Suddenly seeing more hexbear posts. Did we re-federate with them?

"imperial core" isn't a phrase we made up. It refers to World Systems Theory, a theory of international relations invented by a guy named Immanuel Wallerstein which argues that imperial "Core" countries (think the traditional "developed" or "first world" countries. Mainly the US and Europe) have a particular extractive, colonial relationship with "Periphery" countries (think poor, raw material exporting, rentier states like Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria).

Then there are semi-periphery countries which are still tied into the imperial core in some way, but have enough sway economically and geopolitically to kind of stand on their own. They have a different kind of relationship to the imperial core, compared to the periphery (these would be the BRICS countries, largely).

That's a gross over simplification, but hopefully that answers your question.

Edit: Here's a really good explanation of World Systems Theory that goes into more depth

Wasn't aware of this framework, thank you for taking the time to explain it :)
- No problem!
- Thanks for engaging in gold faith!
To be fair, colonialism is a human trait and it's been proven in every large society time and time again. You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it's the same thing with a different spin.
It is inevitable, humans are destined for this. It's unfortunate but it's what we do.
- That's just the propaganda you've been fed. The world doesn't need to be xenophobic or exploitative. These are learnt behaviors.
  
  No man these are facts. Proven, hard irrefutable facts.
  
  Lmao no they're not. Humans are a communal species, it's literally what we've evolved to be.
  However acting as if behavioral (or even worse evolutionary) psychology can in any way give a definite answer on what is human nature and what is learnt behaviour, is ridiculous.
  There are no factual answers to the question "what is human nature?"
  
  If you look at human history, every civilization has eventually pretty much done the same thing just at different scales.
  At some point humans do in general attain that trait, in larger societies.
  Keep the group small, it'll eventually grow larger. It literally all happened throughout human history, there are physical artifacts across the globe, all before globalization and communication technologies, and they all generally did the same thing. Or they were one of your "communal" societies that no longer exist because..
  
  Lmao post your academic sources instead of vague gesturing towards human History
  
  I'm being vague because these are common facts. I'm not about to go spend half my Saturday sourcing this for you, to win some kind of online argument lol its nice and sunny outside and I'm planting trees all day and imbibing with you kids on here on my breaks.
  
  You're being vague because you are wrong.
  
  https://www.college.columbia.edu/core/content/mutual-aid-factor-evolution-peter-kropotkin-1902-ce
  
  Just because you're a terrible person doesn't mean everyone else is.
  
  I have no idea what you're trying to say here
  
  Like a Christian deep in the closet talking about how gay people just need to suppress the natural urge all men feel to engage in gay sex, you believe that your internal experiences are universally shared across humanity. Because you are a selfish, deeply evil person, you refuse to believe that there is actually any such thing as a good person at all. You feel smugly superior to the rest of us who refuse to admit we're all evil, without realizing that not everyone thinks like you.
  
  Well I didn't say anything close to what you opened up with. I think you're angry and projecting.
  I am none of what you say I am, you simply assume I am because I say things that go against your narrative.
  I may seem smug to you because I can easily reject your claims and don't feel the need to prove myself to you. But I'm not, you just seem lost and honestly a little delusional.
  I hope you find what you're looking for in life.
- yeah but the thing is other countries' policies didn't inspire apartied and the nazis and their holocaust.
  the US's exterminationist and segregationalist The US did those thing
  Hitler wrote in his diary how good america was at genociding its undesireables, and took it and ran with it
  The United States: world leader in being the absolute fucking worst thing in human history since 1619
  
  But that's kind of my point. The CCP engages in almost identical policies and political strategy. It's just under a different banner with a different mascot.
  
  Absolutely fucking wild to go yeah the US Inspired the nazis and aparteid and segregation, but china has the belt and road so its basically the same
  The fuck?!
  
  If somebody looks at you and likes a thing you do, and then goes and commits genocide because they liked that you liked their favorite potato chip, does not make you connected to their genocide.
  You are fabricating connections while denying reality.
  
  Hitler literally wrote in his diary how good the US policies of extermination and land settling were, and, quite famously, his basis for Lebensraum: the material basis for the holocaust
  Get the fuck out of here nazi apologist
  
  You know just because we don't see things in the same (extreme) light doesn't make either of us a bad person. And I'm no nazi apologist but that move on your part leads me to believe that you're a child, like literally an undeveloped, immature, angry child.
- You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it's the same thing with a different spin.
  I don't think any non-Western country has enslaved a continent, refused to pay reparations for enslaving an entire continent, and continue to plunder an entire continent of its resources.
  
  Japan, China, Persian empire, Egypt, Spain, US, UK, Cambodia, et al.
  History is nasty, our goal should be to learn from it and not repeat it.
  
