Don’t get me wrong. This site’s dunking culture is good and it serves an important purpose. It’s an immune system that stops bad-faith trolls and fascists from getting a foot in the door. Just like a biological immune system, though, it can get overactive and start attacking its own body. This is called an autoimmune disease and it can severely damage or even kill its host body.
What’s appropriate for a lib or a fascist who refuses to even consider whether they might be wrong about our fundamental ideas isn’t appropriate for a comrade who, in good faith, is voicing an opinion you happen to disagree with. This is very similar to something Mao talks about in his essay “On The Correct Handling Of Contradictions Among The People.” Mao’s essay splits contradictions into two types:
- Antagonistic contradictions are those between class and political opponents with irreconcilable interests. There’s no real debate to be had here. They’re enemies. You don’t engage in dialog with them. You defeat them.
- Non-antagonistic contradictions are those that occur within a class or movement. The interests of all involved are fundamentally aligned, but there’s disagreement on how to advance those interests. These disagreements are resolved through discussion that improves mutual understanding and allows for arrival at a consensus.
Applying the analogy to posting on Hexbear:
- Antagonistic contradiction: A chud wanders in to lecture the site about how Stalin killed 50 quintillion people / Hamas is an evil terrorist group / the transes are corrupting the youth. You can’t convince these people and it’s not worth trying. Post dunks, express hostility, drive them off. That’s community hygiene.
- Non-antagonistic contradiction: A comrade who’s been on this site for years voices a concern that you posted something bigoted / disagrees with your interpretation of a work of media / advocates engaging with people politically in a way you don’t consider effective. You both want communism, you are both anti-imperialist, you both want Hexbear to be a welcoming space for marginalized people. Good-faith dialogue is a way to share information and enhance mutual understanding. Responding to these people with insults and dunks just pisses them off and discourages them or anyone watching from engaging with the site except to post their own insults and dunks. The site becomes more toxic and hostile.
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You’re missing that what you said before is seriously just a non-sequitur, but it’s fine I guess.
a) I don’t think that this is as easy a generalization to make as you seem to and b) just ban them
Let me know when Hexbear murders a minority, but in the meantime I think we should bear in mind that matters of life and death are somewhat downstream of this website outside of mutual aid, and there are many other tributaries. Hexbear’s role in this, according to some, depends on what you view the best use of Hexbear as being.
My personal view, which I expect to be the minority view on Hexbear now, is that this space is best used for radicalization and education, which necessarily means firmly pushing back against conservative and miseducated sentiments, but not doing so from a standpoint of crassly attacking participants. I would furthermore add that insofar as the website contributes to the safety of minorities at all, this would be the best way to do it because it produces more allies. I don’t expect you to hold this view, I am just mentioning it for completeness.
The more popular stance on Hexbear is to view it as being principally a safe space where we treat people who depart from the line as pests to be removed (“it’s not my job to educate you,” etc.), that having a space optimized purely toward being welcoming is for the best, but then this culture of ritualized abuse doesn’t seem very effective for that purpose either, because the poc that white liberals on this site like to use as human shields to deflect criticism (see the non-indigenous carnists cynically citing indigenous dietary conventions for example) are not actually a monolith and having backwards opinions is not exclusively the domain of whiteness, however much more prevalent it is with snowroaches. So if you want x minority to not be abused, “bullying works” still seems like a bad idea. Either someone is worth talking to and can be treated like a human or they are outside of those bounds and should be banned.
So I’d say even under the maximalist framing, bullying still does not work, and in basically anything but a genuinely closed group, the issue of consciousness-raising is unavoidable.
We are arguing in part about policy here, so we should not be treating the admins in a way that is de facto oppositional.
Edit: Reworded the reference to an old anti-veganism argument to be more clear.