this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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This accusation always confuses me. Blahaj zone was around for half a year before the reddit migration, long before 196 was on lemmy and we did fine without them. They're here not because they wield crazy power, but because they're a queer lead community, with a strong queer user base. That means they have a home with us, because creating spaces for communities like that is the reason Blahaj Lemmy exists in the first place
The truth is, the hexbear admins asked me to talk to the 196 mod team and ask them to remove the "no tankies" rule, because hexbear users wanted to be part of 196. I told them to talk to the mods of the community directly, because I'm not going to force political opinions on a queer, trans fem lead community.
The 196 mods rejected the hexbear request, and like that, the hexbear narrative changed, and suddenly their users no longer wanted to join 196, claiming that it is transphobic and unsafe. So either they don't believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request.
Either way, part of their narrative change involved painting 196 as being both harmful and unassailable, with blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community.
From my perspective, the biggest harm to trans people in all of this isn't a trans fem lead community with politics that run counter to hexbear, but rather, the ongoing demonising and dogpiling of specific trans folk and trans communities by the hexbear community.
This is also an interesting part of the ongoing narrative. It's not a co-incidence that I'm being painted as naïve; well meaning but ultimately ill equipped to deal with moderating a large community. It allows people to attack me without attacking me.
The truth is though, I've been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I've managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.
You can disagree with my choices, but the narrative that they are naïve and ill informed is simply a tool to trigger an emotional response in people, to develop sympathy for the hexbear claims, to undermine my perceived competence, without them having to outright demonise me.
It's a cheap tactic, and and a cheap tactic typically used to undermine women in positions of responsibility at that.
It shows. You've handled this saga admirably. As someone with none of that experience who has performed significantly worse in navigating this situation, I'm happy to know that there are people to lean on.
Hexbear voted strongly in favor of federating with us and their admins assured us they would be well behaved. They immediately brigaded our main community and disrupted all local discussion for about 48 hours by spamming our communities, and then defederated from us, citing absolutely no evidence of misbehavior by our users in the defederation announcement. They claim ableist slurs, but considering they think the word "crazy" is an ableist slur... it rings somewhat hollow.
It's not even the politics that bothers me, despite the fact that they often take pointless, inflammatory positions. It honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space.
When they see a user from another server make a good point against their narrative, they swarm like white blood cells fighting an infection, hurling a combination of invective and irrelevancy to prevent the cold hand of logic from penetrating their bubble. The discrepancy between their treatment of their own users and users from any other server (barring lemmygrad) is remarkable to witness.
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I'm still very upset about this whole situation because I know chapos, I listened to the podcast, I frequented the subreddit. Back in 2016/7 I thought wow, the far left is making a bit of a comeback here in America, this could be the start of something.
Then eventually reddit banned the subreddit and it seems that was all it took to dismantle that budding source of leftist activism. I guess I'm partially to blame, because I'm one of the many voices of reason that didn't bother putting in the effort of joining a different site. Clearly, the extremists were the only ones who cared enough, and the 3 year isolation surely solidified that fact. The only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
And now they actively sequester themselves from... pretty much everybody, comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives. It's extremely frustrating to know that thousands of potential comrades have been neutralized, and in fact are potentially being wielded like a bludgeon against real western leftists to blunt our ability to effectively collaborate and find common ground.
Yeah, I feel that. I put a lot in to trying to federate with another instance that is strongly protective of its gender diverse members, and for it to end the way it did was a bit crushing...
There’s really no sage advice that anyone can offer in the wake of what is very apparently a major disappointment to you. They were just more insecure and… emphatic than was required for the job you entrusted to them. Looking back a decade, you’ll find people preaching for social changes that are now ubiquitous despite their champions’ entirely uncharismatic involvement.
The game’s not over, it just needs new players. I fucking despise hexbear now, but my opinion on socialism is largely unchanged, if that improves your mood in the least.
If nothing else, the past week has reinforced my confidence in the local users of sh.itjust.works. Hexbear has been a massive disappointment, but SJW has, as always, provided an abundance of good takes.
I'm not cashing in my chips, I'm just realizing that I need to raise my level going forward. Hexbear is like the level 1 boss that we need to defeat to reach the next stage of Lemmy's growth. They have a bombastic opening attack, but upon closer analysis they also have gaping vulnerabilities.
