Like, I have a buddy who’s a communist, and we agree on everything. I come on Lemmy and say I don’t agree with the most extreme forms of socialism and communism, though, and I get straight up shit on and banned as if I said something incredibly offensive.
Oh I’m well aware. Hexbear seems to be the biggest hive of bastards I’ve encountered on all of the federated instances. Every hexbear post I see is either super right wing or just insanely cringe My Little Pony type stuff.
Hexbear users can be obnoxious, but they’re not “pedo right wing shit heads.” Ask them what they think about pedos and right wingers.
To clarify my tone, I’m not some scoffing, irony-poisoned debatelord, and when I say “it’s wild” I’m not rolling my eyes sarcastically, I’m genuinely surprised to see this shit.
I can’t keep track of this one-dimensional political spectrum people keep using. I thought tankies, socialists, communists, and liberals were all considered left wing, but I keep hearing things about some of these groups being on the right instead.
Yeah, people say right-wing when what they mean is authoritarian. There’s a guy named Bob Altemeyer that has been studying authoritarianism for decades and he makes a distinction between left wing and right wing authoritarianism.
That’d make sense, but there’s a good deal of stuff typically considered left wing (like antimisinformation and gun control) that is authoritarian too. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it’s handled fairly, of course.
The troll in me kinda wants to see how people would react if I started calling them righties for wanting to stop hate speech, but I think I know better.
Society requires a socially agreed upon level of authoritarianism to enforce the socially agreed upon ruleset. No system of organisation or control is absent from authority, but trying to conflate functional social authority with forced authoritarianism has been something I’m seeing a lot more from fascist thinkers.
Authority: When the majority tell the government how they wish to be controlled.
Authoritarianism: When the government tells the majority how they will be controlled.
Huh… I see you set a bit of a rhetorical trap there, where disagreeing or countering would make me seem like one of these fascist thinkers. Nice. Might not have been intentional though.
Anyways, I see them as different steps along the same spectrum. Authority is a component of authoritarianism, but the presence of authority is not necessarily indicative of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is authority taken too far.
On that topic, non-authoritarian authority is not always a good thing, nor does good authority necessarily stem from the will of the people. Sometimes the masses really don’t know what’s best. That said, democracy is probably still the best paradigm humans can manage on a long term.
Whether the will of the masses is “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant, society as a construct is one of cooperation for mutual benefit and improved quality of life through cedeing control and authority to those who represent the will of the majority, so if the masses managed to corral themselves into society then the understanding of the benefit of cooperation is strong in the social consciousness.
A result of this is the understanding that anything that works against the will of the masses to benefit from cooperation is unsustainable because it involves exploitation of the least protected sections of society.
This means that anyone trying to abuse and mismanage social systems for their own selfish benefit (emotional, financial, or otherwise) are objectively harming society. Ergo, anything that restricts the will of the masses by allowing selfish minorities to exploit their way to wealth and power and to further let them diminish the capacity of the majority to benefit from social cooperation is forced without consent, we call these actions “fascist”.
Fascism was the default social structure, he who controls the resources controls the society, but instead of that being an elected government of the populace it was one guy and his family that abused their position to maintain that position however possible from the first time an ape stole another ape’s rock to a king stealing another king’s country.
Society has slowly been slowly wresting control from the selfish individual to support the masses as social consciousness grows, democracy was one of the biggest steps in that direction of taking the power out of the hands of fascists and putting it into the hands of the people. But it’s a work in progress, and those that are selfish and want to hold back the progress of social benefit are thusly called conservatives, because they wish to conserve the ability to abuse society for chance to gain more wealth and power than other people as opposed to contributing to society to increase the wealth and power of all the people.
Many of these fascist systems still exist and will take a significant about of time for society to claim more control away from fascist actors, there will always be an ebb and flow of fascism and selfishness in society but that lessens as time goes on. For example, the Democratic electoral system of the US government has been unable to avoid the influence of fascism over the years as evident by legal voter disenfranchisement through first past the post, non-preferential voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college, attempts to limit and remove citizens rights to engage with the electoral system by de-funding postal services and limiting mail voting, etc. These are all fascist claw backs attempting to regain selfish control over societies power structures for their percieved personal benefit.
