I’ve been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?
Political views aside, the way they promote their political views is unappealing.
Look through any of their popular threads. Everyone piles on any comment which doesn’t align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Everyone piles on any comment which doesn’t align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Sounds like every popular community on Lemmy. The only difference is the “agreed perspective”.
Not really.
In most communities you can at least entice some robust discussion, hexbear just seems sp aggressively intolerant of alternative views.
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Love how at the very idea of somebody disagreeing with you, you start throwing up all sorts of topics you know are hot buttons just so you can preemptively slam anyone who has a different perspective than you. Rather than taking a second to teach a single thing about the topics you claim to care about you just flash them like political merit badges to prove you’re in the in-group, and anybody who doesn’t know exactly what one of those things are, or what you think is the truth about it, is worth dismissing out of hand. It’s just a secret handshake that if people don’t parrot it back to you they’re not worth debating. You were never here for healthy debate though. You don’t care about convincing anyone or advancing your causes or ideas. You’re here for the badges.
@JungleJim@sh.itjust.works your assessment of @TheAnоnymоuseJоker@lemmy.ml is spot-on, highlighting behaviors indicative of a fragile ego and a need for superiority. This individual frequently deflects from central topics, especially when their views are challenged, revealing an inability to handle opposing viewpoints. It’s normal to have differences in opinion, but for TheAnоnymоuseJоker this seems to be an act of war, a mindset that is immature and counterproductive for meaningful online interactions.
Psychologically, it’s a common fallacy for some individuals to oversimplify complex social interactions, reducing them to mere players in the game of their subjective perception. This viewpoint often ignores the nuanced realities of human behavior and interaction.
Recognizing these behaviors — deflecting, causing dismay, dismissing, denying, deceiving — is essential in understanding the underlying motivations and responding appropriately to maintain the integrity of the discussion.
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Analyzing me psychologically? That’s an interesting deflection, TheAnonymouseJoker. You claim I’m engaging in deflective and ignorant behavior, yet here you are, quickly labeling and dismissing my points without addressing their substance. It’s quite telling that instead of engaging with the critique, you resort to calling out my account’s age and my supposed affiliations. This tactic of yours, focusing on personal attacks rather than the discussion at hand, really highlights the earlier point about your tendency to dismiss and belittle differing opinions. It seems like any perspective that doesn’t align with yours is automatically considered ‘contextless liberal rants and libel.’ Isn’t that, in itself, a form of intellectual compromise? Let’s stick to the actual content of the discussion, shall we?
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See, this is why people have problems with ML and hexbears. How will you ever bring the revolution when you can’t stop screeching? Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to be around it. You’ll be a revolution of one because nobody can take being around such an abrasive asshole long enough to even listen to their points, much less realize they might be right.
Imagine somebody walking down the street. They see a poster on the wall of the store they pass. It’s a Starbucks. “Looks tasty, I’m cold” they say. Suddenly, you’re there, shrieking about labor rights and fair trade. You are without a doubt correct, but you’ve scared the person and now they’re annoyed. One of those drones inside with the green hats comes out and sees the situation. They ask the customer to come inside where they’re safe from you, and now they’re buying overpriced drinks from exploited workers produced by exploited farmers etc.
All because instead of talking to someone like a human, you had to be edgy and witty. You treat real humans the way tv characters talk to each other. On TV the wittiest oneo-liner wins. In real life you have to show a little human compassion, even if you’re faking it or else you alienate who you’re talking to and are left in an echo chamber, alone, or in the case of our imagined scenario the employees may call security or police (agents of oppression, and they’ll probably buy coffee too) on a person harassing potential customers.
His tendency to dismiss and belittle differing opinions aligns with the behavior of making jokes at someone else’s expense, a red flag of his intention to demean rather than engage. This approach not only stifles productive discourse but also exposes their inability to appreciate the nuances in complex issues. The mark of a first-rate intelligence is holding two opposed ideas while still functioning, *a capacity *TheAnоnymоuseJоker seems to lack. He demonstrates an inability to see a world where an idea can be both right and wrong, as seen in his black-and-white arguments.
You’ll be a revolution of one
Ironically, and I quote him:
powerless against one many army
Furthermore, the consistent denial and projection of his biases onto others underscore his low self-esteem and desire to control and influence the narrative. This manipulation, characterized by deceiving and creating misleading narratives, aligns with the observation that the most argumentative people rarely persuade anyone. Persuasion is an art that requires observation, listening, and inquiry, not blunt force.
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That’s a very mature response
It’s also crucial to consider the source of advice or criticism. TheAnоnymоuseJоker’s attacks are reminiscent of those who criticize yet have never built anything themselves. Their actions seems more about garnering attention than offering constructive criticism. One cannot be offended by someone they do not respect. It’s important to take advice from those you respect and who contribute positively, not from those who seek to destroy. TheAnоnymоuseJоker should address the need for maturity and constructive engagement rather than dismissive or sarcastic remarks.
