I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
I am formally asking hexbear users to stop participating in meta posts on other instances.
All trans hexbear emotes
almost as bad as the_donald though
Don’t compare us to the_donald just because we’re not libs. I’m trans, just also a Marxist Leninist.
Other instances (including mine) have defederated from them. Apparently a tonne of people from Exploding Heads just commandeered the instance one day. Hexbear admins are also inactive.
Some of the users takes on the CCP are garbage, but a few garbage opinions doesn’t warrant defederating.
Edit: You know what on second thought let’s defederate. There are a lot of tankies shilling for countries that hate the lgbtq.
I’m trans and know people that live in China, their conditions are basically the same as the USA, but slightly better these days because they don’t have a hate mob spreading lies about them in the media and trying to genocide them in select states like America does. In general, there is next to zero awareness about transness in China, whereas the opposite is true in America (they are highly aware and full of hate about it), so it is a different flavor of bad in that regard. The emphasis the government has on accessible affordable housing and food makes that aspect of transness easier than in America, though, the trans women I know in China all have their own safe place to live in.
Now Russia… yeah… they’re doing what those American states were doing federally now. But Ukraine does similar too, unfortunately. Source: I’m Czech and can read/speak most slavic languages by virtue of that, I also have been part of an illegal network to help trans/queer refugees leave Russia and Ukraine. In this organization we would typically help people move to Prague, St. Petersburg (for people who cant leave Russia, this is the best choice of city), and in the east, to China, particularly Shanghai and Harbin (large russian community there). Language barrier and cost of living are huge factors in where we’d help people move.
spoiler
And the excessive brigading.
Just so you know, CPC or communist party of China
as opposed to CCP, or Chinese communist party,
is what they call themselves, and does not have certain racist connotations that CCP does.
I will still call them the CCP. I hate the Chinese Government, not the people. The people deserve a government that actually gives a shit about them.
Since you “hate the Chinese Government, not the people,” i.e. you have some basic human respect for those people, do you suppose that even a fraction of the population (say, ~10%) knows more about the Chinese government than you do? Remember before responding that VPNs are exceedingly common in China.
There are more than a hundred million Chinese people in the CPC and it has a 95.5 percent approval rate. If you hate the government but love the people that implies some prejudice about how Chinese people are in order to approve of their government.
Not giving a shit about your population by lifting millions out of poverty
Also CCP was used to associate with CCCP to help recycle a century of anti-soviet propaganda.
You can filter out instances with Ublock Origin for desktop and Sync for mobile. This will remove any posts and comments from users from that instance. It’s a lot easier than trying to get your instance admin to defederate a major instance or setting up your own while still getting rid of hexbear for you
you’ll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.
if you need to cut allies off to avoid getting trolled idk man, that seems lame.
Hexbear is more trans friendly than the majority of trans places, honestly. The reason for this is the mods defer to trans users on what counts as transphobia, half the mod team itself is trans, and offensive posts are removed quickly before they can affect other people. I’d say its more trans positive than here, based off what I’ve seen. There are chaser comments that are left up even in response to moderators and admins on blahaj, these would be rapidly removed on hexbear. Plenty of trans places, this one included, also are not very good at weeding out people that are being sneaky about their transphobia and chaser habits, which can poison the well. And not only do the moderators of hexbear do good work, the dev team specifically goes out of their way to program ways to make trans users feel more comfortable (e.g. the universal pronoun tag system).
As a trans woman that is also a survivor of abuse, jokes are made all over the internet about sexual violence and its very hard for me to avoid upsetting my PTSD. Hexbear actively removes these sorts of posts rapidly, too, and even removes borderline cases like bringing up SV out of context and without content warnings. For these reasons hexbear is the main site I visit, no other site or community really comes close.
They aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be but some of them really are too combative. I’ve seen them get into arguments with people for not being the correct type of left I don’t know how to respond to them because I’m not a polisci or world history major.
I’m also pretty tired of those huge emojis. The pig butt thing was funny maybe once. I don’t know what the right answer is I’d just wish they would chill.
😔
Hexbear is one of the biggest left unity instances on lemmy
Oh, well that’s nice to hear. Whatever I saw was probably an exception, and not the rule then.
The emote problem seems like it’d be really annoying, I’ve stopped using them when I’m not on hexbear communities (though sometimes I forget what instance I’m on sorry in advance).
As for the “wrong type of leftist” sort of stuff, hexbear tries to be a big tent community for leftists (we’ve got all sorts over there although it’s admittedly heavily leaning towards marxist-leninists) and it tends to be a much more welcoming site outside of those overcrowded threads on active where everyone is arguing.
Hopefully the chaos will die down soon enough.
You’re gaslighting when you say it’s a “big tent community for leftists”. I block any Hexbear community I see as it’s only people trying to “dunk on libs” while also saying they should “get up against the wall”.
