New tagline just dropped.
Hexbear is fascist. They’re pretending to be tankies, but every single post on there is right-wing and bigoted. It’s so damn obvious.
These people absolutely just make shit up relentlessly.
We are fascists for checks notes… not supporting ukrainian nazi militias in their struggle to purge ukraine of the ethnic russians.
Wasn’t the fact that “the nazi ukranians with a jewish president are trying to ethnic clean the russians” the same excuse used by Putin to start the invasion?
CW: holocaust, corpses, nazis
the nazi ukranians with a jewish president
suggesting that their president is jewish means they don’t have a nazi problem in their military is just as ridiculous as suggesting that america doesn’t have a racist cop problem because Obama was black. Imagine if we had elected Bernie Sanders (who is Jewish) in America. Does that mean all the nazis in our military and police would simply disappear? of course not. Nor would have electing Hillary Clinton brought an end to sexism. Nor would electing Pete Buttigieg have brought an end to LGBTphobia. There’s a difference between the milestone of electing to high office a member of a marginalized group and the literal end of all discrimination against the marginalized group. The two should not be confused with each other under any circumstances.
Zelensky admits it is in US interests to use Ukraine
Biden before the war admitting the US would target nordstream 2 if Russia goes into Ukraine
the same excuse used by Putin to start the invasion?
Just because someone uses something as an excuse doesn’t mean it isn’t a real problem. America used terrorism, a real problem, as an excuse to invade 7 different countries. The irony being that many of those right wing jihadist terrorist groups the US was fighting were originally CIA-backed anti-soviet reactionaries.
Putin’s actual reason for the invasion was Ukraine threatening to join NATO. NATO membership means the US can stage nuclear weapons in your country, train your troops, etc. Putin didn’t want US power that close to Moscow (the Russo-Ukrainian border is the closest international border to Moscow). This makes sense. After all, the so-called Cuban missile crisis back in the day actually started when America put nukes in Turkey, about 1200 miles from Moscow, so Moscow put missiles in Cuba, about 1200 miles from Washington. It was a tit-for-tat. After 3 decades of NATO expanding eastward into former Warsaw pact countries (usually under the rhetoric of “increasing security cooperation”) Putin finally decided to invade Ukraine. However, yes, it was rhetorically convenient for him to point out the neo nazis in Ukraine.
NATO gave informal promises to Gorbachev to not expand eastward (Gorbachev was stupid to believe these promises and not get them in writing as formal, legally-binding promises)
The Soviet Union tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn’t allowed
Meanwhile NATO kept expanding
and including “former” nazis in its ranks
Jewish people can be nazi collaborators. Of which, Zelensky is all-but-explicitly one, given the kinds of people he materially supports and empowers. Source: I’m Jewish
Yes, it was. I’m honestly shocked. No one seems to know what Russia’s causus belli was.
Anyone of that video of the Banderites laughing about how Zelensky deflects all attention from the Nazi formations because Liberals can’t hold the idea of a Jewish President in a country dominated by Nazi politics in their heads?
we’re ideologically much, much further away from Putin than they are. if he didn’t intervene in Crimea or Ukraine but kept all his policies otherwise intact, including the ones repressing minorities and pro-market ones, he wouldn’t be nearly as hated by these people.
libs fall over each other for the esteemed opportunity to lick the boots of the most depraved, most despotic, most comically evil politicians and oligarchs, with three exceptions: when they carry out those acts in a transparent way rather than hiding it behind veils of “we need to cut social security because of X”; when they use the state for economic interventions rather than free market “solutions”; and when they decide to snub America on a certain issue (but are otherwise perfectly willing lapdogs)
e.g.
unhinged rightwinger: “I will kill 100,000 poor people.”
libs: “nooooo! we need to register with our local police department to hold a 1 hour march through the city and then get teargassed anyway and then mutter “just a few bad apples” on the way home! but it’s important to remember that China does way worse things! stop using whataboutisms by bringing up America!”
unhinged rightwinger: “fine. I will reduce social security spending and cut funding to hospitals and homeless shelters (this will have the effect of killing 100,000 poor people)”
libs: “hm, yes, very wise, for I am also socially liberal but fiscally conservative and I think it’s important to reach across the aisle and engage civilly with our opposition so that they will give us policies in return (they won’t). the efficiencies in this sector will go up 4.7% according to this think tank’s analysis…”
leftwinger: “we should increase funding to hospitals and build more houses in this city to fix the homelessness problem (this will have the effect of saving 100,000 poor people)”
libs: “noooo! you’re using state funds which will increase the big magical national debt number! you’re not allowing the free market to build the best and most efficient housing! we can’t do this while there’s inflation! read economics 101! some of those building materials come from Russia and China, you’re a tankie!”
