Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there’s some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Hexbear is actually one of the oldest Lemmy instances, been around for over three years. Due to technical issues around our high number of active users and having to rely on volunteer labour, we have only been able to federate within the last few weeks.
Because they are. This isn’t even a radical far left idea. Ever heard of “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky? That’s one of the main arguments, that the media is owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
Lemmy was built by communists and the audacity of these liberals to come here and demand shelter from exposure to communists is really something
I have no problem with communism, I have a problem with authoritarian propaganda.
Let’s not pretend that your politics aren’t inherently authoritarian as well.
Either you support capitalism (or worse), which is grossly authoritarian as it inflicts massive violence not only via warfare but through mass starvation and deprivation, or you support socialism, in which case you have two options:
The violent overthrow of the current system (spoiler alert: that’s a very authoritarian thing to do!)
The gradual reform of the current system, meaning maintaining the status quo for an exceptionally long time as we ever so slowly creep our way to a more just economic system while countless people starve, go homeless, die without healthcare, end up in yet-another war and so on (which is a very authoritarian proposition, just throwing away the lives of the poor in your own country-not to mention those in the developing world-just so you can have a neat and tidy reformist approach that doesn’t rock the boat.)
Ok…
Leaving this here for anyone else who got this far and feels confused:
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Check out the cool political plurality in the USA
Has anything changed in 70 years? The legacy of the suppression of the left wing in the United States is still with us today!
The cold war ended, the USSR collapsed, and china shifted to being a semi-capitalist autocracy… I could go on but you’re just trying to dunk on the libs (like MAGA, big surprise) and I’m not one anyway.
lmaoooooo
Impossible that the social institutions we built back then could still be in use when the fucking water pipes we built back then still are
Hey America (and Canada, UK, Australia, etc.), how ya doing?
✅ Rejection of political plurality (See: Range of acceptable thought among mainstream political parties; Also, consider some self-reflection)
✅ Strong central power to preserve the political status quo (See: Mainstream media apparatus, spanning news, movies, tv, etc.)
✅ Reductions in the rule of law (See: Absolute failure to hold politicians or corporations accountable)
✅ Reductions in the separation of powers (See: Politicians funded by and catering to corporate interests)
✅ Reductions in democratic Voting (See again: Politicians funded by and catering to corporate interests + absolute failure to hold politicians accountable; Also see: Rampant gerrymandering, erosion of voters’ right, zero democracy in the workplace or outside of political elections)
No see you’re allowed to decide if the guy with the blue tie or the guy with the red tie is your representative (uh… if you live in one of the handful of districts that are competitive anyway) so that means it cant be authoritarian. God I love our illusion of democracy. It makes me feel so nice.
So we have to pretend political plurality is inherently and self evidently good now?
Hey! The guy in the red tie and the guy in the blue tie disagree slightly on one issue! The ability to decide between them is true freedom!
I wonder who made that definition.
authoritarianism is characterized by reductions in the rule of law?? what???
wanna explain how that definition applies to us??? it’s really easy to just point at a wikipedia article but you’re not really proving anything by just stating an extremely loaded definition.
Using wikipedia as a reference for political ideology is like asking W Bush which countries are good and bad
I didn’t say everything is authoritarian, I specifically stated your politics as being authoritarian.
name your favourite anti-authoritarian system. you wanna have a revolution to create it? whoopsie doopsie, you’re literally forcing people (maybe at gunpoint!!!) to do something that they don’t want to do, you fucking authoritarian tankie monster. next you’ll be saying you want to get rid of corporations (extremely authoritarian over those business owners)
No I don’t want a revolution, I want people to try to work together instead of fighting.
Yeah, us too. Unfortuntely society is currently managed by a bunch of literal sociopaths who are more than willing to throw their stolen wealth into militarized police, private deathsquads, and good ol’ normal armies.
We dont get to dictate the escalation of force, the bourgeoisie have and will do that for us.
STATE AND REVOLUTION
You know, I am reading Rabinowitch’s book on the July-October 1917 period and what really strikes me is how all the leading Bolsheviks-including Lenin-really wanted the transfer of power to the soviets to be peaceful. They pretty much exhausted every option until the right-SRs/right-Mensheviks and Kerensky types gave them no possible alternative to violent insurrection. There were differences over the timing and tactics of this insurrection (on one hand, those like Lenin and later Bubnov and Sverdlov who wanted insurrection immediately, those in the ‘centre’ like Stalin, Trotsky, Volodarsky who supported insurrection soon but wanted to shore up support in the provinces + at the front more, and those on the party right like Zinoviev and Kamenev who wanted to create a democratic worker’s republic with the SRs and Menshevik internationalists before beginning any violence to ensure full peasant support).
