NailBunny

What age do I have to hit before I become so bitter and joyless?

Never too late for that first "blemish" on one's heterosexuality, I suppose.

I'm a big fan of Goth, mostly dark wave and post-punk. They fill out a the majority of my rotation most days, but I like breakcore/IDM adjacent stuff quite a bit too.

1.3% dyscalculic

I suppose I can understand that justification, yeah. I've always considered it a matter of quantity, i.e. the more people you have in support the better, but In terms of fostering a community/movement I can see the merit in filtering out people who won't make the effort to understand or learn further since they're just as likely to be swayed by something else at a later point. Hope you don't think I'm trying to "change" this community, I just have the outsider experience fresh in my head still and can understand some of the more flippant reactions we have gotten.

It's not just that you can't convert them so you shouldn't try, it's that by antagonizing them you push them even further away from mutual understanding. We set up the pretense that all their future interactions with leftists will be no better than the time their shit opinion got PPB'd. It's not rational, but it's how this stuff often goes. I get the frustration of being met with absolute nonsense when you're trying to have a proper discussion with someone, but I think we also have to consider the ramifications of creating an absolute shitstorm whenever someone posts uninformed bullshit.

FWIW I am pretty new here so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but when I first encountered a bunch of bears in a thread my first thought was "what the fuck is wrong with these people." I had to sift through many pictures of shit-smeared pig testicles to find out what Hexbear was really about, and even further to find out that you're all a bunch of really great people. Not everyone will take the time necessary to separate the rhetoric from the culture like I did out of curiosity. Most will see the worst and form hasty, unfair conclusions about the community and it will only poison their interactions going forward. It sux and I don't think Hexbear should water down its culture for the sake of any other community, but I think we all could do with being a little more mindful of how aggro we can be when we dunk and what it looks like to people who just want to laugh at shit memes on their phone.

Sure one might change their behaviors when traveling accordingly, but I think people would be generally understanding if an American tried to tip in the UK, and I would hope a waitress in America would understand why someone from the UK might not tip. With federation that cultural overlap is even more understandable because it's not like I'm getting on a plane and traveling across the ocean, I'm just clicking a link that was already on my All on Hexbear. We're also a lot larger/more active of an instance with almost quadruple the active monthly users of lemm.ee, and Hexbear has been around for about 3 years. A lot of the "brigading" people see is just the result of there being many active bears + this stuff showing up on our feeds + it being directly about us. When you consider all of these things, does it make a bit more sense why we might show up like a swarm of locusts throwing around our own inside jokes?

I'm pleasantly surprised by your response, honestly. I understand the temptation to make such arguments, and I'd be lying if I told you that astroturfing and shit like that didn't happen, but hard leftists like us are small in number in American spaces and that level of bullshittery generally requires some alignment with corporate interests to find the resources. We're just a bunch of regular people from many different corners who are really passionate about our opinions for a variety of reasons. Hope I wasn't too aggro with my comment, and hope the rest of your day is a nice one

Whenever leftists post outside of their home instance it inevitably breaks down into a rehashed version of "This is America, why can't you speak American?"

You know, I've read exactly one comment from you, ReakDuck, and It would be a bit silly if I assumed from this single comment that your entire life to this point has been paranoid whingeing about Russian bots.

"Russia and China love to manipulate and do everything to convince people that what they are doing is great"

If it's a matter of propaganda, I hope you understand that America is perfectly capable of churning out plenty of absolute pig shit on its own. All large nations with their own media ecosystems employ propaganda as a means of placation, diversion, and general control. Do you worry about the people who agree with you being bots, too? Aren't your online peers just as likely to be bots? Do you think your particular party or associates don't employ the same trickery as everyone else? How have they stayed competitive?

Furthermore, what proof would you require to know I'm not a bot? No amount of personal information is beyond manufacturing. I could even send you a social security number and valid identification and you could say I stole it. Do you see where I'm going with this? That rationale of yours is a catch-all justification of complete dismissal. One can protect themselves from any dissenting opinions if they can convince themselves that the other person writing to them is a bot. There's nothing they can say or do to prove such an assertion wrong short of showing up at your house and shitting on your lawn.

I believe you should challenge the rhetoric being presented to you instead of protecting your own through frivolous dismissals, but I don't know why I've wasted all my time writing this response to a lib bot.