Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
- “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
- “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”
“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
As a leftist can I just say how cringe it is to treat “fighting liberalism on the fediverse” like it’s activism? Go outside.
Liberalism has an actual definition, and it is not the colloquial definition used in mass-media to refer to “the left half of what is acceptable.”
Liberalism is an idealist (another word which has a very specific definition) political philosophy which champions private property, constitutionalism, republicanism, rule of law, and free trade. It has a philosophical canon, flowing through writers like Locke, Montesquieu, Mirabeau, Rousseau, Paine, etc. Further economic works, like Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” are built on this philosophical underpinning.
Marxists are materialists. This is in contrast with the idealism of Liberals. While Liberals believe ideas are the force which drives change in the material world, Marxists understand that ideas are just a reflection of the material conditions they emerge from.
Liberals find themselves banging their heads against the walls of the institutions time and time again, because from their perspective, these institutions are just a reflection of ideas, and as long as the justification for an institution on paper is sound, there is no reason to think it cannot be reformed. An institution like the US Congress, or the Executive Branch is never at fault. It is simply a good institution simply being run by bad people. Marxists (and Anarchists) reject this quite simply, by looking at the material incentives involved, and the long ghastly history surrounding these institutions.
“Combating liberalism” does not mean being a piece of shit to anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders or Jeromy Corbin. There is a genuine struggle to ensure the new crop of social media platforms don’t simply end up defending the legitimacy of the established institutions at the expense of genuine radicals who find themselves at odds with the actual longstanding policy and practices of these institutions. To avoid situations like when mastodon.lol banned CODEPINK, a prominent anti-war organization, for being “Tankies.” This is Liberalism, and it should be combated.
least studied marxist
Liberalism: a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
I think you are conflating the free enterprise to mean endorsement of late stage capitalism instead of a system of actual market competition. Please don’t base this on the complete market capture demonstrated in the US currently. If anything the US is more like an authoritarian oligarchy with the illusion of democracy peddled through conflicting culture wars in the media. While there are great ideologies in play in something like socialism the reality is unless you could end the idea of money tomorrow their will always be inducements and incentives to hoard and leverage outsized resources outside of which ever community produced them in the first place. It’s why US resource capture on smaller nations works effectively, and it’s why Russian oligarchs have most of their wealth outside of Russia, etc.
Liberal vs Marxist has nothing to do with being a materialist or idealist, and trying to conflate them like they are is very disingenuous and misleading. Not to mention that is not what a materialist even is. A materialist is someone who values possessions for comfort, think a hyper consumer, where as an idealist is routed in ideals, like equality for all, regardless of the difficulties in trying to accomplish such a task. If anything by your definitions a Marxist would be an idealist fueled by an ideal (communism) , and a liberal would be someone on either side as they value personal freedoms and ones ability to choose either ideology.
Either you are trying to be intentionally misleading or you need to take a step back from your own propaganda as you are parroting off information that is completely ill informed at best or intentionally misleading at worst. There are definitely issues in US institutions, but a liberal is not going to defend the shortcomings, they would be proposing ranked choice voting, imposing age limits, redefining our checks and balances, and making sure these systems are inherently democratic. We don’t even have a true left in the US, we have a moderate center and then people like Bernie who are just barely into the left political territory in the global scale of things. A conservative would be someone who values conserving existing systems and institutions or leaving them as initially intended as they aim to conserve status quo. Seriously take a step back my friend, seems like you have been lost in an echo chamber for a while.
Tankies gonna tanky.
I am a Liberal with very leftist leanings (a lot of online quizzes call me “progressive left” but I think that is mostly because of one or two issues that skew the quiz). Liberals… we suck. We are inherently a position of compromise and need constant pushback to ensure we keep what is important in mind while still making sure we get anything at all.
But, the thing with tankies is that they focus all of their hatred on Liberals. Often to the point of outright defending fascism so long as it is vaguely “communist”. There are a lot of theories as to why (not like certain governments aren’t known for running psyops to co-opt movements…) but it results in pretty much destroying all discussion and turning what remains of said discourse into a laughing stock.
That’s partly because ‘tankies’ read theory. Liberal theory, Marxist theory, all of it that they can get their hands on. According to both liberal and Marxist theory, liberalism is the main ideology of capitalism. When ‘tankies’ oppose ‘liberals’, they are talking about the ‘progressive’ left of the Anlgo-European empire and what that ‘left’ calls ‘conservatives’. So if conservatives laugh when ‘tankies’ make fun of liberals, the joke’s on them because the ‘tankie’ means them, too.
