_Donald. It started out as a meme space. It’s where Donnie as “The God Emperor” all started. But then people actually started taking it seriously.
So I guess we have Reddit to blame for the situation that America is in right now.
Thanks Reddit!
In the comments to their repost of my post here, they’re mocking my use of the word politics, but it’s all twisted like you described. On Gamingcirclejerk, it’s used satirically to mock bigots who say that people of color, trans people or women are political and thus unwanted in video games, but here in the Hexbear reading I’m suddenly the same as those people for not expecting a gaming community to be about the actual politics of authoritarian communism.
alot of cities, or regions were infiltrated by other right wingers, or tankies in the subreddits.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these aren’t real people or they are being manipulated by very effective propaganda the same way the qanon are.
If you look objectively, the various tankie movements are a net negative when it comes to promoting socialist ideologies. Its having an inverse effect of whatever they’re trying to accomplish.
Getting banned from hexbear is your initiation into the broader world of lemmy. It happens to everyone who isn’t a tankie at some point. Wear it with pride
Ukrainians have the same problem with neo-Nazis as other ex-Soviet countries.
Holodomor is a bit of a fuzzy matter, it’s picking a part of the more wide scale events relating to Ukraine and calling it genocide of Ukrainian people, while genocide involves intention to wipe out an ethnic group.
This was more of Stalin’s USSR treating people as expendable and hunger as acceptable when he needed the resources to build heavy industries for the military. Most of the grain producing areas of the USSR were in Ukraine and south of Russia, which is also where most of the victims were, because grain was taken by force according to planned norm and to fake reports (as it happens in such systems, administrators overreporting gains and underreporting losses).
So I somewhat feel strange when people talk of it like genocide example, but people arguing against that are usually worse, so let it be.
Anyway, the point of this comment was - those people don’t even think of such things, they act purely on vibes. Most of Soviet propaganda was intended for people literate in the first-second generation, it relied on vibes even more than, say, Nazi German propaganda or Western propaganda of that time and of our time. That allows it to work on people very far from Soviet reality or knowledge of USSR’s history. (Of course, there were more intelligent levels of Soviet propaganda, they seem almost fully forgotten, include marxist dialectics, optimism of the future, dreams of a united peaceful planet of intelligent people using their lives for learning and creation, and no war and violence. Would be weird to expect tankies to be familiar with anything of that.)
You can’t reason with people acting on vibes. Your comments’ vibes for them are predefined, you don’t affect them.
“holodomor is not a real genocide because stalin descided to just fucking let that specific group of people to fucking die from the famine that was fabricated through incompetence or other methods”
people making excuses for commie war crimes are same pieces of shit like those who make excuses for nazi war crimes. Literally a palette swap.
The whole fucking point is that this wasn’t
that specific group of people
, it was much bigger in scale. Before thinking you’re being ironic or calling others names you might want to check such things.
they targeted specific groups of people often as well. Soviet union conducted genocide on a mass scale and its entire point was same as nazis: take over large parts of europe and replace their populations with russians. Unless you are explaining to ukranians that holodomor was okay and just an accident, bro, dont worry, I wasnt calling you names. And those who I did call names deserve it.
Commies are literally palette swapped nazis.
What do you mean by vibes exactly?
Music, art style, socrealism in portraits. Soviet architecture (the monumental and decorative kind). All that.
Yeah people who know literally nothing about communism other than russian propaganda and dont know anyone who lived under communism tend to like it.
putin sympathizes with elon nazi musk. I wonder what they think about him.
Musk can’t be a nazi, he is white, loves trump, hates minorities, wants white power, supports putin and comes from a family with strong beliefs. There is no way mr putin would befriend nazis, as he is waging a war against invasion of nazis right this moment.
I think thats what they think.
*comrade putin
That’s the funniest thing. Like, if you were an original Hungary-era tankie, at least you could say “the Soviet Union is the leader of the worldwide Communist movement, I believe what the SU says about itself.” But Putin’s Russia is explicitly not Communist or Socialist in any way. Putin’s ideology is inconsistent but his public statements are all basically imperial or “blood and soil” nationalism. How do they twist this guy into being a “comrade?”