You’re part of a toxic community and then come here and try to paint it as peaches and rainbows.
Just sort by Hot. :)
Can you help me see the appeal of hexbear? I took a look before knowing any of this stuff about the instance(saw it in everything and had a look around). Reading how some users describe it (pro-trans, inclusive, not a US echo chamber) and being LGBT, having a trans husband and poly, and finds pro capitalism stuff kinda tiring I thought it would be a good fit for me but…as I look at posts on hot and the comments I see a lot that makes me uneasy.
Comments about how a user was talking with “euro trash”. The impression that if I’m not pro Russia then I must be pro America is something I see in the few Russia/Ukraine posts I read through.
Like…I’m very much anti capitalism and while I don’t know how far left I go I can’t understand how the community can say Ukraine should surrender to save lives and not become a US puppet when surely they’d just become a Russian puppet instead?
If what hexbear users say about the friendliness and inclusiveness it sounds like a group of people I’d love to chat with, but with what I see when I go there myself I just don’t see it. Yeah I haven’t seen any antilgbt of users but that’s kinda it
like others have said, the common understanding is more anti-NATO than pro-Russia, but if you’re on the other end of it, like getting into an argument with a Hexbear, we’re all going to have a pretty united front and not criticize eachother. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of heated debate within the Hexbear community, that happens a lot. Esp on geopolitics.
from the perspective of the average westerner, who doesn’t really think of these things, yeah its very weird. The appeal I think lies in the incivility. These are people who are tired of civility-politics that dress up all the monstrous atrocities committed by the same people we’re all supposed to look up to as leaders. so the behavior I think is largely cathartic.
Looking at the big picture, I think to sum up the ukraine take that’s the most common on hexbear is: Ukraine cannot possibly win despite what we’ve all been lead to believe, the people who suffer most in any war is the working class (the people we sympathize with) so it’s better for a peace settlement to end the suffering, even if that means Russia “wins”. There’s a lot more history to the situation than that
While I agree with a lot of what you said (apart from Ukraine not having a chance, I’m not an expert in the matter (and surely it’s their choice?)) And I see the benefit of some cathartic release and generally having a space to complain/rant (god knows I’ve done it many times in more private spaces) I dont see the appeal to anybody who is not already very far down their leftist journey and worry it actively pushes people away. And hey maybe that’s intentional, maybe hexbear only wants these views but I get the impression from the comments defending the instance in other instance communities that this isn’t true?
If it’s intentional then I’m all for you having that space, benefits of the multitude of instances. That reminds me I need to create a new account elsewhere anyway
Fair enough! I’ll just leave you with this:
You do have to wonder, yeah, is it their choice? Countries like the US, Russia and China can make “choices” but in geopolitics I’d say smaller countries like Ukraine kind of don’t. Maybe they can choose to be in Russian-sphere or EU-sphere, but they certainly can’t choose to be neutral. The powers that be: the US as the global hegemony, and Russia, the local regional hegemony are going to try their best to make those choices for them. It’s real bad
Genuinely I think Zelensky had promises made to him by the US/NATO about how much support he was going to get which the US reneged, and the far-right elements of his government and military he’s not able to control- so even him I don’t think has much choice. I do have (limited) sympathy for the guy. I think most people on Hexbear share a similar understanding, it’s def not a chauvinistic pro-Russia thing. Esp given how transphobic the Russian state is, you’re not going to see any touting of that as a good thing on hexbear.
So in your opinion, what would a good alternative have been? If Ukraine had simply said “here ya go” and became part of russia, then what? Russia stops there? They finally begin to become the global opponent that can defeat the usa and institute communism? Because last I checked, Putin help execute a bunch of those back in the day, and he seems to currently be the one in charge. I’m being genuine by the way, I just can’t comprehend how leftist folx can endorse like, a strongman leader who makes a show of invading another country?
I’m not the one you were talking to, but I think most Hexbears would prefer to see a negotiated settlement of some kind that brought an end to the war, one that also stopped the killing of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine that has been ongoing since 2014, and precluded Ukraine joining NATO (because Ukraine joining would complete NATO’s encirclement of Russia, something that Russia has been seeking to prevent for decades now, and which would dramatically increase nuclear tensions). I don’t think any Hexbears actually like Putin at all, and even “endorse” is an awfully strong word. And certainly no one thinks Putin’s Russia is going to institute communism. We just oppose the Western party line on the war, which gets us cast as pro-Russia (due to black-and-white thinking) when we’re totally not.
The standard Western position, by contrast, comes across to us as bloodthirsty, calling as it does for an extended conflict which will indefinitely prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The West seems eager to spend Ukrainian lives for the sake of suppressing a geopolitical rival, not for humanitarian reasons but for economic ones, and so we stand against that.
surely it’s their choice?
