Doubledee [comrade/them]

I know, I thought about bringing it up but I didn’t think it would help make my point. I think the larger point (that self-described libertarians aren’t all obsessed with age of consent the way that American ones are) is still valid, but it is very unfortunate that the poster example of what I’m trying to describe had Epstein as an accountant.

I think a pretty strong reaction IS warranted against defense of NATO, personally I think it’s a very bad take but I’m trying to stick up for you here. I think it would be better to focus the vitriol against that disagreement than going after your label.

If it’s any help I’m not sure how much awareness you have of the recent controversy that’s been roiling with the folks at SJW but there have been a lot of people recently defending the specific position you are but also engaging in a pretty hostile way, especially in regards to the use of ableist/transphobic rhetoric that we do not tolerate. Nerves are a bit frayed on Hexbear writ large. I think a lot of Hexbears are reacting to hostility with carpet bombing rather than precision as a result.

Hell, until this weekend I was basically just a lurker, the recent stuff brought me out of the woodwork. I can’t tell you what to do, but I think if you give Hexbear some time things will mellow out, things are just tense at the moment. I wouldn’t say you should ever expect them to like you being pro-NATO but I think you’re likely to get more constructive engagement generally the further out from this weekend we get.

Just my two cents.

Don’t people of a Chomsky-type bent sometimes self-describe as libertarian? It’s less common in the US because of how libertarians here are usually right-wingers but the libertarians=pedophiles trope is less common abroad is my understanding. I usually peg them as more anarchist types, which usually are welcome in hexbear.

Not super into this one wanting to defend NATO but I think they have a point about the pedo stuff.

I’m not moving the goalposts, I’m just pointing out that it’s a bit disingenuous to frame a question about what should happen in an unresolved civil war as a question of nations and their sovereignty. It would be disingenuous to frame Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as defending the independence of an entire country, I think it’s a similar situation between ROC/PRC, the primary difference being the length of the dispute.

Which is relevant if we’re talking about how one can consistently be anti-imperialist, I think. I agree it’s a bit flippant to say stuff about ‘giving up Loser Island’ but I think it’s important to recognize that it’s more complicated than ‘two independent countries fighting over the territory of one of them.’

I appreciate your openness here. I think the PRC would also prefer peaceful engagement with the longer term goal of peaceful reincorporation, the trade ties they’ve cultivated in spite of US hostility I think lend credence to their sincerity there. In the big picture I just don’t think the region can sustain two governments that each claim sovereignty over the same areas, and given their historical cultural and economic ties I think reunification would be the outcome of a process of dialogue between them.

Is the Donbas a separate country because it declared independence from Ukraine?

EDIT: Which is actually more than Taiwan has done, the government in exile on Taiwan considers itself the rightful government of the entirety of mainland China and parts of Mongolia.

Look further up this comment chain. Momo said something I won’t repeat that your mods removed, that’s what I called ableist. Your mods agree with you that ‘crazy’ isn’t a slur so they didn’t remove the comment for that. It was worse.

You really don’t have to come to the defense of a post your mods removed for being bad.

You didn’t actually say any of my takes were wrong, you asked clarifying questions or moved from what we were talking about to another related issue that bothered you. It’s truly unfortunate that you’ve blocked the community and can’t go back to see the context, I felt like we were getting somewhere. I’m sure you had your reasons though.

You really don’t have to come to the defense of a post your mods removed for being bad.

I can’t tell how serious you’re being but I read a really good book on this subject- The History of White People

The TL;DR on that is that whiteness is a social category, not an objective observation of human beings and their differences. For most of American history, as an example, Anglo-Saxons, Dutch/Low Germans and Scandinavians were considered a superior race to the ‘alpine’ and ‘mediterranean’ races of High Germans, Spaniards, and Italians. Irish weren’t Anglo-Saxon, they were Celtic and were thus considered inferior. The racism people observe when they see ‘Irish need not apply’ signs or slurs directed at Italians in the 1800s were because those people were not considered ‘white’ at the time. It’s an over-simplification, but these groups needed to be incorporated into the dominant group before they would be given the treatment we generally think is normal for white people.