  I'm going to make the bold claim that the Tang dynasty and the Achaemenid empire was nowhere near as bad as the Spanish empire or the British empire and unlike the first two, the second two are still relevant in modern times.
  
  Do you seriously think Cambodia "enslaved a continent"? Like, I think Pol Pot was one of the more destructive leaders in human history, but you're being silly.
  Japan was working on it but only partially did it. China didn't. Persia? uh . . . I don't think so. Egypt? No. Spain was part of the overall effort that the US and UK were part of.

It's another term for 'the West' effectively, so the US and Western Europe.

I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about but every time I poke my head into that instance you guys are "dunking" every other instance with language nobody else understands. It's very alienating.
- Lol that's fair. We've developed a pretty insular culture over the past three years and I can see how it's hard to decipher.
  
  you guys are also like, just huge dicks without provocation. like all the fucken time. 99% of what i see from hexbear users is either condescension or outright hostility.
  
  usually how conversations go is this
  I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk
  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
  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]"
  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. thousands upon thousands of times, I've seen arguments become people just saying quotes like "Well, communism works on paper but not in practice" and "If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither" or "Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?" and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily "when you have elections" or if there's something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner's knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I'll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.
  no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don't "contribute to the discussion", 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 can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or "struggle sessions") rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it's by far the healthiest online community I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. it's also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of "if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can't downvote" means that we're all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.
  
  GOOD post
  
  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
  
  Oh, so you understand how everyone else feels about you then.
  
  :smuglord:
  
  Yeah, cognitive dissonance hurts, so you respond aggressively, perfectly understandable, if disappointing.
  
  hey ditto! i have very little patience for the worst among you, because when i look through comment sections looking for discourse i instead see you fuckers starting the same 5 arguments.
  also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty. it’s hard to respect what you say your motives are when your camp is acting like it is.
  
  Really? cause when I look through comment sections it's always liberals spewing the same fucking lines, and acting like everyone they disagree with can't possibly also be from marginalized groups. (In fact most seem to take the fact that you disagree with them as prima facie evidence that you can't be from a marginalized group!)
  The amount of casual misogyny, racism, and generally sickening comments I've seen has shot through the roof since we federated, and it's exclusively been coming from lemmitors.
  
  Give me an example of a user from Hexbear being racist/transphobic/homophobic etc.
  Just one. Please.
  
  hey ditto! i have very little patience for the worst among you, because when i look through comment sections looking for discourse i instead see you fuckers starting the same 5 arguments.
  If this is how you initiate discussion - with hostility - then that experience does not surprise me. Consider being less shitty yourself.
  also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty. it’s hard to respect what you say your motives are when your camp is acting like it is.
  I find that very hard to believe. The websites modteam is majority LGBTQ+ we have a diverse group of users, and this is because the mod team takes bigotry very seriously. If you see any bigoted takes please report them, and also please give me some examples of this from hexbear users.
  
  also, coincidentally, i see a lot of folks from marginalized groups specifically complaining about y’all being insensitive and shitty.
  Now that's a lie if I ever saw one lmao
  
  "All the they/thems in this thread are bigots, they're actually right-wingers!" - WTF is this take
  
  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?
  
  You have a very strange idea of "without provocation"
- Honestly your best bet is probably to do some reading first, unfortunately. A lot of Hexbear dialect is that way because it's tied to concepts that come from books and thinkers we're broadly familiar with.
  If you're more into video stuff you could try this guy. I think he's pretty approachable.
  Actually if you went into the megathreads and asked most people would probably give you suggestions too. We are fiesty but in my experience we also like to be helpful to people with questions.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/channel/UCGog4JPn5-W3_XIKccENysg
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- We're literally just communists. Read any introductory text to communism and 99% of what we say will make sense in context.
  
  "Donald Trump is a liberal"
  Break this down.
  
  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.
  
  "The colloquialisms from the place I am directly talking about don't matter as much as this one I am using, everyone who disagrees is propagandized"
  This is what I'm seeing when I read your comment. I can call the sky green all damn day, that doesn't make it green, you dip.
  
  Wow what an insightful response to a user answering your question in good faith! I cannot imagine why you would ever be treated with derision or condescention
  
  You reap what you sow. I figured a tankie would know about planting things but I suppose I was wrong again.
  
  Funny because the other user sowed a civil and good-faith response. I'm used to that resulting in a response in good faith as well, and yet here you are with shit in your diapers acting like a pissbaby. Must be something in the soil
  
  Most civil and good faith lemmylib.
  
  Really? I see them answering the question you asked.
  
  Exactly the same as a chud saying college biology is fake pseudoscience because of the biology they were taught in 5th grade.
  In any decent political science education in the states you will also see these definitions. You can stop having a tantrum about it.
  