The concept of a national deficit is so hard for me to grasp.
So a deficit is when the government spends more money than they take in from taxes, cool. So government just raises taxes when they end up doing that, sort of like how I up my tax contribution if I end up owing at the end of the year. Wait, they only raise taxes on the working class? Because the capitalist class, through their money, is able to organize and consolidate power? That’s shit but surely it doesn’t get worse.
Okay, so where do they get the money to spend if they’re spending more than they take in? It’s gotta come from somewhere, I’m sure they just print more and that can’t be bad. Oh, so when they print more money that makes the existing money worth less… Well that goes for the capitalists too, so at least that’s even. Oh, you mean that they get to park their money in appreciating assets while mine gets spent day to day and my wage stagnates so my purchasing power and meager savings just fucking declines… It surely can’t get worse.
Yeah, I remember that appreciating assets thing. Get it over with, how does that fuck me over? So the government issues bonds, basically guaranteeing a set return on the money capitalists spend on them. How can the government guarantee that? Isn’t the market too volatile for that kind of guarantee? Ah, of course they would make up the difference with taxes, which I just learned are dis-proportionately paid by the working class.
Liberals have no consistency and are totally operating on vibes. I remember liberals used to really like Israel.
They’ve even somehow rehabilitated George W. Bush even though he’s evil incarnate. They also admire literal monarchy? Like they were really into Elizabeth II back when she was around. They’ll all trip over themselves to say nice things about Churchill, about Alexander Hamilton (slave owner), and will say war crimes like the atom bombing of Japan are complicated. Other things their heroes did just aren’t in their worldview at all, like Clinton bombing Yugoslavia and Sudan, or Obama overthrowing Libya. Those events just vanished into nothingness for liberals. Or if you bring them up you’re accused of whataboutism and the conversation stops.
And yet they have the gumption to say we’re bootlickers?
And they criticize us for saying otherwise factual things about Russia? Not even bootlicking, just very neutral information like that NATO is openly hostile to Russia and that Crimea is currently administered by the Russian state. That’s enough to be called pro-Putin, but more than that, you’re not just expressing a political reality, your mind has been infected with Putin and you’re a bad person now.
They’ve even somehow rehabilitated George W. Bush even though he’s evil incarnate.
The bit where they had Bush giving candy to Michelle Obama six fucking years after the “end” of the Iraq War.
“He has the presence of mind and the sense of humor to bring me a mint,” Obama said of the former president, per ABC7. “And he made it a point to give me that mint right then and there, and that’s the beauty of George Bush.”
Actual quote from Michelle Obama.
In October of this year, Obama discussed her close relationship with the former president while making an appearance on TODAY to interview with Bush’s daughter, Jenna Bush Hager.
“I’d love if we as a country could get back to the place where we didn’t demonize people who disagreed with us. Because that’s essentially the difference between Republicans and Democrats,” she began. "That doesn’t make me evil. And that doesn’t make him, you know, stupid—it’s just a disagreement and that’s how I feel about your father. You know? He’s a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man.”
HE MURDERED A MILLION PEOPLE OBAMA!
(I never know how to refer to the spouses of major political figures. First name, for women especially, seems demeaning but not in a useful way, while last name is confusing, and fuck me if I’m putting “Mrs”.)
Hadn’t thought about Clinton bombing that pharma factory in Sudan for a while. : |
Try telling them that there was no political reality where Russia would allow Ukraine to sieze control of Crimea and had it to NATO. Watch them seethe at you for denying the holiness of national sovereignty. Watch their minds bounce off the idea of strategic interest like a duck bouncing off a jetski. Oh, and try telling them that pretty much everyone in Crimea in some way worked for or worked to support the Russian Black Sea Fleet, so Russia didn’t have to invade because they already had a huge military base there. They just took the old flags down and put new ones up.
if he didn’t intervene in Crimea or Ukraine but kept all his policies otherwise intact, including the ones repressing minorities and pro-market ones, he wouldn’t be nearly as hated by these people.
all the old putin tough-guy memes are plenty of proof of this - you couldn’t go anywhere on the internet without seeing that one picture of him on a horse
To defend Azov, I’ve had a lib send me a picture of Putin riding a horse where it’s reins had a metal swastika buckle and tried to imply that Putin is a nazi using the same logic but
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That wasn’t Putin’s horse, he was borrowing it on a visit.
