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?
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