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Ukraine good Russia bad?
Sorry I don’t side with imperialism.
Ukraine wants to not be invaded by it’s neighbor, and Russia did so to conquer it in direct contradiction to a treaty it signed when Ukraine gave it’s nukes to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. On multiple occasions.
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Did Russia not invade Ukraine’s sovereign territory?
That’s a pretty big rock you’ve been living under to miss that.
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Do you actually believe these things or do you just say them to try to get a rise out of people because I’ve never been able to work that one
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It’s evident that the your not interested in a genuine exchange of ideas or healthy debate. By rapidly switching topics and using them as shields rather than points of discussion, you’re clearly employing tactics like deflecting and deceiving. These types of methods serve to derail the conversation and assert dominance rather than contribute meaningfully.
Classic case of using hot-button issues not to educate or enlighten but to create an ‘in-group’ and outcast those who question or differ. This approach isn’t just unproductive; it’s an attempt to manipulate the discourse for personal gratification rather than collective understanding.
Recognizing these tactics is the first step in not falling victim to them and maintaining the integrity of the discussion
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That’s basically every political sub I’ve come across browsing in my instance
It’s a question of degree.
They are hardline Marxist-Leninists, something that is very rare in the western world even amongst those who identify as leftist or socialist. If their views make you uncomfortable, then you’re not a ML, which is okay.
Left-wing politics is a very broad spectrum, and a lot of Lemmy users lean towards the more moderate end which brings them into conflict with the more radical communities that are Lemmygrad and Hexbear.
That’s all there is to it.
I would also add that there are a lot of them on Lemmy, which is even more uncommon.
And they’re not artificially suppressed like they are on other social media platforms.
*depending on what instance you’re on
They are defederated from a lot of instances, from their own side or the other’s (my instance is defederated from LG and HB defederated itself from my instance)
That’s all there is to it.
That’s it? Nothing about their notoriety for posting pictures of pigs pooping on their balls as part of their lively defense of MLism?
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“Tankie” is a term that’s applied to literally any communist. I’ve heard it used against Trotskyists and fucking social democrats.
So, what’s actually the problem with them? Are they Maoists? CPC apologists?
They like Stalin, Putin , Xi and Kim. And defend everything they do.
Like WTF? How can a communist defend putin!?
II hear this constantly, I have yet to see it one time ever by ANY communists on ANY website.
Visit a few Ukraine threads, it’s one of the topics the fanatics pile on.
My point was that tankies are a “special” subset of communists.I have. I’ve still never seen it. What I do constantly see in those threads is dehumanization of Russian people and calls for mass genocide of them, though. Calling them orcs and talking about how they all deserve to die.
I don’t believe you, to be honest. One can acknowledge Russian security concerns (like multiple U.S. military officials and many high members of the UN have) without praising Putin. And I’ve still never seen a single communist say anything good about Putin. On any website.
I’ve never seen what you’re describing. Not about Russians anyway. I’ve seen far too many zionists saying that shit about Palestinians tho.
I’m glad for your sake. It’s pretty gross.
People who throw the word “tankie” around indiscriminately aren’t using it right. From what I’ve seen, it applies specifically to extreme communist fanboys who are apologists for communist militarism. For example, Tankies will say that the Tiananmen Square massacre was either justified or didn’t happen.
Just being a fan of communism doesn’t make someone a tankie.
Edit: see below for an excellent example
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Thank you!
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Excuses for the Uighur genocide
Are you seriously still on that shit?? After everything that has come out??? Also I give solarpunk like a month tops before it goes ecofash.
Ok, I’ll bite. What is “everything that has come out”?
A bunch of journalists actually went to China to see the abuse for themselves and didn’t walk away with anything to support that narrative. Best they could say to defend their case was “China is hiding the truth, that’s why we didn’t see anything” Over time, all the claims the right made about the “genocide” were slowly being deconfirmed to the point that it was becoming clear it was all made up. Is there a chance that some of the stuff actually was right? Maybe, but when you know it came from a place of bad faith you don’t exactly need to waste energy debunking each and every claim from the likes of faith healers and flat earthers when they have a rich history of flat out lying to drive a narrative.
When people actively invested in finding out fucked up shit can’t find any fucked up shit, it’s a pretty good sign it’s not happening.
EDIT: Doesn’t help that a lot of the people making the biggest fuss about the Uighurs are all siding with Israel in their genocide. One of the big key things that genocide deniers do is make a big stink about fake genocides that they made up on the spot (Fx: the great replacement)
Do you have a source for this? Last I looked into the Uighur genocide, it was being reported by well-respected outlets (not faith healers and flat earthers) and had photos of people being marched into camps.
So for it to suddenly be “all made up” sounds rather far-fetched to me.