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His visit was to Mongolia where Buddhism is the largest religion.
I expect swastikas in Buddhist countries. Swastikas in Europe only mean one thing.
the efficiencies in this sector will go up 4.7% according to this think tank’s analysis.
Of course that think tank is bought and paid for by a deranged right-winger, but being critical of your sources is a concept libs only understand insofar as to ask “who published it? Oh CNN, then it must be fine”. They don’t actually employ any skepticism or source critique, propaganda is something that happens to other people far away
he wouldn’t be nearly as hated by these people.
I honestly cannot remember how they talked about him in the before times. It certainly wasn’t with this level of mindlessness, but I’m also pretty certain they hated him back them too.
it depends whether you define the “before times” as pre-2022 or pre-2014. I think before 2014 he was just another world leader to some extent. he was initially hated a lot post-2014 I remember but because the invasion of Crimea was so quick (relative to this invasion) it was hard for a ton of self-reinforcing narratives to be set up in the media, and this was before the rise of calling everybody a tankie or calling out China on every political post, so within a couple years it was back to “strong-man Putin”. Russiagate obviously made his reputation tumble but if you weren’t really into that, you could still have been neutral on him leading up to 2022.
I’ve spoken about this before, but they think that everything is a binary good/bad. Liberals = good and Conservatives = bad.
We clearly aren’t liberals, so we can’t fit in that “good” box, so we must go in the “bad/conservative” box instead.
That’s it. That’s their rationale behind this. “They aren’t liberals so they must be conservatives.” Words mean nothing to a liberal, it’s all about vibes.
It really is pretty much just this for a lot of them. Maybe the slightly more sophisticated among them will call us like “useful idiots in service of the right wing” or something along those lines. Not a lot of rigorous thought goes into this shit most of the time. It’s basically a disney understanding of politics.
It’s fiction brain. They need the real world to be full of simple good guys and bad guys, because they’ve always been a “good guy” their whole life, and if being good or bad was based on actions and nuance and not just a simplistic “We are the good guy team” they might need to consider if they aren’t actually as wonderful a person as they think they are.
Shit like this always reminds me of how a big watershed moment for my baby leftist journey was finally coming to the understanding that these words have meanings that get warped like a fun house mirror in the U.S.
I just casually referred to Stalin as a fascist once in front of a non Anglo and they called me out for it. They weren’t even an overly ideological person they had just grown up in a non Anglo education system and to their ear calling Stalin a fascist was factually incorrect and sounds kinda idiotic to most non western ears. The self awareness this created was the start of a lot of of layers peeling in retrospect.
They were absolutely correct! Obviously! Whatever criticism you may have of Stalin, and I think we all have them, he was not a fucking fascist! Stalin could easily be one of the most pivotal figures in the DEFEAT of fascism in Europe and yet liberalism and propaganda and the myopic political lens that Americans are given to interpret the world drains all texture and greyness from history and leaves you with this shambling nonsense narrative where everyone who was opposed to the U.S. global hegemony post WW2 in ANY capacity is either a “fascist” or a footnote in the history books because whatever shot they had at the wheel was usurped by the State department.
All this is to say never stop bullying and always remember to remind anglos that the western narrative of history is far from universally accepted and full of gaping holes.
Breaking people out of national chauvinism and into internationalism is in my opinion the key trigger moment between sympathising with some left ideas and becoming a true actual leftist. It is the key that inoculates a person against “the tankies are evil” bullshit and finally rips them out of the hands of liberal propaganda. Once people make that transition into wanting a truly international perspective, learning things at the international level, viewing things from the position of truly seeking international socialism and so on… It is where people finally rid themselves of brainworms that have sometimes been built up for many decades.
Somewhere along that transition from national to international people undergo a personal decision of “I have a huge amount to learn” and go on that learning journey. That personal decision to actually learn is where they discard many things they thought they already knew, built up from billionaire media and propaganda.
I will keep on saying this over and over again here. The biggest thing we should be doing is pushing people to stop being nationalists and to become internationalists. Once they do this they become so much easier for us to engage with.