Watching .world libs talk about Hexbear is always entertaining because it’s like a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire swapping stories, with the bear growing 5 ft taller with each retelling.
You want to know why they think Putin’s a communist? You know you can just go there and ask them. They’ll tell you 1) they don’t, 2) what they do think about Putin, and 3) why they think what they do. It’s not hard, it’s not like it’s some big secret.
But I want you to bear with me and embark on a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you’re a full on MAGA chud, like, you believe George Soros is the communist CEO of Antifa aiming to kill all white people. But then you’re like, “Maybe I should try talking to these people so I can understand why it is that they want to kill all white people,” and you leave your bubble and seek out communists and antifascists all over the place and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspectives (regardless of what you think of it), and then you come back to Truth Social or whatever and try to share what you learned. How do you think that’ll be received? It’ll be received very poorly. They’ll say you’re a communist trying to spread lies or that you were duped by them and what they actually believe is what they’re said to believe, in the MAGA lore. If, on the other hand, you just repeat what everyone else in the community is saying about Antifa, putting no effort into understanding the actual beliefs of the people you’re talking about, you’ll receive praise and agreement, and those oh so precious upvotes. This is how their collective fiction is maintained, growing ever more divorced from reality.
Now, if you step away from lemmy.world and go to hexbear.net and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspective, and then come back to your community and try to share what you learned, how do you think that will be received? As opposed to just repeating what everyone in your community says? It’s the same shit, it’s the exact same social dynamic at play. If you want upvotes on .world/truth social, you have to accept the collective fiction about hexbear/Antifa and then develop and expand upon that fiction. Saying the truth will only earn you scorn, exclusion, and downvotes (see: this comment’s ratio, soon).
But like, at least internally, you should have the self-awareness to realize that obviously there isn’t any logical rationale for why someone would think Putin is a communist, in the same way that there is no logical rationale for why Antifa would want to kill all white people. Because it’s not based on any real thing that people believe, it’s a strawman created as part of a collective fiction that you’re not allowed to challenge if you want to be a part of a particular in-group.
Watching .world libs talk about Hexbear
Are the .world libs in the room with us right now? Because they’re not in the thread you replied to.
Yeah, they’re in the broader thread.
Besides, being a .world lib is like being a boomer, it’s really more of a state of mind 😉
They will claim to hate him (and Trump), and then keep on regurgitating propaganda constructed in favour of him.
They despise Trump and that’s why they love him. They’re an accelerationist death cult.
They fucking hate both, Putin because he’s a liberal and Musk because he’s a deeply unserious shithead.
Well, now you know why sensible admins defederate from this trash. I’d suggest using an app that allows you to block instances from your side and ignore them.
You don’t need an app, it’s a native Lemmy feature.
Only since 0.19.1, many instances haven’t updated yet.
That’s a year and a half. If you’re on an instance that is that outdated, you should consider migrating.
You’re better off, they suck.
I’m reading through the comments and, yeah, they really do. Holy shit what an insufferable bunch, especially that Seasonal_Peace guy.
Indeed, nothing has been lost.
What do you expect, it’s HexBear. They make ML look like neoliberals.
I align more closely with hexbear politics than almost all non-hexbear users. IMO, their politics is not the problem – they’re just an astoundingly toxic community.
That’s the honey trap.
They appear to be a progressive left wing community- very supportive of socialism, trans rights, big fat queer comm…then you interact and find out these are all just populist shoes they like to wear for kicking the shit out of people
I agree, and both their problematic hot takes and their toxicity are well-represented in OP’s link.
Elaborate!