Should the people in the areas that voted to secede from Ukraine after the gov’t banned their language and supported military units shelling them right up until the day of the invasion have a choice?
But regarding the rest of Ukraine, every gun, weapon, and bomb we’ve sent there is a bad day for someone, statistically mostly civilians. They’re not fighting for freedom, they’re being sacrificed so that the Ukrainian land, gov’t, and businesses are owned by westerners instead of Russians. The only correct position is to oppose your own nation’s involvement.
The popular consensus on Hexbear is anti-NATO, rather than pro-Russia. If this is a sticking point for you, I don’t think you will agree much with the average users on geopolitics.
But, as long as you stay out of the news megathread, you likely won’t see much discussion of the war on Hexbear.
I can’t understand how the community can say Ukraine should surrender to save lives and not become a US puppet when surely they’d just become a Russian puppet instead?
If Crimea from 2014 - 2022 is what being “a Russian puppet” entails, i.e. being Russian citizens, that’s a lot better than how being a US puppet goes. Unless you mean western Ukraine since Putin probably does not want to annex it anyway, but we can get some idea of what being “a Russian puppet” by that definition would be from looking at the terms of Minsk II, which seem much less bad to me than being a US puppet.
Comments about how a user was talking with “euro trash”
for what it’s worth, this user was contacted by a site mod and their wording was corrected. One thing that Hexbear explicitly stands against is dehumanizing language, most of the time you’ll have your post removed, or cop a ban for it if you don’t stop.
not pro Russia
No, its good to be Anti russia, you should just also be anti NATO because neither one is on our side
I mean I’ll admit my bias as a politically-minded leftist, but I like them. I don’t agree with all their takes, but it feels like a positive way to poke some holes in the echo chamber a bit.
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It can often get tense with them and I don’t agree with some of their takes, but they are definitely a voice to consider seriously and worth arguing (in a polite way) with.
Unlike those conservative right echo chambers, most of them are actually educated, historically literate and smart, and they actually provide sources for their claims instead of hand waiving and using every falacy in the book.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us. Their ideology is incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+. You would fight against that for the same reason you fight against Nazis. The ecological politics or so are irrelevant at this point. Even if you agree with that, don’t forget that they want us gone.
This is so close to the Nazi bar problem and I fully understand why defederation might be the best course of action. Personally I don’t know what the right call is, but I blocked the instance using the Connect app anyway.
hexbear, with a mod team that is 50% trans, a user base that heavily skews trans, has the largest collection of trans emotes I’ve ever seen on any website, and enforces pronoun tags, is anti-trans.
this does not make any sense. you are writing off an entire community based on foolish (and provably false) preconceived notions.
Do people at hexbear ever show support for Russia? China? Soviet Union? Stalin? Mao?
If there is a single yes then explain me how that does compute? All those countries or dictators are known to harshly discriminate, jail or kill LGBT+ people.
Soon I will probably receive another 10 replies explaining why the USA is bad or some unrelated NATO rant, but so far no one gave a clear answer how anyone in their right mind would want to see any of those regimes to succeed or even come back.
Without ignoring this major problem which is incompatible with our lives and our freedom I don’t know how any sane LGBT+ person would ever want that. I am not sure how I am the foolish one and so far with all the replies I have yet to read one single agreeable take which isn’t some form of whataboutism.
I know you’re mostly going on vibes but I’m curious if you have intel on Mao’s personal stance on homosexuality. It’s surprisingly easy to find solid evidence that Stalin was decidedly personally homophobic (something which I don’t think anyone at Hexbear denies unless they just don’t know the Lore), but I haven’t found information one way or the other on Mao’s personal stance, just the usual concern trolling from neoliberals.
China has clinics dedicated specifically for trans people, especially trans youth ( https://www.gingerriver.com/p/story-of-teens-at-a-transgender-clinic ). I believe earlier in the thread someone linked sources regarding LGBT people in the Soviet Union, I don’t have the sources on hand bu,t I can circle back to this comment when I get home from work.
We do not support Russia, even though our comments are frequently misconstrued as such. Please, understand that criticizing politics in the western world does not equate support for Russia. Also, please understand that Hexbear is not a monolith. We have a wide range of users with a focus on left-unity, but we aren’t a hivemind with the same uniform opinions.
We do not shy away from mistakes that past socialist projects made, we attempt learn from those mistakes to build something better. Many socialist revolutionaries (Che and Fidel, to name a couple off the top of my head), recanted their backwards opinions upon learning more about queer issues.
Am I saying that China or the USSR are perfect? Of course not. They’ve both made mistakes. The important thing is to realize the progress that has/had been made regarding minority rights in those nations.