There is absolutely no defence of fascism from ‘tankies’. That term usually refers to Marxist-Leninists, who praise Stalin and Mao for their stances against fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. If nothing else (and there is a lot ‘else’), anti-fascism is a central tenet of ‘tankie’ ideology and practice. Anti-fascism is/was a core tenet of all Marxist parties. If you think that a ‘tankie’ is ‘defending fascism’, you have misunderstood what they are saying and/or have inferred something from their words that they did not intend. Horseshoe theory is an intellectually bankrupt ‘theory’.
You are right about this:
As Mao said:
This and the other types of liberalism are often what ‘tankies’ are challenging when they criticise ‘liberals’—not what counts as ‘liberal’ in the extremely narrow US electoral politics sense of the term.
Leftists are not tankies. If all you are doing is criticizing liberal institutions and capitalism, you are… a leftist.
If you are going above and beyond to treat “liberalism” as the greatest threat to humanity while simultaneously ignoring, or outright endorsing, the actions of demonstrably horrifying “communist” regimes? You are a tankie and you are a problem and… kind of a fascist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie is a good breakdown
Being a Lefitst or even an outright worshipper of Marxism-Leninism is not a bad thing (I would argue being a Leftist is an objectively good thing since that tends to be very heavily based on social justice and egalitarianism). But a refusal to acknowledge where past efforts went wrong (if only to learn from them) and an active defense of where it went wrong is bad.
And while you can have one without the other, saying nonsense like… basically every single quote in the OP is a real big red flag. If only because… a lot of countries should PROBABLY be dismantled if we want to actually make the world a better place. US is definitely up there. So is Russia and China. And arguably large parts of the EU (since they find good ways to still exploit the global south in the name of profits).
Its just like how people can support aspects of Capitalism without thinking we need full on US/China levels of horror on that front. Or how people can think Communism is a good form of government while still being able to condemn the horrifying abominations that the Soviet Union and the like were (which, honestly, a lot of that boils down to actually being capitalist at its core due to the resource scarcity and bribes).
To put an intentionally provocative invocation of Godwin’s Law into play. It is very much possible to discuss Nazi technology and praise it (even if that mostly just indicates that you don’t understand logistics or what makes sense during a war versus peace time…). But if you start talking about how the STG-44 was a work of art rifle and amazing and don’t even say “But, just to be clear. Nazis are bad. Shouldn’t have to say it but…” then… that raises some HUGE red flags.
Which, again, same for Communism. You can praise the good and even argue about how the bad could have been avoided. But you kind of have to acknowledge the bad because of how many people suffered horribly under those regimes.
Tankies are just fascists with a different coat of paint. Everything about their ideology and policy positions would be endorsed by Mussolini if you dressed it up in sorelian terminology and viceversa.
As an end result? Yeah.
But, mostly, I think they are just ignorant. They know that Capitalism and The West is not working. They hear very persuasive people who “Read Literature” who are spewing aphorisms and concepts that sound really good. But they don’t read it themselves. So they see the nice things Chairman Mao said and… not the horrific things Mao said and did and all the suffering it caused. We have less of that with Stalin (because the US cared about Russia before 2010 or so) , but still a lot.
And it is a self perpetuating cycle. Because people LOVE to talk about how they read up on their theory and literature. But, just like with right wing christians, “read(ing) up” often means “reading a facebook post”. Well, reddit posts are more common for left wing, but same idea. And their preachers similarly ignore aspects.
We more or less saw the exact same thing with libertarianism in the 90s. It is well documented, but the 80s and 90s resulted in media being INFESTED with libertarian talking points and figureheads and ideology. And a lot of people decided “I like personal freedom. I am a Libertarian!”. And, over the 00s, they pretty much became bog standard republicans because they were indoctrinated into all the hate and bigotry while being taught “Stupid liberals are going to steal your tax money and give it to Others”
And much like with the average Tankie having no idea about just how hellish the Soviet Union and… basically every single communist regime actually was. Most Libertarians won’t even know Grafton (briefly) existed or even think about things like “So how do orphanages work?”
It sucks because I think Leftist ideology is objectively good. It is about egalitarianism and social justice (even if not all Leftists accept that…). But it is the deranged tankies who scream the loudest and make people think everyone wants to live in a house run by Mao and Stalin.
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This has that fox news energy of “everything I don’t like is socialism and communism!”
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Did u just call me a Chewbacca
This is what is known as the “Chewbacca Offense”
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ur uncultured brother
You’re just throwing around insults because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Very childish.
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