Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
- “The West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
- “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”
“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
This is what I find absolutely crazy. I am, by and large, in agreement with socialists on economic matters. But why do they always support China and Russia? Like wtf? In what world is the genocide being committed against the Uyghur people cool? In what world is banning access to free communication including many of the largest websites worth defending? Why is it ok to lock up gay people? How is aggressively invading a neighbouring country cool? How is threatening to invade a neighbouring independent country (which has been de facto independent for over 70 years) whilst frequently flying your military into their airspace as a form of threat somehow the actions of the good guys?
You can believe in socialist economics without needing to defend the extreme authoritarian nature of countries that pretend as though their economy runs on socialist principles (or worse, which are the explicitly non-socialist successor state to a country that formerly professed to socialism). Tankies make no fucking sense to me.
I just want to say that most communists/socialists are not in favor of china or other authoritarian “communist” regimes (any country where factories need suicide nets can hardly be called communist, even if you disregard all the other ways they fail at communist ideals).
Unfortunately tankies are incredibly loud and often well-organized. They are just authoritarian dickriders, no better than the imperialist they claim to oppose.
Communists practice critical support. To quote Marx, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” We do not believe China’s economy is socialist. But the CPC has lifted more people out of poverty than any government in history, at the same time that living standards for the Western working class have collapsed. In so far as they support the working class, we critically support the CPC.
What you call ‘Tankies’, is a word that has been used to associate Marxist-Leninist’s with all kinds of bizarre micro-ideologies. But Marxism-Leninism is the primary form of communism in most countries in the world, and in that sense most communists will practice critical support towards AES states.
Exactly this. Even the CPC doesn't claim to have achieved socialism yet. They don't plan to achieve it till ~2050 (although seeing how they smash all other targets, they might get there a bit sooner).
I can agree that getting people out of poverty is cool. But tankies generally don't practice "critical support" of CPC. They practice unwavering boot-deepthroating. I have never heard anyone from that side of the left say (or acknowledge) anything negative about CPC. Any critiques put up is usually dismissed as "CIA propaganda".
There are a wide range of views towards China among communist and amongst ourselves we argue about them a lot. The thing is, a lot of the criticisms of China that the average Westerner has, are naturally informed by the Western media. This is understandable, but it leads to criticisms that often aren’t based in reality. I don’t know how many times I’ve had someone tell me, for example, that China is a warmongering, imperialist state, when in reality they haven’t been in a war for more than half a century. So this creates the idea among non-communists that we are aligned and have a unified, uncritical front in regard to China, whereas actually nothing could be further from the truth.
China has been engaged in hostilities with India trying to expand their border in the last year, so the “You silly westerners don’t understand China doesn’t do war anymore” is exactly the kind of bullshit nonsense that people are being critical of pro-China users. Arunachal Pradesh does not belong to China.
Echoing/adding to Tabitha's point, it gets tedious very quickly to argue with liberals about China because they're rarely well informed.
Marxism stands for the 'ruthless criticism of all that exists' and the 'concrete analysis of concrete conditions'. China does not get a free pass. But it's not very productive to argue with someone who isn't concerned with material reality in China because they've been led to believe falsehoods spread by liberals.
One of the reasons you don't see the critical side to the 'tankie' analysis of China is because you might never have got to the point where you're talking about China (as opposed to what westerners think about China).
If the 'tankie' has to debunk a blatant lie for the millionth time, a constructive conversation cannot follow unless the liberal is willing to move past that point. The liberal must first accept that they might be wrong and then continue the discussion beyond where it usually ends—which is usually where the liberal accuses the 'tankie' of arguing in bad faith for daring to investigate an issue beyond the headline.
(Again, to caveat this, by liberal, I mean pro-capitalists, not the 'progressive' liberals of the US.)
are in China and the rest of the global south.
What passes for socialism/the 'left' in the US/west is 'progressive' liberalism. I encourage you to read the classic and modern texts of liberalism with a critical eye. Then read Marx.
Otherwise, you could start with Zac Cope (critical of China/Marxism-Leninism).
