This missed the historical context for why downvotes were disabled on Hexbear in the first place. Moderators were trying to implement trans-friendly policies and features like pronouns, and reactionary weirdos kept downvoting the shit out of people who agreed with and wanted those features. Mods tried to ban based on upvotes and downvotes, but it didn’t work.

I think the assumption that any site’s general culture will be correct on an issue is a faulty one. Yeah, it’s going to be generally correct about international politics or Marxism or something everyone researched on the site probably (when it’s on Hexbear or Lemmygrad at least), but anyone who’s part of a smaller or more fucked over minority has to basically fight an uphill battle to even be listened to even with downvotes off. With downvotes on, someone asking for accommodations or sympathy in a radical or surprising way that other users haven’t seen before will just be shut down entirely. I think a good example of this is how I’ve seen people constantly make fun of others for stuff like not showering and, when people talk about how those with depression often do their best but can’t manage it and so making fun of someone for that can be hurtful, they were just ridiculed. If downvotes were enabled most complaints about ableism or more obscure forms of anti-queer oppression would be pushed to the fringes and ignored.

The main issue with downvotes are that they allow those with hegemonic beliefs to enforce them without considering why they hold those beliefs in the first place.

So ultimately, it’s a trade off between if you want to be open to more radical theory that people would have a knee-jerk reaction to and downvote, or be more closed to that theory but allow site members to enforce the popular opinion more strongly

The landlord fucking charged me a cleaning fee for the sheet left on the bedbug infested mattress

Um, isn’t this like an undebatably violent action? Who approved this with the full knowledge that it could literally lead to nuclear war???

Russia? But Ukraine is way more of a puppet state than Russia is. Russia was created as a U.S.-backed coup, which makes me suspicious of it, but it isn’t an active puppet like Ukraine is. Russia has somewhat broken free of those strings. It doesn’t really change it’s roots as the country that existed because of Y*ltsin and the cold blooded murder of the USSR though. Just means it’s opposing the right country for once, now.

I mean maybe? I guess what im saying is pretty irrelevant. Nobody trusts each other in global politics anyways. I wouldn’t expect it to be that controversial, though. I mean we’re talking about the country that was instated as a coup by the US.

Like, I wholeheartedly support their opposition of NATO and the US, none of this changes that

Yes but Russia is still sussus amongus Just because there is no choice but to accept the sussus imposter as part of the group doesn’t mean they’re not a sussus amongus

this specific image is good and upsets that actually

At risk of coming across as a lib, I am super skeptical of Russia, but more in an Imposter Amongus sense than a “Russia bad!” sense.

Like their desire to attack NATO is based asf, but I don’t trust a capitalist country to be a good member of an international socialist coalition for long

So this is good, but North Korea should probably watch their back in electrical

What?

Just because something is “marxist” doesn’t make it objectively correct. I don’t limit myself to things Marxists did because that’s a silly bastardization of Marxism.

I can take inspiration, but that’s a different thing entirely.

I care much more about the well being of humans than insects.

There is no reason to care about a human being that provides you no benefit more than an animal, other than pure prejudice. Human beings do not have “greater moral value” or some insane shit like that. The only possible justification we could use to prioritize human beings is some variant of “might makes right” bullshit which is just fascist schlock and leaves no room for the human beings that aren’t “mighty”. Or some weird pseudo scientific argument that animals feel less pain than us or something, but everyone agrees that’s highly suspect anyways.

Either all conscious life is sacred, none of it is, or the life that you care about or directly benefits you is sacred. So, it’s valid to care about humans more, but don’t pretend it’s an objectively correct belief, because there is no such thing in that field. I could claim that crickets are way more important than human beings and have about as much grounding as you as long as I legitimately believed that.

Does it make more sense to prioritize human beings because we’re all human and want to be prioritized? Yeah, that makes sense. But hurting animals is still sus under that logic.

Removed by mod

Let’s not pretend the stigma against veganism doesn’t exist.

It definitely does, and it makes it much easier to for them to push this shit.

