And as for this comment,

• fears and mistrusts the media (to an extreme)

• “the West”

This is frustrating, because, while there’s a lot you don’t know, there are at least two instances you definitely do know about: the Nayirah testimony, and the Iraq WMDs reports. The wars and sanctions following those lies killed millions of people and displaced and immiserated millions more. There’s a term for this: manufacturing consent. Many other examples have never received the same degree of attention because America did not use them to justify major wars.

And yes, “the West.” Imperialism still exists, books and papers are written about this by serious people. Even in the thread where you were banned, people had already started to bring up details. Imperialism is a little better hidden than it used to be, but it’s still not that well hidden. Michael Hudson’s “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” is a good source.

They act like Nazis… the behavior makes a really bad first impression

nazis who were very intent on telling you about queer rights in Cuba and colonialism in the global south.

The conversation has gone stale while I’ve been swamped with work, but I’m going to respond anyway.

Looking back at the modlog, what you actually said was that their pronouns “look like an alt-right satire of pronouns” and that anyone using those pronouns must be a “basement dweller.” And people with those pronoun tags were right there reading your comments. Why the fuck would you do that? I actually got mad reading it. Whatever your motivations, you walked in and made it very clear you had no respect for people’s pronoun tags and no interest in understanding them, right to their faces.

At one point you compared neopronoun tags to being trans-species, whatever the fuck that meant

You also seemed dismissive throughout the thread, on every topic that came up, which was frustrating to read because first you made all these assumptions about people and then you showed so little interest in what they were actually saying! The one exception was maybe when you asked for a source on Cuba — but did you even expect to get one? What is just rhetorical? Maybe you got banned before you could respond, I don’t fucking know. Did you even click on the information you asked for? In 2022 Cubans themselves democratically drafted the country’s new progressive family code in over 80,000 citizen councils around the island. Hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free since 2008. I think this is interesting information that you might want to know. People also brought up trends in state regulation of farming around the world, neocolonial cash crop economics, Iraqi food imports and exports, IMF policies toward food exporters in the global south, the British planned economy during WW2, Chinese agribusiness and farming co-ops, soil exhaustion, and grammatical gender, and you seemed to show zero interest in any of it. You responded to these comments with paper-thin truisms about liberal values and basically tuned everyone out, called people misinformation trolls, and somehow managed to conclude that all the people in that thread were fucking nazis pretending to be queer communists for three years with no audience on a defederated site.

And for the most part, the worst thing anyone called you was “liberal,” except for one trans user who called you a fascist and told you to post hog after you said the trans-species thing — probably because it kinda sounded like one of those right wing “gay marriage today, bestiality tomorrow” talking points.

Reading that thread, yeah I understand why they were mad.

For the record, on hexbear, pronoun tags are not only a list of “things you can call me” but also a casual way for some users to communicate their identity and personality. Having two pronoun slots and an extended set of options not only allows for more flexibility in conversation (like them vs comrade) but also more granular self-expression, which is nice when you can’t fucking see or hear each other. In practice, the default thing people call each other is “they/them.” Someone with “love/loves” as their pronoun tag isn’t gonna get mad at you if you call them “them.” It’s the sort of thing you pick up on if you take the time to actually understand the site culture.

There’s not much more frustrating in conversation than when someone has their mind made up about you incorrectly and superficially, and they’re not interested in understanding who you actually are or what you believe or why you believe it. Maybe you were just bewildered by unfamiliar takes and you shut down a little. I don’t fucking know.

You called them unhinged for having neo pronouns. People have been attacking them for years, they expect a fight, and if you come in and fucking mock their pronouns and talk down to them they’re not gonna care enough to find out about your real world stances or activism, they’re just going to look at the comment right in front of them, and assume you’re some bigoted CNN lib who pays performative lip service to genderqueer rights but sees them as goofy caricatures and has no interest in understanding them. They get enough people like that already. If they took the time to investigate and understand and categorize everyone who threw shit at them it’d be a fucking full time job.

i think it’s a fucking massive leap to characterize hexbear as a “pro-sexual harassment” environment. You can argue that they are overzealous in who they consider nazis sometimes, but multiple hexbears earlier in the thread did call /u/randint a nazi apologist for defending Adrien Zenz, so it’s clear they considered him a fair target. Hexbear users see hog posting as punching upward at privileged bullies and reactionaries they are powerless against in real life. You can dispute that view, you might even consider them delusional or self-indulgent, but I think it’s an enormous leap to conclude that they are generally in favor of sexual harassment of people.

I just saw it, you sent me this link:

https://hexbear.net/post/613387

which contains a screenshot of this comment:

https://lemm.ee/comment/3622601

where /u/randint complains that hexbear admin /u/TomboyShulk dismissed his complaints about three other comments, which he then links to.

The three comments are all from the same 22 day old thread, and his engagement with the thread starts here:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3829077

There are two pieces of context I think ought to be mentioned:

• “post hog” and other “post your dick” variants are a canned /r/ChapoTrapHouse response against any user who seems like an unusually odious or bad faith wrecker or reactionary, like a rebuttal to 4chan’s “tits or gtfo”. It started when a neo-nazi went on CTH to spout race science but was mocked into posting his dick, which defused the guy completely; at the time, the subreddit was getting a lot of people like that, and “post hog” became one of the go-to responses because it was low-effort and it shut them down. It bewildered and frustrated people who were there say awful things or make users feel unsafe.

• /u/randint has been on a crusade against hexbear for fucking weeks. He goes out of his way to stir shit and has explicitly admitted that his aim is to make the site look bad. Increasingly frustrated hexbears pointed out his bad faith engagement in the thread I linked. He goes about it in a bloodless, polite-sounding way, but he’s not there with good intentions. Only at the very end of the thread, deep in the exchange, did anyone give him the canned response, and it made him leave.

Can you give an example?

that’s pretty much only happening in China

Socialism means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules

What you’re describing is “social democracy” — capitalism with safety nets, where production is still controlled by owners rather than workers. “Socialism” explicitly implies worker control of production. “Nordic socialism” could more accurately be called “Nordic social democracy.”

“Communism” refers to a classless, stateless society where everyone has what they need, no one is exploited or coerced, and there are no wars. It’s an aspirational vision for the future, not something you can do right after a revolution when capitalism still rules the world.

Tax them how? With the government they own?

Modern life in wealthy capitalist countries is subsidized by massive wealth extraction from the global south.

deleted by creator

Hot take but I also dig creative brutalist buildings like Boston City Hall and the Boston Government Services Building. I just like how permanent it looks, like cold war architects were reminding people to think of the future. But I’m probably in the minority.

It would be cool to spend some of my time gardening and landscaping to make the community look better. Having greenery around me and seeing public spaces that look cared for and lived in always puts me in a better mood. For that matter, we could bring back some of the skilled decorative trades and start embellishing buildings with stone and wood carving, tile work, tapestries, rugs, relief sculptures, and stuff like that. Maybe we could develop some new aesthetics instead of copying ostentatious old buildings. I just like when you can tell someone put attention and time into a building, and it’s not all disposable prefab that will get torn down in twenty years.

Cuba has an extensive democratic process. Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country.

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.