Capitalism, a system integrated into almost all modern world cultures and societies is also a fascist concession that is a middle ground between kings owning everything in their kingdom to personal ownership and control, of course exploitation is still present under capitalism, because capitalism is just a stepping stone to a socially beneficial system not an end point of social development, it is also one of the last bastions of fascist control over wealth consolidation.
I could go on about how all these developments relate to issues in the social order and the inability for individuals to develop cognisance of the nuances of societies current place in human development but it’s starting to feel like rambling.
If anything I hope that something I said resonates and provides context and understanding of the complex weave that is human social development.
Kinda skimmed because that’s a really long essay, but:
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism is a fairly specific thing. It’s not just anything that’s not democracy. Overapplying the term is a tool that allows you to condemn reasonable stances as absolute evil. Note that reasonable, used here, does not mean ideal or without caveats. If you can condemn every stance other than your own as absolute evil, that is radicalization. Radicalization can have its use, but it’s a dangerous thing. It needs to be focused. What is “Punch a Nazi” when capitalists are fascists too?
This is the take that bothers me the most, as if the most aggressive and outspoken faction of any group exist only to drag the more respectable members down by association.
I would be one thing to say, “I don’t understand that group”, but it’s quite remarkable to say, “I understand that group so little that they must be the opposition in disguise”
This is the take that bothers me the most, as if the most aggressive and outspoken faction of any group exist only to drag the more respectable members down by association.
Eh, only a small minority of hexbears are fascists, but almost all hexbears tolerate fascists. All the fascists have to do is walk in and say “NATO is bad, Ukraine is bad, libs are bad, vote for Trump because he is a big lovable goofball” and the other hexbears are like aight let’s own the shitlibs.
only a small minority of hexbears are fascists, but almost all hexbears tolerate fascists
A huge portion of hexbear users are trans or otherwise LGBTQ. Ask them what they think fascists want to do to them. Fascists also massacre socialists — often with American support, as in Indonesia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, and Bolivia. Ask them how they feel about this. Hexbear users do hold some complex views on topics like China and Russia, but they have reasons for this and would tell you if you asked. You should consider talking to them, instead of making things up about them in an authoritative tone of voice. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a hexbear user who doesn’t want Trump dead or in jail.
A huge portion of hexbear users are trans or otherwise LGBTQ. Ask them what they think fascists want to do to them.
Maybe I should ask Jessica Watkins, who explicitly supported fascists, and is now being misgendered and put in the wrong prison by fascists, for supporting fascists.
Trans and genderqueer people can be just as stupid as Cishet people and vote for the leapords eating faces party. It’s not like fascism actually benefits people, it’s predatory to vulnerable people.
You should consider talking to them, instead of making things up about them in an authoritative tone of voice.
I have interacted quite a bit already. I got lots of animal poop pictures and a lot of people requesting that I post a picture of my genitalia.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a hexbear user who doesn’t want Trump dead or in jail.
I’ve seen a number of comments from Hexbears supporting DJT and not a single comment expressing this.
On hexbear, geopolitics exists as whatever hexbears feel like owns the shitlibs the most at that particular moment.
Sometimes, Russia is just months away from a well planned and strategized victory, against an evil Nazi Ukraine.
Other times, everything is a mastermind NATO move that’s all benefiting NATO, and Ukraine is just the meatgrinder victim.
What feels most alt-right about hexbear isn’t any particular position, but the fact that there’s no particular position. No logical cohesiveness, no rooted in solid reality. It’s superfluid ever changing dream reality.
I think the parallel with right wing extremism is because they’re both pushed by the CCP. They use a divide and conquer approach via LLMs on social media to weaken political opponents.