I saw one in here recently who hopefully had a bit of an epiphany moment. They were defending the US’s actions with a “doesn’t everyone just want their country to be strong?” kind of rhetoric. But they didn’t seem to be a conscious national chauvinist, they just seemed to assume that’s what everyone was and didn’t even know there were other options.
I hope they’ve been lurking and learning since then.
You know… I don’t know if it was the tipping point. That’s hard to say. But this was a major tipping point for me: knowing that all those great welfare programs in any liberal democracy would have to be funded by hyper-exploiting the global south… that shook some of the last remnants of liberalism out of me.
It’s unacceptable. That conclusion only leaves revolution and the need for a coherent theory that has been shown to work. Marxism is the theory and, to put it simply, either we all get free or none of us do. Makes it a lot easier to empathise not only with other people but also with the socialist struggle in other places. It’s more of a bridge than a stepping stone to class consciousness.
There are likely a lot of people susceptible to this view as it’s common in the west to e.g. tell kids not to waste food because there are starving people in poorer countries. It doesn’t fully make sense even as a kid. It’s well-meaning but ultimately it’s a liberal performance. It means that many, many people are hardwired to think about the damage caused by their consumption (or lack of it, here). All they need is a radical analysis to see why liberalism can’t solve the problem that they already accept and want to fix.
Not an easy task, still. In pedagogical terms, revolutionaries need to identify this and other ‘threshold concepts’. Then make them visible and comprehensible for potential comrades.
I usually just dismiss these goofballs by replying with “Tell me you don’t have a functioning definition of fascism without telling me” and maybe I’ll challenge them to define fascism in their own words without looking it up.
If, by some miracle, they start invoking the trash-tier Umberto Eco definition of fascism then you have two clear routes:
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You demonstrate how the US comfortably fits this definition, point by point
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You draw upon a Marxist analysis of fascism which centres the importance of materialist analysis of fascism, such as from the works of Georgi Dimitrov
What makes you think Eco’s definition is trash tier? Ur-fascism is a decent essay that gets frequently misinterpreted.
Hexbear is fascist. They’re pretending to be tankies, but every single post on there is right-wing and bigoted. It’s so damn obvious.
You all have been found out.
Hexbear might actually be one of the most non-bigoted places on the internet. we are militantly against bigotry. no epic logical debates here, you just get smacked in the fucking face by a banhammer if you try that shit here
we are militantly against bigotry
Except for Estonians. The exception that proves the rule.
I’m not sure quite what to think about the Baltics. Obviously fuck their governments, and the numerous institutions pushing Holocaust revisionism and denial and re-writing 20th century history. But blanket-condemning little countries like that, no matter how shitty their government is, feels different from blanket condemning the US or UK. They’re under the NATO umbrella but despite being little pissant countries with fash governments they’re not exerting hegemonic power and are at most expendable speed bumps for Imperialism. I can’t imagine it’s fun or say being a dissident in the Baltics. hell, I don’t even think it’s legal, is it? Yeah, looks like they’ve got some blanket laws they use to hunt down Communists and, probably, anyone they think is communist
Idk, I gotta think about it.
the fact they think so many trans people are out and about fascists is fucking wild. plus they talk about blahaj being ran by trans people, which is true, but also ignore that the trans community on lemmy is largely here, and for very obvious reasons
10% trans users on lemmygrad + 30% from hexbear, assuming we have no crossover (and I don’t think we have much) means 40% of our combined user base is trans (or 20 idk), WAY above world averages and way above what most instances can boast.
Compared to the lemmyverse as a whole however I’m not sure of the proportion our two instances represent, we’d have to look at active users on all relevant websites
Still waiting for blahaj to finally run a demos survey btw.
… that’s not how percentages work
lemmygrad seems to be trans-friendly, and hexbear certainly is, but you can’t just add percentages together to get the total percentage
10% trans users on lemmygrad + 30% from hexbear, assuming we have no crossover (and I don’t think we have much) means 40% of our combined user base is trans, WAY above world averages and way above what most instances can boast.
🤓 um, ackshually, it would be 20%, because sample percentages are averaged into each other when added, not counting for the actual numerical difference between the instances’ userbases
I believe you, but i honestly can’t find anything fascist on their front page right now
No evidence, just vibes
Response 1 to that:
“I believe you, but i honestly can’t find anything fascist on their front page right now”
Lol maybe they shouldn’t believe a claim that has no evidence!
Response to that:
“Give it time. You’ll stumble across a pro-Putin post eventually.”