I agree, but I'm not so sure that it's the case in the more extreme communities, otherwise those views would be downvoted/grouppressured out to a larger extent.
To be fair, this sound like a Muslim decrying that ISIS doesn't consist of "actual" Muslims. If they themselves identify as Muslims, or communists in this case, that's what counts for me. You can't wipe your driveway clean of that stain just by saying "meh, they're not really communist".
I do agree that's it's a bit of a "no true scotsman" fallacy, but on the other hand many states call them themselves "democratic" without being so. At some point you have to look at the actual ideology and see if the state lives up to it. And nearly all self-proclaimed communist states simply do not. But it doesn't really matter if they are "real" communists or not - they are not what a lot of communists/socialist believe in and support.
Where are these communist/socialists that you're speaking of? In the west?
China lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty in one generation. This is pretty impressive.
You can do good things and bad things at the same time. What I find funny is people complaining about censorship and at the same time support states like Russia and China, their extreme censorship goes hand in hand with the authoritarian rule.
Censorship in China does not have an impact on my life, or on the life of most people here. Let the Chinese people be the judge of what happens in China.
On the other hand, censorship here matters a lot to us.
I'm sure it doesn't have an impact on your life... if you agree with whatever the government does.
I don't live in China. But I live in a country where there are millions of refugees fleeing America's wars.
Do you not understand what the general 'you' means? I wasn't talking about you in specific.
Chinese people who support the government obviously have no problem with the censorship and oppression. Plenty of Chinese people do, which is why they do all they can to get around it- like refer to Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh (until that was outlawed).
Also, America bad does not equal China good.
The same applies in reverse. China's problems do not excuse the fact that America is a murderous nation that has invaded/bombed multiple countries in recent times.
Did anyone make that suggestion?
That may be true but it should be considered before defending China in a conversation. Otherwise it would be like me advocating social justice and at the same time defending the Iranian government. All I'm saying is freedom of speech goes together with China like oil with water. But if you don't really defend China then my comment doesn't really apply.
That being said I do tentatively (don't really know the content of hexbear) disagree with defederating.
Literally so did the Nazis.
What do you mean by socialist economics?
You'll be hard pressed to find anyone on Hexbear (or Lemmygrad for that matter) who 'supports Russia' or thinks it's 'ok to lock up gay people'. In fact, it's the exact opposite. If you read Hexbear's Code of Conduct, any kind of bigotry will result in a ban: https://www.hexbear.net/code_of_conduct
Socialist covers a pretty wide swath of political ideologies. Some of them buy into the old propaganda that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Xi, etc, were actually on the right track, and that we can only achieve some sort of utopia with extreme authoritarianism first. They're generally no better than people on the right who fall into the Trump cult of personality. There's a lot of denial on both sides.
The type of Socialists that are generally more sane and denounce those dictators for the monsters they were are the the Libertarian-Left ideologies, like Anarchists.
This is a gross mischaracterisation. Please read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels. This is the basis of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Xi, etc's thought: all these figures are Marxist-Leninists, who reject the idea of utopia. Everything is contradiction. The Marxism you refer to, which is mainly Marxism-Leninism, is not teleological.
This is the real reason why Hexbear cannot be federated.
There has been a large push to redefine Marxists Leninists as ‘Tankies’. They are this associated with bizarre, reactionary micro-ideologies, uninformed cliches about supporting Russia, etc.
Any interaction with hexbear users would quickly dispel such ideas.
Communists do not ‘support’ Russia, - the Russian oligarchic state represents everything they despise. But these are people who are highly engaged with politics. And their worldview is a lot more nuanced than the average person, who doesn’t have any particular interest in politics and so will only pickup the general gist of mainstream narratives, and accept them without much criticism.
So for example, in relation to Russia, while Marxists do not support their war in Ukraine, they do recognise that Russia was baited into that war by the West, and by a Ukranian state that was captured by a minority of far-right fascists following the Maiden revolution. That is geopolitical realism, and has nothing to do with ideology. No Marxist supports the economic system or cultural bigotry of modern Russia.