You know this is the first take I can actually mostly agree with. At least I can kinda understand it. I don’t like the glossing over the human rights violations in support for any of the mentioned people, regimes or countries which let’s be honest is a lot of baggage. Hence I reject to associate with any of that.
Unfortunately your view seems to be mostly unique between all the other replies which either dodge or contradict the question you answered.
Thank you for taking the time.
Hey, no problem! I’m glad we could talk. If you’re ever curious or have more questions, feel free to post in our daily megathreads, you’ll always find a friendly group there!
I’d urge you to consider the fact that we are explicitly, radically pro-trans. Our mod team is over half trans people and our userbase heavily skews that direction as well. I myself am trans. And I’m a communist, partially because of the experiences I’ve had as a trans person living under neoliberalism. I didn’t start out as a communist, I slowly drifted that way as a result of learning, specifically learning more history. I’ll recommend the podcast Blowback here, I think all 3 seasons are really good, well-researched, informative, and entertaining. They give a lot of context to various US actions abroad and it’s a very approachable podcast. Season 4 is coming out soon and I can’t wait!
Also, check out Cuba’s family code if you want an example of a communist country being extremely socially progressive. It’s cool and good!
I know that the US are not the good guys. They did and they are still doing horrible things. But the world isn’t the USA.
I never will support an authoritarian regime, especially if they are anti LGBT+. Supporting anything like that is such an leopards ate my face take and on the same level as Polish or Jewish Nazis.
Your role models are horrible. Even if the ideology might have its merits there is nothing to discuss as long as there is so much widespread support for hostile regimes and their politics.
Honestly this whole thing is puzzling me for this very reason. I don’t know how a trans person could ever reason themselves into that position. I don’t know how a sane person could be so delighted to see the suffering of others (e.g. Ukraine or Uyghur genocide) as many comments are implying from your server.
Sorry if I have the wrong idea, but it just does not compute.
I never will support an authoritarian regime, especially if they are anti LGBT+. Supporting anything like that is such an leopards ate my face take and on the same level as Polish or Jewish Nazis.
If you’re a trans USian who supports NATO living in for example Florida that exact leopards ate my face take is unfolding in real time.
The US is incredibly authoritarian if you don’t have money- which is a large part of why it has such a high prison and unhoused population. I view trans liberation as a part of every one elses liberation, because there’s a lot of trans people who can’t afford gender affirming care, don’t have access to it, and don’t even have access to a safe place to live, and don’t have resources if their family abandons them.
I mean, a lot of us are pro-Cuba, which is AES and has some of the most progressive family policy in the world.
Also, your “historical” thing is just really hard to process. After all, standards change. Hell, within the “West”, LGBTQ+ acceptance is barely 40 years old (and often, as we see, under attack for the gains that have been won). Was the US in the 90’s really that much better for LGBTQ+ folks than the USSR before it collapsed? And while not LGBTQ specifically, the situation of women in the USSR was far superior to the West - especially in STEM..
This doesn’t mean that we can’t (and shouldn’t) judge the lack of LGBTQ+rights in the past – we can and should. However, Cuba’s family policy shows that there’s nothing inherent to communism that’s “incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.”
In summary (and here I’ll post my only emoji, since there’s the bug),
Of course I am referring to all the Stalin apologists on your server. Some people really want to argue for the sake of arguing.
So far no one even bothered to justify how they can even pretend to support Russia, the late Soviet Union etc. It’s just a bunch of whataboutism.
The Soviet Union pioneered many modern trans surgeries and research, particularly modern trans male surgeries. These were done in Riga for trans men with significant dysphoria and the bravery to deal with a largely queerphobic world. Remember to compare two countries from the same time period, gay and trans rights were never even thought of by any society at large in the 50s and 60s.
Also as an anecdote, my grandma was a party official in communist Czechoslovakia for a major union and had a lot of ploy in our region, almost everyone important knew her. She didn’t know what being trans was until I came out to her. She immediately became the most supportive person in my life (outside of my amazing bf) and began advocating for trans and queer issues to her cadre of commie grandmas to great success. I fully believe that if the communists were still in control, LGBT rights would be much better in Eastern Europe. The issue with communists back then was largely ignorance and not knowing that anything LGBT even existed.
Support Stalin: which country liberated Auschwitz? What country wrested control of Berlin from the Nazis? The Soviet Union. “Every Party member must raise his revolutionary qualities in every respect to the same level as those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” -Nelson Mandela
Support modern Russia- Russia opposes NATO, and anything that hurts the west is good. Also the current Ukraine government was founded by guys who want to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.” Anyone killing Nazis is good, and Russia is currently doing so. “Russians are Asians. They have a completely different culture, vision. Our key difference from them is humanity” -Aleksy Danilov, head of Ukraine national security and defense council.
