cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1338851
Archived version: https://archive.ph/yDjTx
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230811193345/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-fire-all-regional-military-recruitment-chiefs-zelenskiy-2023-08-11/
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GOD i hate these STUPID hexbears SO much it makes my SKIN crawl… Sure hope they’re not reading this thread and brigading you… Eek!
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Spoken like somebody who is definitely not mad.
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Definitely, definitely not. mad.
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You came out the gate with big mad tantrum insults, and now you expect people to have a dialogue with you?
You were never interested in “trying to have a conversation”
Yeah, I was kinda hoping someone could convince me my interpretation of what I saw was incorrect. I made an attempt to ask you something, and instead I was greeted with nothing but more responses that re-iterated my subjective experience.
I said an unkind thing about that community, so when I was presented with the ability to talk to an individual in that community I took it, hoping to see if I was wrong. To give an analogy, sure I can say nasty things about Trumpists, think they are racists by default, doesn’t mean I think all of them are the same thing as what I call their community. Some of them might not be racists.
To play a bit tu quoque and be unkind to you, it sounds like you big mad about me having an experience with your community and you being salty about me not liking your community. That’s fine, that’s your right.
You are however correctly right that the OP post I made wasn’t conducive to a dialogue, wasn’t expecting it when I made it. Didn’t feel like I could ask in your community either though. For all its apparent inclusiveness (I mean I should feel right at home, it’s lgbtqia+ after all) I felt a seriously hostile vibe, which is why I blocked it instead.
“Everyone knows that the left and the right are the same and that the REASONABLE MODERATE CENTER is best! Right? Right? It’s not as though Biden is a war criminal rapist segregationist and virtually the twin brother of Trump, right? America might have some problems (ongoing slavery, genocide, imperialism, civilizational suicide via climate change) but it’s still overall a force for good, right???”
I get that you guys love seeing trump do stupid shit and abuse his power as president, because it vindicates your view of the US government, but still, the asshole that tells his fans to harass people and shits on rule of law is objectively worse than the ones who didn’t, please. I thought one of hexbear’s redeeming qualities was at least anti-homophobia, anti-misogyny, etc. This whole “trump is no worse than anyone else” is just crypto-trumpism and one example of why you guys are accused of being the lefty version of MAGAts.
Roe v. Wade was undone and LGBTQ+ rights are collapsing with Biden and the Democrats running the country. Biden also regularly sends the police to deport and/or imprison anyone who isn’t white. Nobody loves or funds the 100% nazi police more than Biden; Biden has actually signed MORE drilling permits than Trump. Biden and Trump are fascists, as are you for excusing them.
I’m not an American… I goddamn hate this American-centrism so many Americans have online. Get a grip, you’re not the center of the planet.
I’m a leftwing proudly out homosexual, voted for the marxist party in my country in Europe, and voted leftwing my entire life before that. I’ve got friends who were trained by greenpeace to climb nuclear power plants. If you asked a centrist I’d be part of the extreme left (well everyone in Europe would be by America’s standards).
But sure, if you feel better about me being an American centrist in your headcannon, and my problem not being the general toxicity of what I saw in that community, then so be it.
lol what
Yeah, I was actually surprised when one in particular told me. That one had always been quite adventurous to put it mildly so it wasn’t too weird for him. At the time he had been swinging between vigilant action, and considering moving to live his hermit life on a specific mountain in the area he lived at the time (he didn’t in the end). Fairly interesting person.
Great person though, and even though he was clearly on the militant leftwing side (I’m not), when we disagreed it was always purely full of respect between us. Some of the best talks we had in random tiny bars in central and eastern Europe (depending on where he was living at the time).
I’m frightened to ask about what their positions are on any policy at all. Let me guess: do what amerikkka says or your are helping putler. That kind of “marxist”?
Yeah, they are indeed crypto fascists, you are so right. Man you are the smartest person ever right? If only I could enjoy a second of your wise divination powers. Why ask, you already kkknow the answer!
And ofc you bring up Putin, should’ve expected it. A bit sad though simping for potentially the richest guy on the planet, who has been running a private army that’s busy doing modern day imperialism in Africa. Such improvements! It’s way better the mines are exploited by Russians instead of French!
Yeah no my ideals don’t make me choose between two evils, I reject them both, but hey if you want to support Russian authoritarianism that’s your choice, it’s just not equality or leftism.
“I reject them both” = i luv amerikkka
It’s really amazing. “I reject them both, but very curiously I only criticize one. Why could that be?“🤔
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Your assumption that Ukraine is an independent country is already an implicit endorsement of American imperialism and slavery. Ukraine has not been independent since the Maidan Coup in 2014. There are recordings of Victoria Nuland confirming this; to deny it means that you are living in a fantasy realm, one paid for with the blood of slaves in the global south. And when you recognize that American imperialism and settler colonialism is a boot on the neck of the global south, you likewise understand that anyone fighting it deserves our critical support, even if they are not angels. Besides, even if everything liberals say about Russia is true, the Iraq War alone is and was a far greater crime than anything [the liberal Harry Potter-esque fantasy of] Putin could dream of. And besides, wasn’t the modern nation state of Russia created by American liberals in the first place? How much money did Clinton give Yeltsin in the 1990s?