Socialism naturally aligns with the humanist value systems that most people hold, and which Western countries claim to uphold even as their actions contradict them. It is essential for those who would uphold the status quo to shut out socialist voices and paint them as extremists. Your confusion - ‘why would people who extol equality and tolerance support inequality and intolerance?’ - is really answering your own question. They don’t.
Just because you redefine a narrative in Russia's favour as "nuanced" doesn't mean you're now somehow not saying pretty much exactly what Russia wants you to think and say. Same for all the defenses of China and Vietnam.
I honestly don’t know what your trying to say. Do you imagine socialists care whether their views are supposedly to the benefit of one or another capitalist country? Our views are not informed by the interests of capitalist countries full stop.
What I'm trying to say is, if you push rhetoric that supports and subscribes to a state's narrative, that doesn't change no matter how nuanced or informed you say your rhetoric is. The effects of it are the same.
Russia was not baited into a war. They attacked a sovereign nation and expected no resistance.
This is why it’s a good thing that LW is defederating.
Even in the 90s, analysts understood that Russia viewed NATO expansion as an existential threat. Now missiles on the border can strike Moscow in 5 minutes. America nearly invaded Cuba under similar circumstances, during the Cuban missile crisis. The missiles were withdrawn from Cuba before that could happen.
Still doesn’t mean they were baited. They attacked an independent nation and got what they deserved.
Got what they deserved? Ukraine isn't winning. Both sides are locked in a stalemate. Maybe that's what you meant.
Holy lack-of-paragraphs, Batman!
Far from all socialists are tankies but yeah, tankies are a maddening bunch of hypocrites for sure!
I'm pretty socialist and incredibly anti-authoritarian, so seems odd to me that socialist societies are pretty authoritarian. It should be the other way but I guess power hungry arseholes corrupt everything
What do you mean by socialist? You support someone like e.g. Bernie Sanders, or?
Free health care, free education, social housing. Things like energy, food and water not to be profited.
I know of Bernie Sanders but don't know much about him.
That's social democracy — capitalism with safety nets. Socialism implies that workers control the means of production.
My view of the socialist position on China is that it is not "the Chinese state is good", but rather "stop being mean to Chinese people".
China is an empire, and socialists hate empires. But the US is also an empire (in that there's a core that gets all the good stuff and a periphery that gets the good stuff extracted from it, which for the US is often places not technically in the country but in practice obligated to listen to it). So when the US comes in all scandalized and decides that what we really need to do to save people from the Chinese empire is to make sure that US companies don't lose market share in GPU computing, and can manufacture solar panels at competitive prices, and that people get their short videos from Instagram Reels and not TikTok, the socialists are very suspicious. The net result looks a lot more like imperial protectionism and/or racism than a coherent anti-imperial program.
I'm not sure why this ends up as a socialist talking point? Maybe because the nonsense of the policies seems obvious? Maybe because it seems like warmongering and wars are terrible and so it must be stopped at once? Maybe just to get a break from telling people that they should probably make sure people have houses?
As a socialist, my view is that China is the lesser evil compared to American hegemony
I'm not sure it's feasible to try and compare the two in an objective way. It's easy to know which oppressive empire one personally prefers, but trying to actually reach consensus on which was better or worse using some kind of convincing evidence would be so complicated that it would probably amount to a waste of everyone's time.
They always say the same opinions because it's part of a massive astroturfing campaign by Chinese and Russian state actors. They're both attempting to sow discord in the West and lay the foundation to ramp it up to interfere in the 2024 US election.
Do you remember what a shit show Reddit became in 2016? We've seen this exact pattern before, where a deluge of people with the same carefully calibrated opinions on everything appear out of the blue. They want to create the illusion that there's some popular movement towards all these inane opinions, and you can even see from the comments on this thread. They're using the same known troll tactics to push this (eg. "Just asking questions").
This a good test of Lemmy's moderation and federation model and will be indicative of how it fairs next year when these campaigns really ramp up. Good on the admins for taking this seriously and nipping it in the bud.