What I have learned:
- Russia has already won the Ukraine war
- Which NATO started
- A lot of people in the West think that Ukraine should surrender
- Also Ukraine was the world’s main provider of CSAM
- Also Ukraine is exploited by the West but if they can unite with Russia then their economy and everything else will finally be alright
It’s literally like a bizarro world and everyone is over there agreeing with it. I’m genuinely confused by, who even are these people (what is the mixture of Russian bots / Russian-aligned ordinary people / confused Westerners / some other explanation.)
OP, the link is to lemmygrad.ml but you keep citing lemmy.ml in this thread; are you mixing up the 2 without realizing it or do you intend to mean both?
I haven’t seen much of anything on lemmy.ml that reaches grad.ml’s level of what you describe. Then again, I stick mostly to somewhat-niche interest subreddits that receive a decent amount of participation from other federated servers.
In my experience even hexbear users are surprisingly (for the internet) good and decent to others, as long as you can avoid provoking their “the capitalist US empire is the current hegemony that’s killing the planet and ourselves, and we don’t punch down, therefore our vitriol is a uni-directional torrent” mode of operation that others in this thread have mentioned.
Obviously, the classical “cult” approach resembles that as well (love-bomb anyone not explicitly an enemy, close ranks against any potential discrediting of the movement). In my books most of them are ordinary people, from whom (legitimate) despair of the current state of the world has leeched all desire for compromise.
I don’t have a less patronizing way of saying it, but they remind me of someone who, after years of abuse by their partner, finally snaps and gravely injures said partner. In some sense, it’s on the rest of us to not have intervened beforehand, and at the same time their lashing out really doesn’t help things.
Oh, and this probably reads as hippy anar-kiddy logic to them, which is part of why I personally stay away from most of their politics-related communities.
I have interacted with lemmy.ml people a decent amount, so most of what I’m saying in the comments is referencing them. I have some level of difficulty in even interacting with lemmygrad or hexbear people, either a block or some kind of federation issue, IDK, so they form sort of a unified maybe-unfair stereotype view in my mind. But certainly to me the linked thread makes them seem wildly misinformed and super-confident and condescending about the truthfulness of their misinformed view.
Usually my experience is that if you have to edit your viewpoints to conform to what someone wants to hear, or else they will attack you, that person’s worth avoiding interacting with.
Not trying to be unkind about it (esp since specifically where hexbear is concerned I have basically no firsthand experience at all interacting with them) but that’s my feeling.
The part that I don’t get about that is the support for some of the actors that are primary engines of death and destruction in the current state of the world.
I had this really disorienting experience when I first started interacting on Lemmy, like “the world is fucked” “I know!” “the American system is pure poison” “yeah preach” “it’s authoritarian and violent and police state and unjust wars and no real freedom” “you’re so right brother” “and that’s why we have to support Russia!” and that was the point where I had to sort of gingerly prod at what were their views and why, and everything I found from that point on was hostile counterfactual condescending insanity.
That’s not lack of compromise, that’s just being wrong and proud of it.
IDK man. Maybe. Like I say I’m not trying to be unkind. They read more to me though like a person fleeing abuse from one partner, and then self-destructively choosing a partner that’s 10 times worse (or maybe more accurately starting a pen-pal relationship with a convict who if they got out and interacted with them would literally do 10 times worse or kill them.)
I think your home instance,
sh.itjust.works(whoops, that’s this community’s instance, not your home) (mbin.)grits.dev, defederated from both of them.My own, jlai.lu, hasn’t, so I see some of their posts crop up in my “All” timeline.
Huh, that’s not what I was expecting. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
This might be a question of personal tolerance to types of interaction (similarly, not trying to be unkind). I see it as selectively choosing when to engage (and on what to engage with), but I can totally understand if to you that is me editing my viewpoints to conform to what they want to hear. For the record, I don’t often engage at all with grad and hexbear, not even up- or down-votes; I’ll read what they have to say if the post title I come across sufficiently grabs my attention. There are a number of lemmy.ml communities that I do directly interact with regularly, mostly tech-related.
Given how sometimes aggressively apolitical most of the fediverse tech spaces are, there is a part of the discussion that I value around current events that I have had a hard time finding outside of lemmy.ml. The best I’ve found are awful.systems and slrpnk.net (notably the permacomputing community at the latter). The scope of the first is intentionally limited to cathartic deconstruction of bad things, and the second I find lacking too much substance to suffice. There’s raddle.me, but as they’re not federated with the wider 'verse it doesn’t really fit the bill either.
I don’t have the energy or know-how to be the change I wish to see, but if there was an instance outside of these three (.ml,grad,hexbear) that provided a place for the construction of good things (admittedly, following my personal definition of good) in place of the bad, I could see myself blocking them after one too many full-on tankie posts cropping up in my feed.
Actually, now that I think about it, mostly what I get from the hexbear and grad posts are a less-substantive form of the catharsis that awful.systems provides but on a broader range of topics. It is, sadly a coin toss on whether that catharsis will be ruined by everything you so rightly are put off by.
My experience lines up with yours, except for me not even attempting to prod at all.
I think there’s being wrong and proud of it, and there’s being so scared and whip-lashed by the obvious contradictions of the West’s purported values and it’s geopolitical impact on the rest of the world over the past few centuries that you lose any sense of truth. That’s maybe me being a bit melodramatic. On the other hand, I see it as akin to how a person’s drowning “reflex” is to pull whoever comes close down with them - to the point that lifeguards need specific training (and a flotation device if I’m not mistaken) to be able to save a drowning person without endangering themselves as well.
That’s probably closer to the mark. It doesn’t help that the former partner has friends all over the world that are very dismissive of any allegations. When I talk about the onus on us to intervene, I mean it more in the sense that we should be finding people that we can train and employ to be internet lifeguards.
On one hand, I don’t think they deserve to be written off as heavily as what I often see expressed in the rest of the fediverse. You don’t solve someone’s trust issues by ragging on their poor follow-up choices. On the other hand, this is online social media, not an irl group of friends and acquaintances. I don’t exactly expect any specific person to do the work to reach them via these spaces.
Thanks in any case for trying to productively engage with me on this. This exact conversation is tiring on the best of days.