If we ever refederate, a whitelist rather than a banlist may do some good. SJW simply lacks the moderator capacity to filter the mix of culture shock and bad faith users. Granted, a whitelist would be a huge undertaking in and of itself, but I can’t see any other way forward between our two instances.
To me this is kind of a life lesson on extremes.
As in, adding opposing extremists into the mix doesn't really balance things out, you're just stuck with more extremists of a different cult.
many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.
The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.
Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There's no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.
That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.
I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is "shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I'm not reading that." "Genocide denier" — or, even less accurate, "genocide supporter" — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you're an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.
As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup'd by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.
I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.
The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it's like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.
Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.
On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country's newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America's real concern.
continued:
in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.
Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?
I'm gonna gloss over the "genocide of westerners and white people" comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.
You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don't find it.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press
from the abstract:
and from further down
What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?
Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it's questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!
America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America's wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
And that's not mentioning the fucking wars.
Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests
There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.
that was me speculating, bridging the gap between my main points of information: 1) that I had seen trans hexbear users discussing chaser messages they had gotten, and complaining that there were too many chasers in 196, 2) that I had seen posts from you where it was obvious to me that you care and consider chasers to be a problem, and 3) that 196 was a lifeboat community and is larger than the rest of blahaj.
If you're happy with 196 how it is, then the three interpretations I see are 1) that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem, 2) that they have a lower tolerance for chaser behavior, or 3) that they have a lower threshold for what they deem to be chaser behavior — or some combination of the three.
Or it's not all the same people, or their opinions changed. But I also think emotions were running high. I remember posts where hexbears were pretty upset that users on blahaj had accused them of pretending to be queer. There are also a lot of comments like that here, but I think it hurts a lot more coming from other queer people. Overall, I don't think the situation brought the best out of anyone.
This is exactly what happened.
The two instances that I am aware of.
The first instance was a cis guy responding explicitly to a prompt from a trans person, talking about how their attraction to a non medically transitioned trans man wouldn't work, precisely because he acknowledged that his attraction would be based on elements that would make the hypothetical trans man in question uncomfortable.
This was not a cis person volunteering an opinion to trans folk unasked for. It was a cis guy responding to an explicit question from a trans person, whilst respecting trans identities and acknowledging the reality of dysphoria.
The resulting discussion about that topic lead to a huge outbreak of transphobic commentary from external users. That lead to me making a post calling out the transphobia and aggressively banning anyone that crossed the line.
This all happened months before hexbear joined, and the post from me addressing the issue is still visible in 196.
It's not an accident that this incident only became an issue for hexbear folk after the 196 mods refused to remove anti tankie political commentary at hexbear's request.
The second instance was a hexbear user reporting someone making chasery comments to them. I asked for details so I could ban the person in question. Before telling me who it was, the hexbear user asked me not to ban the account in question, because they looked like they were a newly out trans person that had taken a joke too far (they were calling people m'lady as a joke). In any case, I talked to the poster making the comments, and told them that it's making people uncomfortable and they need to stop. They did (they already had before I messaged them)
And that's the "endemic" of chasers. A trans person making an ill conceived joke, and a single cis person answering a direct question from months ago.
I can absolutely understand why some people would be uncomfortable with both of the events in question. But even allowing for that, what we have is two misrepresented events that were actively addressed at the time they occurred, one of which occurred months before hexbear even appeared on the scene.
Again, it's not an accident that most of the chasers hexbear are concerned about apparently hang out in 196, a community that hexbear users wanted to join until they found out they couldn't. Only then did the chasers and transphobia appear in their narrative.
Here are the instances I'm aware of. There might be more, I just saw these posts ambiently while browsing hexbear. And I also don't know if the ones mentioned on hexbear are the sum of all chaser experiences users have had.
(Scroll down, these are all comment links not post links)
https://hexbear.net/comment/3826339
https://hexbear.net/comment/3772050
https://hexbear.net/comment/3775110 (see screenshot)
The two additional incidents linked in there (in post 1 and 3), were both actioned by a moderator, the user spoken to, and the behaviour hasn't been repeated. The one in your third link was aimed at me directly, not a hexbear user, and occurred before hexbear federated with us.
So, 4 events in total, 2 of which involved hexbear users, and 2 of which occurred before hexbear federated with us. All 4 of which received a moderator response and communication with the user, which stopped the behaviour in question.
Notably, 3 of the users accused of being chasers are trans, gender diverse or gender questioning themselves. And I'm not going to kick a trans person to the kerb for behaviour that can be addressed by talking to them.