In both cases, it’s less of “these guys good” but of “the other guys worse.”
Holy hell. This is the most ridiculous take I have read so far.
As I said before supporting those regimes or dictators is incompatible with our lives and our freedom. Therefore there is no further discussion to be had and any trans* or LGBT+ person should fight against it for the same reason we fight against Nazis.
This just proves my point and it’s seriously frightening that it is even a conclusion any person in an allegedly LGBT+ friendly space would come to.
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For example, 40 percent of homeless youth in the US are queer, socialist “everyone should have a home” policies really help the most marginalized queer folks.
the US is historically anti-LGBT and it’s currently undertaking a genocide of trans people in red states.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+.
Communist countries generally speaking are better on lgbtq rights for their economic development.
You can’t be a capitalist and be pro-lgbt. Cuba, a marxist leninist democracy, has the most lgbtq rights in the world.
Also the reunification threw back lgbt rights in east Germany decades.
The stasi were assigned to defeat subversion by lgbt activists. Their recommendation, which was followed, was to give the activists all the rights they asked for.
is this your second ever comment or does your profile display incorrectly for me?
If they are active on some trashbin like lemmy.world or something, then I don’t think we can see those comments
This is a good way to put it and one of the reasons I’m so perplexed about how queer the instance is. I genuinely don’t understand how LGBTQ+ people can simp for regimes that simply want to/wanted to murder them.
And before someone jumps in with “but America/the West/liberals are trying to do the same thing”… if you don’t think it’s easier being queer in the US, even with all the problems, than in Russia or North Korea, I just don’t know what to tell you.
Posting a reply I just wrote elsewhere:
I’m trans and know people that live in China, their conditions are basically the same as the USA, but slightly better these days because they don’t have a hate mob spreading lies about them in the media and trying to genocide them in select states like America does. In general, there is next to zero awareness about transness in China, whereas the opposite is true in America (they are highly aware and full of hate about it), so it is a different flavor of bad in that regard. The emphasis the government has on accessible affordable housing and food makes that aspect of transness easier than in America, though, the trans women I know in China all have their own safe place to live in.
Now Russia… yeah… they’re doing what those American states were doing federally now. But Ukraine does similar too, unfortunately. Source: I’m Czech and can read/speak most slavic languages by virtue of that, I also have been part of an illegal network to help trans/queer refugees leave Russia and Ukraine. In this organization we would typically help people move to Prague, St. Petersburg (for people who cant leave Russia, this is the best choice of city), and in the east, to China, particularly Shanghai and Harbin (large russian community there). Language barrier and cost of living are huge factors in where we’d help people move.
spoiler
historically anti LGBT+.
This strikes me as a silly way to complain about Cuba, since for the other AES states you’d probably just say “currently,” but today Cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, maybe in world history when talking at the national level, along with other merits regarding state support of HRT, etc. We all recognize that the early ban on gay marriage was an error, one for which Fidel Castro himself apologized publicly and encouraged the reversal of!
The vast majority of us are queer, I’ve literally never been in a more trans inclusive space on the internet (except for the unofficial invite only trans hexbear user discord), I’m in DMs with like a dozen of the trans users from here pretty frequently and frankly without the amazing support from them I think it would have taken years longer for me to realise I was trans, the mods and admins have shown repeatedly over the last several years that they’re completely committed to the rights of trans people - including “provoking” reactionaries within the early hexbear user base into a massive site splitting argument that ended with one of the mods almost getting doxxed and the site getting ddossed because transphobes were angry at being made to respect trans people (we still have our lovely pronouns to this day and anyone who protested got banned on the spot for a while) and at one point there was a reading group on a book of trans liberationist theory by Leslie feinberg that was pushed as pretty much mandatory by one of the old head mods TransComrade69
I actually view the rainbow-washing of us foreign policy as a big part of the problem- It allows reactionaries and conservatives to express bigotry and persecute LGBT people under the guise of being “anti-imperialist” or resisting western influences.
Fuck corporate pride and rainbow raytheon shit, America has historically been extremely shitty to gay and trans people and it makes me sick even being associated with their ‘foreign policy’. Just because they ‘legalized gay marriage’ via decree 8 years ago, doesn’t mean they’ve not done real genocides in the past to LGBT people, and aren’t laying the groundwork for doing it again in the future (eg Florida).
Allies marched gay people right back into the concentration camps when they liberated them, for example:
I don’t live in the USA and I am not fond of its politics in any way. It does not matter though. We are trying to survive and flourish with what we have.
What you are saying is that what I am doing is actually just bullshit. I am trying to improve the working environment for other LGBT+ people, I help them with problems they have. I fully support visibility of queer people in their work place and I spend a lot of personal time on that.