I didn’t know that at all. It shows how these guys-especially in 1917-did not like violence, did not glorify it, and did not fetishise it. They tried to avoid it and were all scared of unleashing the horrific civil war that eventually did come to pass. It’s something to remember.
Violence is bad and scary and should be only be wielded with immense caution and respect, but at the same time, when the time comes, you have to be ready for the decisive confrontation. Maybe Kamenev or Zinoviev, or maybe Volodarsky and Podvoisky, were actually right and it would have been better to wait longer until the correlation of forces was more on their side and the civil war could have been lessened at the very least. Maybe they were wrong and the revolutionary moment would have passed and the ProvGov would’ve re-gathered its strength. I don’t know. I’m still reading the book!
Very interesting write up. I’ll have to put that book on my to-read list. Thank you for sharing this kernel of knowledge!
Don’t forget the stochastic violence they do to us with their control of media and culture
That’d be nice. Unfortunately the bourgeoise have class solidarity with each other and not with us, they will prevent change from happening peacefully.
A smooth, voluntary, nonviolent transition to peace and harmony would be every leftist’s dream, but there are institutions with power who have used, are using, and will continue to use violence to prevent it from happening in order to maintain their material interests. Call it whatever you want, but the process of transitioning from our status quo to something better will require dismantling institutions that are capable of defending their existence with violence. It sucks.
Did you have the opportunity to see what the state does in the face of nonviolent resistance when the BLM protests were happening?
Please tell me how you’re imagining getting people like Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to “work together instead of fighting” and give up their hoarded wealth. What short of sheer force would compel them to do that?
Utopian socialism would be nice if it worked but it patently does not. The bourgeoisie have a very fine time controlling the wealth of the world and they have nothing to gain by accepting democracy. Socialism, like any economic order, is only going to be a reality if it is enforced with violence. If somebody tries to undo the collective ownership to the means of production they will have to be stopped by force, just as force is applied today to stop people from violating bourgeois property rights.
Do you think the capitalists will work with you? Do you believe that their sense of fraternity and human decency will lead them to throw down arms and accept more radical change to the system than the strikes, protests, and abolition movements that the capitalists have met with mass murder for centuries?
The capitalists are not your friends. Their power will not be voted away, it won’t be argued away, it won’t be negotiated away. It can only be removed by force, and removing it is the only way to keep them from using it to sculpt society into an ever-crueler engine of profiteering.
our literal entire platform is that the people should work together as much as possible and efforts to divide the people should be met with the harshest punishment
hundreds of thousands of volumes of literature spread across every nation, every language, every race, every gender, every sexuality, spanning centuries, and this is like the one thing we agree on the most
Yeah that would be great, unfortunately the world we live in doesn’t work like that. Asking for cooperation when the other side is perfectly fine using violence and manipulation then you are effectively just advocating for subservience to the bourgeoisie.
so you gonna work with us or
I am descending into madness.
Which political system do you suggest is more authoritarian than the owner of the largest military in the world, the largest police force in the world, and the largest intelligence (espionage) agency in the world?
Don’t forget the largest prison population.
If you have no problem with communists and you have a problem with authoritarianism you may wish to read this short essay by Friedrich Engels, one of the most important communists in history, on the matter: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Damn this was actually successful. Nice work.
We’re out here winning hearts and minds bay-beee
I’d say he’s the second most important communist in history… bookmarked to read later.
All political systems are authoritarian.
Propaganda is any alternative to the hegemony of Western corporate media
all political systems require authoritarian principles until class can be abolished after communism, do you know anything about the words you are using?
Police are authoritarian, for instance. Do you think your “democracy” is peaceful? Do you think it is nonviolent?
Then you should have a problem with the term itself “authoritarian propaganda”
looks at my own account age
Nah bro I think we’re all one month old bot accounts personally ran by the standing committee of the Politburo of the People’s Republic of China and the standing committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the People’s Republic of Korea
Seems like you’re missing a ton of nuance in manufacturing consent, and have turned from the frying pan into the fire in that sense.
Yes, Western media is biased towards corporations. This is most clearly seen in anything labeled “finance” or “money”, but is pervasive.
But the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of censoring the 1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre is the Iraq MWD debacle. And they’ve never done anything like the Great Firewall.
As a rule the US government does not mislead its own citizens the way Russia and China do.
And even if you’re 100% on board with every word Marx has written, I don’t understand how that leads one to defend modern day Russia and China.
