never leave the news mega folks, it's not worth it

I'm not gonna lie, the moderation in the news mega is so tight that I think I've only been the person to ban that guy once out of all the times he's been around. He's almost always gone before I get to him and even see what he said, though I get the gist of it from the replies dunking on him

There are multiple summaries out there, such as this one here

The short of it is that the mod team, as part of an initiative to shift site culture, shuttered the dunk tank and dredge tank and opened up c/gossip and c/counterpropaganda to generally, but not entirely, replace the two comms. This was, depending on your position and level of knowledge, either a brave attempt to encourage better values in a time of massive upheaval where organizing will become more important, or the mods being bitter wet blankets who think they know better and are dictating to and patronizing independent adults.

This was pretty unpopular, especially because there was no democratic vote; the comms were just locked out of nowhere. A series of massive communication errors from both the moderators and admins alike culminated in responses that failed to address the concerns of the users and made remarks that were offensive to the userbase (saying that the users gave off "white cishet vibes" when the userbase is not largely cishet) especially without the context of knowing who said those remarks (thereby making people think that some clique of bioessentalist transphobic moderators existed, when none in fact did).

TC69 returned and was getting re-acquainted in the middle of this chaos, instantly promoted to admin, for better or worse. This gave TC69 the power to just start waving the banhammer left and right like Sauron taking out soldiers without actually considering whether this was helpful, or perhaps even completely counterproductive, and there was a mixture of irony-poisoning and patronizing statements basically stating that those who objected were just widdle babies who needed to take a week off.

Eventually, other admins stepped in and stopped this, apologizing and unbanning most people. TC69 decided to resign and leave the site again, after doing far more harm than good. I also resigned from the mod team for my (small but still non-zero) impact during all this, though will stay on the site and keep doing things pretty much how I've been doing them, so no significant changes are expected in the news mega.

I think Cuban leadership and to an extent the people of Cuba know what capitulation to the US means: a future more bleak than anything they are going through now.

I agree, I think this is Cuba's real strength in that regard: whatever domestic situation they've created, it withstood what the USSR could not. It wasn't just the Soviet citizenry becoming disillusioned (or perhaps, a better word is "illusioned") that led to the fall but it was a big factor, and Cuba has managed to mitigate that despite living mere miles from the US.

Though it's still possible that the US tries something in their increasing desperation and attacks Cuba, and even with the US's profound lack of military ability to perform competent invasions they could still just bomb the shit out of the island for a year until there are no structures left standing.

Trump may cut off all aid to Ecuador and Peru, which would be very funny if he just threw away everything Biden did. And he might even tell Milei to fuck off, which would mean the end of Libertad Carajo man

I can honestly see it now:

"folks, we're getting a very bad deal out of Peru and Ecuador. they want us to send our soldiers in to help them. lots of trouble there, many incidents, most of them very bad. I keep hearing it, they're saying it's bad. we need our soldiers elsewhere, like helping Israel and fighting China."

meanwhile Laura Richardson is sitting behind him, visibly distraught, her life's work crumbling before her eyes

thank you very much for your take!

As stated in my post in selfcrit, I'm staying on the site to host the news megathreads and will keep posting as normal.

I already completely made up my mind. My post there wasn't to try and get people to beg for me to return, it was just to be transparent about why I felt like I was a subpar moderator in light of recent events and therefore why I left. I'm the only mod on self_improvement so I can't just leave (literally, the site UI doesn't allow zero moderators AFAIK) so once we've sorted that out, I will no longer be a part of the mod team and I've already left the mod chat.

I lurked on the subreddit, I lurked on the discord lifeboat (and left it as soon as the site went up) and then started posting occasionally. went through a few accounts with a dozen or so comments on each and then stuck with this one just in time for the Ukraine War to start

my upbringing in relative poverty primed me to accept genuinely left-wing ideas but remained in the liberal bubble until Corbyn and the movement that brought him to power came around and exposed me to the concept that ideas left of Obama existed. I was still kind of in that I'm-a-very-smart-and-respectable-and-civil-politics-understander zone but all it would take is a push, and that push came from the subreddit. I didn't really have any background or knowledge of anarchism nor possessed any particular drive to distrust authority as a general concept so I slid pretty easily into Marxism-Leninism (though I do definitely like and respect anarchists and don't really have any reason or background to be sectarian against them, so this website's non-sectarianism fit me quite well).