Go ask them for their opinions about Russia and China. You’ll get unanimous agreement that Putin is a homophobic capitalist reactionary and Russia is not a socialist or left-wing state. For China, you’ll get disagreements, but most of the takes will be pretty nuanced either way. Some believe Deng’s reforms were necessary to avoid economic strangulation, others are deeply suspicious of the direction China is headed.
See, this is exactly what I mean by “I understand them so little that they must be the opposition in disguise”
If you tried at all, youd understand that they’re position on “modern day Russia and China” is based on the idea of critical support. They evaluate policy decisions against “does this bring the working class closer to solidarity or not”.
I.e. on the Ukraine war, their position is basically “U.S. Involvement in any war is a net-negative to worker solidarity in the country of question”. None there support Russia’s invasion, but they think Americas involvement spells the end of any socialist coalition to begin with.
But again, “I understand them so little they must be a part of the opposition”. They have a different (definitively leftist) understanding of the war than you do. Doesn’t make them right-wing.
in most of the world, “leftist” implies that you are anti-capitalist, while “liberal” implies that you support capitalism. Leftists believe workers should control production, while liberals believe owners should control production. Liberals might be “left wing on cultural issues” but it’s a lot less consistent among liberals than among leftists. You can find, for example, a large number of anti-trans liberals, but you’ll have a harder time finding anti-trans leftists.
That still doesn’t tell me what a liberal is. How do you define liberal? At best, what I’m getting from that is “a liberal is someone who supports capitalism,” but that makes Donald Trump a liberal.
in America, “liberal” also usually implies “left-wing on cultural issues,” which excludes Trump — but like I said American liberals are a large group and aren’t always consistent on cultural issues. I’m also necessarily being kinda reductionist because political labels are pretty messy and hard to pin down. I chose to reduce it in a way that highlights the main disagreement between leftists and American liberals because I think that’s the most clarifying.
I don’t think highlighting the disagreement between “leftists” and “liberals” is very clarifying here. That kind of clarification tells me “liberals are leftists except for the differences highlighted,” but the differences highlighted seem to be everything that makes a leftist a leftist.
Google tells me that liberal means socially progressive (i.e. culturally left) and promoting social welfare.
How does your definition differ?
Please don’t tell me it’s just “they’re not always progressive and don’t always promote welfare.” : )
“In popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.”
There’s not many all-in on authoritarianism that aren’t extreme left or right economically.
The political compass is better than a one-dimensional spectrum, but it’s literally twice as complicated.
You can pretty safely plot a symmetrical U shaped line running through the political compass and find almost everybody. That’s why one-axis works well for describing the political climate of the USA, it’s mostly in the right half of the political compass sitting on this line.
So tankies are very Communist (left) and necessarily very authoritarian to achieve their goals.
They represent the other half of the political compass that Americans usually do not see. So people on here frequently get confused when exposed to tankies.
And you also have the tankies talking about the Bernie-Sanders-style/social democrats (found at the vertex of our U shape) as “right” because if you follow the U line, they would be.
Extreme left-wing ideology is indistinguishable from extreme right-wing ideology. They both want to kill lots of people, and if you aren’t on their side you’re on their shit list.
Lol, I’ve been wondering how to describe them…
Like, I have a buddy who’s a communist, and we agree on everything. I come on Lemmy and say I don’t agree with the most extreme forms of socialism and communism, though, and I get straight up shit on and banned as if I said something incredibly offensive.
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Oh I’m well aware. Hexbear seems to be the biggest hive of bastards I’ve encountered on all of the federated instances. Every hexbear post I see is either super right wing or just insanely cringe My Little Pony type stuff.
its almost like hexbear is full of pedo right wing shit heads or something
I get the impression everyone on there is typically on 4chan. It’s a cesspool.
it’s wild seeing these comments get zero pushback.
Take your authoritarian propaganda and arrogance and go back to your own fork.
Hexbear users can be obnoxious, but they’re not “pedo right wing shit heads.” Ask them what they think about pedos and right wingers.