The West absolutely has problems. And it’s good and right to point those out and try to fix them. But to try to paint the East as the answer to stand against the West is dangerous and dumb.
The great firewall is for your own protection, just look at how you guys react to a small group of users with different opinions!
Are people stupid enough to believe this?
The real answer is it is, among other things, an economic tool
The alternative was having the big US techs invade china economically, along with the mass propaganda from capitalist entities (chief among them the US, always pursuing efforts to destabilize China) that would have followed
You don’t speak to actual Chinese citizens often, do you ? basically all young people there have VPNs, and nobody cares. Like, at all
No, the truth is the CCP is a violently authoritarian government that needs to control what it’s citizens think in order to stay in power.
No I’m pretty sure they do that by increasing their citizens quality of life. I know, it’s a bizarre concept.
The US Is the most violent police state in the world, not that you actually give a shit
lol, the great firewall is protecting you right now from getting bodied by millions of CPC members
Lol, you’re complaining about other people being propagandized while you say shit like this.
I mean, visit any third world country where there’s no such thing as a “great firewall” and you’ll find western services and corporations embedded in everything to do with technology. WhatsApp has basically replaced text messaging to the point where even banks use it in my country, twitter is basically a PSA and tech support tool, and Facebook is everywhere. This is terrible for sovereignty. Meanwhile China has developed their own stuff such as WeChat and Weibo. So they’re not subject to relying on Zuckerberg and Musk for everything from texting to banking.
That’s the main economic purpose the great firewall served, it allowed China to develop their own tech industry instead of relying on silicon valley dorks. Not everything is some evil authoritarian communist scheme to oppress everyone. Chinese citizens could just get a VPN if they wanted to find out anything cordoned off.
Do you think people don’t have VPNs?
That was clearly a joke
The Great Firewall was to protect their own citizens from being data mined from foreign companies and propagandized by hostile state actors that want to put the Chinese in mines to extract resources for dirt cheap like they’ve done to many other nations in Africa, South America, and Asia
Notably also to make room in the domestic market for the domestic bourgeoisie to fill the roles Facebook, YT, etc. fill elsewhere, since those companies collaborate with the US.
Be more direct. Who are you even replying to?
I’m not replying to anyone, I’m posting this for other people who come along and might be susceptible to Hexbear propaganda.
Well thank god they have you to tell them… what exactly? What counter-movement do you stand for?
It might shock you but you aren’t required to stand for an anti-establishment whatever and shove your opinions down other people’s throats.
Capitalism in it’s current form may be responsible for incredible suffering and truly horrific global environmental damage. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is 100% wrong, that Communism is compatible with human nature, or that it’s in humanities best interest to split of into a bunch of counter-movements.
You are ideologically incoherent.
So what i’m getting is, you’ll never do anything to make it better and just roll with the material conditions like a boxing dummy on a swivel. You lash out at our approach to the system bc you have none of your own.
Time to check the ”human nature tho” box on my bingo card.
Why do you speak so confidently about subjects you clearly have spent almost exactly zero time investigating? There are over a hundred years of accumulated knowledge and study from a Marxist perspective on the nature and mechanics of capitalism (and that’s basically what Marxism is). You say that [single observation] isn’t proof that it’s inherently bad? Well big fucking whoop. The conclusion comes from a LOT more than that.
How do you know that? Did the US government tell you?
Hexbear doesn’t “defend modern day Russia”. I’m sure there are some users who do purely from a position of believing a multipolar world is preferable to one dominated unilaterally by the US, but even in those users think Putin is a piece of shit.
There’s a difference between understanding NATO’s role in provoking the war in Ukraine, not calling Russians orcs or comparing Putin to Hitler and defending modern-day Russia.
Reality is calling
They can’t even spell it right, of course they never took the initiative to question the massacre narrative
I’m always so paranoid about saying something wrong let alone spelling something wrong. It blows my mind when people just spout off without double checking themselves.
You know back in school years ago (the small amount I actually remember) I had a history teacher show us the tankman video and it just cut off with him standing there and my teacher said “the Chinese cut the film before it could leave the country” or something like that. Only more recently did I learn that was bullshit.
Good thing I had already figured most of the history classes were bullshit before that. Oh and having a school designed by someone who designs prisons really didn’t help my motivation.
USians are literally the most propagandized pop on the planet.
USians are the only dipshits who think their state will just do the right thing with zero pressure.
Imagine thinking the people living in a system where bribery and corruption have literally been legalized and (somehow) still believe is the least corrupt system on earth, have not been propagandized into a pulp of absolute impotence and servility.
then you should try to do some more thinking. maybe even some reading
You should check out literally any declassified CIA document.
Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered for no reason to accomplish nothing but to line the pockets of Raytheon shareholders. And you write it off as if it doesn’t even matter.
No one, neither the politicians nor the journalists who knowingly lied to you faced any repercussions. Not only that, but in many cases, it’s the same people in the same positions with no reason not to do it again.
Even if you ignore all the other times that the media has lied, how many people do you believe died at Tiananmen Square to think that the two are remotely comparable?
First of all, multiple western sources agree with us on Tiananmin Square
Second Iraq is definitly not the only time. Vietnam is another huge example. Literally every post-WWII military conflict has involved the press lying about it to manufacture consent. Some of the things are things you probably haven’t realized you’re being lied to about it yet though, so if I use them as examples it won’t help. But still.
Manufacturing Consent wasn’t just about the media being on the side of the corporations, its also about them being on the side of Western imperlialist motivations. And they will lie to you about “enemy countries” over, and over, and over again.
You think this because you don’t see the misleading happening and believing the things the western sources tell you about the “bad countries”.
Also Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq the first time and through the sanctions… You know, Ukraine… North Korea, the US government definitely tries to pull the wool over our eyes on that one. Venezuela, Cuba, on and on
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
CW: description of the events of it from Wikipedia, mention of: media suppression of a massacre, mass killing of civilians, r*pe, infanticide, pedophilia and mutilation, picture of the dead mutilated women and children under a sub spoiler warning
Between 347 and 504 civilians were killed by US soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children who were as young as 12.
photo of some of the victims
media suppression of the massacre and the (lack of) consequences for those responsible
Only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of murdering 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence but served three-and-a-half years under house arrest after US President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.
…
On 4 April 1968, the information office of the 11th Brigade issued a press-release, Recent Operations in Pinkville, without reporting mass casualties among civilians. Subsequent criminal investigation found that, “Both individuals failed to report what they had seen, the reporter wrote a false and misleading account of the operation, and the photographer withheld and suppressed from proper authorities the photographic evidence of atrocities he had obtained.”
…
The first reporting of the Mỹ Lai massacre appeared in the American media after Fort Benning issued a press release related to the charges pressed against Lieutenant William Calley. This was issued on 5 September 1969.[163]
Consequently, NBC aired on 10 September 1969 a segment in the Huntley-Brinkley Report which reported the killings of numerous civilians in South Vietnam. Following that, Ronald Ridenhour decided to disobey the Army’s order to withhold the information from the media. He approached reporter Ben Cole of the Phoenix Republic, who chose not to handle the scoop. Charles Black from the Columbus Enquirer uncovered the story on his own but also decided to put it on hold. Two major national news press outlets—The New York Times and The Washington Post—received some tips with partial information but did not act on them.[164]
Ridenhour called Seymour Hersh on 22 October 1969. The freelance investigative journalist conducted an independent inquiry, and published to break the wall of silence that was surrounding the Mỹ Lai massacre. Hersh initially tried to sell the story to Life and Look magazines; both turned it down. Hersh went to the small, Washington-based Dispatch News Service, which sent it to fifty major American newspapers; thirty accepted it for publication.[165] New York Times reporter Henry Kamm investigated further and found several survivors of the Mỹ Lai massacre in South Vietnam. He estimated the number of civilians killed as 567.[166]
Next, Ben Cole published an article about Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner and an Army whistleblower, who was among the first who started to uncover the truth about the Mỹ Lai massacre. And Haeberle contacted Joseph Eszterhas of The Plain Dealer, which then published Haeberle’s grisly images of the dead bodies of old men, women, and children on 20 November 1969.[44] Time Magazine’s article on 28 November 1969 and in Life magazine on 5 December 1969, both of which included Haeberle’s photos,[167] finally brought Mỹ Lai to the fore of the public debate about Vietnam War.[168]
Richard L. Strout, the Christian Science Monitor political commentator, wrote: “American press self-censorship thwarted Mr. Ridenhour’s disclosures for a year. ‘No one wanted to go into it’, his agent said of telegrams sent to Life, Look, and Newsweek magazines outlining allegations…”[169]
Afterward, interviews and stories connected to the Mỹ Lai massacre started to appear regularly in the American and international press.[170][49]
Concluding an ABC television news broadcast, anchor man Frank Reynolds said to his audience that, as a consequence of the allegations, ‘‘our spirit as a people is scarred.’’ The massacre, he believed, offered ‘‘the most compelling argument yet advanced for America to end its involvement in Vietnam, not alone because of what the war is doing to the Vietnamese or to our reputation abroad, but because of what it is doing to us.’