I think the biggest part that attracted me was that people actually gave a shit about politics, there was actual passionate energy there, after years of lukewarm boring shit about how we just need to gradually introduce ranked-choice voting and shift taxes around and we'd create the perfect society. The only people I'd heard yelling about politics before was people yelling in support of reactionary policies, or sort of just yelling into the void about how they wished things could be better but offering no solution, but hearing people yell in support of policies that would help people was this big moment where my latent frustrations felt validated. Hearing somebody say something like "LET'S JUST GIVE HOMELESS PEOPLE HOUSES!" instead of liberals going "Hm, well, first we need to introduce a means-tested system of soup kitchens that utilize tax breaks to attract social workers..." was just one of those moments where you realize that problems can actually have (relatively) simple solutions and not everything has to be this stupid fucking 53-stage system which inevitably fails at stage 11 when a new president takes over and the parliamentarian says that there isn't enough money or whatever.

also, I hate to say that the chapo podcast was a big part of my left-wing turn as much as the subreddit was, but it kinda was, so I'll always have a spot in my heart for Felix and Matt even though I've outgrown them politically and don't listen to it anymore. It did kinda Americanize me but I made up for it by becoming the Ultimate Geopolitics Understander Who Knows Something About Most Countries later on once the Ukraine War started.

yeah, it's intentional total gridlock. any candidate for meaningful change has to battle through a dozen layers of increasingly impossible barriers, while acceptable candidates like Harris are just plucked out of semi-obscurity and made the presidential candidate with popularity being no problem. the current third parties are probably dead-ends in terms of using them as a vessel for change, but I reckon there will eventually be a point where organizations and parties arise organically out of the working class and those will have actual staying power. That the left and its ideologies are mostly kept in higher education and academia (which are places where liberalism can be instilled and intellectuals either isolated or co-opted) is not an accident, as it seeks to prevent the working class gaining class consciousness. But there are vast populations of exploited people who have the potential to form a revolutionary base; not only those who still work in factories where the means of production are accessible to seize, but also more generally among groups like native Americans, black people, those of Central/South American descent, and so on.

that being said, I think many of us here hypothesize that a working class uprising is unlikely until imperial relationships break down, if by nothing else observing the historical fact that revolutions rarely occur inside the imperial core. the timeline for this is very hard to predict - most of us prior to 2022 and definitely prior to 2020 would have said many decades, but now we're looking at glaring failures at American military projection with its navy vulnerable to even very poor nations, and the pace will likely accelerate, so it's good to be prepared as SkimmeringKoi says.

"There are 80 million Germans in our glorious Fatherland. There are only 16 million Jews. It's actually pretty selfish to choose the Jews over ourselves."

I don't personally know the distribution of Hezbollah's tunnels but I imagine we'd see a Gaza-esque situation where it doesn't matter militarily what happens to the buildings above ground, and if anything destroyed buildings are a more chaotic and difficult environment for anti-guerrilla urban warfare

and it's obvious that Israel has learned and internalized nothing from their warfare in Gaza or they'd have, y'know, results

Area (and especially volume) are one of those numbers where it's really easy to see a big number and go "oh shit" but then you look for comparisons and realize that we're talking about nothing.

For a comparison every true newshead will understand: Israel has so far taken an area half the size of Mariupol on a front that is about 80 kilometers (50 miles) long, against a force that isn't even designed to hold territory in a conventional sense (trenches and dragon's teeth and such).

As Hezbollah have stated (there's a comment elsewhere in the thread about this), in previous wars Israel was basically unstoppable in terms of territorial advancement, taking towns and villages miles and miles into Lebanon within hours and days, but now Hezbollah is strong enough to stop them taking border villages after a month. So when I was talking a couple months ago how we shouldn't panic if Israel makes rapid gains because it's just part of how guerrilla warfare is, and that Hezbollah is orders of magnitude stronger now than they were back then, I was still underestimating Hezbollah's strength.

denial of LTV is where the whole "paying somebody to dig a ditch and then fill it back in again is a refutation of Marx because there's no value created there and yet labor was done" thing comes from, which is really a sign that these people haven't read a single word of Marx

As another moderator, I'd just like to piggyback this comment and talk about this.

First, what is (hopefully) the least objectionable part: the creation of c/counterpropaganda. It does have some degree of overlap with c/effort and c/agitprop, but I envision it as a place for stockpiling useful counterarguments and framing devices for use against liberals, whether that be online or when talking to friends and family, where c/agitprop is about creating spreadable images and memes. I might end up posting things from citationsneeded in there. That being said, I wasn't the one who came up with the idea of the comm, and how it'll actually evolve remains to be seen.

While I also did not come up with it, the naming of c/gossip was made intentionally frivolous because what X streamer is saying today is fairly unimportant. In fact, there was an idea that naming it c/gossip would help ferret out people who were like "I'm not doing gossip, that's feminine! I'm a very serious politics understander who is talking about the very important issue of what neo-Nazi shit [streamer] has said today!" I would be fine with a name change (and tried to come up with some in the mod chat but couldn't really find something in the same vein) but the fundamental idea of what it should be is fine in my eyes - if you like discussing what a shitty public figure is doing then you can do that there, and those that don't want to do so can block the comm.

