city government: run by suburban car lovers, absolutely intractable, getting bike or bus lanes might as well be happening on the moon

state government: run by liberals who largely run near or entirely un-opposed. They do good things sometimes, but are simultaneously incapable of forcing municipalities to do good things, and roll over the feds when pressed. For example, no resistance to the fucked up ICE kidnapping campaign that’s still going on.

National government is a hot mess and voting in my state has had a zero percent chance of influencing it in every election I’ve been alive for.

“democracy”

forgot to turn off bighead mode before entering pvp zone

I know a bunch of people from in person organizing in the US who are ML/maoist and have positive opinions of China, Russia, Cuba, etc, but it’s generally the kind of critical support you see on hexbear. A lot of them are trans/NB and have grown up in the US propaganda bubble and reject it.

Also pretty sure both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net are blocked in china. It’s probably just because they block all foreign social media as a general practice though. If they’re looking to do propaganda work they’re probably going to do it on platforms with more people tbh.

time to check in on the straights, how bad could it be

I don’t disagree, they have nice features and I hope that results in those features eventually spilling over to similar improvements in lemmy. If it wasn’t for the ideological crusade some people are on I wouldn’t care at all.

The a lot of the promotion of it has been along the lines of ‘fuck those tankie degenerates, come use piefed’, an example of which I included here

From that link pretty much all of the usage is talking about the literal insect, or talking about reactionaries/fascists using it to refer to muslims, immigrants and other ‘undesirables’.

Out of the handful of remaining uses, it’s stuff like in the hexbear thread on this meanwhileongrad thread:

This is the most questionable usage I found, and it’s referring to fash/reactionaries.

That’s not the main point though, the bigger issue was getting called a ‘degenerate’ that’s pretty much a red flag that someone’s a cryptofash.

citing db0 on this one:

compare the use of the term on shit vs hexbear: https://sh.itjust.works/search?q=degenerate&type=All&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=TopAll

https://hexbear.net/search?q=degenerate&type=All&listingType=Local&page=1&sort=TopAll

While looking I found this one on hexbear 5 years ago, almost 90 upvotes shitting on stalin for criminalizing homosexuality, and quoting him calling someone degenerate. I read this as extremely critical of Stalin:

All the usage on hexbear I see is either self-deprecating or discussing (negatively) about people using the term.

Vaush this year defended the idea that he is allowed to call trans people shit like “subhuman, degenerate, mentally ill, leeching off society” if they step out of line and oppose him or his breadtube friends.

meanwhile on meanwhile on grad:

My experience on lemmy is vastly improved after blocking lemmygrad, lemmy.ml, hexbear, beehaw, and pawb. Wiped out vast swathes of degenerates from my feed.

hmmm, calling people degenerates and complaining about commies, progressives and furries.

Goat seems fine with replies calling people he doesn’t like degenerates:

more examples:

Wouldn’t be surprised to hear they are, but nonetheless the chapo trap house degenerates that make up hexbear and grad are real. They do believe the dumb shit they say. It can’t all just be explained away with CCP and FSB boogeymen unfortunately, that would honestly be better imo. I’m sure some of it is, but mostly it’s people crazy enough to believe the stupid bullshit they spout.

On the shit main community someone deleted their posts after getting called out for this behavior, this is a known issue:

‘degenerate tankie roaches’

site admin calls it out, entirely downvoted lol

Like you might think I’m being melodramatic, but I really don’t see how meanwhileongrad isn’t a nazi bar.

As I said, I don’t have a dog in this fight, it seems indeed bad to have such comments on both sides.

I really hope you re-assess both sides, because they are not equivalent.

I understand, there’s plenty of problematic posters to go around, the issue I have is that it’s normalized calling an instance which is overwhelmingly trans and queer ‘degenerates’, that’s a major red flag, and it’s behavior like that which was why hexbear defederated shit in the first place.

sh.it doesn’t seem to have improved in that time

The issues I have with piefed are more related to the auto-collapsing comments based on votes, and the terrible search features, particularly its modlog. Seems way worse for transparency to have things that opaque and censorship happening through votes.

Question, do you feel comfortable posting in comms where other people are getting called degenerate roaches?

It’s the default setting for the echo chamber that I took issue with.

I did say that it was something admins can change manually in my initial post here, twice.

I did say as much in my post, it’s still an ideologically motivated preset. I’m sure all those sorts would be able to create their echo chamber without it being pre-configured for them. It’s hard to have ‘good faith’ when all the usual suspects plus its developer are posting in the comm alongside the people saying that we’re degenerate roaches. That’s why it looks like a Nazi bar from where I’m at.

He’s just very committed to making sure the Nazi bars have a good public image okay?

There’s a huge post in their snark comm where they’re spinning this as ‘just a default’ and he’s pasting it there too lmao

“wow switching to piefed cured my Havana syndrome”:

For hexbear + lemmygrad it’s by default

from what I can tell, when a server is spun up there’s the option to subscribe to an existing blocklist on a piefed server.

This means blocklists can propagate transitively:

If instance A blocks lemmy.ml, and instance B subscribes to A’s blocklist, and instance C subscribes to B’s blocklist, then whatever instance is blocked on A will also end up blocked on C (unless filtered out manually).

quoting the developer of piefed, hexbear and lemmygrad are blocked by default:

Hexbear and lemmygrad will always be blocked and PieFed is coded to block them by default on all new instances (admins can change it). No plans to defederate lemmy.ml as I’ve built mod tools that help me find the most odious users & banned them and now it’s tolerable.

This is why piefed is so popular with centrist extremists.

I feel like the op meme would hit harder with this on the well guy cause they’re fine to push the ‘lesser evil’ when it means getting their preferred evil in. when it comes to opposing communism then it’s suddenly purity testing is fine

I mean, the CFA franc is one part of the system. governments can willingly become a part of a system that’s exploitative when they see some advantage. Usually it’s the people on the receiving end of shock therapy that get the negative consequences while a minority cash out.

This year has sucked but I’ve been keeping my shit together at least.

in-person non-electoral organizing keeps me sane

a third of African countries have a monetary policy run out of EU right now; CFA Franc is used by like 200 million people.

I’m also Russian but living in US. ‘fighting Russian propaganda’ isn’t really a priority for me tbh. It’s just another side of the story to be evaluated with the rest of the propaganda coming from state and corporate media sources.

I prefer to evaluate sources where I know their biases ahead of time. Sources that pretend to be impartial and unbiased are perfectly capable of spreading propaganda too.

this is pretty spot on, bonus points for including anarchists

the best organizers I know do happen to be doms