Comment on Who knew 1989 was an uneventful year in China

• PopOfAfrica@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Hexbear is more or less a 4Chan equivalent, sharing the same memes and single image posting behavior. They exist to make left leaning people look bad.

  Their supposed communism is equivalent to start an argument online with “as a black man”

  Just a bunch of right wing trolls.

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  • archomrade@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is the take that bothers me the most, as if the most aggressive and outspoken faction of any group exist only to drag the more respectable members down by association.

    I would be one thing to say, “I don’t understand that group”, but it’s quite remarkable to say, “I understand that group so little that they must be the opposition in disguise”

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    • FaeDrifter@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is the take that bothers me the most, as if the most aggressive and outspoken faction of any group exist only to drag the more respectable members down by association.

      Eh, only a small minority of hexbears are fascists, but almost all hexbears tolerate fascists. All the fascists have to do is walk in and say “NATO is bad, Ukraine is bad, libs are bad, vote for Trump because he is a big lovable goofball” and the other hexbears are like aight let’s own the shitlibs.

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    • JokeDeity@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s blatant though? They use right wing talking points for everything and it’s all dog whistles?

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      • archomrade@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        “Geopolitics exists as a binary, and on some issues they agree with the opposite binary from me”.

        Worse actually, “they might agree with me on one issue but they disagree on another, so they must be pretending to agree with me to begin with”

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    • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Again, they are “left wingers” supporting far right regimes. Its bit that big a consipracy

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      • archomrade@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Just a point of clarification: you think the USSR was a far-right regime?

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• AmberPrince@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yeah, people say right-wing when what they mean is authoritarian. There’s a guy named Bob Altemeyer that has been studying authoritarianism for decades and he makes a distinction between left wing and right wing authoritarianism.

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  • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’d make sense, but there’s a good deal of stuff typically considered left wing (like antimisinformation and gun control) that is authoritarian too. Nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as it’s handled fairly, of course.

    The troll in me kinda wants to see how people would react if I started calling them righties for wanting to stop hate speech, but I think I know better.

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    • Cabrio@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Society required a socially agreed upon level of authoritarianism to enforce the socially agreed upon rukeset. No system of organisation or control is absent from authority, but trying to conflate functional social authority with forced authoritarianism has been something I’m seeing a lot more from fascist thinkers.

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      • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Huh… I see you set a bit of a rhetorical trap there, where disagreeing or countering would make me seem like one of these fascist thinkers. Nice. Might not have been intentional though.

        Anyways, I see them as different steps along the same spectrum. Authority is a component of authoritarianism, but the presence of authority is not necessarily indicative of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is authority taken too far.

        On that topic, non-authoritarian authority is not always a good thing, nor does good authority necessarily stem from the will of the people. Sometimes the masses really don’t know what’s best. That said, democracy is probably still the best paradigm humans can manage on a long term.

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      • BigNote@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yes, you are basically describing Hobbes’ “Leviathan.”

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• s_s@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There’s not many all-in on authoritarianism that aren’t extreme left or right economically.

  The political compass is better than a one-dimensional spectrum, but it’s literally twice as complicated.

  You can pretty safely plot a U shaped line running through the political compass and find almost everybody. That’s why one-axis works well for describing the political climate of the USA, it’s mostly in the right half of the political compass sitting on this line.

  So tankies are very Communist (left) and necessarily very authoritarian to achieve their goals.

  They represent the other half of the political compass that Americans usually do not see. So people get confused.

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  • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, political compass is more precise, but I like splitting social and economics too, which makes a cube. Then I said tesseract as a joke.

    But “us vs them” doesn’t work as well when “them” has so much nuance.

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• PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “In popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.”

  From Wikipedia

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