Which we should see as an excellent radicalization and growth opportunity!
It can be exhausting explaining ourselves again and again, always met with the same accusations and assumptions born from the mythos spun by our enemies.
However, we must remember these people are people, and many people change their minds given enough information, delivered with firm respect. For every belligerent person who appears like they wouldn’t change their mind for anything, there are 10 people quietly lurking who are more on-the-fence. Even those who regurgitate insults and contempt may change their mind when the stars align!
These people are not our enemies, they are victims to the greatest campaign of dishonesty in human history! It is our duty to draw out the poison and deliver the medicine!
I know many comrades here have very difficult lives and do not have the patience or energy to deal with such people. Please do not exhaust yourself interacting with liberals, and allow comrades with more energy to deal with them.
Radicalizing online is not the end-all be-all, but at this point in the psychological war for those within the Anglosphere, every victory is invaluable!!!
While you were away, reddit made a big fuckup by charging a fortune to use their APIs, killing third party apps. This caused many redditors to jump ship to other platforms, and lemmy was the biggest alternative.
Hence all the libs.
I heard about that, I should have figured the consequence.
Well, it’s like old GenZedong days, only we can’t get quarantined 😈😈😈😈
Hexbear is also federated now, so we have r/chapotraphouse veterans here now too.
While you were away, reddit made a big fuckup by charging a fortune to use their APIs, killing third party apps. This caused many redditors to jump ship to other platforms, and lemmy was the biggest alternative.
Hence all the libs.
So many federated libs have a “fuck you, got mine” attitude and outright brag about throwing money at their corporate masters, so why did they leave Reddit in the first place?
Gotta say I was expecting some friction with ya’ll at lemmygrad after Federation (because we are all libs on hexbear) but so far you folks rock and I have been very pleased to see your high quality posts on my feed.
Loving to see posts like this. Can’t remember the Sankara quote but ya’ll know it. Cannot get tired of explaining ourselves because when the people understand us they will side with us.
Loving having new comrades in the posting trenches with us.
Hey this is about me!
I probably don’t know the right words to use and I don’t know my history or theory and couldn’t hold my own in a real debate but I sure am learning a lot from you all when I find your posts on All and your comments all over the place.
Realizing that, I don’t exactly know where I fall politically. Previously I would say I am left, but seeing conversations I realize that I don’t even know where Left-land is. At the moment I don’t see myself agreeing with a lot of stuff posted by hexbear/lemmygrad users, but I’m open to learn, and, more importantly, have a fuller understanding of your perspective(s).
Coming from Reddit I’m not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much. So it’s hard to navigate conversations sometimes, and figure out what is a joke and what is serious. And even if I personally don’t engage in the conversation, usually someone with a similar mindset to me will do so, and I appreciate it when you folks take the time to soften your words/message to actually (edit to cross out judgy word) explain your position.
Additionally I hope we can see and treat each other as individuals and not our instance names when traversing the fediverse (honestly this is more about non-hexbear/lemmygrad users, but felt I should say it anyway). It certainly is a shame that some instances choose to defed you. I hope mine doesn’t, but I’m prepared to move if mine gets overly censor-y, though my understanding is that sdf is unlikely to do so.
Anyway, keep it up, there are absolutely people out there lurking and reading what you all write, and occasionally learning something.
Stuff like this is why I loved the internet so much long ago (near 30 years, wow) and I’m really happy to see it hasn’t gone anywhere, I just lost track of it.
Cheers!
Honestly, if nothing else, I hope liberals are learning how to actually phrase questions in a good faith manner. As a former liberal myself, so many of my questions in the beginning were phrased in such an anglocentric way that just assumed Western ideals as the default and it put everyone else on the defensive. So of course I got dunked on or people assumed I was trolling. Really, I was just ignorant af.
Me too, but it did help me learn. Though I would imagine some might double down due to the insult, learning that some ideas people in the west just take for granted have their roots in anglocentrism and white supremacy does help some people really reflect on everything they’ve just assumed about the world for most of their life.
I recently hung out with friends that I hadnt seen in a while and they were saying some of the most ignorant, chauvanistic shit. Really nice people who consider themselves progressive. They just lack the information to understand why a thought of theirs is just a racist regurgitation that they picked up from a source they can’t even remember. They can’t remember the context of how those beliefs entered their worldview.
It was a startling reminder of just how big the task is of educating people out of a colonizers mindset. We can’t get tired of it.
Oh don’t worry, I understand the dunking(*) culture, it’s just that sometimes the barbs are so snide and buried beneath 3 layers of irony I literally don’t know what the message is supposed to be. Maybe this isn’t “dunking” how you guys mean it- more for me to figure out. But I refer to the trolling, biting, insincere remarks that are used as return fire to vitriolic remarks, events, or policies that you take offense to. All bad faith, as you say, or deserving of ridicule from your POV.
(*) Edit to add: I do/did not understand the dunking culture, I should I have said I understand the trolling culture. I thought they were more synonymous, but now I know it is not a full venn diagram overlap. Dunking may or may not include trolling, and not all trolling by this community is considered dunking.
When I first found my way to this corner of the internet and leftism in general, I was attracted at first by the truly caring priorities of leftism, taking care of people, not turning people into useful cogs.
