• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • This missed the historical context for why downvotes were disabled on Hexbear in the first place. Moderators were trying to implement trans-friendly policies and features like pronouns, and reactionary weirdos kept downvoting the shit out of people who agreed with and wanted those features. Mods tried to ban based on upvotes and downvotes, but it didn’t work.

    I think the assumption that any site’s general culture will be correct on an issue is a faulty one. Yeah, it’s going to be generally correct about international politics or Marxism or something everyone researched on the site probably (when it’s on Hexbear or Lemmygrad at least), but anyone who’s part of a smaller or more fucked over minority has to basically fight an uphill battle to even be listened to even with downvotes off. With downvotes on, someone asking for accommodations or sympathy in a radical or surprising way that other users haven’t seen before will just be shut down entirely. I think a good example of this is how I’ve seen people constantly make fun of others for stuff like not showering and, when people talk about how those with depression often do their best but can’t manage it and so making fun of someone for that can be hurtful, they were just ridiculed. If downvotes were enabled most complaints about ableism or more obscure forms of anti-queer oppression would be pushed to the fringes and ignored.

    The main issue with downvotes are that they allow those with hegemonic beliefs to enforce them without considering why they hold those beliefs in the first place.

    So ultimately, it’s a trade off between if you want to be open to more radical theory that people would have a knee-jerk reaction to and downvote, or be more closed to that theory but allow site members to enforce the popular opinion more strongly




  • Russia? But Ukraine is way more of a puppet state than Russia is. Russia was created as a U.S.-backed coup, which makes me suspicious of it, but it isn’t an active puppet like Ukraine is. Russia has somewhat broken free of those strings. It doesn’t really change it’s roots as the country that existed because of Y*ltsin and the cold blooded murder of the USSR though. Just means it’s opposing the right country for once, now.











  • I care much more about the well being of humans than insects.

    There is no reason to care about a human being that provides you no benefit more than an animal, other than pure prejudice. Human beings do not have “greater moral value” or some insane shit like that. The only possible justification we could use to prioritize human beings is some variant of “might makes right” bullshit which is just fascist schlock and leaves no room for the human beings that aren’t “mighty”. Or some weird pseudo scientific argument that animals feel less pain than us or something, but everyone agrees that’s highly suspect anyways.

    Either all conscious life is sacred, none of it is, or the life that you care about or directly benefits you is sacred. So, it’s valid to care about humans more, but don’t pretend it’s an objectively correct belief, because there is no such thing in that field. I could claim that crickets are way more important than human beings and have about as much grounding as you as long as I legitimately believed that.

    Does it make more sense to prioritize human beings because we’re all human and want to be prioritized? Yeah, that makes sense. But hurting animals is still sus under that logic.