Three American media outlets that weren’t censored by the government. How do you think this is handled in Russia? In China?
If we used non-western (or even independent western) outlets to talk about something that major western outlets don’t, you’d dismiss it as propaganda and conspiracy theory
Lib: The American media doesn’t lie.
Leftist: Here’s evidence that it does, from Western sources
Lib: Ah, but at least those Western sources reported it!
Leftist: Alright, here’s evidence that it lies, from non-western sources
Lib: You don’t really believe that propaganda, do you?
Unfalsifiable orthodoxy.
Thank you for putting that into words I had trouble picking my jaw up off the floor after reading their reply.
How do you think it’s handled? And why do you think that?
The US government doesn’t have to (but still does anyway) mislead its own citizens because it works hand in glove with the class it represents (not you) which does all the misleading via the private “free press” that it owns and operates for it’s own benefit.
For the life of me I will never understand why liberals think something bad is less bad when it is a private actor doing it instead of the government, but the private actors actually control more of your daily life than the government does because you live in a neoliberal hellscape.
You have no control over anything the government OR the corporate overlords do. Does it really matter which one is screwing you when they’re basically all the same people anyway?
With regard to China, please just try to ask yourself why the standard of living has been improving there for decades while it continues to decline in the US. It’s not fucking rocket science, but you can’t rely on western corporate media to explain it to you.
I think most of users on hexbear and lemmygrad are not from US, so internal US politics is not so important to them, foreign policy is and that’s where US made a lot of haters.
It is not even that surprising, every country that was in war with US involved is not liking it, no one likes other nation’s army on their teritory, whatever the reason.
A ton of hexbear users are from the US, and still live there.
Yep, sorry my mistake. Thanks for correcting me.
we are trapped in the belly of this beast, and,
, it is bleeding to death
lol what? hexbear is largely amerikan. we just have a lot of international users bc we arent racist. US internal politics are horrific as well. Biden wrote the bill responsible for the massive increase in policing and the war on drugs in 1994
Makes sense, since podcast is from US too. Thank you for correcting me, I have never spent much time there since I don’t get the humor.
no problem. ik theres a lot of inside jokes so it can be confusing at first, but we are very welcoming as long as ur receptive to left-wing politics and act in good faith
It’s not a matter of liking the US but how it affects my country, that’s how I know about American politics.
Their Internal politics influence foreign policy and economic exchange tied to the dollar.
On the contrary, Americans tend to be myopic about foreign policy because it doesn’t affect them.
That’s why I don’t care about the Democratic-Republican political theater, they have the same foreign policy anyway (neoliberal imperialism).
Biden claims to be pro-LGBT for example, yet upholds the same US military that brutally abuses and kills transpeople, women and children abroad. Do you still think that it’s as simple as
liking or disliking on a whim, like a high school crush? PSY faced so much backlash when it was revealed that he made an Anti-American song a decade before Gangnam Style, but the American press conviniently all forgot about the events that influenced it.
An American tank crushed two Korean teens walking on public road to go to a party.
The servicemen got away scot-free.
damn you sound like a chauv lol
just say you don’t like the Asianic horde
go full mask-off
inventing the reality of the 1989 TIANANMEN Square Massacre in the first place
Aside from the incredible irony of this statement that others have mentioned
What leads you to being able to think of examples in China? Was it because you were there and experienced it yourself? Or did you hear about it from people who were there? Did you look through archives in China? Did you see modern reporting from (to pick an arbitrary state) India on this topic?
Or did you hear about it from western media themselves?
Can you see a conflict of interest in that conception of things? Perhaps especially when it comes to reporting on media fabrications in the west?
Edit: Russiagate is a fun example because I don’t give a shit either way, but the Dem-aligned media did an excellent job of convincing their base that Russia first hacked the election and then somehow flipped the election with Facebook ads, and had QAnon-level lore with Igor Fuckstyvich and Boris Shitov in a great web of conspiracy theories to draw connections between people. It was all so tedious that I stopped following it pretty early, but a lot of people still genuinely believe that shit even as it was shown that Russia did very, very little.
Also it keeps evading the notice of liberals that if Russia bought the election, that means Facebook sold it! I think that second one would be much more of a concern, especially since it should be more actionable for the US to control one of its own companies. Whoops.
Edit 2: Consider that most of what you believe about the DPRK is false because the media in the west is just a constant churn of comically bullshit stories. haircuts, anyone?