I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point

Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down

  • scoobford@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Many of them, yes. They’re among the most radical of the leftist instances, which means that they attract a lot of propagandists and tankies. They have some perfectly reasonable people too, but you know, vocal minority. Its the main thing most people notice about those instances.

    Many people block hexbear, Lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad for these reasons.

      • TraitorToAmerica@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.

        https://redsails.org/tankies/

        here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long

      • Facebones@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        In theory, the things the other replies said.

        In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.

        I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.

        • expr@programming.dev
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          3 months ago

          I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.

          I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.

          FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.

          • Facebones@reddthat.com
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            3 months ago

            I was sure to not be an absolutist for a reason, I’m not always cruising Lemmy. Hexbear in particular absolutely has a sense of humor sometimes that I myself am a bit old for, but judging them for that is very much more “Old man yelling at clouds” than anything. If you don’t like it, sure, but that doesn’t say A or B about them.

            Maybe there’s blatant apologism, but in my experience it’s people taking whatever scraps they can find to claim “Apologism.” For example, discussing high speed rail development in China. Admiring a rail system isn’t “blatant apologism,” but most lemmy liberals would call it as such, because it was built by China. It’s like calling me a Putin apologist for discussing Dostoyevsky. Yes, I’m admiring a creation of the country or it’s culture, but I’m not saying that their current governments are the only way forward or really saying anything about governance at all.

            Again, I’m not claiming you haven’t seen something “blatant” before (I could name so many one off events I’ve witnessed that don’t hold to norms,) I’m just saying that people claiming it to be this widespread norm on every leftist instance are spreading disinformation.

            • expr@programming.dev
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              3 months ago

              Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.

              • Facebones@reddthat.com
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                3 months ago

                As I mentioned, I’d be inclined to wonder what you’re considering “apologism.” The fact that you didn’t address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to “apologism” to take up arms against instances you don’t like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        “Leftists” who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Apologists for authoritarian regimes that have either historically been communist or paint themselves as such currently.

        Or as far as most of .world is concerned, anyone to the left of Joe Manchin.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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        3 months ago

        Pro-China sycophants. They’d be the ones driving the tanks at Tiananman Square.

        I’d also argue that these people only put up a facade of being leftist. I’ve never once seen a hexbear user actually make arguments for leftist policies, socialism, or communism. They just shitpost a bunch of anti-American memes and rally for the Russian and Chinese governments.

          • irreticent@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            How do you know a tankie from a government paid shill like UniversalMonk?

            I’m not familiar with UniversalMonk. Why do you think they’re a government paid shill?

    • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I have yet to see any reasonableness from hexbear.

      Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

      They brigade like annoying unwanted fleas that you cannot get rid of.

      • Christian@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

        Definitely a joke, I’m having trouble imagining a person who could believe this in earnest, let alone enough to say it out loud. I’m even having trouble accepting that you can imagine that a person would say this with no sarcasm. No one actually believes that.

        edit: just realized that maybe you’re trying to be funny and I’m slow on the uptake

      • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

        Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.

    • foxontherocks@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Tankie is such a weird thing to call these communists. They are way way less violent than liberals and conservatives are. They don’t even support any on going genocides like the others do.

      • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        The historical through-line is that the term originated from British Communists that supported the USSR putting down the Hungarian Counter-Revolution, which involved tanks and violent fighting.

        Nowadays, Tankie is used for everyone left of liberalism that agrees with the Marxist theory of the State, rather than the Anarchist, it’s muddled and has no meaning.