Since when do leftists support a capitalist like Putin? This is what late-stage Russia Derangement Syndrome looks like.
I have literally never once seen a pro-Putin post.
Really? I see so many anti-Clinton, anti-Biden and anti-Democrat posts here. You literally supported Russia’s illegal electoral interference to undermine our democracy. You were the reason we got Trump. You are pro-Putin, just admit it.
Is this an actual bot? You got me if so.
If not: USA does bad thing
But they do bad thing
USA bad thing is worse
USA tries to be good
USA kills millions and destabilizes the world
You wouldn’t vote for harm reduction
“Harm reduction”
Conservative bad
Oh here we go, it’s the most important election again, right?
Putin’s puppet
Ukraine should surrender the two pieces of land so they can stop fighting
Not how it works
I wouldn’t go to bat for a place that has no interest in helping a socialist project. It’s not my war
Incrementslism
We’re incrementing away with shit like abortion restrictions
Conservatives
It happened with democratic majority
Not supermajority
Lucy and the football
If you voted for them-
“If you voted for them 🙄”
All Putin’s talking points, see, Hexbear be like
See, not a single leftward consession. Do you think it was brunch losers who canvased for Biden? Professional losers
I hate you
Dumb lib
that’s not how it works line in regards to the Donbas leaving Ukraine really gets to me. They use it constantly whenever you you bring up what is the most likely outcome of that war. How do they think it works?
“Pro-Putin” to them just means not being ok with the west sacrificing every last man women and child in Ukraine for profit. Because Putin Bad Man.
It’s pretty wild watching some people go around in circles from “We need to end the war!” “So there should be a negotiated peace?” “No, you tankie fuck, we need to crush Putler!” “So… you want to keep throwing Ukrainians in to the grinder until you run out?” “No, we need to end the war!” “So, there should be a negotiated peace?” and on and on from there until they become frustrated by your inability to understand that if they just manifest it hard enough Putler will run out of missiles and the Russian army will collapse and Ukraine will counter offense or some bs like that.
To paraphrase a Daily Show quote: “You’ve confused a negotiated settlement with always getting everything you want"
I don’t know how they think this war is going to end. Anything other than a complete Russian capitulation will seem unacceptably morally compromised appeasement.
Their favorite argument is “the war would end if Putler just gave up and pulled his troops out”
And it’s just… Yeah sure, that would be fine I guess, but there’s like a zero percent chance of that happening. So if you actually want this shit to end you have to come up with a realistic solution. It’s almost as if the world doesn’t work on thoughts and prayers.
It’s brain-melting that these people who care so deeply about the lives of Ukrainians and their right to self determination will about-face the moment that you raise the issue of the state of civil war in Eastern Ukraine was in since 2014 and the right to self-determination for people in the Donbas region.
They’ll literally go out of their way to call you an apologist for Putin and shit. Like, bruh, Ukrainians have been dying for nearly a decade now and you only started giving a shit about it when the media told you to, and even then it’s only a curated, selective concern for the lives of Ukrainians.
Free Hong Kong! Free Tibet! Free Hawaii! Free Puerto Rico!! Free Donetsk and Lugansk!
Not to mention that war with Russia could have easily been avoided if at any point in those 8 years of Ukraine killing civilians, it had lived up to the promise it made in Minsk and Minsk II of just giving the eastern regions autonomy and a vote on self-determination. That was always the only major demand from Russia.
Yeah, the sheer hypocrisy of the position is just disgusting. Hell, I doubt most of them even knew anything about Ukraine before this war started, except for maybe some vague “Russia stole Crimea, that bad.”
I really don’t get how people can’t understand that it’s possible for a person to support something and also admit it’s flaws. Like, people are really out here not understanding dialectical thinking. It IS possible for something to be two things at once.
Hexbear is fascist. They’re pretending to be tankies, but every single post on there is right-wing and bigoted. It’s so damn obvious.
I thought the entire point of libs screeching “tankie” was to conflate principled communists and fascists as being the same thing.
I believe you, but i honestly can’t find anything fascist on their front page right now
Some of them are close to figuring it out.
Yeah that didn’t make sense to me either. Is tankie good to them now? These people are driving themselves insane.
Them: “hexbear is a tankie echo chamber”
Hexbear: Federates to specifically not be an echo chamber
Them: “hexbear is federating just to fuck shit up”
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.” -Michael Parenti