You know there are other problems people have which can be solved without a radical and forceful revolution. It is unrealistic and currently a daydream at best. I am actually trying to improve the situation with the cards that were dealt and for some reason you ridicule all of that.
Sorry, but that’s just a bad take. You are barking at the wrong tree.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us.
we’re not against you. We are you. We all want a better world and work towards it however we can. Painting us as queerphobic feels pretty disingenuous
Then stop associating with the queerphobic regimes. Simple.
If you side with the people who are against us I have no reason to trust you in any way.
A significant portion of Hexbears users are LGBT themselves. Your argument kind of falls flat.
No, not really. It is not even special. I mean there are Polish Nazis around. They associate with the same people who will eat their face the first chance they get.
That’s how I see you. It’s the same situation really.
I don’t understand why you associate with those regimes, defend them or even cheer them on. But I doubt there is anything I can say to change your mind.
Hey, so I wanted to talk about this point a bit more. I’m LGBT+ myself, and I used to have issues with countries that are definitely not queer friendly. What changed my thinking about this was seeing how so-called progressive countries are far more harmful to us than most countries that have actual anti-LGBT+ laws.
The main example I would point to is Israel. I used to be somewhat supportive because I bought into the fact that they do give us some rights, whereas the main groups fighting for Palestinian people are not friendly to us. However, because of how many civilians are killed by Israel they objectively kill more LGBT+ people than Hamas or the PLA. A few years back there was a major bombing campaign against Gaza in which over 60 Palestinian children were killed. Statistically some of those kids would have grown up to be LGBT+ if they had been allowed to live. Now, being LGBT+ in Palestine is NOT a great situation, but it’s still better to be alive and have a chance to fight for better rights.
This applies even further for NATO and the US military. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Many of those people were LGBT+. Statistically the US war machine is the single biggest killer of people like us in the world.
I’m also replying to your bottom comment, and lots of you generally, but I can shit on everything antilgbt and still hate russia, and not like nato. It’s not some fucking wild thing. Stop acting like people here are fucking ignorant of the world.
This doesn’t even go into how our countries prop up anti-LGBT+ regimes like Saudi Arabia or the other gulf states. In the Israel example, they will entrap gay men and force them to act as spies, placing their lives in greater jeopardy. The recent burst of anti-LGBT+ laws in African countries are being funded and even written by American churches, churches which are untaxed and thus funded by the US government.
yeah ok
I am actually trying to improve the situation with the cards that were dealt and for some reason you ridicule all of that.
When the game is rigged, sometimes the only response is to upend the table.
You might not be familiar with queer history in the US, but one of the pivotal moments in it- Stonewall, was an actual riot, with cops beating the shit out of trans girls and everything. It immediately got whitewashed and co-opted by liberal elements to the point where now people routinely have cops at pride!
It’s a convenient fantasy that rights can be won by passively participating and voting. Rights are won by fighting for them, and making people uncomfortable until they give you what you want.
Of course I am aware what is happening, what was happening and where you are heading. Where I live I am doing my part and don’t you dare to ridicule that.
We are gaining ground. Many things got better over the past few years where I live and I will continue to do what I do and support what I can support.
I cannot wait and dream about some communist revolution and look down on others for actually trying. At this point I am not sure if this discussion is even in good faith anymore or if you just want to insult me and others like me.
I haven’t insulted you, at least not intentionally - you seem to think I’m sitting on my hands posting online, I do plenty of real life organizing with other trans and unhoused people. It’s being exposed to people living on the fringes of society that I otherwise have so much in common with that gives me this orientation towards electoralism.
hi, i live in capitalist florida and my human rights are worth about as much as week-old dogshit. if you’re pro-nato or pro-u.s. then you are anti-lgbt rights
as an interesting note of comparison, china, while historically quite bad on trans issues, has been making pretty impressive strides as of late, even opening their very first gender clinic (for children) a few years back
idk what you’re going on about “their ideology is incompatible with lgbt rights” a plurality of people on hexbear are some variety of gay or trans or both (like me!). i’m pretty sure a solid 70% of our userbase would commit a murder with their bare hands if it could meaningfully improve the station of lgbt people even a single iota
your entire comment is very ignorant. ironically it’s probably closer to propaganda than anything you’ll see on hexbear
I am anti LGBT that’s a new one. I am repeating myself, but NATO is irrelevant for LGBT+ rights and it is just brought up as some form of whataboutism for the 20th time. The world is not the USA, but most of you seem to have a very narrow view. Yes, the US sucks. So far none of you mentioned that you were jailed or killed for being LGBT+ in the USA, even though it is so much worse than the Soviet Union or Russia or anywhere else in the world (lol).
Yes, recently you took many steps backwards especially in Florida and the problems are real, but it is still a better situation than just a few years ago. Get a grip.
