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.
I mean, their name and description say it all. They appear to fuse two rather telling themes:
1- “Hex” : as in the fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme launched by Richard Heart (real name: Richard James Schueler), a notorious spammer and lawbreaker who ultimately faced the consequences of his actions.
2- A shameful endorsement of communist-style authoritarianism : essentially, a system that violates basic human rights while promoting a fully centralised, stagnant, and corrupt regime devoid of meaningful technological progress.
Frankly, if I got banned from a place like that, I’d wear it as a badge of honour, LoL ❗😂
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.
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
It’s easy to get banned on that instance if you’re not sticking to the facts. They’re quite sensitive in this matter. Holodomor is Nazi propaganda tho.
Last time I checked, to be classified as a “Nazi” you had to persecute other cultures and ethnicities , and engage in imperialistic, criminal invasions of your neighbours.
Sounds an awful lot like russia and its supporters to me!
The Holodomor is a well-documented historical fact, recognised by numerous scholars and parliaments worldwide as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
If you deny it just like that, guess who has just failed spectacularly at… “sticking to the facts”? 🤥
putin sympathizes with elon nazi musk. I wonder what they think about him.
They fucking hate both, Putin because he’s a liberal and Musk because he’s a deeply unserious shithead.
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?”
They will claim to hate him (and Trump), and then keep on regurgitating propaganda constructed in favour of him.
Honestly the entirety of Lemmy is far left so for them anything not far left is nazi. If you’re not far left, switch to a different platform or don’t talk about anything even remotely connected to politics.
The entirety of Lemmy far left? You must be an American. .world is blatantly majority centre-left.
Well in “far left” I mean “aggressively behaving left”. I’m not really up to date with the classification.
Other than commie symbolism, whitewashing and apologism being a problem, lemmy is pretty normal for a community of mostly educated people.
Tankies are primarily authoritarians, not really far left in any useful sense of that term. And even though they are vocal, they definitely don’t constitute “the entirety of Lemmy”.
I’m not very sure about that. I don’t get banned on literally every community for being right wing (even when I talk about it) but I do feel hostility coming from everyone. I understand that their opinion is way different to mine but if they act passively/actively aggressive towards other opinions (not just me), doesn’t it make them tankies automatically?
I always thought tankies are mostly stalinists and nostalgic brezhnevists, a violent and fanatic type of marxist-leninist who will crush anyone and anything to establish their utopia. They don’t argue much, it’s just aesthetics, violence and rhetoric, they are essentially red fascists. Most communists I know (which includes leninists, but not only) are mostly pacifist…but they will quickly turn authoritarian to tamp down any fascists and rich people who get a little too uppity, so yea, naturally, rule of law and property rights are secondary to them.
I don’t get banned on literally every community for being right wing
You do know where you are, right? Did you get lost?
I agree with your point that “the ideas furthest from you politically all look alike” (aka political myopia), that’s why fascists think everyone left of an ultraneoliberal is a “dirty commie” and why tankies think everyone right of liberal socialists are nazis (no, I’m not one of those who say elon is not a nazi, he is, but for his own actions, lol). It’s just terrifying when you see a friend of yours imbibe that bullshit and suddenly call everyone they don’t like (including FDR) a commie…are they fascist now? :/
It’s just terrifying when you see a friend of yours imbibe that bullshit and suddenly call everyone they don’t like a commie…are they fascist now?
Nah it’s just far right and far left movements are similar. They do the same things to those with a different opinion. What makes leftists way more successful is their disguise. They claim to support very nice things and people believe them. But ultimately both of them want a dictatorship of their opinion. After all they’re on the ends of the political spectrum for a reason.
I don’t know yet, I’ve seen democratic communists, like Lula, who are a bit daft sometimes (e.g. meeting putin wearing his little St. George ribbon, somebody slap him 😠💢 , hard), but who truly believe in welfare, nonviolence, human rights and democracy. I even understand that he is unnerved and aggrieved by bozo’s foreign-backed efforts to destroy Brazil, but he’s also making strange bedfellows.
But I’ve never seen a democratic/“cuddly” fascist that doesn’t eventually take their mask off and the whip out…maybe Meloni so far (I don’t understand italian politics enough to get what damage she’s done) or maybe peronismo…
Well afaik far right movements are supposed to be aggressive. That’s a part of their views.
Non aggressive leftists may exist but from my experience most of them are either aggressive or look nice only on the outside and are easy to make show their true personality. I guess that’s the kind of leftism that’s by far the most popular now.
Fuck that, I will gladly use Lemmy to tell tankies to fuck off. And if I get banned on some instances then so be it.
That’s my man.
You’re better off, they suck.
Indeed, nothing has been lost.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds about right for them. Sorry you had to go through that.
Post this over at !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works they love this kind of content.
Never heard of that, but I’ll crosspost. Thanks! 😄
Do yourself a favor and just block the entire instance from your profile settings. It’s irredeemable.
yeah duh, thats why we block the redfash triad
Some people there post burning flags of other countries and want the total destruction of them… “Death to country XY” being upvoted is as normal there as using toothpaste… Mods seem to support that and ban people who criticize it.
If we had only those people on the planet, there would be nothing but war.
If we had only those people on the planet,
there would be nothing but war.we’d have a stateless, classless, moneyless society. If only.
I think you’ve just made a completely unwarranted assumption about how often those people are brushing their teeth.
