Hexbear has been getting a lot more attention and activity as of late, and while it is very fun to dunk on the new people posting on the site in bad faith, a post to appreciate the new good faith users contributing to the site seems like a great idea.
So, what new users do you appreciate, and what should other potential new users do to get the same reception?
Been lurking for a few months but this is first online space I haven’t gotten those fucked vibes from
I’m still getting through my list of theory so I don’t feel confident joining certain conversations yet but I’d like to think being open-minded to deprogramming all the western propaganda bullshit I’ve ingested over a lifetime has helped me discover this community
I wish hexbear had gone with the name lib.rehab, because finding this place has done so many wonders for getting the worms out of my brain
Don’t feel like you can’t join conversations because you don’t have all the theory down comrade. We’ve all got plenty gaps in our knowledge and people are pretty cool about explaining things if required.
Sometimes the best discussions are kept going and reach greater depths because someone asks an ‘obvious’ question or contributes a ‘basic’ point, too. The simple shift in perspective can help everyone to see things from a different angle, which is hard to do even if it’s the crux of diamat. And we all learn when a question or contribution prompts an even more knowledgeable comrade to swing by with more theory, etc.
Yeah absolutely.
Yeah absolutely.
Just make sure to qualify your statements and ask questions in earnest. I appreciate they aren’t making declarations without investigation
Say the wrong thing some time. Folk will set you right. Its a bit rough on the ego but nothing stamps out brain worms quite like a stern rebuke and as soon as you say “oh shit you are right” everything is good.
I’d almost consider it like an online anxiety lol. Mustering up the strength to not revert back to being a lurker after not expressing a thought succinctly and powering through the posting to stamp those worms out.
I had that until hexbear. Right now I’m possibly getting torn apart by a comrade who seems to have raead more than me. Otherwise how do I figure out what I don’t know? And this comrade is cool about it
It always helps when it’s an actual discussion instead of a bad faith debate
A related question: do you ever get that feeling where you say something (if you’re lucky you might stop yourself first) about something that you learned before becoming a commiewithoutorgans and realise it’s ludicrous? I do that so often. It’s like only the new memories and information have been re-framed. Much of the old memories and information is sat in an archive in the back of my mind, complete with a perfectly intact liberal outlook.
Back to your question: when this happens to me it takes a [span of time] to realise that although I have an answer, I don’t actually know what I’m talking about. If yours wasn’t a rhetorical question, I don’t have a great answer other than to say: try to recall where you learned what you think you know and when. If the answer isn’t The Collected Works of Lenarx Dengping and/or ‘recently’, I try to err on the side of caution.
Oh I daily (maybe slight exaggeration) think about why I think/know something and realize it’s absolutely baseless and either drop that or try to figure out where I went wrong, depending on the situation. Just yesterday I was discussing with my SO how an oversimplified understanding of linguistics had led to my belief that, for example " 'TWAS" was only to be understand as a shortened “it was” and I remember feeling proud of the realization at like 12. But now I disagree, as 'twas has very specific context in which it is used, not for all "it was"s and therefore I was proud to remove it from all context and analyse it nakedly as opposed to seeing it’s relations to other words. Very small example but I haven’t been organizing/working for a few weeks so it happens less hahaha
That’s a great example and exactly the kind of thing I meant. My mind is littered with them! Although now there’s one fewer: I hadn’t considered that you can’t replace every “it was” with “'twas”.
There’s just so much room for ever increasing nuance. Always something else that looks completely different if it’s understood as a relation. Sometimes it’s big ideas but not always (or often, really, as they’re likely the first ones to reconsider).
I envy future generations who will never have to start the first however many decades of life learning an outlook that doesn’t correspond with reality. They’re going to achieve so much. It’s hard to imagine.
Or go back and revisit something you loved from childhood and realize it’s shitty and reactionary and you didn’t have any idea at the time.
Dark Knight, CGP Grey, a bunch of anime (like 99% of it), Lion King, etc etc. There’s so many things dripping with ideology and it doesn’t even cross your mind until you have a Marxist lens shift
How’s your son feeling?
It’s been a while since he posted some Jewish conspiracies
You know, I gotta say the whole Lemmy vibe has fixed a lot of that issue for me. I had some 500k karma on Reddit from comments, but I deleted all of them within a week of posting because the anxiety got to me. I wanted to be entirely transient there. Part of the conversation, but as soon as the conversation was over, gone.
Lemmy is a smaller more community-feel community in general, and other than a few bad actors, it’s really peaceful here.
I have wild amounts of anxiety about tons of things, and I don’t feel weird participating here (even without deleting all my content regularly!)
Once you get through the “I’m posting to help everyone here” barrier, which that silly message on posts with no comments helps a ton with, it’s such a good space to exist. Even if you don’t agree, if you do so from a place of open communication and accept what others want to share with you, you’ll be totally fine.
Thanks, this gives me a lot more confidence in just going with the flow. Some of the back and forths here have already been pleasant too
Better yet, if you’re not confident you have the right answer, say that instead of pretending you have all the best takes and then digging in when people disagree. You’ll get an even better reception.
Even after reading loads it’s still possible to be wrong. It’s good to be humble and see knowledge not as an individual thing but as something that it takes a community to work out. That helps a little with the hits to my ego, anyway. It’s still hard not to take a stand due to the way liberalism shapes the mind before it’s freed.
The dialectical process of discovering knowledge is awesome until it arrives at something I disagree with. Then its bullshit!!!
Is As We Have Always Done By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on that theory list?
I’ll read it! Thank you
holy shit, the GOAT joined our website
also don’t worry, we’re fucking wrong all the time. we then talk it out. it’s how we grow
pls be the real lebron