I believe it was the AP who did a report on it.
Can you provide a link to the report?
CBA, it’s not going to change anyone’s mind anyway.
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Just take a look at this question, all of the answers are from lemmygrad and hexbear users. You are not going to get a good answer from them because they’re the people you’re asking the question about.
They are not hated they’re just annoying, no one really cares about their opinions the problem is is that they try and push their opinions on everybody else.
Yeah, they have a very alternative interpretation of geopolitics and they’re loud about it. If there was a flat earth instance with users that spammed every physics thread there would be some grumbling just the same.
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The hexbear and lemmygrad users/posts I run across in All mostly remind me of those street corner preachers. I don’t care one way or another about their ideologies but it’s tiring that they always feel the need to shout it in your face.
I don’t hate them but find them to be obnoxious and mostly cult-like.
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Well, when I see a .ml user from here on out I’m not sure I’ll be able to give them the same sort of leeway.
I had one of their users confirm they were racist. Then I saw that only the parts where our conversation was removed by mods, and not shit canning the user.
You want people to like you, don’t lie down with racists.
I believe you’ve answered your own question.
Lemmy isn’t Marxist-only. The majority of Lemmy users are what the more vocal Lemmygrad and Hexbear users deride as “libs.” As a thought experiment, imagine that you are one of us for a moment and then browse Local on one of those.
I haven’t seen or maybe haven’t noticed much of lemmygrad. But hex bear has a culture of spamming the same handful of images, using them like punctuation in their posts. And they show up huge in my reader at least (I just found out they look small to them.) So it’s like you’re trying to have a discussion and someone comes parading through with like five crappy drawings that take up all the space. Also I don’t mind having Marxists around but they tend to want to steer every discussion toward it, regardless of its relevance. Can’t wait to be able to block the instance.
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I’m the only person I’ve ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I’m not qualified to be a proper communist though – I’ve read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I’m basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.
I’m am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.
I am interested in the physics divination bot. How’s it work?
There’s a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.
The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That’s amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It’s not a ‘safe’ way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.
Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D
Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.
I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.
I can’t imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we’ll talk about it :P
Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I’ll gently beat it into submission so it works again.
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God yeah. Even if they had some interesting ideas they’ve been lost to all the circle jerking that there’s no way of seeing how any of them can be taken seriously.
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Lemmygrad I can’t comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I’m not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven’t seen them out in any of the threads I’ve been on.
Hexbear I’ve enjoyed honestly. They’ve got nice hobby communities and it’s all I’m here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don’t share their views. People screaming “tankie!” just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.
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tankie
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samee
Yes, it has nothing to do with their inability to follow other instances’ rules and constant need to “dunk” on “shit libs” mostly by posting the same image of a pig pooping on itself. /S
Such discourse. Much Praxis. So brave.
If this is your vibe normally I wouldn’t want to engage and would just post a troll image as well, it’s rancid.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.
That’s not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that’s what people have an issue with.
Holy shit you got them to brigade your comment. They might as well be bots, I think Chat GPT’s “intelligence” outpaces them.
As is tradition! What’s funny is that they’re supposed to be defederated from my instance so I don’t know why they even see my comments… Their admin even called my instance “sh.itsfullof.nazis” in their defederation message because they were angry that they were confronted to people who disagreed with them when they brigaded our administration communities…
They have a community dedicated to organizing brigades so it’s no surprise that they are brigading their comment
The rules in the side bar are very telling
Of course the last time I mentioned it’s existence with one of my alts I got a 2 week sitewide-ban so this comment probably won’t last long
Edit: Spleling
Extremely accurate
I literally netted a 2 week sitewide-ban on one of my alts in this thread for a softer worded take than this
Don’t know how I managed to escape consequences so far 😂
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Thanks for providing an example of what I was talking about :)
end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves
anyone complaining about “reverse racism” or “anti white racism” is a complete joke. like boo fucking hoo, someone called you a cracker on the internet, get over it.
That isn’t what they are talking about, hopefully. But if it is, I agree, a hearty “lol” is in order.
they replied confirming to me that what they were complaining about was in fact racism against white people, given that it seems to be a pretty common bit on lemmygrad to call people crackers and compare them to that kid who went onto fox news to complain about his face being photoshopped onto a picture of a ritz cracker by left wing students at his university that seems to be what they were complaining about
Bad interpretation is bad
Racism has a definition that’s fairly easy to understand and yes people of all colors can be victims and even people of the same skin colour can be racists against one another because racism isn’t necessarily about the color of your skin, it can be about your ethnicity.
Racism:
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.Ethnicity:
the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.If you had taken a crowd of anonymous Germans all dressed the same in 1935, how would you have told who was a Jew and who wasn’t? You wouldn’t have been able to because they were all just white people.
