Thoughts on Trump apologia emanating from Hexbear
Thoughts on Trump apologia emanating from Hexbear
I've come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it's a tell about their own thought process. Just like it's a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear's censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to "their" place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
Tankies= Republicans
That's all you gotta say. They love the orange fucker.
To build off that, I was going to say it is easier for them to understand authoritarianism than liberalism. They more closely relate to using power to enforce will rather than consensus and damned the consequences.
Eh, I think that only applies to Hexbear. The ml instances seem to hate anything US (or western, for that matter) without picking sides.
They sure love to criticize the "west" but god forbid China or Russia gets called out for their savagery
Not in my experience, but ml seems less obviously pro trump at least.
Tankies are very much not Republicans
Extreme left and extreme right are similar since they both embrace Authoritarianism and government oppression.
I have been calling this out since my first interactions with those instances. They are heavily infested with right wing trolls making "leftist" noises. And the ones who aren't actually trolls are either so blinded by their disdain for liberalism, or just too young to notice.
Yeah. I'm genuinely curious how many of them are right wing trolls, how many are useful idiots, how many are normal trolls, how many are subject to mental illness and will sincerely believe anything and yell it at everyone else because of brain chemicals, how many are some other category, just what are the details of the real demographics there. I wish there was a way to know.
And how many of them are people sitting in offices in third world countries being paid to diseminate pro-russia/china propaganda on social media.
They're brainwashed and also fascists. They don't stand for communism at all and never had.
Communism is pretty much tied to authoritarianism
Okay, if you define "communism" as "whatever the fuck the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is doing" then your statement is sound. However, most people around here (including myself) define the word to mean something like "a classless, stateless, moneyless society" and sometimes then regard the statement "The USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. is communist" as an outright lie. They often assume that the person making the assumed-lie is ignorant, actively trying to infiltrate leftist spaces by pretending to be a leftist (the way tankies do), or are actively trying to smear leftist ideas.
I'd like to remind everyone that which words we choose to use to express our ideas are usually far less important than the ideas those words express. So long as we agree that the things the USSR/CCP/DPRK/etc. did/are doing are bad, acknowledge that capitalism has caused a great deal of strife, and seek to make the world kinder and more equitable, I think we should be able to agree and work together.
Settings ▶ Blocks
While yes, that is a thing. This is however literally a community meant to discuss this sort of thing.
I'm just fascinated by it though. I'm curious about human behavior, and I think the ways that people get themselves worked into a non-reality view of the world in a big community that all agrees about it is a highly relevant topic for the modern world.
I won't pretend to understand what's going on over there completely, but I'm interested enough in it that I want to be able to observe it. From a distance.
That's the only instance I have blocked.
Just so much spam all over the all scroll..
It got old really quick.
Fascists gonna fash.
Cmon. If you haven't already blocked hexbear you are just part of the problem. 90% 4chan garbage. You won't miss it.
I tried to block them but they dont show up in the list, so I assume the instance that I belong to already took care of it?
Yeah, Blahaj and Hexbear had a falling out over Hexbear accusing Blahaj users of tolerating 'chasers'.
There will always be people who believe absurd things. I just leave them the fuck alone, and hope they’ll grant me the same courtesy.
Some people are doomed to repeat the same mistake they are brainwashed to make over and over: picking a side in every scenario.
What you’re noticing I think is actually a pandemic in modern society. People cannot fathom nuance. I dunno if social media put the final nail in the coffin of a long-festering problem, or if social media and the ensuing collapse in discourse birthed the problem alone.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary. “You’re with me or you’re against me.” Or “information supports me or it’s rigged.” Extending that: “you’re my ideological enemy and whatever you think I think the opposite.” It doesn’t matter if it’s logical or it’s entirely contradictory. All that matters is getting to say “NO! You’re wrong and I’m right! You’re a [liberal, conservative, fascist, etc.]” Whatever serves their argument.
The complete inability to have logical discourse based in reality, is itself responsible for the larger systemic problems. When there’s no common ground because the ground is either “yours or mine,” and when it changes in every discussion, there’s just no hope to ever do anything about problems. And the problems are mounting. And the ownership class is capitalizing on this constant culture war bullshit—and I mean “culture war” in the sense of each “ideology” having its in group and everyone else belonging to the out group—to run wild on what’s left of this current paradigm.
It’s hard not to feel doom when realizing this foundational problem. It undercuts any kind of underclass solidarity, so the class war is really just an ever-worsening class slaughter.