My Ukrainian friends disagree and I’ll have to defer to their judgement seeing they live there.
Your idea of “independent” is also a country subjugated to Russia. What an improvement! Not withstanding that Putin’s own war declaration speech denied the existence of a Ukrainian cultural identity, calling them all Russians. You are literally supporting someone who consider an entire culture as lesser not worthy of existence. Wow, such great ideals you hold!
Right, so you do support Russia. I’ll never support anyone supporting Russia, while people in my queer community have been dying and persecuted for years there.
You delude yourself into thinking Russia is “fighting your fight”, all I see in your argument is one boot replacing the other. If only you could live under the yoke of Russia to see what kind of nightmare you’d be living under.
You delude yourself “one greater evil justifies another unrelated evil”, that’s a really messed up moral compass. Do you also support Israel’s actions then because what happened to them in ww2? What evils are allowed to happen, and which ones aren’t in your strange moral compass.
Hexbear User here: where did you see people claim Putin’s Russia being a bastion of leftism?
Right, didn’t mean to imply you think Russia is considered leftist, just calling out there’s a large amount of pro-Russia because it’s anti-NATO. Even down to the Russian propaganda and referring to Ukraine as “The Ukraine” at times lol. Highly upvoted posts gleefully saying the “ukronazis haven’t broken through a defense line yet”
The prevailing support for Russia on that community because it is anti-NATO is the problem here. Your hate for NATO is so intense your posters are at times delighted at the suffering of Ukrainians, victim blaming their suffering because they had the audacity to ask for weapons to defend their lives. Many of whom I call my friends even before this war started, many of whom now refugees, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to in the past year. Real families displaced, families losing their children during bombings. Ever had to talk to a mother who has lost their only child? Your community thinks this could have been averted “by not sending bullets”, this is some messed up view. Russia isn’t there to just take control over them, but erase their identity. Putin himself in a speech said “Ukraine never existed”, it’s the opening speech where he declared war ffs.
My minority, lgbtqia+, suffers daily in Russia while you all cheer because in some really messed up alternate reality you think NATO would “suffer”. It’s disgusting you associate yourself with people that are happy that Ukraine is being taken over by literal imperialists.
That’s not to say the support for North Korea, people massively upvoted being gleeful Taiwan and South Korea are next after the Ukraine war in the thread about the failed counteroffensive, what the actual fuck. That’s when I blocked it. You’re just warmongers at that point without the balls to admit it. You’re as bad as the US.
I’ll however not directly link but I gave enough info to find the thread and search the keywords.
I’m going to let someone more educated on the geopolitics involved handle the rest of this (hopefully someone will) but i really want to zero in on this because.
there are like, 2 cishet people on all of Hexbear. Its like the most queer space on the internet thats not explicitly only for queer people… It is AGRESSIVLY pro-trans, and purged the slightest hints of transphobia in its early days. The admin team is 100% queer i’m pretty sure.
We think the oppression of queer people in Russia is bad. Whatever support an individual Hexbear has for Russia, its not for Putin’s regime or the Russian government. It is, as you yourself say, opposition to NATO. Again, I’m not going to get into the why of that, but please don’t imply that we support the Russian government’s oppression of queer people.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3717499
This one is very much pro Russia, as he himself said in the comments.
As he refers to it as needing our “critical support”
I’ve never had as heated of a discussion online as I’ve enjoyed with your community. This isn’t a good thing. It feels as if members of your community thrive on the negative emotions rather than productive debate. The few normal responses I’ve gotten from people like yourself are too far in between.
I do appreciate your normal response. I know your community is an inclusive space, but personally as a member myself of the lgbtqia+ community it’s not a space I would consider welcoming for the aforementioned reason.
I’ve been called a Roma hater, ironic as I even donate to them, that I must have swastika tattooed Ukrainians as friends, and that obviously I must be a fascist.
It’s unironically the unsafest safe space I’ve ever encountered. I hope the sample I received is not indicative, but at this point I don’t think it matters anymore.
What do you think critical support means?
If that’s really true, you may well be the most sheltered person on earth.
Let me elaborate, the sheer hostility I’ve been shown, making assumptions that I must be fascist, Roma hater, etc to justify your hate towards me without proof is one that doesn’t belong in safe spaces. Tunnel visioning your hate so hard that when you focus it on someone who would not be prepared for that you could do real irreparable damage. Those words are luckily meaningless to me, but I have had friends who, at their lowest, would not be safe with someone that writes like some people in your community do.
And I say this because I know the things I’ve been called would make my friends laugh with incredulity. The fact someone in your community thinks I’m those things, and are so self convinced is what makes your community dangerous.
