this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I just saw it, you sent me this link:
https://hexbear.net/post/613387
which contains a screenshot of this comment:
https://lemm.ee/comment/3622601
where /u/randint complains that hexbear admin /u/TomboyShulk dismissed his complaints about three other comments, which he then links to.
The three comments are all from the same 22 day old thread, and his engagement with the thread starts here:
https://hexbear.net/comment/3829077
There are two pieces of context I think ought to be mentioned:
"post hog" and other "post your dick" variants are a canned /r/ChapoTrapHouse response against any user who seems like an unusually odious or bad faith wrecker or reactionary, like a rebuttal to 4chan's "tits or gtfo". It started when a neo-nazi went on CTH to spout race science but was mocked into posting his dick, which defused the guy completely; at the time, the subreddit was getting a lot of people like that, and "post hog" became one of the go-to responses because it was low-effort and it shut them down. It bewildered and frustrated people who were there say awful things or make users feel unsafe.
/u/randint has been on a crusade against hexbear for fucking weeks. He goes out of his way to stir shit and has explicitly admitted that his aim is to make the site look bad. Increasingly frustrated hexbears pointed out his bad faith engagement in the thread I linked. He goes about it in a bloodless, polite-sounding way, but he's not there with good intentions. Only at the very end of the thread, deep in the exchange, did anyone give him the canned response, and it made him leave.
Ok, the deep lore of "post your hog" makes sense, and I honestly don't think I can argue against sexually harassing a literal Neo-Nazi. Let the kid gloves come off.
But it is straight up sexual harassment. Yeah, it shuts people down quickly and easily, that's literally what sexual harassment was designed for. And it's not being reserved for Nazis, it's being used liberally and the community and moderators foster an atmosphere that encourages sexual harassment of outsiders.
And to be fair, I see there's outside actors acting in bad faith. But sexual harassment is either okay in a community, or it isn't. You can't blame a pro-sexual-harassment environment on a bad faith outside actor. And when sexual harassment has been normalized, how much space do you really have to complain about other people being bad faith actors?
The really terrible thing is that I don't think Hexbear is even capable of having a good faith discussion about sexual harassment, with itself. If anyone was to point out the issue, the mods and most prolific posters would not be able to take it seriously and nothing would change.
In unixporn someone brought to light that the traditional term "ricing" had racist origins, and there was a little pushback, but by and large the community accepted that the term will be removed and banned. The community learned, and changed.
I have 0% expectation that Hexbear community is capable of listening, or changing.
i think it's a fucking massive leap to characterize hexbear as a "pro-sexual harassment" environment. You can argue that they are overzealous in who they consider nazis sometimes, but multiple hexbears earlier in the thread did call /u/randint a nazi apologist for defending Adrien Zenz, so it's clear they considered him a fair target. Hexbear users see hog posting as punching upward at privileged bullies and reactionaries they are powerless against in real life. You can dispute that view, you might even consider them delusional or self-indulgent, but I think it's an enormous leap to conclude that they are generally in favor of sexual harassment of people.
I got dozens of people telling my to post my dick because I said that neopronouns are stupid.
I wouldn't consider myself a Nazi, I'm extremely anti-Nazi. I'm very involved in trans activism in real life. I'm in management - I changed schedule posting so that it includes pronouns. I ordered give out free pronoun pins (I wear one too). I correct people and guests when they misgender someone. I've been to marches and I've donated to events. I have a lil trans flag in my window. Real life trans safety and inclusion is important to me. (And why I'm off put when a Hexbear confuses all people with penises as automatically being "men") I'm not making these up to try to look a certain kind of way, this is all verifiably real and I can get you the pictures and receipts if you need them.
Maybe I'm not pronoun progressive enough yet and I'll change my mind later. I still think neopronouns are stupid, and only part of chronic online-ness. I'm willing to consider that I might still be in the wrong here.
But if you sexually harass someone and get 100 upvotes, you're punching down.
If the mods delete any posts and ban users who call out sexual harassment, you're punching down.
What I see is people who probably don't stand up to bullies in real life, they turn into bullies when they're the big fish in a little pond.
You called them unhinged for having neo pronouns. People have been attacking them for years, they expect a fight, and if you come in and fucking mock their pronouns and talk down to them they’re not gonna care enough to find out about your real world stances or activism, they’re just going to look at the comment right in front of them, and assume you’re some bigoted CNN lib who pays performative lip service to genderqueer rights but sees them as goofy caricatures and has no interest in understanding them. They get enough people like that already. If they took the time to investigate and understand and categorize everyone who threw shit at them it’d be a fucking full time job.
And for the record, I didn't come out swinging against neopronouns. I don't think there's anything wrong with neo-pronouns themselves.
What happened is that I saw a community who
And I saw all that and double sets of pronouns including neopronouns, and I was like omg, it's Nazis pretending to be leftists. They act like Nazis, who ran with the pronoun thing and took it to the highest level. (I know now they aren't Nazi's, but the behavior makes a really bad first impression)
The problem was never actually the neopronouns. It was the Nazi-like behavior that came attached.
And as for this comment,
This is frustrating, because, while there's a lot you don't know, there are at least two instances you definitely do know about: the Nayirah testimony, and the Iraq WMDs reports. The wars and sanctions following those lies killed millions of people and displaced and immiserated millions more. There's a term for this: manufacturing consent. Many other examples have never received the same degree of attention because America did not use them to justify major wars.