I don’t really know how to do that other than to dig through replies from hexbear users pointing out how much vitriol they use. But in general, there’s a lot of name-calling (e.g. since you disagree with me, you must be a “white cracker,” “minstrel,” etc. – wtf kind of problem these guys have with minstrels I don’t understand); a lot of posting of flippant reaction images instead of actual responses, and so on. They’re clearly very angry about politics, which I get, but also have no interest in actually debating politics with any level of subtlety; even when I agree with someone in broad strokes but disagree about a particular item because I think it’s counter-productive to their own cause, I just get harshly told off. As a result, I can only assume they imagine everyone else is disingenuous.
Ah yeah, even in that thread, there were people responding with images or immediately labeling me a liberal without explaining or knowing anything about my views except that I seemingly sided with Ukraine. One person was very angry and needlessly escalatory with their “go fuck yourself”. Another felt the need to comment on my post history and try to use me running an Epic Games community against me. There’s a lot of ad hominem and straw man type arguments, which is usually indicative of not having strong counterarguments on the main subject itself.
I get the same shit on world or other super lib instances claiming I’m a Tankie or fascist apologist or what the fuck ever if I at all question the msm narrative, point out democratic failings, etc.
There’s a lot of ad hominem and straw man type arguments, which is usually indicative of not having strong counterarguments on the main subject itself.
That’s every internet discussion. You skipped over the constructive arguments and effortposts, didn’t address any of their valid criticism, and focused solely on the shitposts. If you’re not engaging in constructive discussion, mods can remove you at their discretion.
Are you serious? If anything, I ignored the angry comment, the low effort image comments, and the one outright denying the mass killing of millions of Ukrainians (which was my reason for reporting it), but I engaged at length with the people who were making more or less proper arguments. I could have engaged with the top one about Ukrainians praising Bandera and remind the person that they should have a perfect understanding of how that works, given that tankies (which was that user’s self-description) too praise the adversaries of their countries despite Stalin and Putin’s track records making Bandera’s pale in comparison, but I thought that would be way too triggering, so I didn’t post that draft.
No, that’s not it. I am not denying that there is constructive and high-effort activity on the instance. But the moment-to-moment conversation is superlatively hostile, (at least when I show up lol), and I’m making pretty tame comments – it’s not because of me. I don’t anywhere near that amount of venom in other instances.
Start making leftist (i.e. anti transphobia, pro worker, pro environment etc) comments on .world or .shit and you’ll experience a lot more vitriol. At least that’s been my experience and the reason I stay away from these cesspools.
Yeah that’s basically my feelings too. I wonder why they are so defensive. (edit: /gen)
I don’t know if this is sarcasm. If it isn’t, it’s because they’re supposedly leftists, but they have also been told they need to support authoritarian regimes who often harm people they’re supposed to want to help, especially Russia invading another much smaller nation (and fighting them poorly). They can’t reconcile these two beliefs, so instead they can only attack others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show
That’s a pretty unhinged insult tbh.
Every time I think of how fucked up things are now, I am glad we at least made some progress. Although recently, things seem to progress backwards with all the shit going on.
The term by itself goes back further than that, and doesn’t mean that originally. So it’s very “clever” of them to appropriate the term in this particular context.
Oh I see, didn’t realize this is what it was. Honestly that’s so much worse than what I was thinking.
Yeah, they’re the worst part of the worst periods of 4chan. I don’t think that’s where most of them come from, but it’s the same type of people.
The fact that they always support authoritarianism is just the cherry on top that makes them totally unreasonable.
Funny, I would’ve thought “the worst part of the worst periods of 4chan” would be all the bigotry, racism, transphobia, and that sort of thing.
And now you know why most instances have defeated from hexbear. It’s extremely toxic.
Agreed, though I’m still not sure I’d defederate even after this incident. It may be best that we inform people of what Hexbear stands for and let them decide.
Incidents like that were not why they were defederated. Those were just the cherry on top. They were defederated because they would organize brigading on communities they had no direct control over. Ie couldn’t just ban you as they did. For going against dogma. Grad was similar.