Politics have become a team sport. All discourse has become a team sport. It’s binary.
I've started to notice that this particular brain rot is becoming more and more common among Democrats as well. To a distressing number of people I've encountered on the Internet, be it here, Reddit, or elsewhere, Democrats ran a perfect political campaign and their candidates and policy were flawless and above question, so it's entirely the fault of the voters that we got Trump again. Never mind that Democrats actively facilitated a genocide and largely ignored their base in favor of appealing to moderate Republicans who were never going to vote for them anyway.
The number of people in this country who are just incapable of seeing (much less understanding) any kind of nuance is dropping rapidly, even among demographics who should be aware of this trend.
Oh, absolutely. It’s a boundless problem. It happens with left wingers as well. It’s a disease in the way people think and engage with the world around them. Ideologies are badges now. They’re uniforms people wear. Similar to mental disorders on TikTok, Instagram, or, previously, on tumblr. That’s why I think the common link is social media. I know tribalism isnt a new phenomenon whatsoever, but widespread, more foundational tribalism on every single topic, kind of is.
People are arguing about reality. As soon as the right drifted away into fantasy politics, the bottom dropped out on discourse altogether. When about half the people are just straight up questioning long-known facts, the reality we all shared and could agree on suddenly became much more shaky and full of holes. Not that reality has changed, obviously, but when the discourse surrounding what we consider facts is questioned on this kind of scale, arguing that facts do, actually, exist just opens a sinkhole. And it’s not getting smaller. Because what are facts to everyday people if not something that we discuss and generally agree upon?
And the fact that this kind of magical thinking is spreading is more than troubling. It’s straight up doomsday shit.
So in a world where all of this is true and people invent an entirely new version of themselves to put online (and then lie to themselves that it’s actually them), pinning the “I’M A PROUD [democrat, Republican, communist, etc.]” to their chest is step one before they actually learn shit. They pick an identity and then look at every issue through that lens. Because they’ve found people online that belong to it and they choose that identity. Instead of learning and then realizing their ideology, they choose a team and then learn usually as little as possible to appear as if they belong. And get defensive and argue online with the “other” side, with wholly incomplete and usually inaccurate information that they looked up specifically to belong to an ideological group.
Fuckin crazy. You see problems like this, look at the state of discourse and really wonder…is there any coming back from this? How do we even start? Well, education. Obviously. But we all know that’s not gonna happen. We’re moving in the opposite direction as fast as we possibly can. (Because that serves the ownership class).
The political spectrum isn't a line: it's a circle. It doesn't matter if you go left or right, once you go far enough, both sides meet on "authoritarianism." Trump wants to be a dictator. Tankies love dictators. Social cohesion is infinitely more important to these people than how they get there. As long as there's a government regulated "in" crowd and they're part of it, they'll justify any level of doublespeak, goal post moving and hypocrisy, and they're willing to perform any amount of mental gymnastics to get there.
this is a ridiculous take, just entirely forgetting the existence of anarchists, it seems. by that logic, anarchists are the enlightened center now, by virtue of being as far removed from authoritarianism (and therefore political extremism) as possible.
also, how does that form a circle? if i go even further left than left-auth, would i go over right-auth, right, right-moderate, until i end up at... where exactly?
I mean, if you want a real genuine answer, it's that simplifying the entirety of political thought into a binary is a rediculous premise to begin with, and highlights one of the core fallacies that the human condition leads to time and time again: that of false dichotomy. Calling the political spectrum a circle is exactly as absurd as calling it a line, and taking either of these paradigms to be literal and infallible is to grossly misunderstand politics.
My point is more that both routes, left or right, have a path through extremism into authoritarianism. Try not to take the silly analogy I used to communicate this point so literally.
I think this is something a lot of people here miss. The farther you move to the extremes the more reality gets distorted. Tankies are so far left that there views are wildly distorted. Part of the extremes is also authoritarianism but that's mostly because that's the only way maintain there limited world view.
They are not in any meaningful sense left. What happens is it when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. The reason tankies look so similar to magats. Is because they are unified in a Devotion to strong men and a authoritarianism over left or right. They believe that might makes right and disagreement is punishable by Death. No more no less. They are authoritarians and will use whatever economic policy they think serves the case in point china.
Good lord, this is the second post I’ve read today that consists of this user bitching about Tankies. The block function is a wonderful thing…
This is a dedicated place to bitch about them. What do you expect?
It's not bitching, it's fascination. I don't need a large dose of it, but a little every now and then is pretty interesting to me to observe.
The block function is a wonderful thing