To clarify my tone, I’m not some scoffing, irony-poisoned debatelord, and when I say “it’s wild” I’m not rolling my eyes sarcastically, I’m genuinely surprised to see this shit.
Lol no, they’re not right wing. They just share the trait of being moronically devoted to their preferred ideology.
Oh, they’re real – I’ve met several in person. It’s very rare they’re older than “young adult”.
I can’t keep track of this one-dimensional political spectrum people keep using. I thought tankies, socialists, communists, and liberals were all considered left wing, but I keep hearing things about some of these groups being on the right instead.
When can we upgrade to the political tesseract?
Yeah, people say right-wing when what they mean is authoritarian. There’s a guy named Bob Altemeyer that has been studying authoritarianism for decades and he makes a distinction between left wing and right wing authoritarianism.
That’d make sense, but there’s a good deal of stuff typically considered left wing (like antimisinformation and gun control) that is authoritarian too. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it’s handled fairly, of course.
The troll in me kinda wants to see how people would react if I started calling them righties for wanting to stop hate speech, but I think I know better.
Society requires a socially agreed upon level of authoritarianism to enforce the socially agreed upon ruleset. No system of organisation or control is absent from authority, but trying to conflate functional social authority with forced authoritarianism has been something I’m seeing a lot more from fascist thinkers.
Authority: When the majority tell the government how they wish to be controlled.
Authoritarianism: When the government tells the majority how they will be controlled.
Huh… I see you set a bit of a rhetorical trap there, where disagreeing or countering would make me seem like one of these fascist thinkers. Nice. Might not have been intentional though.
Anyways, I see them as different steps along the same spectrum. Authority is a component of authoritarianism, but the presence of authority is not necessarily indicative of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is authority taken too far.
On that topic, non-authoritarian authority is not always a good thing, nor does good authority necessarily stem from the will of the people. Sometimes the masses really don’t know what’s best. That said, democracy is probably still the best paradigm humans can manage on a long term.
Whether the will of the masses is “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant, society as a construct is one of cooperation for mutual benefit and improved quality of life through cedeing control and authority to those who represent the will of the majority, so if the masses managed to corral themselves into society then the understanding of the benefit of cooperation is strong in the social consciousness.
A result of this is the understanding that anything that works against the will of the masses to benefit from cooperation is unsustainable because it involves exploitation of the least protected sections of society.
This means that anyone trying to abuse and mismanage social systems for their own selfish benefit (emotional, financial, or otherwise) are objectively harming society. Ergo, anything that restricts the will of the masses by allowing selfish minorities to exploit their way to wealth and power and to further let them diminish the capacity of the majority to benefit from social cooperation is forced without consent, we call these actions “fascist”.
Fascism was the default social structure, he who controls the resources controls the society, but instead of that being an elected government of the populace it was one guy and his family that abused their position to maintain that position however possible from the first time an ape stole another ape’s rock to a king stealing another king’s country.
Society has slowly been slowly wresting control from the selfish individual to support the masses as social consciousness grows, democracy was one of the biggest steps in that direction of taking the power out of the hands of fascists and putting it into the hands of the people. But it’s a work in progress, and those that are selfish and want to hold back the progress of social benefit are thusly called conservatives, because they wish to conserve the ability to abuse society for chance to gain more wealth and power than other people as opposed to contributing to society to increase the wealth and power of all the people.
Many of these fascist systems still exist and will take a significant about of time for society to claim more control away from fascist actors, there will always be an ebb and flow of fascism and selfishness in society but that lessens as time goes on. For example, the Democratic electoral system of the US government has been unable to avoid the influence of fascism over the years as evident by legal voter disenfranchisement through first past the post, non-preferential voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college, attempts to limit and remove citizens rights to engage with the electoral system by de-funding postal services and limiting mail voting, etc. These are all fascist claw backs attempting to regain selfish control over societies power structures for their percieved personal benefit.
