1y ago

PSA: I noticed there's a lot of libs here lately,

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!!!

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152 comments

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.
- Welcome!
  The dunking culture is primarily useful as a tactic against bad faith actors, an attempt to alleviate the effort assymetry associated with engaging with them. It takes very little effort to spew nonsense and rile people up, and 10 times as much effort to kindly and carefully refute the nonsense.
  Especially in an ecosystem where accuracy and kindess is less important for "winning" an argument than coming off as more confident (see the effectiveness of wojack memes in calcifying opinion) or popular, it's a necessary evil to be able to respond to such actors without wasting too much time. Relevant is Sartre's analysis of antisemites:
  Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
  Now all that being said, not all of us are as good as "turning it off" as we need to be. But despite that my experience with Hexbear is that there's a ton of users there very capable of good faith disagreement and discussion.
  Generally if you engage in good faith, most of us should as well. Most of us were in a similar position to you at one point.
  
  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.
  
  Im having trouble understanding this comment, am I just tired?
  
  Ehh I am definitely tired so maybe I worded it poorly, and/or our tiredness combined is interfering with getting my point across.
  I meant to acknowledge that you guys have this term dunking, which I've definitely heard people say irl (general mainstream slang in parts of USA) and it seems to reference general trolling behavior in the same way, but I acknowledge that I may not be using the term exactly how this community does.
  And I am familiar with modern internet trolling and humor which often relies on a lot of in-jokes, references, etc with layers of irony and sarcasm which are indecipherable to outsiders. But not sure if that is entirely synonymous with this community's usage
  Hopefully that helps clarify?
  
  I would disagree slighly. We definitely do a little trolling from time to time, but that is not what dunking is.
  Dunking is ripping on someone for having terrible politics, advocating for terrible politics, or otherwise. It is doing so in a way that shames the person but more than that is a public spectacle. That is important to enforce acceptable norms. It should be quite clear by now on Lemmy that if you're federated with Hexbear and you do a transphobia you'd better be ready to be swarmed by LOTS of angry communists. Thats community protection online, without it you get communities that grow nazi problems. In addition to that, the spectacle of the dunking often includes reference to why the politics are terrible, links with other types of bad politics, these things are all interlinked as they are a part of the interdependent system of globalized neoliberal capitalism, which itself is supported on layers of classism, deep histories of racial tensions, homophobia, transphobia, and one of the most OG layers patriarchy. It provides opportunities for us to tie these disparate pieces together, and thats not to mention the inevitable effort post as one of us just cant stand it any longer and has to write a book on the subject.
  But most importantly, its how we can get some catharsis. Its been said by many a leftist that its harder to face the world once you know. The suffering is just so blinding. Its a horrible world full of horrible systems that force people to do horrible things and I'm usually powerless to stop it, but I can make that liberal feel bad about it and since they support what this world is and does, and they're daring to do it in front of me, it feels great. In a grand and twisted sort of way its kind of like yelling at customer service, kind of. They're only like this because capitalism melted their brains, the poor fellas. I used to be worse than most of these libs so I know they could come around, but when I was that way I deserved it.
  That was more than I intended to write lol
  
  Guess my hunch that I didn't fully understand it was right ;) thanks for taking the time
  
  Side note: you should add pronouns to your name so we know you're cool, tbh if I don't see pronouns or at least lemmygrad.ml in the name I expect bad faith lol
  You'll likely get even better engagements with us that way
  
  Is that even possible for us folks on non-custom lemmy instances? I've heard hexbear etc run their own versions of lemmy with modifications for additional features. Regardless, I don't think I can do it through my app, so I'll have to figure it out when I get back to a computer. Thanks for the heads up
  
  If you go into your user settings you can set a screen name in addition to your @ and you can include some pronouns if you have enough characters left after entering your username into it (I think most Lemmy instances have a 25 character display name limit iirc so you should have space)
  
  Found it, thank you!
  
  Yep, it is. Hexbear actually does it in the display name I believe.
  
  o7 o7
- 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.
- we're all libs in the end anyway
  
  Thank you for this. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves. It can be hard to hear. But we need to hear it.
- 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...
- Major cheers! I can't speak for everyone here but don't hesitste to ask for clarificatiom and hopefully someone who isn't too cranky will be able to explain anything and everything. Bless

152 comments