sh.itjust.works Main Community

honestly it's a pretty friendly instance all told, we just have p strong feelings about politics and bigotry

and admittedly a lot of us have little patience for the worst among you bc we deal with that shit permeating society at every level on a constant basis

usually how conversations go is this

1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk

2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect

3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like "Oh, so you've come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it's much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you're wrong because of [link to wikipedia]"

4. we then start dunking given that they aren't operating in good faith

perhaps reddit's typical style of "debate", where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of "You're wrong, here's why you're wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don't then you'll start screeching 'CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH' at us"

additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven't for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. no matter how often you remind people, no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into "I dislike you and/or the point you're making and I'm not going to explain why. fuck you." disagreement on Hexbear is done through posting and replying, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot.

I see a lot of hexbear users be provocative, but I've yet to see it without reason. It's in response to someone else acting in bad faith. When you see someone act rude, take a step back and consider why they are acting rude.
Not to say we don't have users that are too quick on the draw of the ppb, but your website certainly has cantankerous assholes as well. Every site has.
Hexbear just has an incredibly low tolerance of debatebros, smuglords and bigotry, which I would say has fostered a site culture that allows for a wide variety of opinions to be shared, a deep analysis of current event and which is a safe space for LGBTQ+ members - our modteam is majority LGBTQ+.

Hexbear - "that's true, I see how our culture can be hard to decipher"

Lemmylib - "you guys are huge dicks without provocation"

Hexbear - oh well fuck you then :)

Lemmylib - "see, so hostile!"

If we respond to people being needlessly aggro with quip derision it's "so uncivil!" If we respond to people in good faith by trying to explain our differing views it's "wow im not going to read that!"

So what should we do?

I'll oversimplify a bit, but here you go. In economic terms, liberalism is a market oriented economy, and the current iteration of neoliberalism is marked by social welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich with "trickle down" effect in mind (allegedly). That ideology is shared by both the democratic and republican parties. The difference between communists and liberals in the sense the word is most often used, is that economic approach, and from that perspective both liberals and conservatives are "liberal".

Now the common use of the word is a bit different, but that's almost exclusively US from what I can tell. Hexbear is also international though, and liberal is a common term for right wingers where I'm from for example.

Hope I could help.

Liberalism has a couple of different definitions. The one you're thinking of is the one in US politics where "Liberal" is synonymous with "Left'. This isn't how it's being used here though.

Liberalism, as a broad ideological trend that came out of the enlightenment, contains within it, Conservatism. Conservatism was theorized by people like Edmund Burke who, seeing that the previous feudal hierarchy was dying off, sought to preserve it, at least as much as was possible, by accepting Liberal notions of property rights and capitalism.

So, instead of a social hierarchy being ordained by God, it's decided by the market, and social conflict is meditated through the liberal, Lockean, Republic.

So when we call Trump a liberal, we mean it in this broad sense. He's still a conservative, but conservatism is a subset of capital L Liberalism.

This is in contrast to Leftism, which also contains a lot of things within it, but breaks from a lot of the philosophical assumptions that undergird Liberalism.

liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. donald trump is a capitalist. donald trump is a liberal. easy.

Is there anything confusing about that statement?