Capitalism, a system integrated into almost all modern world cultures and societies is also a fascist concession that is a middle ground between kings owning everything in their kingdom to personal ownership and control, of course exploitation is still present under capitalism, because capitalism is just a stepping stone to a socially beneficial system not an end point of social development, it is also one of the last bastions of fascist control over wealth consolidation.
I could go on about how all these developments relate to issues in the social order and the inability for individuals to develop cognisance of the nuances of societies current place in human development but it’s starting to feel like rambling.
If anything I hope that something I said resonates and provides context and understanding of the complex weave that is human social development.
Kinda skimmed because that’s a really long essay, but:
Fascism is a fairly specific thing. It’s not just anything that’s not democracy. Overapplying the term is a tool that allows you to condemn reasonable stances as absolute evil. Note that reasonable, used here, does not mean ideal or without caveats. If you can condemn every stance other than your own as absolute evil, that is radicalization. Radicalization can have its use, but it’s a dangerous thing. It needs to be focused. What is “Punch a Nazi” when capitalists are fascists too?
Yes, you are basically describing Hobbes’ “Leviathan.”
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This is the take that bothers me the most, as if the most aggressive and outspoken faction of any group exist only to drag the more respectable members down by association.
I would be one thing to say, “I don’t understand that group”, but it’s quite remarkable to say, “I understand that group so little that they must be the opposition in disguise”
Eh, only a small minority of hexbears are fascists, but almost all hexbears tolerate fascists. All the fascists have to do is walk in and say “NATO is bad, Ukraine is bad, libs are bad, vote for Trump because he is a big lovable goofball” and the other hexbears are like aight let’s own the shitlibs.
A huge portion of hexbear users are trans or otherwise LGBTQ. Ask them what they think fascists want to do to them. Fascists also massacre socialists — often with American support, as in Indonesia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, El Salvador, Argentina, and Bolivia. Ask them how they feel about this. Hexbear users do hold some complex views on topics like China and Russia, but they have reasons for this and would tell you if you asked. You should consider talking to them, instead of making things up about them in an authoritative tone of voice. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a hexbear user who doesn’t want Trump dead or in jail.
Maybe I should ask Jessica Watkins, who explicitly supported fascists, and is now being misgendered and put in the wrong prison by fascists, for supporting fascists.
Trans and genderqueer people can be just as stupid as Cishet people and vote for the leapords eating faces party. It’s not like fascism actually benefits people, it’s predatory to vulnerable people.
I have interacted quite a bit already. I got lots of animal poop pictures and a lot of people requesting that I post a picture of my genitalia.
I’ve seen a number of comments from Hexbears supporting DJT and not a single comment expressing this.
show me one
*make sure it’s sincere though, because I’m gonna go over there and ask the user what they think of donald trump and why
It’s blatant though? They use right wing talking points for everything and it’s all dog whistles?
“Geopolitics exists as a binary, and on some issues they agree with the opposite binary from me”.
Worse actually, “they might agree with me on one issue but they disagree on another, so they must be pretending to agree with me to begin with”
On hexbear, geopolitics exists as whatever hexbears feel like owns the shitlibs the most at that particular moment.
Sometimes, Russia is just months away from a well planned and strategized victory, against an evil Nazi Ukraine.
Other times, everything is a mastermind NATO move that’s all benefiting NATO, and Ukraine is just the meatgrinder victim.
What feels most alt-right about hexbear isn’t any particular position, but the fact that there’s no particular position. No logical cohesiveness, no rooted in solid reality. It’s superfluid ever changing dream reality.
I think the parallel with right wing extremism is because they’re both pushed by the CCP. They use a divide and conquer approach via LLMs on social media to weaken political opponents.
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is Cuba a far-right regime? They just passed the most comprehensive pro-LGBTQ legislation package on the planet.
