I'm an old school Southern Democrat. I'm Progressive and extremely to the left of modern Democrats. I believe that everyone is entitled to a standard of living and that includes a home and a mode of transportation and a mode of communication and a way to provide for themselves. I hate how the New Southern vision was sabotaged by Reagan and the Republican Party. We could've had a more inclusive and diverse South. I'm from the Gulf Coast. When I was growing up the Gulf Coast was the last bastion of Southern Democratic dominance. Republicans have taken over our area and corrupted the minds of our people. Southern Democrats are often seen as a monolith but just like the overall Democratic Party it was a big tent. I believe we can revive the Progressive tradition in the South but it's going to take effort.

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[–] 19 points 16 hours ago (9 children)

I looked at the bio and I see the user made multiple posts asking for donations in the mutual_aid comm. I don't think the account is a bit. I'm not sure why a bit account would be asking for help. I think the user made this post to try to get more sympathy for help.

I live in the Southern US as well. There is one thing you have to know about Americans. Every American has a mishmash of contradictory ideas acquired through various life experiences. The average American will say something and then contradict themselves in the next sentence. Eery American seems like they are doing a bit but not doing a bit.

Also I don't care if the account is a bit, my comment is written for anyone who is new to hexbear, wants to join hexbear, or interested in learning about communism.

Additionally, "mutual aid" does not mean charity. The term mutual aid is credited to Peter Kropotkin. The premise of mutual aid is that the organization helps individuals, but then the individuals also go on to help the organization. That's why it's called "mutual". If someone receives donations from Hexbear, they should also make some effort to participate in the community. If they don't participate in Hexbear, then it isn't mutual.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 hours ago

    I understand what you're saying and I appreciate you clarifying where you're coming from. I also understand the distinction you're making about mutual aid versus charity.

    That said, I don't think the fact that I've made mutual-aid posts means my political beliefs or this post are some kind of attempt to manufacture sympathy. I'm genuinely in a difficult situation and I've asked for help because I need help. At the same time, I'm genuinely interested in politics and have been trying to explain my political tradition.

    And honestly, the fact that I'm a Southern Democrat who is also strongly anti-capitalist, skeptical of concentrated wealth and power, supportive of mutual aid and sympathetic to anarchic and communist ideas shouldn't be as contradictory as some of the responses have made it sound.

    I also don't expect everyone on Hexbear to agree with me. I just found it strange that so many people seemed more interested in deciding what category I belong in than actually discussing what I was saying.

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  • [–] 10 points 16 hours ago* (7 children)

    If you don't see the inauthenticity of a less than week old hexbear user with description stating how much they like pan europeanism, neoliberal politicans, and Anton Lavey, with a posting history that consists of 5 posts in total, stating how much they like southern democrats, a picture of a soda and asking for money, then frankly I don't know what would be a tell to you.

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  • [–] 8 points 15 hours ago* (6 children)

    I'm not agreeing with the bio. The weird assortment of political figures in the bio seems like something that would be picked up at public schools. The Anton Lavey reference is probably just a rejection of religion. I lived in the Southern US my whole life and Christianity was forced onto me through my entire youth. My public high school in the 2000s had an optional Bible class and it was considered to be a substitute for History class. Some rebellious teenagers in the South try to seek out Lavey's Satanism because they want to reject the Christianity that was forced on them.

    That is to say, the account doesn't seem like a bit to me. Living in the Southern US sucks ass and it leads people to having weird beliefs because there is no communist party to guide people.

    My comment presents an opportunity to learn. If a user is anti-communist, then the user can leave.

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  • [–] 9 points 14 hours ago* (5 children)

    I'm not agreeing with the bio.

    Of course you aren't because the bio is of a person who doesn't exist, and if they did exist would not be on hexbear. The person who admires Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Huey Long is either someone whose mind has been incurable altered by video game mods (In which case they would still be able to mention a single actual left wing person in their bio) or they are fictional.

    This isn't a person who had a spotty public school education with absolutely zero outside reading because then they wouldn't know about Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi without being able to mention a single leftist figure. But even if that was the case, this person would have to stumble past all other social media, past reddit, past all other lemmy instances, to end up on the openly communist lemmy instance offshoot of a discord server of a subreddit that closed near a decade ago, a site which damn near all of lemmy and the parts of reddit that know about it tell everyone is a bunch of communists, pass the sign up questionaire asking them about their opinion on zionism and the soviet union, then write a bio about how much they like pan-europeanism, segregationists and neoliberalism, before immediately making a post about they like old school southern democrats. Without knowing about the existence of a figure left of Jimmy fucking Carter

    That's just not real. That's not a thing that happened.

