Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis

Animal Farm

The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.

It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”

https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/

I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

framework for statecraft

I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.

Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens

Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.

Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

sing praise about Russia

I have never seen a communist claim that the modern Russian government is good or communist, only that it opposes western hegemony, to the occasional benefit of poor nations in the global south.

how old were you when the USSR fell? Did you experience communism, or the capitalist takeover after communism fell?

communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66

it is a requirement if you want to be a very rich social democracy

Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.

I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me

Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.

The Sapply model runs into the exact same problem the video is focusing on.

When you take the quiz at https://sapplyvalues.github.io you get questions like “Agree or disagree: Only the government can fairly and effectively regulate organizations” — but what kind of government are we talking about? Who’s in charge? Are there corporate think tanks running it? Is there a fossil fuel lobby? Are we talking about corporations regulating themselves?

When I get a question like that, I don’t know how to respond, because I don’t have a blanket attitude toward all government. My opinion depends on what is actually happening in real life. Which is ultimately the central criticism of the video. What matters most to most people is the material context, not some blanket feeling about the abstract concept of government

And as for this comment,

• fears and mistrusts the media (to an extreme)

• “the West”

This is frustrating, because, while there’s a lot you don’t know, there are at least two instances you definitely do know about: the Nayirah testimony, and the Iraq WMDs reports. The wars and sanctions following those lies killed millions of people and displaced and immiserated millions more. There’s a term for this: manufacturing consent. Many other examples have never received the same degree of attention because America did not use them to justify major wars.

And yes, “the West.” Imperialism still exists, books and papers are written about this by serious people. Even in the thread where you were banned, people had already started to bring up details. Imperialism is a little better hidden than it used to be, but it’s still not that well hidden. Michael Hudson’s “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” is a good source.

They act like Nazis… the behavior makes a really bad first impression

nazis who were very intent on telling you about queer rights in Cuba and colonialism in the global south.

The conversation has gone stale while I’ve been swamped with work, but I’m going to respond anyway.

Looking back at the modlog, what you actually said was that their pronouns “look like an alt-right satire of pronouns” and that anyone using those pronouns must be a “basement dweller.” And people with those pronoun tags were right there reading your comments. Why the fuck would you do that? I actually got mad reading it. Whatever your motivations, you walked in and made it very clear you had no respect for people’s pronoun tags and no interest in understanding them, right to their faces.

At one point you compared neopronoun tags to being trans-species, whatever the fuck that meant

You also seemed dismissive throughout the thread, on every topic that came up, which was frustrating to read because first you made all these assumptions about people and then you showed so little interest in what they were actually saying! The one exception was maybe when you asked for a source on Cuba — but did you even expect to get one? What is just rhetorical? Maybe you got banned before you could respond, I don’t fucking know. Did you even click on the information you asked for? In 2022 Cubans themselves democratically drafted the country’s new progressive family code in over 80,000 citizen councils around the island. Hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free since 2008. I think this is interesting information that you might want to know. People also brought up trends in state regulation of farming around the world, neocolonial cash crop economics, Iraqi food imports and exports, IMF policies toward food exporters in the global south, the British planned economy during WW2, Chinese agribusiness and farming co-ops, soil exhaustion, and grammatical gender, and you seemed to show zero interest in any of it. You responded to these comments with paper-thin truisms about liberal values and basically tuned everyone out, called people misinformation trolls, and somehow managed to conclude that all the people in that thread were fucking nazis pretending to be queer communists for three years with no audience on a defederated site.

And for the most part, the worst thing anyone called you was “liberal,” except for one trans user who called you a fascist and told you to post hog after you said the trans-species thing — probably because it kinda sounded like one of those right wing “gay marriage today, bestiality tomorrow” talking points.

Reading that thread, yeah I understand why they were mad.

For the record, on hexbear, pronoun tags are not only a list of “things you can call me” but also a casual way for some users to communicate their identity and personality. Having two pronoun slots and an extended set of options not only allows for more flexibility in conversation (like them vs comrade) but also more granular self-expression, which is nice when you can’t fucking see or hear each other. In practice, the default thing people call each other is “they/them.” Someone with “love/loves” as their pronoun tag isn’t gonna get mad at you if you call them “them.” It’s the sort of thing you pick up on if you take the time to actually understand the site culture.

There’s not much more frustrating in conversation than when someone has their mind made up about you incorrectly and superficially, and they’re not interested in understanding who you actually are or what you believe or why you believe it. Maybe you were just bewildered by unfamiliar takes and you shut down a little. I don’t fucking know.

You called them unhinged for having neo pronouns. People have been attacking them for years, they expect a fight, and if you come in and fucking mock their pronouns and talk down to them they’re not gonna care enough to find out about your real world stances or activism, they’re just going to look at the comment right in front of them, and assume you’re some bigoted CNN lib who pays performative lip service to genderqueer rights but sees them as goofy caricatures and has no interest in understanding them. They get enough people like that already. If they took the time to investigate and understand and categorize everyone who threw shit at them it’d be a fucking full time job.

i think it’s a fucking massive leap to characterize hexbear as a “pro-sexual harassment” environment. You can argue that they are overzealous in who they consider nazis sometimes, but multiple hexbears earlier in the thread did call /u/randint a nazi apologist for defending Adrien Zenz, so it’s clear they considered him a fair target. Hexbear users see hog posting as punching upward at privileged bullies and reactionaries they are powerless against in real life. You can dispute that view, you might even consider them delusional or self-indulgent, but I think it’s an enormous leap to conclude that they are generally in favor of sexual harassment of people.

I just saw it, you sent me this link:

https://hexbear.net/post/613387

which contains a screenshot of this comment:

https://lemm.ee/comment/3622601

where /u/randint complains that hexbear admin /u/TomboyShulk dismissed his complaints about three other comments, which he then links to.

The three comments are all from the same 22 day old thread, and his engagement with the thread starts here:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3829077

There are two pieces of context I think ought to be mentioned:

• “post hog” and other “post your dick” variants are a canned /r/ChapoTrapHouse response against any user who seems like an unusually odious or bad faith wrecker or reactionary, like a rebuttal to 4chan’s “tits or gtfo”. It started when a neo-nazi went on CTH to spout race science but was mocked into posting his dick, which defused the guy completely; at the time, the subreddit was getting a lot of people like that, and “post hog” became one of the go-to responses because it was low-effort and it shut them down. It bewildered and frustrated people who were there say awful things or make users feel unsafe.

• /u/randint has been on a crusade against hexbear for fucking weeks. He goes out of his way to stir shit and has explicitly admitted that his aim is to make the site look bad. Increasingly frustrated hexbears pointed out his bad faith engagement in the thread I linked. He goes about it in a bloodless, polite-sounding way, but he’s not there with good intentions. Only at the very end of the thread, deep in the exchange, did anyone give him the canned response, and it made him leave.

Can you give an example?

that’s pretty much only happening in China

Socialism means the state has social support networks, but largely works under capitalist rules

What you’re describing is “social democracy” — capitalism with safety nets, where production is still controlled by owners rather than workers. “Socialism” explicitly implies worker control of production. “Nordic socialism” could more accurately be called “Nordic social democracy.”

“Communism” refers to a classless, stateless society where everyone has what they need, no one is exploited or coerced, and there are no wars. It’s an aspirational vision for the future, not something you can do right after a revolution when capitalism still rules the world.

Tax them how? With the government they own?