Venat [he/him, any]

Ultimately, upon reflection and reading the favorable statements, I think I support this decision.

r/shitliberalssay and other left subreddits is where yuri got most of the dunk/dredge content. You could just go to those websites and forums to get your slop.

I guess you can miss the emotes.

I kind of think it might affect the Hexbear users in that it might diminish its engagement numbers, but things like Oct 7th and the genocide thereof; well, I understand that this collective outrage and need for a punching bag via the dunk tank as an outlet to let off steam is an act of futility and self-indulgence.

To be satisfied with having the right disgust at the right people, to think emotional regulation and ventilation is sufficient to maintain our humanity in the midst of believing the world to be conquered by evil. All of this is insufficient and only helps to maintain your sense of self; an act of individuality not collective catharsis and action.

Refreshing your outrage is not enough. I think UlyssesT understood this both times he left the site. You have to act.

Posting isn’t praxis despite its alleged intent in !gossip & !counterpropaganda, because those communities real intent is for you, the user, to process on an intellectual rather than an emotional level why your reactionary prole is wrong, why a member of the power elite acts this way, how these institutions manipulate and destroy you. When you can articulate these emotions on an intellectual level you can communicate these thoughts, analyses, and insights to others in your own life.

You have to reconcile what you know is true in your heart with how you can communicate those thoughts and feelings through your mind, intellect, and persuasiveness.

r/shitliberalssay, r/trueanon, and r/thedeprogram already have this sort of content. I can understand the derision for this slop, but turning Hexbear into r/communism where only serious assessment of reality through Marxism is allowed also baffling given the name of this site and the site culture.

Good on the name changes and the intent behind the change of content, but this presumes that the user base uses this site for education on political theory and understanding and executing political activism, and not a refuge for levity and catharsis.

I didn’t really engage in those forums, and I think the existence of those communities did diminish the content and cathartic, insightful, and resolutions that insight can provide. r/chapotraphouse had those types of posts. But things have changed. Since those days where people , young people especially, needed levity and perspective, now there is only a future of impotent rage and alienation where we pursue our philosophies more so as an affirmation of our humanity than hopes that we can succeed in creating change or even a better future.

I made a post about a year go “you used to post better” under a different account, Zodiark, and was told by the users of this site that the megathreads had become the heart and soul of the website, and the rest of the forums and communities were meant to drive user engagement and for levity.

I think the frustration in this thread is that there is a genuine struggle to formulate thoughts, insights, catharses, preparations, and analyses outside of memetic format or recycled axioms, truisms, and insider knowledge. Trying to divine this knowledge from the internet is definitely not the answer. Outside of also reading, a lived experience of being an activist should inform your world view.

Speaking of socialism’s resurgence in the West, it’s been 9 years since Bernie rehabilitating socialism as a concept, Trump’s candidacy, and Obama’s presidency of liberal failure.

The insight gained there has stalled, and no one has really written What is to be done because what is to be done is the same as ever: educate, agitate, organize, blockade, strike, protest, obstruct, and build community. And since the state knows this too, the state then disrupts all of those efforts to delay a meaningful counter balance. Everyone’s set two steps behind as soon as they start.

So we post here, in the rebranded shitliberalssay forums, to ask ourselves how to cope in a reality where evil is living, dynamic, adaptive, and omnipresent.

Thanks for telling me. Godspeed to him then.

welcome back! o/

I understand that UT left, but was it the election result that prompted his departure?

I hope to see them in another incarnation in a year or so, but respect his decision to derive perspective and connection with the verdant flora of reality.

RedWizard is in the trenches it seems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1gkzzq1/trump_wins_dearborn_largest_arab_american_city/?sort=controversial

wild scratched liberals oozing bloodlust.

I think at the very least, I’d have expected them to pushback against the bigoted rhetoric from becoming normalized within their own dominion of culture, but seeing as they just normalized a genocide because not doing so would make them become uncomfortable again (another term of Trump) it was a moot point.

It wasn’t a ramble, I appreciated the perspective. What you were referencing about liberalism being a death cult is on point.

I know people are kind of enjoying schadenfreude here, but it is alarming how many liberals are just going mask off in their tantrum against ethnic minorities in the US, and just brazenly expressing not only depraved indifference to Palestine/Gaza but active contempt and hatred of them and their sympathizers which liberals blame for losing the election. Their coping mechanisms are devolving into *maybe we shouldn’t protect trans people, immigrants, BIPOC. PEP is also clearly the right choice."

I felt like our secret shared hope was that liberals would somehow rediscover their affection for organizing, protesting, canvassing for causes, but AOC encapsulated it in her video about #resistance being ceremonial and performative bullshit.

Life is going to get worse, and I’d be fooling myself to declare that the difference between a Harris defeat from a victory is the normalization of reactionary politics. It just stings differently because in 2016 there was a vague hope, given Sanders’ campaign and reinvigoration of socialism/leftism, that life did not have to be that way.

There was a youtube link in my recommendations about the beginning of the disintegration of Israel, by Ilan Pappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgkbhEzwd-8

How plausible is his argument? He seems rather certain.

I don’t know, that thread looks like ignorance being replaced by knowledge and context; it looks like deprograming of past propaganda despite any detractors using the old messaging, cliches, slogans, and talking points. The discussion there genuinely seems to be earnest and unindulgent of Zionism and its talking points, with corrective information and argument dispelling the impressions people once had about Israel and Zionism.

I think this marks a turning point where people no longer regard Israel as sacred, and are beginning to see - and entirely due to Israel’s own open, brazen, and genocidal actions and rhetoric following October 7th 2023 - Israel as what it is as defined by its own actions, and not its impression.

Isn’t that the state though? The state is the avatar, the apparatus, the tool and apparatus of the dominant political class of a given polity. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a government position, agency, or NGO/NPO connected thereof.

removed by todd

I think it was when they were covering the DNC? It was fairly recent. I cna’t recall the exact episode, but one of those DNC coverage episodes.

Brace talks about it briefly; he just says that Americans are exhausted from actually engaging in politics and that’s just not where they were. He was dryly describing a situation rather than lamenting it or admonishing Americans for their apathy and resignation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfVqEFIPFoc

A nostalgia for the year 2014:

I disagree. It isn’t effective propaganda but a quick slogan to dismiss criticism. If its not Russian disinformation, it’d be “conservative propaganda” or performative and ceremonial politics like it was during the Obama administration. The heart of the sentiment is indifference and annoyance.

In other words, “don’t make me think about politics”. Brace Belden mentioned this in a True anon episode a month ago, and a recent post on the_dredge_tank linked a redditor who echoed the same sentiment (despite working in politics and having a PhD thereof).

A sentiment articulated in that Red Sails article about propaganda, or how Morris Berman - an academic who describes the US - says that the “wool isn’t over American eyes, but they are the eyes”; which means American culture makes Americans inherently delusional and prone to refute any challenge to it. Americans have been under such cultural hypnosis likely as long as the post-independence period from Britain.

These generations of Americans want to believe in their idealized version of it to the detriment of everyone else, including themselves, because they themselves have it pretty good. Their material conditions do not prompt them to question the American civic religion.

Militarised citizenry

Isn’t that just the police now. I think they’re classified as civil servants too, not professional soldiers.