Seriously, it is just annoying at this point. It is ridiculous that you believe that you are somehow special and won’t be prosecuted by dictators like Putin, killed by Stalin for “anti communist behavior” etc. I am not saying any of this, because I disagree with communism as a whole, but because the regimes you associate with would never allow us to live and flourish like we do and I don’t want to find out.
Yes, recently you took many steps backwards especially in Florida and the problems are real, but it is still a better situation than just a few years ago.
Seriously, it is just annoying at this point. It is ridiculous that you believe that you are somehow special and won’t be prosecuted by dictators like Putin, killed by Stalin for “anti communist behavior” etc.
Quite literally nobody is saying this. But to be completely fair, Cuba, a communist state, currently has better protections for LGBTQ+ people than any state in the US. ESPECIALLY Florida.
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Then by your logic you cannot be pro US or pro NATO and be LGBT. Funny
I don’t know why NATO even matters. Well I know why it is brought up, but seriously I won’t even entertain that.
What makes you think that I even would want to visit the US? I wouldn’t feel safe there for many reasons.
I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t understand how you can in all seriousness support your position without glossing over all the anti humanistic and anti LGBT+ things going on. I doubt I can say anything to make you understand why that’s a line I like many others won’t ever cross.
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Oh, so you are anti NATO then, yes? You are outspoken against every country that has ever had anti LGBT laws? Or are you being disingenuous because you are an anti communist? 🤔
Why would I care about NATO in this context? Unless it is supposed to be sone stupid pro Putin argument or so. I don’t support the military and that should be enough of this.
And yes, I am outspoken about unequal laws. Why should I be outspoken against countries that ever had any and presumely not anymore? That’s a weird take. I don’t have the power to fix the world, but I still have an opinion and a long list of countries I’d refuse to visit.
Why some economical system even matters in this discussion is another point I don’t really understand. I never made my own position clear, because it does not matter in the slightest. I am for a social and democratic system which cares about the needs of everyone equally and it does not really matter how it is implemented or what you call it if it does actually work. Post scarcity communism is the optimal state we could maybe archive in a few hundred or thousand years, but until then we have to take one step at a time. Right now it is a utopic idea and seriously irrelevant to this discussion. Does that sound like anti communist to you? Not that it really matters.
Sorry, but my world isn’t as black and white as you think it is.
Right now it is a utopic idea
This is 100% just me having a Pavlovian response to that word, but is there even the slimmest chance I could interest you in reading Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels? Here’s a text online and here’s a great, free audiobook.
You are right that FALGSC is a utopian idea (depending on what specifically you mean) and therefore not relevant, but it’s so not relevant that I wonder why you mention it?
I am for a social and democratic system which cares about the needs of everyone equally and it does not really matter how it is implemented or what you call it if it does actually work
Oh, right, okay, that makes sense. I think you have misconceptions about Marxism if you believe Marxists would not describe their views in roughly these terms. The text I linked discusses that topic in some level of detail, in the broader context of historical social progress and other socialist theorists.
No, I mentioned it because I know that the ideas are compatible. They don’t necessitate each other though. The economic system does not matter if (!) you can achieve the goals otherwise and was a direct reply to the idea that I might be anti communist which is obviously not the case. The full answer to this is much more complicated though.
That’s… not the kind of debating I’ve seen them do, but sure. As far as reasonable debate goes: if you have to brigade and spam, you’ve already lost. What exactly the message was just doesn’t matter.
Let’s chill on the defederation unless it’s really bad for a while.
Unless they start brigading heavily or cross a line in terms of the communities they house, we won’t be defederating them.
Their own communities are, quite something, but their admins have told them to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance, and so far, they seem to be doing that
That’s good to hear! I like getting blahaj posts in my feed
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Based
Have you been in the news communities of late? Any time Russia/Ukraine comes up they’re flooding it with Russian apologia and silly emoticons.
No moreso than liberals are flooding it with liberal apologia. Also the vast majority of us aren’t pro russia, we’re anti NATO and Anti the war in Ukraine. Russia is fucked
No moreso than liberals are flooding it with liberal apologia
By sheer numbers we are probably “flooding” it more, though that isn’t to speak one way or the other about the legitimacy of what any of us might say
In a thoughtful and respectful dialogue, it would be more constructive to engage with differing ideas on their merits, rather than dismissing them with labels that may or may not apply.
🥰
mErItS
Yeah the “whAt AbOuT UkraInian FASciSm” thing is pushed really hard over there.
It’s not Russian apologia. It’s just pointing out that Ukraine is not a smol bean like the saturation by western media and Reddit lackeys have painted it as.