And yes, "the West." Imperialism still exists, books and papers are written about this by serious people. Even in the thread where you were banned, people had already started to bring up details. Imperialism is a little better hidden than it used to be, but it's still not that well hidden. Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" is a good source.
nazis who were very intent on telling you about queer rights in Cuba and colonialism in the global south.
Being anti-American-imperialism is great, what's suspect is the apparent Soviet ultra-nationalism, which somehow extends to Russia, so the same people who say they are against imperialism and in favor of gay rights end up supporting an imperialist, colonialist, and insanely homophobic empire.
And yes, lots of countries in the West do lots of very bad things. I think the vague, broad, all-encompassing term of "the West" is about creating an out-group boogieman man for the in-group to identify itself against. And that's how you get people supporting a country that represents almost everything against their apparent values. Russia gets a pass for using homophobic conspiracy theories to justify a military invasion, because it's "against the West".
Thank you, I'm grabbing an audiobook version to listen to, I am interested in learning more.
No I didn't, now that's a gross misrepresentation.
I said it was unhinged that I was being told that I was literally Hitler because I think neopronouns are silly.
If you think everyone who finds neopronouns impractical for real life is a Nazi, that sounds pretty unhinged, I still feel that way.
Pfff, yeah when in that same post Hexbears couldn't tell the difference between a man and a person with a penis.
Well I guess that's the way you justify sexual harassment.
The conversation has gone stale while I've been swamped with work, but I'm going to respond anyway.
Looking back at the modlog, what you actually said was that their pronouns "look like an alt-right satire of pronouns" and that anyone using those pronouns must be a "basement dweller." And people with those pronoun tags were right there reading your comments. Why the fuck would you do that? I actually got mad reading it. Whatever your motivations, you walked in and made it very clear you had no respect for people's pronoun tags and no interest in understanding them, right to their faces.
At one point you compared neopronoun tags to being trans-species, whatever the fuck that meant
You also seemed dismissive throughout the thread, on every topic that came up, which was frustrating to read because first you made all these assumptions about people and then you showed so little interest in what they were actually saying! The one exception was maybe when you asked for a source on Cuba — but did you even expect to get one? What is just rhetorical? Maybe you got banned before you could respond, I don't fucking know. Did you even click on the information you asked for? In 2022 Cubans themselves democratically drafted the country's new progressive family code in over 80,000 citizen councils around the island. Hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free since 2008. I think this is interesting information that you might want to know. People also brought up trends in state regulation of farming around the world, neocolonial cash crop economics, Iraqi food imports and exports, IMF policies toward food exporters in the global south, the British planned economy during WW2, Chinese agribusiness and farming co-ops, soil exhaustion, and grammatical gender, and you seemed to show zero interest in any of it. You responded to these comments with paper-thin truisms about liberal values and basically tuned everyone out, called people misinformation trolls, and somehow managed to conclude that all the people in that thread were fucking nazis pretending to be queer communists for three years with no audience on a defederated site.
And for the most part, the worst thing anyone called you was "liberal," except for one trans user who called you a fascist and told you to post hog after you said the trans-species thing — probably because it kinda sounded like one of those right wing "gay marriage today, bestiality tomorrow" talking points.
Reading that thread, yeah I understand why they were mad.
For the record, on hexbear, pronoun tags are not only a list of “things you can call me” but also a casual way for some users to communicate their identity and personality. Having two pronoun slots and an extended set of options not only allows for more flexibility in conversation (like them vs comrade) but also more granular self-expression, which is nice when you can’t fucking see or hear each other. In practice, the default thing people call each other is "they/them." Someone with "love/loves" as their pronoun tag isn't gonna get mad at you if you call them "them." It's the sort of thing you pick up on if you take the time to actually understand the site culture.
There's not much more frustrating in conversation than when someone has their mind made up about you incorrectly and superficially, and they're not interested in understanding who you actually are or what you believe or why you believe it. Maybe you were just bewildered by unfamiliar takes and you shut down a little. I don't fucking know.
I definitely forgot all what I said, and I regret being that much of a dick. I did read the sources on Cuba and by that point I think I was banned, because I was trying to thank the person who posted it for me.
I think that if I'm dishing it out to people, I should be prepared to take it from them too. It's a bit late to go back, but for anyone who confronts me about it, I will humble myself and apologize for my remarks about the pronouns. And for what it's worth, I apologize to you for my pronoun comments. People deserve to feel safe in their gender identity,
Not excusing what I said, but to explain, this is after several days of seeing a bunch of - completely new to me accounts - who happen to have double and neo pronoun sets, act a certain type of way. I might have never even really noticed the pronouns if it wasn't for their 4chan-esque behavior first. I very quickly began to mentally associate 4chan behavior to people who have double and neo pronoun sets.
And there were occasional good things - I learned that a common term for desktop theming had racist origins, and now I know better than to use that term. But even in that same thread there was another trying to race bait the very people who were trying to be better.
So there are hexbears trolling, race baiting, and defending Russia (which is a whole conversation) - regardless the end result is comments that would be identical to the alt-right. So I see alt-right clone comments coming from people with double sets of neo-pronouns, and I made a bad and wrong assumption.
The biggest mystery is still why hexbear seems collectively intent on making communists and progressives look so bad. Cuba offers many amazing examples of how progressive policies work well. Why choose to die on some alt-right hills, particularly when it comes to sexual harassment, fetishization of violence, race baiting, and Russia?