Which is very jarring to us, since obviously Irish and Italians and Bavarian Germans are ‘white’. But it literally does vary, and the entire purpose of the category is to render people inside of it superior by virtue of belonging to it, it’s a category that exists to express supremacy.

Oh hey! You never got back to me on whether you felt that the discussion we had exposed some more nuance on the subject of the war in Ukraine, I assumed you must have gone to sleep or something. But I was really enjoying our discussion and was genuinely curious if you felt it had been productive. Maybe you just wanted to argue with other people more, but it seemed like we were making progress.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t say Russia was justified, I said the war was bad and the US made decisions that lead to this situation. I’d appreciate it if you would represent me fairly. I certainly hope you’re representing everyone else fairly too, I didn’t really read the other discussions you were having.

Are you outside of the US? It might be hard to explain, I used to deliver post to a rural American ‘town’, they had folks who sold chicken eggs by putting them in a cooler by the highway with a box, you could leave money in the box and take eggs. I never saw anyone do this. There was no centralized location to sell produce in this ‘town’ so I assume you either ate it or threw it away. Many American rural areas have no infrastructure to facilitate community gatherings or farmer’s markets.

Hell yeah!

Forreal your instance might be the one I’m most confused by, you’ve got like a 50/50 split of chill people who are okay with conversation and people who drop slurs and reply to any attempt at engagement in memes and gotcha one-liners.

I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.

When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.

So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.

I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Liberals don’t believe that countries exert influence on other countries around them? You think Joe Biden objects to the concept of spheres of influence? You brought up Kissinger, you don’t think US foreign policy is operating under the logic of realpolitik? I’m not sure what the alternative is to believing that countries act to pursue their interests in other countries. That just sounds like a description of the concept of foreign policy.

Could you be more specific?

I think, for example, that most alt-right types oppose the war either because of chauvinistic beliefs about American boys and American blood and treasure being spent on foreigners, or because they would like to work together with Russia to counter China and think a war with them hurts the white struggle against the eastern hordes. No one on hexbear would defend either of those positions.

It needs to be more specific than “both of you are against continuing the war.” Just like it wouldn’t be fair for me to accuse you of being alt- right because you and them both agree that there weren’t WMDs in Iraq and that that invasion was sold on false pretenses. You might both technically agree but it would be missing the point.

Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it’s tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we’re broadly familiar with.

If you’re more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he’s pretty approachable.

Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.

In my experience alt right folks are pretty anti China, to the point where that is often the reason they oppose the Ukraine war, as it is dividing the attention of the Christian west from the rising, menacing Tigers that threaten white society.

Hexbears are often skeptical of Adrian Zenz who is usually the source of claims about China. Most that I’ve seen acknowledge that there are camps (China openly says it is running programs to deradicalize separatists and fundamentalists in the region), but disagree that they are as bad as western media depicts them, and would probably argue that western nations are concern trolling about the issue regardless because it is easy to question whether American foreign policy is motivated by concern for Muslims. Genuinely curious, who is an alt-right guy who doesn’t think there are camps in Xinjiang? I’ve never encountered a pro-Chinese reactionary.

As to Korea I thought MAGA types just memed about Kim Jong Un because Trump sort of got along with him. Hexbears think that the Korean War was bad and that Korea is acting predictably given that a nuclear power is constantly threatening them with annihilation. There are a variety of positions in Hexbear on the DPRK though, and I can’t really account for all of them, but I think they arise out of a genuine anti-imperial and anti-war sentiment, and a healthy doze of skepticism of western narratives of a state enemy. I don’t think you could say that for the alt right.

Could you provide an example of Hexbears agreeing with the alt-right about something specific? I think a lot of people conflate “disagreeing with the liberal consensus” with “thinking a MAGA thing” when they’re really pretty different.