My favorite part of refederation is we can now bait libs again
America sucks. Israel sucks. Capitalism is collapsing. Kill all slave owners. Fuck the police. Fuck centrists. Fuck landlords. McDonalds tastes like piss. I think rich people should be in gulags. Crackers can't cook. The Dems let Trump win. You probably can't even read this because your education system is gutted.
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The frequency of “HEXBEARS BAD, plz defederate” posts I’ve seen from some of the libbier instances has been higher the last week or two.
Amusingly most of them, once you review their post history to see what the unpleasant interaction they had was, seem to just be weird blue maga trolls. I still don’t get the concept of centrist trolls, like it just doesn’t compute.
Silver lining, all the defed posts reminded me that I don’t have to suffer having .world in my feed thanks to instance blocking.
I still find it funny that the majority of anticommunist posts I've seen are from people on instances who aren't federated with hexbear but they're just upset hexbear has fixed it's federation issues which is very funny to me.
There're a few wannabe power mods railing against hexbear et al who really want to grow the fediverse to be the next big thing so they can feel important. Specifically their instances. I feel like those guys don't hate commies, they hate the fact they don't have any power on those servers. Without us around, they wouldfind a reason to hate every instance that they didn't directly control
Yes, in most of the ones I’ve seen, they’re just pissed Hexbear exists it seems. Most of them also have no interest in discussion, they seem to only want internet community for mirroring their convictions.
Some are world people that for some reason think we used to be federated with them and trolled them until defederation, really funny.
Preemptive last resort lol
Unfortunately, Lemmygrad was nice enough to withhold the power of this incredible effortpost from the libs over there, and they still couldn't handle it
I still don’t get the concept of centrist trolls, like it just doesn’t compute.
Centrists make sense when you realize they're just right-wingers in denial, purposefully or not.
You never hear shit from them that's remotely left-wing, it's always right-wing radio shock jockey bullshit disguised as "I'm a centrist, but"
Yeah that’s probably true. Like a core of right wing, covered in a candy coated performative virtue signaling shell. But definitely ok with a little genocide, as long as it’s their guy, and he’s “distraught” about it.
I'm a centrist. I think both anarchists and communists have a point.
I'm a centrist but you Republicans keep pushing me further left with your extremist beliefs
I bet it's every accusation a confession. Like they assume we have an ahistorical stance that isn't tempered with theory because they don't. They probably graft things that feel good, things they heard on TV, and anecdotes over uncomfortable situations. If we're saying "the world would be more or peaceful with WITHOUT I MEANT WITHOUT Israel and the US" they probably think saying something like "tariffs are what happen when you don't vote for Kamala" has equal sting and edginess. The fact that you come back and disagree with them defies their sense of the terminal nature of mud slinging. There's no Liberal Manifesto. What are they going to read? Kierkegard? You going to debate a communist with some shit written by Kissinger or something? You going to misunderstand Martlin Luther King Jr? No! You said something mean and the lefties were ready to talk about it and that's bewildering.
Yeah ok your point about “there’s no liberal manifesto” neatly describes what I think I was trying to articulate. Which is, I understand more extreme behaviors from left and right—they’re farther from the cultural setpoint, and the farther you are from where you think you should be, the sorta stronger your rhetoric and convictions need to be in order to have a hope of moving things closer to a world you want. But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.
Also I wonder in some cases, if it actually requires more mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance to maintain a pure liberal viewpoint, than to reside in the right or left. At least when you’re on either side of the spectrum, you have clear thoughts about how you disagree with the present and the direction things need to move, but if you are a status quo enjoyer, you have to somehow discount and explain away internally any thing that is ugly or not working, which is how we saw tons of these liberals urging us to tolerate an actual genocide in favor of preventing a hypothetically worse future genocide under Trump. And certainly, Trump will most likely be as bad or worse for Palestinians, but it was just shocking to see people claiming to hold progressive tendencies accepting what happened to Palestinians over the last year + of the Biden regime.
Clearly there were no actual red lines in terms of what actions were acceptable to undertake, instead it was: no matter how horrible our actions are, they are at least going to be slightly better than the opposition.
David Adler, from the University of Oxford's Department of Politics & International Relations, published a study in 2018, that demonstrated that in surveys of their views "centrists" were meaningfully, contrary to conventional rhetoric, more anti-democratic, least supportive of democratic institutions, and most supportive of what he classifies as "authoritarianism".
(That catch-all term again, I know)
It's not very long (it's mostly survey results and graphs) and you can read it here.
I do think that you could argue that this is a manifestation of their ideology being predicated not on a fixed ideology or particular material reality, but on an almost gnostic belief in their own position as being simply 'the right one' and therefore all others being inherently worthless or even malevolent. It's essentially the divine right of kings but for self-defined superior wonks.
The benefit of having an ideology that's so rootless and immaterial is that you can shift to whatever position is neccessarily to maintain the status you create for yourself. The downside is that its immateriality means that it's a mirage, an illusion of a position, and so any alternative beyond its current makeup cannot be valid, but also the illusion cannot exist without defining itself against them.
All outside perspectives become an existential threat and can only be proclaimed to be untrue and from bad actors. Your material experience of the economy is wrong, everything's great! Views beyond my centerist consensus can't be real people, it must be disinfo spread by bots! Jewishness is definied by my narrow defininition the 'correct' amount of support for Israel in this moment! Yes, we wrote articles for 20 years about the worrying influence of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, but they've all just stopped being Nazis and are democratic patriots! History is sacrosanct until it differs with the personally beneficial version I was taught! We believe in science until listening to scientists on the climate or Covid would negatively influence my lifestyle or stock portfolio! And so on.
Always a pleasure to see concepts well-explained. Thanks for this, much more precise than whatever stumbling articulation I was trying to get to haha.
I think mine is a little bit stumbling and inarticulate myself actually. I've had too much coffee today and not enough sleep last night.
Yeah i always regret interacting with Lemmy only via my phone, I feel like it limits how well I’m going to be able to express/ articulate, but in any case I appreciated how you framed it—was useful to improve / expand my thinking on it.
No problem. Happy it helped!
I do think that you could argue that this is a manifestation of their ideology being predicated not on a fixed ideology or particular material reality, but on an almost gnostic belief in their own position as being simply ‘the right one’ and therefore all others being inherently worthless or even malevolent. It’s essentially the divine right of kings but for self-defined superior wonks.
Here's a relevant George Carlin joke/quote about this exact psychological concept that has always stuck with me:
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Ha, spot on. A good analogy for the centrist mindset.
I'm glad you liked it. Unfortunately, I feel that it's broader than that and speaks to general human nature. I think the issue becomes when some people weaponize this conviction that they are at just the right level of whatever scale they're measuring against.
But for the liberal it’s basically just I mostly support the status quo (with small incremental changes to social issues at home!), and because of that, anything that’s not roughly the status quo represents a threat immediately.
The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
Yeah I think this why I’m always sorta weirded out by rabid behavior from centrists. There’s a tacit subconscious understanding somewhere that tells me they don’t have significant beliefs, so how could they be so invested? But this and some of the other replies make a good case for why this might be so; they’re fighting for control and the maintenance of status, and any change, whether forward or backwards, must necessarily represent, by virtue of their constructed reality, a diminishment of their power and status.
There's no Liberal Manifesto. What are they going to read?
I'll one-up you: the Harry Potter series. This configuration of government was talked about in Harry Potter 4: Deathly Hollows when Harry had to demean a dementor:
blahblahlblahablaalhabalhalabalhabalh