all of your comments here are about blocking them

if you just made this thread as a ploy to draw out hexbears to block — ostensibly because you are annoyed that they swarm threads — then you could have simply found one of those previous threads that annoyed you and blocked the hexbear users there, instead of creating a whole new thread just for the occasion.

You are scoffing at people for wanting the government to help its citizens. I think your priorities are skewed if you value politeness and decorum over actually, meaningfully improving the lives of real people. And it should surprise no one when people with the inverse priorities — wanting to help others and not caring so much about politeness and decorum — come into this thread and are not very polite or decorus toward a perspective they think hurts people.

you made a thread calling out another community by name and now you are complaining that they are in the thread

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.

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?

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 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:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

and from further down

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

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

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

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.

comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives

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.

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

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:

America has caused the deaths of around 4.5 million people in the middle east since 9/11

I've read through the reproductive rights section of the report but only some of the citations, and I'm still looking for the interviews.

The OHCHR report does cite Zenz in citation #140 a few times, on page 19 and continuing into the footnote on page 20 of the pdf.

Citation #140 is for a statistic that in certain counties 10–20% of the adult "ethnic population" (the report's words) were detained.

The footnote mentions Zenz's name twice, but also mentions Xinjiang Police Files, which is Zenz again.

I'm still looking for the 40 interviews. It would be really interesting to hear what they have to say. Speaking before seeing them, I'm not sure I can have full confidence in them when I'm aware of so many instances where western governments and their allies have produced false witness testimony to justify foreign policy, e.g., the Nayirah testimony before the Gulf War, witness accounts of Iraqi WMDs before the Iraq War, fictitious witness accounts of a genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing campaign that obliterated the country, and a large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. This is how consent is manufactured. America is engaged in a trade war with China and hostilities are escalating in the South China Sea, and these activities require consent from legislators and the public. But I'm not going to discount the interviews either — it's evidence that has to be stacked up with other evidence and then appraised as a whole.

heads up, that's a different person, not me

The twitter thread (nitter is a twitter mirror) uses the same data Zenz uses. But also, you should consider reading the rest of it. Zenz was not saying he made a mistake or that he should have paid more attention, he was saying that about his critics. He then answered the criticisms with more statistical sleight of hand that he doubled down on.

SUMMARY OF THE STATISTICAL SLEIGHT OF HAND OUTLINED IN THE LINK.

The statistic Zenz gives — that “80% of net IUD insertions in China were in XJ” — is extremely misleading because the percent is not out of 100. Using his math, many provinces have percentages below 0, because we are comparing net values. When you add up net values for all of China, negatives and positives cancel, giving a small denominator.

(Xinjiang insertions - removals) / (China insertions - removals) = a nonsense percentage, potentially negative, potentially dividing by zero

If you add up Xinjiang, Henan and Hebei you get 210%

So it's not just a simple mistaken wording, the statistic itself was fundamentally nonsense from the start.

To drive the point home: In 2014, per the twitter thread, Xinjiang net insertions were roughly the same as in 2018, but China net insertions were much higher, so Xinjiang’s percent was only 2.5% rather than 80%, even though there was no significant change in Xinjiang.

Which brings me to the next point: There is a time element to the story. Less-developed provinces, where access to reproductive health services is still expanding, will have more net insertions, because there are fewer older people removing old IUDs. But over the years, insertions and removals will balance out, and can even dip negative in aging populations that have had IUD access for a long enough time. An underdeveloped province that is still expanding reproductive health access will have more net insertions than other provinces. It is expected that provinces will have high net insertions early in that timeline.

What's missing is the actual number of IUDs in Xinjiang, which would be illuminating.

PLEASE LEARN WHO ADRIAN ZENZ IS AND STOP CITING HIM

Your sources are 1) the State Department saying “our biggest lie is no longer tenable but we’re not backing down that easy” while giving no evidence for anything, 2) a paywalled decision from an unofficial tribunal that appears to just be some random fucking people in the UK, and 3) Adrian fucking Zenz, an infamous propagandist who has been caught lying and misrepresenting data numerous times, including in that report

Please find better sources.

Zenz is cited everywhere, and you should always check for his name. Ask me tomorrow if you want more examples of him lying. Form your own conclusions, but don’t look to that guy.

I appreciate that, thanks

if you're saying that being a too-online leftist is not really doing anything, hexbears are self-aware about that and riff on it pretty often. but plenty of hexbears are also involved in orgs, unionization efforts, and volunteer work. and the ones who aren't are self-deprecating about it. this is where the "I will never log off!" riffs come from, they all know they should log off. that said, the community is also sort of a support group for people to share their stress about the world to other people who understand it and share a similar perspective. that's the main purpose of the community, no one sees it as some "change the world by posting" platform. if they did, it wouldn't make sense for them to stay defederated for three years.

where's the raccoon community?

I guess the question is, if you don't actually believe the shit you say, what actually motivates you?

I might be wrong, but I think even if you changed nothing else about society except abolishing landlording, supply and demand would drive down home costs and force banks to offer mortgages to the people they currently deny. Ideally though, abolishing landlording would be part of a larger change to the way housing works.

"whataboutism" does not mean "you're never allowed to point out a double standard"

Aren't you the guy who admitted earlier you were lying about them just to stir shit?

https://lemmy.ml/comment/3381095 (scroll down to the bottom)

Would I appreciate a civil conversation to better understand their POV? Totally. Will that happen? No.

People have actually had that conversation. You just have to seem curious and not too accusatory. Also — depending on how skeptical you come across — it might help to keep your questions specific so they don't feel like they have to defend their entire perspective in one fell swoop, although some might be up for that.

They're aware that their perspective tends to be vilified and poorly understood, which both makes them wary of people but also enthusiastic to respond when they find someone they think is actually interested in what they have to say. If I showed them your comment they'd probably be like "hell yeah, send him in."

*I made a thread and I was going to link it to you if you wanted to ask questions, but I realized you're defederated

if you think anyone on hexbear wants to watch the fucking world burn, you clearly have no fucking idea what any of these people think or believe or care about. I'm honestly struggling to even respond to this. It just shows complete ignorance, and then that you would go on and on for days slandering this community you know nothing about, with complete confidence, even after people contradict you and argue with you... I mean what the fuck do I say to someone who thinks a community whose entire set of political beliefs orients toward defending the poor and the marginalized from the monstrous psychopaths who rule this planet — wants to watch the fucking world burn? Please stop saying shit about hexbear when you do not know anything about these people.

We can dig it up

Yeah, lets, instead of you cherry picking shit and distorting the intent behind it. Here's the fucking thread. Holy shit, the consensus view is fucking exactly what I said it is.

As for thinking Trump is funny, the overwhelming view in Hexbear is extremely bleak. People struggle with depression and doomerism. They laugh to cope.

Here are hexbears talking about why they laugh at Trump

https://hexbear.net/comment/3843298

https://hexbear.net/comment/3841843

https://hexbear.net/comment/3839607

https://hexbear.net/comment/3842243

https://hexbear.net/comment/3840197