    Come on. Be for real.

    Edit: If you triple down on this person being a real person I can't stop you. I'm not going to continue the discussion though. This is not real.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

    Of course you aren't because the bio is of a person who doesn't exist, and if they did exist would not be on hexbear. The person who admires Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Huey Long is either someone whose mind has been incurable altered by video game mods (In which case they would still be able to mention a single actual left wing person in their bio) or they are fictional.

    For anyone keeping score, we have:

    • Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a race science crank after whom one version of the Great Replacement/White Genocide theory is named.
    • Huey Long, a racist who subscribed to another variant of White Genocide bullshit.
    • Gore Vidal, a tacit Roman Polanski and Scientology defender who nonetheless had a few stopped clock moments in his later years re: recognizing the fallacy of bourgeois electoralism.
    • Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter; probably the least fucked people on the list, although Jimmy's constant triangulation on issues paved the way for Bill Clinton and neoliberalism as we know it.
    • Lolbertarian Satan man, beloved by teenage edgelords everywhere. Read [a pirated PDF of] The Satanic Bible some time and drink every time it makes you cringe. You will be blackout drunk by chapter 3.
    • Ann Richards, the Texas Governor who criminalized same-sex sexual relations after campaigning to repeal that very law. Otherwise your standard lib, but I guess I repeat myself.
    • Username that may or may not be a reference to Germany's air raids against Great Britain in WWI, or just casually name-dropping the Gotha Program and, by extension, creation of the SPD rosa-shining

    It's a sad state of affairs when a fair amount of us genuinely can't tell for sure if someone is just a brain-broken 'Murican trying and failing to purge their Dixieland brainworms, or a bit account perfectly tailored to fuck with the only Lemmy instance with a "give me free money" comm. Those first few are pretty goddamned sus, though.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 hours ago (1 child)

    Honestly, this list proves my point more than yours. You’re treating every person I’ve mentioned as a package deal and then judging me based on the worst interpretation of each one. That’s not how intellectual influence works.

    I can admire or find value in particular ideas from people while rejecting other things they believed or did. And there actually is a coherent thread running through my interests: human liberation, opposition to concentrated power, populism, anti-capitalism, individual autonomy and a fascination with people who challenged the political order of their time.

    I’m a Creole Gulf Coast Southerner with a very eclectic, old-school intellectual worldview. Of course my influences aren’t going to look like a contemporary ideological reading list.

    You see contradictions. I see a political worldview with a history behind it.

    Also "give me free money"? I was reaching out to my fellow leftists because I'm going through hell.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 hours ago

    The funny thing is that the people I mentioned actually are coherent. Each of them was concerned with human liberation, social transformation and breaking people out of systems they believed were holding humanity back.

    That makes perfect sense to me as a Creole Gulf Coast Southerner with an old-school intellectual outlook. My influences don't have to belong to the same modern political faction to be connected. I’m interested in the underlying ideas, not in forcing every thinker into a contemporary ideological box. I’m Creole from the Gulf Coast, where the old social and cultural world was a lot more mixed and culturally distinct than the modern American South. In some ways, parts of the Gulf Coast historically had more in common with the kind of multicultural, fluid society you’d associate with Brazil than with the rigid categories people project onto the South today.

    So yes, my worldview is eclectic. It’s Southern, Creole, historically minded, populist, anti-capitalist and full of influences that don't fit neatly into modern left/right boxes. That isn't a contradiction. That's the point.

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  • [–] 7 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

    I don't care if you think the user is a real person or not. I want to share an anecdote with you.

    Over a decade ago, I had a coworker who was extremely racist. There's nothing I could do to change his mind. I just try to avoid him. I don't know him anymore, he's probably smoking meth somewhere right now.

    One day, this coworker comes to me and tells me that one of his icons is 'Henry David Thoreau'. Henry David Thoreau was an abolitionist who was friends with John Brown. So I ask him why he likes Henry David Thoreau when that contradicts all of the racist stuff he believes. The co-worker tells me that he likes Thoreau because he learned about Thoreau from his favorite high school teacher.

    My point is that sometimes people just remember names that they heard in high school and don't actually know what it means.

    edit / I want to add that it's impossible for me to prove that any person on hexbear is real because rule 2 is no doxxing. However I would say that if a user voluntarily posts their real legal name, in the form of an email address for example, it's pretty easy to find their other social accounts.

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