I was put off by all the talk of communism, the USSR, etc, but the more I interacted and spoke with people and read about what I was hearing, the more I realized I was taught to fear these topics, that I was conditioned to believe some things were right, natural, and obvious, and others were evil, unnatural, and sinister
I kept looking into things, reading about what sounded like it couldn’t be true (USA’s activities meddling in every other nation, especially the ones trying to be socialist, was a big one, but also how they treated their own people like when they actually bombed a black neighborhood because they were becoming too affluent by relying on each other)
Really, just keep doing what you’re doing. The thing about leftists is we’re correct, so I’m not worried about winning you over this second. As far as I’m concerned, now that you’re realizing that maybe there’s more to this whole “leftism” thing than youve been lead to believe, I know you’re going to figure it out eventually.
Godspeed comrade o7 o7 o7
The thing about leftists is we’re correct, so I’m not worried about winning you over this second. As far as I’m concerned, now that you’re realizing that maybe there’s more to this whole “leftism” thing than youve been lead to believe, I know you’re going to figure it out eventually.
Precisely. I don’t stress over any interaction with anyone, because I know the truth always goes the distance.
Lies have very short legs, and therefore do not go very far. Time and personal experience will take care of the seeds you have planted, so there’s no need to chase after anyone.
Thank you for posting this. It’s pretty valuable for me. I remember when I was in your position. I got banned from multiple communist communities because I was engaging the way I was taught to engage in university. There, I was allowed to just posit bullshit and get argued with. I thought it was the normal way of doing things. Getting slammed by commies over a couple of years made me realize that I was putting a ton of intellectual and emotional burden on them and instead what I needed to do was to become more curious than I knew how. As I finally developed that sort of curiosity, I suddenly started to learn more (go figure) and then I became one of those people who didn’t want to deal with the same liberal arguments against communism that come up thousands of times a day.
So, good on you for starting to navigate this. I’m fairly confident that the reason you don’t see yourself agreeing with the revolutionary communist left is because you’re “not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view”. Once you get enough of the historical context behind this position, you’ll start to really ask questions about how we solve it and why we can’t solve it in other ways. And then you’ll find that there’s historical context to those answers as well, and the long and the short of it ends up being, you’re not entering in a brave new world where people are just starting to come to consciousness. You’re a Westerner who is just starting to come to consciousness in a world that has been working through this dynamic for well over a century now.
Stay curious!
Do you have any theoretical or historical questions on your mind?
People here are usually being pretty sincere unless they are doing a parody of a liberal. No one is ironically pretending to support the Khmer Rouge or Gonzolites, we either criticize them or say nothing. Support for the DPRK is sincere.
Not at this time. Thank you for the offer. As I implied (or tried to?) I am mostly a lurker and generally only engage in serious threads when I have a question or viewpoint that I believe is outside the usual threads of discussion. I am happy to learn from you all through osmosis at this time. Maybe in the future, when I have intelligent questions to ask, I will take you (and others) up on the offer in the appropriate forum.
Speaking of, I also believe in keeping threads mostly on-topic so wouldn’t want to change the course of this post’s discussion too drastically (though, it is happening naturally, and you offered, so certainly not strictly opposed to it. Just trying to keep the internet tidy, futile as that is).
Once again, thanks for your earnest offer - and the detail you added.
I also believe in keeping threads mostly on-topic
Please don’t worry too much about this, even on hexbear I’ll ask a good faith question out of plain ignorance and get an honest response.
Like you said, this thread is about you! We want to help educate folks as best we can and a lot of users have read a ton of theory and love to educate others.
Coming from Reddit I’m not used to the incredibly in-depth dialectic with a non-/anti-Western point of view, nor the intense levels of trolling/sarcasm/dunking that you all seem to love so much.
Because there was a concerted effort to remove us. Pre-2020 we were out there.
I am aware of that, uh, “development” (was on reddit since… '07?), however I would also add that it seems much more common on Lemmy to “cross pollinate” communities at the moment, at least for me, my main view is the All feed, whereas on reddit it was more focused/curated to my interests and/or “mainstream” content.
But yea, once the CTH purge happened obviously there was less of you all around…
I completely agree with that. I find the trick is recognizing whether a person disagrees, but wants to have a genuine discussion to understand where you’re coming from or just trolling. I think we can give people the benefit of the doubt, but as the discussion progresses it’s important to watch for signs such as the person ignoring or misrepresenting the points you’re making, talking past you, using tropes, etc. At that point it’s best to just leave a note pointing that out for people reading the thread and disengage.
I’ve found it useful in my personal life to just ask people why they think the way they do. I don’t judge or act condescendingly towards them. I simply try to understand.
Getting people to explain their own positions is the best way to get people to change their positions because it forces them to do some introspection on why they believe something. When ideas come from outside they’re rejected much easier. So, definitely agree with the approach of just asking questions and steering people towards making their own realizations.
Bingo. One thing liberals don’t seem to realize is that you cannot force people to think differently, they have to come to that conclusion on their own. I feel like a lot of capitalist culture encourages people to think as little as possible.
You have the patience of a saint for continuing to debate them after the Reddit influx. I’ve completely stopped trying to debate the libs on Lemmy because it ruins my mood and mental health more than it has hope of convincing them or even starting a productive conversation where either one of us stand to learn from the other. I still make it a point to expose myself to all dissenting views because I feel that as a socialist I should at least be aware of all the viewpoints, but I don’t care enough to actually engage with them anymore.
I usually just hope that other people reading learn something. I’m trying to engage less with them less as well, blocking a few really prolific trolls definitely helped. I gotta say though, with hexbear federating the vibes got so much better.