No person of the lgbtqia+ is sheltered by sheer upbringing. Hopefully the young generation can be, but mine, and where I grew up wasn’t afforded that luxury.
English isn’t my first language but elaborate how “Russia needs our critical support” isn’t a support of Russia.
Spare me the self-righteousness, if “the people I was rude too were rude back to me” is something you can describe as “the most unsafe space I have ever encountered” without feeling deeply embarrassed, then you have no business trying to pontificate about what actually marginalised people endure. No amount of cope about how you’re totally definitely not big mad, but your girlfriend in Canada is, will change that.
So you didn’t know what it meant, but you used it to insult someone anyway?
It means support from a place of criticism, in the sense of “I don’t agree with them in general, but align on certain things”.
Look, I’ll back up a bit and try to be more sincere here. There are three points I would like you to consider. The first is that your own behaviour has not exactly been free of toxicity. The second is that we on hexbear are used to liberals coming in with naked bad faith hostility, so we’ve, unfortunately fallen to the habit of responding in kind. This leads into my third point; the hostility you describe sounds basically like the bog standard normal that I’ve experienced when trying to converse in mainstream liberal spaces; Hexbear is one of the few spaces where I’m not showered with abuse for the crime of having a political alignment outside the overton window of a country I’m not even from.
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Sounds like someone else has already explained the critical support thing to you, I didnt really understand the term at first either and English IS my first language, so I actually understand this one.
I hope you can see that my comrade’s defensive stance is because of past experiances and not anything personal.
I actually dont disagree that people here sometimes make unfair assumptions about the person they’re talking to. I remember the human and understand where they’re coming from and why that assume that though (past experiences with people who are like that). I wish my friends would try to remember the human more too, but I get why they can forget because of their experiences. I hope that makes sense.
Thank you for your response.
It makes sense, but tbh victimizing random strangers isn’t a solution (I don’t feel like a victim, just putting it into words of how dangerous I think this can be). And I do hope you understand where I’m coming from, with the understanding this might be my very skewed view, it’s this that made me consider your community dangerous, especially for minority groups. It feels like weaponized anger, where dissenting thoughts are attacked intensively (as I’ve experienced here, and I for the most part agree with hexbear’s ideological/social stance even). I think that’s fine for your community, but it’s this why I had negative flashbacks to my early days when I stumbled upon places like 4chan. Trolling, flamming, “jokes”, until it wasn’t jokes anymore, then the real problematic elements took over. I truly do hope that what I’ve encountered is a skewed image that isn’t true.
It’s also very difficult to detach action from intent, I sadly can’t read people’s intent when they hurl insults my way, I can only see actions, what they write down. I don’t see past trauma and experiences, only their words they direct at me. Having dealt with people with deep seated trauma in my close friendgroup and beyond, I know those things take time and understanding to get through, and the anger you receive isn’t always intended, but unleashing anger at random internet forum members isn’t a great outlet (well it’s a great outlet for the person with the trauma, but not the receiving people, nobody deserves to be the punching bag to someone else’s trauma).
It’s also a hard ask for me to assume only the best intentions, when I keep being called the worst. But I do enjoy you have talked to me as a person, even when my OP was an unkind opener for this dialogue, I really appreciate it.
I had moved to the fediverse in the hopes of finding the earlier days of internet forums again, smaller communities with a good baseline of respect, where long form debate was more common, including differing opinions (to within reasons ofc, nobody likes a Nazi, and they were hated in the early days luckily), but I’ve not enjoyed that here. I’ve instead experienced hate worse than I have experienced on reddit, when trump was still the big problem, and the best quality responses you’d get from his fanatics is “cope harder” and some pepe images. A time where any debate was just sad responses of “oh you malding” etc… Where the perception of “winning” meant insulting the other person harder, lying about them and continuously moving to other topics.
Perhaps I’ll keep to social events in person, speakeasies etc… It seems social media has just soured permanently. Luckily I’m still part of several inclusive programming communities, that has been enough for now for me, and perhaps it’s better that way.
Thank you very much for your response, I wish you the bests.
I can actually understand all that very well. Sorry about your negative experience
I do want to mention one thing though
Our “weaponized anger” is quiet frequently used in defense of minority groups, particularly trans people. She’s gone now but one of our original admins, TransComrade69, was militantly defensive of trans people and it really shaped how our community formed. We also do our best to do the same for other queer people, bipoc, the disabled and nuerodiverse, women, the poor, and (most relevant to the arguments we get into here) people from the global south.
But I actually do understand how our community’s stance can be offputting for some people and wouldnt recommend it to just anyone, even leftists.
And they definitely deserve all the protection they need. I am fortunate to have some trans friends myself as well, they are definitely the most oppressed group and even frequently the ignored member of the lgbtqia+ by its own members. By comparison I’m definitely the weakest member as a gay man, I have “passed” to varying degrees for a large amount of my life and so have been fortune to dodge some of the atrocities they are subjected to.
If there’s one group that deserves the militant protection in today’s environment it is them. That I can definitely appreciate your community does!