Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]
.
If we’re tallying the opinions here, I agree that this would be the ideal situation. Shitposting should be fine and accepted in the newsmega so long as it’s news-related, at least tangentially. There should also still be a completely separate megathread for general socializing, posting random thoughts, or whatever people want to say. One thread is for talking specifically about news, if it’s not always serious discussion, and another thread where people can just hang out, shoot the shit, or let off steam. Pretty much how it was most of the time since the founding of the newsmega as more than just an ongoing Ukraine thread
It’s definitely not that most in there are assholes but the second part of what you said. It’s that the assholes feel safer there and so tend to concentrate there. Since until recently it was mostly just about the news and geopolitics (hence this OP), any communist who is anti-imperialist will fit right in. This is good of course, but it’s only one of several other bars that people have to pass to be accepted in the culture of the rest of the site. It meant that people who otherwise would get called out for their bullshit like (for example) transphobia and antiveganism would never get called out for it simply because those topics were almost never delved into, certainly not in the way or to the same degree they are on broader hexbear. When those topics would start coming up to the point that there were disagreements, they would get quickly and understandably shutdown by mods with “don’t bring that struggle session shit here.”
I’m not saying that any of that is bad on its face, but I think it’s an explanation why it tends to be that a lot of the shittier takes seem to be from people who leaked out of the news mega. Someone who was permanently site-wide banned recently after multiple temp bans and warnings on the rest of the site would use obvious alts and go on the newsthread to say things like “once again the news mega is the best part of the site” because they weren’t banned there and could get tons of upvotes for saying correctly anti-imperialist things. That just kind of exemplifies what I’m talking about, but it’s not the only case.
I love the newsmega and used to read every single comment every day when it was more explicitly focused on world news. Most of the people there, even the ones who mostly only comment there are not assholes. But it’s a lot easier for the assholes to hang out there, get a well known positive reputation there, then clash hard when they encounter the rest of hexbear and fail to do self crit. I do not think that’s a failing of the news thread, just an unfortunate inevitability of the focused topic.
Sentience is not a “low bar” and means a hell of a lot more than just responding to stimuli. Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It necessitates qualia. Sentience is the high bar and sapience is only a little ways further up from it. So-called “AI” is nowhere near either one.
Tankies usually are bastions of political understanding though, whether you agree with them or not. They have to be to stand up to the mountains of propaganda we’re all fed that people are trained since childhood to accept as “simply how things are.” Many tankies only earn that title after developing a perspective that requires spending years reading, you know, actual books, on history and theory and working to honestly understand why things are the way they are, not how they wish they were, nor simply accepting what everyone is told for the sake of reinforcing existing power structures. Hexbear is way out there, yes, since the overton window is so ridiculously far to the right, by design, that it keeps most people from ever even understanding what leftism is. Hexbear is not divorced from reality so much as it is painfully hyper-tuned in to how dire reality actually is.
I’m not a Jewish person, but the imagery that immediately and involuntarily springs into my mind when I see a burning Star of David is that of people and industrial ovens. Personally, I couldn’t just decouple a symbol like that in my head from the more notorious of Nazi atrocities any more than if I were to try not to think of fascism when I see a swastika. I thought this was a common if not universal association, and that’s why we never had the emoji in the first place but I guess not.
Obviously, Israel as a state should burn and no one should have to hold back from showing their disgust and rage at it, at the fascist settler colonizers that make it up, and anyone who supports it/them. But expressing that rage by specifically using the most well-known symbol for Judaism on fire would, in a small way, be going along with the Zionist agenda to associate Judaism with Zionism.
@WhyEssEff@hexbear.net I’m totally with you on this, and I’m grateful you draw a hard line at not implementing that emoji. I hope the other mods and admins do too.
I keep trying to reply to a comment on a post in the dunk tank, but even after canceling and retrying multiple times, it never goes through. I just get an infinite spinning bear head on the reply button.
nevermind. I’m a dork. The comment I was replying to was fine but the post it was on got removed.
Possibly, but the article does mention that it jumped significantly even from 2020/2021 during “the height of the Covid-19 pandemic,” though they are probably discounting the cumulative effects of covid since everyone knows it’s all over and done with since Biden defeated Covid. Damaged immune systems could make sense at least for part of it:
Of the 10 leading causes of death for infants in the U.S., mortality rates increased for two: bacterial sepsis, or infection, and maternal complications.
I was assuming it probably has mostly to do with the sudden inability to access abortion (and other reproductive healthcare as a result) for so much of the US now. Here’s what the article said about it:
One question the researchers had was whether the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion access, may have played a role in the latter. But because “maternal complications” encompasses a number of things that can go wrong in pregnancy, says Ely, the data aren’t granular enough to know if any specific state policies regarding womens’ health have impacted infant mortality rates.