Wait, the “other cultures eat bugs” thing is a racist stereotype?

how much of it is just chuds throwing a fit over hunter biden having furry porn on his computer or something?

it’s a good argument against imperialism when you’re trying to convince the people who live in the Amerikkka

the fact this is downvoted while a meme that explicitly just dunks on anarchists without any real critique to it is just sad

seems like a weird thing to specify. are people who are “too lazy” to revolt not considered human then or something? I understand the necessity of the working class to liberate itself without some sort of outside help, but there are lots of situations where it isn’t immediately possible

Doesn’t the title mean that slaves who can’t revolt should be left under oppression or am I massively misreading it? I assume the latter but I’m struggling to find an alternative interpretation

The commodification of human relationships is one of the worst blights that exists in this world, and whoever aims to prolongue it is an enemy of socialism. As long as one sees human interactions as something to bbe bought and sold, they will be unable to understand what the liberation of the working people entails.

Shouldn’t this be argued for everything in general, not just human relations? Isn’t the damage capital does inherent to how it commodified everything, not just human relationships?

I think I agree with you based on that (and already agreed that it would be impossible to do prostitution and therefore flawed to even try under communism), but I don’t think your criticism is limited to just sex or human relationships, it implies that we should seriously consider the risks of having any kind of trade in our theoretical utopian communist society and I think that tracks.

From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. You are comparing (in a frankly offensive manner) those who cannot work to those who are not willing to work.

Well, fair criticism, but in my experience the kind of people who are most often accused of not wanting to work tend to just be straight-up disabled people that can’t. My comparison was flawed, but I think my first reaction of disgust at the concept was warranted. Similar to how someone pointed out that removing the context from prostitution is silly, expecting me or anyone else to just ignore how similar concepts have been used to shit on disabled people is also silly. It’s not offensive to mention disabled people here, because what I’m talking about is their literal lived experience, being told they have to be productive to be valuable and then being blamed and gaslit when they tell others that they can’t. You can say that you’ll just listen to them when they protest but I honestly don’t believe you. Someone will ask “what stops a landlord from trying to reclaim their lifestyle by claiming they’re disabled?”, and then people will start casting doubt on disabled people’s experiences again, something that can only be avoided with a radical willingness to just let people not work.

The only consistent way we have right now to find out if someone mentally can’t do something, or is just choosing not to, is by pushing them to a breaking point, and I’ve seen too many people talk about how abusive that can be to even remotely want to fight for a society that keeps it around.

We should eliminate the impetus to work altogether. It’s toxic and shitty. If we have to force and coerce each other to do labor to survive as a species, I say we let ourselves die off. The void is better than torturing each other for the rest of time for no reason.

But that doesn’t have to be our future. Sure, we would need to remove reactionary elements and drastically reconstruct society, and that’s what a dictatorship of the proletariat is for. But, in my dream world (I understand this is absurd Utopianism, but bear with me), everyone would contribute to collective goals of their own free volition, because that’s what they naturally are inclined to do. There would be no need to coerce, or threaten, or even abandon anyone. Those who could work naturally would be inclined to work because there would be no systems or unfulfilled needs or contradictory goals stopping them (though personal goals would still exist, just encouraged to not be antisocial). And then, with no reactionary elements or notions of selfish grandeur or enlightenment through wealth in the heads of anyone, we would know that those who don’t want to work would actually just be the people who can’t, either because their brain won’t let them or because they’re phrasing having an unmet need badly.

In the meantime, I get the need for what is probably (in my view) a toxic level of discipline with a socialist state. We aren’t going to get rid of reactionaries by being nice to them. And I think the kind of people you refer to when you say that they don’t want to work, or social parasitism, only really exist as reaction. It is not a normal human inclination to just refuse to do anything for no reason. There has to be a system or condition to convince someone to do nothing helpful for anyone else, people get bored and will stumble their way into some level production otherwise. If we get rid of ideologically reactionary elements, the parasitic elements will wither. Trying to get rid of parasitic elements first is blindly shooting in the dark and we could end up with us shooting ourselves in the foot.

Labor shouldn’t be a painful process that human beings need to draw straws to fulfill. It is a natural aspect of our psychology. We can only imagine the idea of people willfully refusing to work out of “laziness” in a society where everyone works jobs that do no good and take disproportionate amounts of effort and time.