The main reason .ml is still federated is because they don’t generally brigade. Despite having the same broken dogma. So it’s sufficient to let people interact with them and learn as they recoil from being struck. When the vanguard strikes back against facts and reality. There’s a very good chance you would get the same treatment there if you were to pierce the groupthink.
By the way, where would Andrew Eldritch stand on this issue? He’s certainly in the know.
My nome de plume is more lovecraftian. As a child of the 70s and 80s as well as a goth. I certainly know the name. To be honest apart from generally having a leftward lean having come from the punk postpunk scenes. I really couldn’t tell you much about his particular politics. I generally don’t look to musicians for politics. They are just people like the rest of us . Far more often than one would like only disappointment is found. Other than that, Beyond him being musically inspired the only things I can really say about him. Mostly stemming from is history with Wayne and Patricia. Is that he is stubborn, a bit dickish, but dedicated.
I generally don’t look to musicians for politics. They are just people like the rest of us . Far more often than one would like only disappointment is found.
Relatable! Though when it comes to Eldritch, it’s hard not to think politics with song titles like Mother Russia and lyrics about “another motherfucker in a motorcade” or “I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and angels. I don’t really know what for”. And that makes me genuinely wonder if he’s as far gone as Hexbear or if he’s the more reasonable type (like you seem to be).
Anything is Possible, especially given his tenacity and willingness to dig in. Conversely John Lydon went from antichrist, anarchîst, with a tongue in cheek good save the Queen. To all hail good emperor trump.
Ouch.
If they want to guzzle auth propaganda they can get it from the tap and make a hexbear grad or ml account. The fact that you genuinely though a mod would do something about holodomor denial on hexbear shows you don’t fully understand what they’re about and why numerous instances already defederated ages ago.
Yeah, in my mind, Holodomor is not a gray area at all, even though I’ve seen my share of pro-Putin people from the West. One of the first encounters I remember was back on Diaspora. Funnily in relation to this ban, I’ve done a lot of research into neo-Nazism, but probably not enough into those Hexbear type views.
Just lurk more political comms there (and grad) and you’ll get an idea pretty quickly.
Nah, it’s pretty simple, America bad, tell me what else to repeat, RT!
Even the Wikipedia page is unsure, how are you so sure?
Wikipedia is not uniform. An article is as good as the active users behind it and the sources that support the claims. Still, on its actual page on whether Holodomor is a genocide, the summary is that it was real and had millions of victims, that most scholars at least hold Stalin responsible for it, that the EU and 34 other countries have recognized it as a genocide, and that even the person who coined the term “genocide” is of the same opinion. Simply put, it feels as though Wikipedia is trying to play two sides without really committing or succeeding in being convincing about it not being more or less clearcut
I think one encounter with hexbear is going to inform most users better than any third-party warning.
We’re witnessing the results of a first proper encounter here, in fact.
Yah, that’s why people call them tankies. Any criticism of the USSR, or even acknowledging why people criticize it, is a banable offense.
The term tankie get’s thrown around a lot, to the point of dilution, but the origin of it comes from western communist who defended the Soviet Union putting down the 1956 Hungarian revolution, notably using T-54/55 tanks. It later came to mean western communist that would ignore or downplay any criticism of the USSR, as “propaganda”. These days it could even be applied more broadly to “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies” IE people who defended Assad and Putin.
I think hexbear fits even a fairly narrow older definition. Which is why most major instances are defederated from them.
IE people who defended Assad
I don’t think y’all get to use that talking point anymore after 1500 people upvoted a .world post calling the only realistic alternative to Assad, “a known terrorist.”
Seems like most people on here hold the position that the US shouldn’t have even lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, let alone given him weapons and supplies. And not wanting to give al-Sharaa weapons and supplies is what you’re describing here as “supporting Assad,” is it not?
Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.
And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.
Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.
More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.
The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.
Do not feed the sea lions.
Oh, ok, so tell me, what’s your vision for Syria, exactly? Have Turkey and Israel annex the whole thing? Or maybe create a power vacuum in ISIS’s backyard? Practically speaking, one of those two assholes was going to end up in power, and if they didn’t, the situation was going to be even worse.
