I saw a post that talked about racism towards people and when I talked about it the response I got was very heated and a person even called lemmy.world a community of ‘hitlerites’
I have been around for a week or so and this is my first time seeing such explicit vulgar reaction towards another community, is this a one-off or should I block hexbear?
Note: being on Lemmy for about a year, I didn’t live through the early days of this place. Here’s what I can recollect, as neutrally given as possible.
TL;DR The recent conflicts between two politically different groups on Lemmy have radicalized many people, and many Hexbear residents in particular. Unless you are to discuss the far-left ideas and are very radical about disadvantaged groups, you are safe to block it.
Hexbear is a far-left (as in actually communist) anti-discrimination community, initially more of a safe haven to promote equality and foster a healthy and welcoming place for leftists to come together.
With core developers of Lemmy also being far-left, Hexbear naturally fitted the landscape along with the official Lemmy.ml, heavy far-left Lemmygrad.ml and others.
As time went on, however, all sorts of left-leaning and apolitical folks, not just far-left, came to the platform, filling other instances like Lemmy.world (now the most populated of them all), sh.itjust.works and many others.
As a result, Lemmy has two groups of people with radically different political views: one is a group of more or less organized far-left, and the other is everyone else, most commonly liberals. This distinction has caused a lot of conflicts and heated discussions based on political adherence.
Most notable case is latest US elections. The far left side generally called not to vote Democrat as Biden has failed to deliver on many of his promises and empowered Israel to commit war crimes in Palestine, while the liberal audience called to vote Democrat to not let Republicans take the lead, which may arguably lead to an even worse outcome than unaccountable Dems can make.
This divide has raised a lot of mutual hostility, brigading, and uncivil behavior, which has radicalized many on both sides of the conflict, the consequences of which you have got to experience.
What to do with that is up to you to decide. Hexbear is very politically uniform and very political overall, so if you’re not here to discuss communism, you won’t lose much and will gain additional peace of mind.
This is by far the best and most informative answer. The only thing it’s missing as another couple commenters pointed out is hexbear is all about their oversized memes and emojis, making anytime you happen upon one of their posts extremely conspicuous (even if politics aren’t being discussed).
The oversized emoji bug was fixed, by the way. They display normally now on other instances.
I’m being a little pedantic here, but “far left (as in actually communist)” wasn’t a thing until these recent online debates and forming groups started putting labels on groups and putting them into boxes. Communists are not necessarily left, nor far left. It feels a bit weird to ‘put’ them anywhere. That said, I know nothing about hexbear or this little group on Lemmy and how they identify…
It is unclear what this excerpt is meant to demonstrate.
By default, the terms “left” and “right” are describing the level of economic equality/freedom in a given society. The left call for economic equality and redistribution of resources, either through peaceful cooperation and abundance or through heavy state intervention, the right stands for private property above equality and freedom to act in personal financial interest.
Communists hold economic equality as paramount and vital for society, and put it above all else; in a perfect communist world, everyone always has access to everything that is available in an economy, and as such, there is no money (you can already take anything you need) and no point to privatize anything as there’s no revenue to speak of.
Thereby, communism is far left.
I assume the rest of it would explain how Stalinism created an economic and social heirarchy at express odds with real Marxism but that still leaves you with real communists being the left. The author is ultimately crying about humanity’s insistence that words mean things and trying to take the word communist away from communists.
Bro tf?
Uh no? Also your linked book page doesn’t fit your argument.
communists are on the left, not sure the page you linked is making the case for anything other than American political scientists being extremely unserious
Cold War brain rot just ruined a generation of thought. My dad was a never-Trumper that called Trump a communist.
What do you believe “leftism” means? I can’t see a world where an ideology based on public ownership, collectivization, and working class liberation could be seen not as left.
A label, in all honesty. Historically they’re not left nor right nor middle. They can have ideologies of many, but too long to get into here. I was being pedantic because it’s a slight bug of mine when they are labelled and boxed like that. For example Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov (Bukharinists) and others like Joseph Stalin were not considered left but were communist.
Bukharin was considered “right” from the standpoint of a far-left ideology, as a point of comparison to the standard party line. That’s like saying -5 is a positive number because it is closer to positive numbers than -10.