The reason behind locking the dunk/dredge tanks is, as stated above, due to concerns about the impact of things like toxicity and irony poisoning leading to chauvinism and bigotry, even if it's accidental. Dunking is not, in my personal view, inherently bad. It is one tool in the toolkit. The ability to dismiss an idea without effort, using all the lovely techniques in the Logical Fallacy diagram, is awesome for when libs and chuds come along with ideas that have been debunked and dismissed for tens if not hundreds of years. It's also a great way to build a community, as chapotraphouse's (albeit terminated) existence demonstrated. Many of us came to chapotraphouse or to Hexbear directly either through being dunked on, or by seeing somebody else get dunked on, and seeing that there are indeed people who have some real passion about politics who aren't seal-clapping chuds. I personally object to an attempt to just stamp out dunking, at least as it's defined as "refusing to take a person or idea seriously and instead insulting them" (what would be the alternative - a hundred lemmy bots that each respond with a 10-paragraph argument that you could summon for every eventuality?)

However, we've seen complaints from people about how the vestiges of reddit that remain here are turning off people, particularly non-white and non-cis-male people. There's just a zeitgeist of masculinity and reddit background radiation that people can detect and they then choose to go elsewhere, and we should do everything within reason to try and make the site more appealing to those people. Mandatory pronouns was a great initial step in that direction, but we must continue down the path. We have black and/or LGBTQIA+ moderators who are trying hard to fix these issues. I am neither of those, so I've largely gone with their expertise on the matter.

Is Hexbear a serious political platform? Is it a bar where you hang out after work with your friends and shoot the shit? It is both and neither. But it can definitely be better.

we shall replace the dollar with goats

he didn't literally say it but when a democrat starts talking about how we need to fellate institutions merely for being institutions, instead of talking about how food prices need to go back to how they were before, then that's essentially campaigning on "nothing will fundamentally change", whether it's said outright or behind closed doors. that was the point I was trying to make, not that I thought Biden was literally going behind a podium and saying "well, we've got nothing to really improve here from Trump, we're gonna do the same stuff he did" (even if that was indeed his actual policies), of course he was going to lie about policies

Great post. The average American is so replete in contradictory positions that it's hard to nail down exactly how many more votes Harris would have gotten if she had done XYZ but seeing people (including Hasan, whose electoral coverage I watched over the night to keep me awake if anything else) point out that the issues that the media finds important are NOT the same as the ones that people find important was an eye-opener for me. Like with his example that Harris' initial policy of punishing grocery store price-gouging was very popular and only became MORE popular despite the Republicans and right-leaning Democrats pumping out propaganda about how the mildest price caps so poor people can afford to eat would be 1984 communist Venezuela Soviet totalitarianism China dictatorship hyperinflation.

I've expressed over the years my "observation" (which probably unknowingly draws from some French philosophers that I haven't gotten around to reading) that Western and especially American politics is this cultural miasma that is disconnected from the rest of the world and material reality, with Atlas carrying this abstracted-away propaganda reality on his shoulders, which explains why despite bettering of material conditions ought to poll well (and often does), a massive minority or perhaps even majority of Americans just cannot be persuaded to give a shit. It's like the political version of how the stock market literally does not reflect anything anymore, every single oil refinery on the planet could implode in one hour and the oil markets would budge by like, 5%, and then correct themselves and go back to normal. Japan had a massive single-day crash semi-recently and then it just got back up if as nothing happened because it wasn't connected to anything, it was just a psychological thing or some rich guys trying to make money or whatever happened there.

But now I'm beginning to think that actually, I'm the idiot and this political disconnection never truly existed and I was being propagandized and brainwashed by the media to think that Americans just don't give a shit, when clearly, millions really do! Biden being this absolute dogshit candidate even back in 2020 getting the most votes ever while campaigning on "nothing will fundamentally change" broke my brain and I believed the media when they said that those two facts were connected, when it doesn't actually seem to have been because Harris was even more "nothing will fundamentally change" and now the Republicans won the fucking popular vote! So I'm glad you've more eloquently expressed this nascent thought. I really ought to have connected the dots better because I go on and on about how Day's hypothesis of brainwashing not being real but for some reason it was a huge blind spot for me. The spectacle of the voteball consumed my critical thinking; the owl of minerva flies at dusk.

they decided they were going to go and vandalise peoples homes, steal and burn pro-Palestinian flags, shout racist slogans, and attack mostly Morooccan taxi drivers.

In a silver lining though, most of them got their shit kicked in by the locals

if I had a nickel for every time that Zionists have gone into a place where they are very unwelcome, been racist and violent, and then got fucking owned, I'd have... quite a lot of nickels actually, in the last year alone

yeah, the destruction is very mutually assured, it's basically a) whether the US thinks that taking down Iran for a decade or two while it rebuilds (certainly with the help of China and friends) is worth the destruction of the last century of empire-building in the Middle East, and perhaps even more importantly b) whether it's even up for the US and Israel to decide anymore, if Iran feels sufficiently emboldened to strike first or if Israel thinks that it's 100% going down if they don't fight Iran and just die to a thousand cuts and there's a 97% chance that they go down if they do fight Iran, so might as well take the second option