Your argument would be a lot stronger if our side was the one calling for active support of one side. You’ve got it completely backwards. My alleged “support” for Assad was always just, “I don’t think either side is worth supporting, so we should leave them alone.” Which is, you know, the proper “null” position when looking at any conflict. But the “null” position of anti-tankies seems to be, “Whatever the news says.” So rather than neutrality being the zero point, it’s seen as “supporting” the opposing side. So much so that you don’t even seem to realize how much your argument is shooting yourself in the foot.
Your side, the side that labels us as “tankies” and “Assadists” and so on and so forth every time we advocate non-interventionism, is the side that “defends one asshole because you like the other less.” In virtually every foreign policy debate, it’s not between which of two sides should be supported, it’s between supporting one side or not supporting either. If you want to convince me to adopt a position of interventionism when both sides are flawed, then you need to argue the exact opposite of what you just said.
long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies
Man, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but Russia isn’t even opposed to the US, as long as the Christian white supremacist fascists are ruling things.
The sheer irony of people playing defense for a white supremacist fascist state and then accusing someone else of being a “fascist sympathizer”. Like dawg the call is coming from inside the house.
I think the current Russian leadership has this detached fantasy of what America’s far right are like, this idea that they’re homebody rural folks who just want to keep to them selves and that if they’re in charge the US will disengage it’s self from the rest of the world, leaving Russia to treat Eastern Europe as a playground for their imperialism.
But the thing is, it ignores the agency of the eastern Europe to oppose them, and it ignores the fact that the the US far right is fundamentally narcissistic and egomaniacal. Ultimately the far right of the US will stay engaged in eastern Europe because they will perceive Russia telling them to get out as an insult and a humiliation. The only way the far right would disengage would be if they could frame it as them “winning” and that framing would be perceived as an insult and humiliation to the Russian leadership, so they won’t allow it.
So they will come to genuinely hate each other. I don’t think this will lead to the US far right suddenly deciding they care deeply about the well being of eastern Europe, but they also aren’t going to disengage completely.
“People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies”
I could never understand that. I mean I understand that for someone completely dissatisfied with the government in a Western country, it’s a lot easier to just switch sides and join a community of like-minded people with a large state-funded network of information behind it, but the morality of that is just beneath me. Besides, you won’t be completely alone even if you oppose or harshly criticize both the West and the likes of Russia or China.
Its very simple. Americans dont give a single flying fuck about eastern euros and consider them lesser humans, therefore being a nazi but with hammer and cicle instead of swastika is acceptable in america
A lot of people seem to believe “if you are for one thing I’m for then you must be perfect - anytime it is proved otherwise it was a small one time thing so I’ll ignore it.” It is really hard to admit someone you don’t like does do good things, or someone you like does bad things.
I mean, I think a big part of it is foreign influence efforts landing very strongly with dissenting groups in the US. Then forging influence networks using the extant distrust for the US’s government to dismiss nuance that would paint their patrons in a bad light.
Good thing the US world never spread propaganda and that you’re immune to propoganda yourself.
how can i remove hexbear, grad and ml from my lemmy? i use boost app. thx
You can block posts from different instancs, but you cannot block comments.
I’d recommend you switch to a server that blocks them, like lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz or discuss.online or use a different software like piefed which supports proper blocking (piefed.social).
In the app you can mute posts from instances, to also get rid of the users you need to use the webpage as someone else mentioned.
To mute the instance in the boost app go on the profile icon, lower right, settings (upper right), “Filters & blocks”, there you should see the option “mute instances”, type in the instance handle and posts from that instance shouldn’t show up anymore.
Log into the web version and block the instance. I just did this for lemmy.org yesterday and couldn’t find a way to do it through the app. I also use boost.
Oh, what did Lemmy.org do?
thanks. :)
Your Lemmy experience is about to get so much better.