Thanks, blahaj.zone is the only real instance I’ve liked on wider fedi because it actually does a decent job of moderating transphobia and homophobia, also I’ve enjoyed posting in the queer comms you have on your instance <3
This aged poorly lol
My only complaint is the popularity might be crashing our instance lol, but they are cool.
to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance
They weren’t in Lemmy.ca, got defederated for shitposting, and being trolls over there.
Yep. Excessive spam of the pig poop emojis, brigades and harassing people. Shadow made the right choice kicking them out
I stand with and support whatever you choose to do. I just thought I’d bring it up. Thanks for all you do!
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem. They can’t seem to help themselves with the brigading and they do seem to be drowning out local opinion with tankie rhetoric and spam.
EDIT: Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
EDIT 2: I was initially pretty excited about federating with hexbear but I think after seeing the effect it has on the overall tone of discussion I’m pretty disappointed.
Not having downvotes does not, by any means, mean you need to post your disagreement. Our instance also does not have downvotes. You ARE drowning out exactly the sort of discussion this community is for. I can guarantee what you would like to say has already been posted and upvoting those posts and moving on IS the appropriate way to handle this issue in a meta community for an instance you are not a part of.
tankie rhetoric
The largest and most inclusive trans positive space outside of blahaj has “tankie rhetoric”. You might want to think on that.
It’s almost like leftists stand for trans rights because it’s in the best interests of our material conditions
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem.
It’s a thread about us, so . . .
tankie rhetoric
My valiant neoliberal argument. Their insidious tankie rhetoric.
Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
You can see the instance of the poster, can’t you? And it’s not like hexbear people are able to downvote posts,
so our vote is (while still something) relatively weaker.tankie rhetoric
It’s a thread about us, so . . .
It’s actually a community about us, so…
My valiant neoliberal argument. Their insidious tankie rhetoric.
I am a leftist.
You can see the instance of the poster, can’t you? And it’s not like hexbear people are able to downvote posts, so our vote is (while still something) relatively weaker.
We can’t downvote either, but a quick sampling shows over 3x as many hexbear users commenting as blahaj, so…
It’s kinda brutal, I actually started this night completely on their side.
It’s actually a community about us, so…
It’s an instance that is federated and it’s not like there aren’t people from other federated instances popping in to offer absolute bullshit.
I am a leftist.
Go on . . .
We can’t downvote either, but a quick sampling shows over 3x as many hexbear users commenting as blahaj, so…
See the first sentence, you can see where we come from. An admin isn’t going to mistake hexbear users for blahaj users, as you demonstrated with your sampling. Noted on the voting part.
I just found this thread, and I’m struggling to find discussion from users of my instance about this. It took me scrolling quite a while to see the reply from our own admin about this. It’s not just about the admins being able to see what comments are from blahaj users. I mean, I think comparing y’all to T_D is fucking bullshit. But like many other blahaj users have said by now, I want to defederate purely based off the brigading of this thread.
I’ve told users from other instances to fuck off out of meta discussions of defederation before and I’ll tell you the same thing.
To all the blahaj users, wasn’t it so refreshing that the admins removed top-level comments from other instance users on the kbin.social defederation post? I think that was the perfect balance, because this thread is a complete fucking shitshow. Not blaming the admins for that, they posted that thread so it would have been easier to keep on top of moderating it.
no one has linked to this thread and encouraged users to jump in. it’s just at the top of Active.
You say “brigading” but I’m just here because the thread was on the front page of Active, and I think most of the other activity from Hexbear users here can be accounted for that way. The only place where there is evidence of “brigading” is the admin’s “People of Nato” comment (which, as an aside, is just an awful take).
We’re one of the oldest instances and have a ton of extremely active users. This post is about our instance and appeared in our feed, why wouldn’t some of us respond to it?
Tend to agree.
We don’t have downvotes because some asshats were targetting trans posts(those asshats were purged) so we comment when we disagree.
Responding to ridiculous claims which now appear on our own instance, comparing us to Donald Trump supporters, is not “brigading”.
You understand federation, right? It means that what you post here shows up on hexbear, what we post shows up on blahaj, and we can all interact. You wanna defederate - go for it. But don’t make ridiculous, outlandish, baseless claims about thousands of people (who are probably the best allies you have on lemmy as evidenced by other instances ITT) and call it “brigading” when people refuse those outrageous claims.
We just like to post a lot
I see this post on my front page. I come in and comment. Many hexbears do the same. We just post a lot. No “brigade” necessary.
I mean, i’d rather have this conversation with their input.
And yes, they have opinions. Opinions with which I often disagree. But recently my largest annoyance on Lemmy has been the “why are you intolerant towards bigots” contingent, not the hexbears.
we just post more than everyone else
you’ve gotta keep up
So, we don’t have downvotes and haven’t for years. If I want to disagree with you, I have to respond, and I disagree with you. I’m not intending you harm by my reply, but, we’re on a forum, what am I to do but post?