What do you call it when 100 years ago in a first world white country the population that speaks one official language has an infant mortality rate comparable to that of colonial Africa while the population that speaks the other official language and lives in the same cities has an infant mortality rate comparable to any other first world nation?
Was the Rwanda genocide not racism because it was two groups with the same skin colour? What about what happened in Yugoslavia?
My white friend who went to China to study had to sit through multiple explanations by many Chinese student of the levels of intelligence being affected by skin colour and ethnicity and guess what, whites weren’t at the top! “All white people are dumber than Indians who are dumber than Koreans who are dumber than Chinese.” Are you telling me that isn’t racism against white people (and anyone that isn’t Chinese)? Because I sure would hope someone would call me a racist if I was saying the same thing about people of another skin colour or ethnicity!
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So you’re saying that what the Jews were victim of during WW2 wasn’t racism? Because they certainly were white!
How about the Irish? The deportation of Acadians? French Canadians seeing their language becoming illegal to teach in Manitoba? The Yugoslav wars?
By your logic it’s also impossible to be racist towards Chinese and Japanese because man, let me tell you, they can be racist as fuck towards everyone else and they were the ones in power on their side of the world for centuries!
Racism has a definition and it’s a bad thing no matter who the victim is.
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It’s funny how it’s always the same whenever you’re confronted to arguments. You just insult the other party and leave the scene like you were a hero.
Also very funny you should call me a cracker when you don’t know what’s my origin, you just assume I’m white because you would be unable to accept that someone not white could realize that racism goes all ways.
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That’s a liberal with no framework. No one denies genocides (pro-tip just because the western media says it’s a genocide doesn’t make it a genocide.) Being so anti-racist you are the real racist is the Liberal Democratic party who elected a hard-core segregationist as president, not a Marxist Leninist. No one except people like you give a fuck about personal attacks. lol.
The “Uyghur genocide” is bullshit Atlanticist propaganda, and English-language Wikipedia is basically NATOpedia in its slant on the topic, so yes we will deny it. It’s a product of the new Cold War propaganda campaign against China.
Here are some properties of any conspiracy theory worth it’s name:
- Closed Ideological Systems: They provide an all-encompassing explanation for various events or states, with everything fitting into their worldview.
- Immunity to Facts: Any contrary evidence is dismissed as false or considered part of the conspiracy.
- Enemy Construction: They tend to draw a clear line between “us” (those who “know the truth”) and “them” (the supposed conspirators).
- Adaptability: Conspiracy narratives can change and incorporate new “evidence” or events to maintain their credibility.
It matches for QAnon and the MAGA crowd as well as the lemmygrad crowd.
I get why people would believe it like a decade ago when the facts were still kind of up in the air, but now even west media is like “yeaaah we looked into it and all of it is complete and utter bullshit” and yet you still have people confidently going on like it’s still a thing.
Eventually you have to come to the grips with the fact that the only reason you believe in the Uyghur genocide is because you’re racist.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
True, but leninists are not leftist in any significant sense either. They are more authoritarian/ totalitarian than they are left or right.
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Any politically focused space on the Internet, left or right, is a cesspool of toxic lies and hatred of anyone outside their sphere
British. Immediately discarded.
That’s what we call racism
im british and i give them the g-word pass (gammon) to refer to british people in a derogatory way
Im not in alot of communities but I’ve never seen the heavy handed claims everyone makes about seemingly any lemmy user to the left of Biden. I’ve seen occasional snark, but nothing out of line for standard internet snark/trolling that those same people never mind when the right does it. 🤷
Lemmygrad isn’t “hated” by most of the wider lemmyverse. There’s just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren’t used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.
It’s no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about “those mean tankies at lemmygrad” (and hexbear too) made by people who can’t take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don’t think most people care enough except to think “oh yeah that’s that instance with those radical lefties, they’re weird but they do make some great memes sometimes.”
There’s a difference between challenging other people’s opinions and calling them fascists or Nazis just because they’re not at the extreme left.
Even worse, in this very thread I’ve been called a fascist for the sole reason that my instance is sh.itjust.works, one of the bigger instances and one where your political opinion isn’t a criteria to subscribe (especially not when I subscribed, they didn’t even ask for an email!)
Yeah, I only joined shitjust works because that’s where the cdda Lemmy is and that’s the first thing I used it for, didn’t even know people think it’s a political instance. Though I guess with the hexbears and lemmygrads everything’s political somehow. That’s why I generally avoid dealing with them anyway.
There are people who called the main lemmy.ml instance a community of tankies, so I’d take a lot of these claims with a grain of salt.
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I’m pretty left/lean socialist. The tankies that annoy me from those instances are pro authoritarian communists who say shit like “Stalin did nothing wrong” with no irony whatsoever. It’s not really about bickering over ideological purity past a certain point, some of that shit makes a good case for the horseshoe theory
Hahahahahaha