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Go ask them for their opinions about Russia and China. You’ll get unanimous agreement that Putin is a homophobic capitalist reactionary and Russia is not a socialist or left-wing state. For China, you’ll get disagreements, but most of the takes will be pretty nuanced either way. Some believe Deng’s reforms were necessary to avoid economic strangulation, others are deeply suspicious of the direction China is headed.
Just a point of clarification: you think the USSR was a far-right regime?
They didn’t say the USSR, they said modern day China and Russia
See, this is exactly what I mean by “I understand them so little that they must be the opposition in disguise”
If you tried at all, youd understand that they’re position on “modern day Russia and China” is based on the idea of critical support. They evaluate policy decisions against “does this bring the working class closer to solidarity or not”.
I.e. on the Ukraine war, their position is basically “U.S. Involvement in any war is a net-negative to worker solidarity in the country of question”. None there support Russia’s invasion, but they think Americas involvement spells the end of any socialist coalition to begin with.
But again, “I understand them so little they must be a part of the opposition”. They have a different (definitively leftist) understanding of the war than you do. Doesn’t make them right-wing.
Liberalism hasn’t been left-wing for the past 150 years at this point
Can you tell me what liberalism is, then? Because to me it’s always meant “left wing on cultural issues.”
Asking a Lemmygrad user to explain something political won’t work out well
Maybe, but you have to know the definitions they’re using to understand what they’re saying.
in most of the world, “leftist” implies that you are anti-capitalist, while “liberal” implies that you support capitalism. Leftists believe workers should control production, while liberals believe owners should control production. Liberals might be “left wing on cultural issues” but it’s a lot less consistent among liberals than among leftists. You can find, for example, a large number of anti-trans liberals, but you’ll have a harder time finding anti-trans leftists.
That still doesn’t tell me what a liberal is. How do you define liberal? At best, what I’m getting from that is “a liberal is someone who supports capitalism,” but that makes Donald Trump a liberal.
in America, “liberal” also usually implies “left-wing on cultural issues,” which excludes Trump — but like I said American liberals are a large group and aren’t always consistent on cultural issues. I’m also necessarily being kinda reductionist because political labels are pretty messy and hard to pin down. I chose to reduce it in a way that highlights the main disagreement between leftists and American liberals because I think that’s the most clarifying.
I don’t think highlighting the disagreement between “leftists” and “liberals” is very clarifying here. That kind of clarification tells me “liberals are leftists except for the differences highlighted,” but the differences highlighted seem to be everything that makes a leftist a leftist.
Google tells me that liberal means socially progressive (i.e. culturally left) and promoting social welfare.
How does your definition differ?
Please don’t tell me it’s just “they’re not always progressive and don’t always promote welfare.” : )
From Wikipedia
image for visualizing
There’s not many all-in on authoritarianism that aren’t extreme left or right economically.
The political compass is better than a one-dimensional spectrum, but it’s literally twice as complicated.
You can pretty safely plot a symmetrical U shaped line running through the political compass and find almost everybody. That’s why one-axis works well for describing the political climate of the USA, it’s mostly in the right half of the political compass sitting on this line.
So tankies are very Communist (left) and necessarily very authoritarian to achieve their goals.
They represent the other half of the political compass that Americans usually do not see. So people on here frequently get confused when exposed to tankies.
And you also have the tankies talking about the Bernie-Sanders-style/social democrats (found at the vertex of our U shape) as “right” because if you follow the U line, they would be.
Yeah, political compass is more precise, but I like splitting social and economics too, which makes a cube. Then I said tesseract as a joke.
But “us vs them” doesn’t work as well when “them” has so much nuance.
Horseshoe nonsense moment
So you think hexbear users sat around unfederated for 3 years and just pretended to be communists to each other?
First time on the internet?
Extreme left-wing ideology is indistinguishable from extreme right-wing ideology. They both want to kill lots of people, and if you aren’t on their side you’re on their shit list.
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The political compass is garbage. All of those political spectrum simplifications are.
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Yeah, but it gives the same misconceptions to laymen’s that the left to right scale does.
Good