  Let me oversimplify even more. Donald Trump upholds the American Revolution which turned British America into a liberal republic.
  
  I think Donald Trump is a communist. He takes care of his own, disregards the status quo and talks mad shit about libs just like hexbears.
  So it must be true, Donald Trump is a communist liberal.
  Suck it westoids.
  
  The politics understander has logged on
  
  Americans can call the sky green as much as they want. In the rest of the world, Liberalism = Liberalism, not "democrat".
  Liberals are people that believe in liberalism, which can be summed up as "everyone has the individual right to be an asshole, even if it fucks everyone else over".
  
  This isn't a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.
  If you're going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that's too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.
  
  Locke was a classical liberal. Trump is a neoliberal. This is very simple.
  
  Trump is a neocommunist.
  
  Socialism is when the government does stuff and the more the government does, the socialister it is, and if the government does a whole lot if stuff, it's communism!
  
  Trump quotes Karl Marx regularly and if you can get a look at his left butt cheek you'll see a Che Guevara tattoo.
  Total communist, Bigtime, his socialism is yuge.
  
  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.
  
  This is actually helpful, thank you for this.
  
  liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. donald trump is a capitalist. donald trump is a liberal. easy.
  
  Is there anything confusing about that statement?
  
  Yes, otherwise they would not have asked it. We all learn something new everyday, and what's old for you is novel for others. We cannot expect everyone to be well-versed in theory that was once new to us as well
  
  Uh, I think I was right to be suspicious of their good faith.
  
  Maybe, maybe not. But that statement is going to be deeply confusing to the average American for whom "liberal" is synonymous with "left".
- I genuinely would like to understand what you guys at hexbear are about
  Well, I'd be more than happy to have a good faith discussion with you. No dunking, I promise 🙏
  
  You've caught me going into a busy Labor Day weekend but sure, I'll think up some questions to ask.
- If you ask good faith questions and give context for why "Hey, I'm a liberal and I don't understand X could you explain what you mean?"
  You WILL get excellent engagement and people will give you very good answers
  its easy, and if you genuinely want to learn give it a shot
- New tagline dropped @CARCOSA@hexbear.net
  Seriously though you are more than welcome to ask, I would recommend the news mega. If you ask questions in gold faith there's a wealth of users willing to interact with you
- To be clear in the dunking threads folks are not usually engaging in good faith with us. When I was on another server and replied with actual questions to stuff everyone was incredibly nice to me and explained stuff super well. Can agree though that folks can see dunking as alientating. I promise though if you can get past that it's one of the friendliest communities I've found on the web.

The imperial core is the countries that have been most involved in the imperialist plunder of other nations, so that would be the US, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, Germany, etcetera

Don't forget China, Tibet?
- Tibet was an oppressive theocratic slave society whose people China liberated.
  
  Woo boy provide me a source for this one
  
  Serfdom in Tibet controversy - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Tibet_controversy
  Here is a very both sides wiki article to start with. You can see the weakness in the argument in the defense of Tibet as they're semantic arguments.
  
  Ok cool I'll check it out and report back. Thanks.
  
  If you want information about Tibet, let me know.
  I am a westerner who was raised Tibetan Buddhist so I'm pretty familiar with Tibetan history and... it's really not the country which gets painted as this peaceful utopia free from political intrigue or human rights abuses that was all about enacting and embodying compassion.
  There's contemporary examples of this, and perhaps the most obvious example is the Karmapa controversy (try figuring that little doozy on your own without being steeped in Tibetan history lol) which often overlooks significant issues such as the struggle over who would hold the seat of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim and lay claim to the considerable amount held in trust for the Karmapa (which featured a wealthy patron, at one point, stationing a small private military to prevent one of the Karmapas from entering the monastery) along with suspicious death of Jamgon Kongtrol Rinpoche and his delegation in a car accident when he was instructed to "test the brakes" on a newly serviced car (BMW? Mercedes? I forget...) or the historical significance of the then-Dalai Lama outlawing the recognition of the Tai Situpa lineage (and liquidating his monastic holdings and forcibly converting the Kagyu monks under his tutelage to the Gelug school) and the current Dalai Lama lifting this centuries-long ban and the implications this would have on the recognition of the current Karmapa(s).
  Then there's historical examples of this, like the famous example of the politically-influential polymath Lungshar, whose son was considered for being a reincarnation of the next Karmapa (this process of recognising reincarnations, strangely enough, tended to exclusively occur to children within wealthy and politically influential families such as Lungshar's) who was sent as part of a delegation to Europe by the British who were courting Tibet at the time as they sought to expand their colonial holdings from India up into Tibet. Lungshar was smitten by western political systems and he sought to bring about reforms to democratise the Tibetan theocracy.
  Unfortunately for Lungshar, his son died under suspicious circumstances around the time that his agenda for political reforms was running into direct opposition by the conservative political powerbrokers in Tibet (monks/lamas and aristocrats) and, in a surprising turn of events, Lungshar was "discovered" to have been practising black magic (they found a piece of paper with someone's name on it inside his shoe which was considered black magic - this name happened to be of the aristocrat Timon who held high offices in the Tibetan theocracy and who happened to be a conservative and the main figure who openly opposed Lungshar's reform agenda. How they knew to check Lungshar's shoes is a matter for speculation...) and so, as punishment, Lungshar had his eyes gouged out on Timon's order and Lungshar lost his political influence and the movement supporting the liberalisation of the Tibetan theocracy was effectively extinguished by this act.
  There's this extremely romanticised, idyllic notion that westerners tend to have about Tibet (and the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is something treasured by westerners rather than being looked at with a skeptical eye for all of its overt orientalism, to me, speaks volumes about just how canonised this notion is) but history paints a markedly different picture than the one we tend to have.
  
  It all just sounds similar to the cast system that China has had for centuries, some based on religion context ( upper cast being divine through God).
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_China
  
  https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/
  several Content Warnings in the essay
China (see taiwan, tibet)
Russia (see crimea/ukraine)
Wow you just got dunked on.
Seethe
- Tibet was a theocratic slave state before being liberated.
  Neither the UN, the EUs member nations, the US or Taiwan thinks Taiwan is a country.
  
  It's okay to be wrong, Taiwan is a beautiful country. Sorry if that makes you upset.
  
  I love being wrong! It means I get to learn new things. I am for example happy to learn that we have a user here from either Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, or Tuvalu, since these are the only places that regonize Taiwan as a country.
  I am very sorry to hear what climate change is doing to your wonderful island/country! I hope your government is working towards a good future.
  
  Taiwan doesn't recognise Taiwanese independence. Let that sink in.
  
  Oh no, it definitely does.
  you probably didn't see this interview with their PM talking about precisely this.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/dQw4w9WgXcQ
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Note that they said "Most involved" Russia, for instance, has always been the modern "Sick man of Europe" since the fall of the USSR. It's imperial aspirations don't extend as far. And it's relationship to the historic Core of the US and Western Europe, is as a semi-peripheral nation trying to coalesce a regional sphere of influence with itself as the center of gravity. None of that makes it a Core country though.
  Maybe if the current world system collapses, and it filled that vacuum. But that hasn't happened.
  Imperial Core refers to the World Systems Theory of International Relations, first put forward by Immanuel Wallerstien. I would suggest you read up on the topic before making half-baked responses like this.
- US (see native Americans)
  Spain (see Cuba/ Mexico)
  Wow you just got touchdowned on.
  
  Canada (see indigenous)
  Wow you just mega-mollywhopped inside of.
  
  wait, do you think calling canada a genocidal colonist state in the imperial core is an own to us?
  Thats literally our point
  
  Lol you don't see the irony?
  
  Are we making a list together or not?
  I guess it's just me; here
  Score several more for China, more current too.
- This is so adorable.
- https://redsails.org/friendly-feudalism/

The Imperial Core was clearly on Coruscant.

RIP

You know how any time there's a map where it colors countries who vote on UN resolutions, or countries where you can be thrown in jail for being poor, etc etc etc etc, you know how its usually a very similar map with US Europe and western allies on one side, and the entire rest of the world (the other 6.5 billion people) on the other?

Yeah, that teeny group that seems to always get its way controlling global politics is the imperial core.

Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?

They prefer to be called The International Community™

And occasionally the "We make the rules, you take the orders" rules-based order.

Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?

Probably start with where all the giant battleships come from: https://www.businessinsider.com/magnitude-of-us-naval-dominance-2013-11

Why does the USA need all those battleships if they're not doing imperialism? Are they just cosmetic battleships? Just for shits and giggles?

They asked a question in good faith, and have since gotten it clarified. No need to be hostile.
- I was answering his question, not trying to be hostile. I did not insult him at all. Just voicing my opinion.
Ok, so the imperial core is in DC to you, got it. The previous reply is more thoughtful than that.

Another user already explained world systems theory, but there's also the school of global historical materialism, that analyses the relationship and structure of the imperial core/triad and the periphery/global south. Samir Amin was a leading figure in that, he also coined the term "Eurocentrism". You can find quite a few recordings of his lectures for free on YouTube, or pirate his books (he's dead now, so it's not like he'd get the money anyways).

Imperial core = CCPs geopolitical enemies