and you think you can just condesendingly harp on about how i've been brainwashed? seeing hexbear made me decide to take a second look at my worldview, and really research who i was, what i believed, and what i stood for. If you think you can reduce that to me being brainwashed, you can go to hell.

Ironically you're experiencing a very old slander here comrade. The term "brainwashing" originated to explain the behavior of downed US pilots during the Korean Genocide. It turns out that once those shot-down American pilots actually met the people they had been killing and found out they weren't what they had been told, they tended to change their tune about the war. They had to be discredited somehow, so it was decided that the tiny rural nation of Korea possessed scary oriental mind-altering techniques that they were using on POWs to make them anti-war.

Pretty similar story to "Stockhopm Syndrome" actually, and the discrediting of returned "israeli" prisoners who had good things to say about Hamas. Any non-sanctioned accounting of the facts that refutes core propaganda narratives must be pathologized. Right now you're being given the immune system treatment by hegemonic cultural liberalism. That's good, that means it perceives you as a threat.

I was not radicalized by Hexbear. I was radicalized by living in the United States of America. By doing my civic duty for 14 years, voting in every election, going to every protest and demonstration I can practically attend, writing letters to my representatives and signing petitions, all for naught. I helped make this place what it is today because my efforts on conventional platforms were met with state censorship.

man i lived with my mother who was like the epitome of the ideal of upward mobility, only to watch her body disintegrate and the systems nominally meant to help her shit all over her, i watched the deteriorating political situation cause once-loving family to turn on her as some kind of pariah parasite, i ended up falling far enough i began just being around people much worse off than me at the time, watching friends of color get harassed by police and their lives ruined by the 'justice' system - watched my dad's mental health collapse - my grandfather lose all non-familial support as his mind left his body - i've seen what bootstrapping does for someone on the fringes (it destroys your body and mind) - i've been desperate for more years than i've been comfortable in the shadow of all of that - and hexbear isn't even the first community of leftists i found that assured me that no, my experience wasn't unique, in these ways i wasn't actually going crazy - and the idea this place is somewhere that mostly radicalizes instead of being a place where the radicalized aggregate to in lieu of support from the major corporations that dictate most of the modern internet - it's insulting yeah, but it's also really funny. You have to be kinda derranged to think a federated reddit offshoot is causative rather than symptomatic

don't think much of it - the fact is, one single absolutely obsessed, self admitted alt-right gamergater continuously monitors hexbear for anything they can pretend to be offended about and post it to their audience of two other obsessed losers. And in true-to-form fashion, the self-admitted alt-right gamergater used your post about enjoying a community as a flimsy pretext to accuse a community where cisgendered posters are a minority of grooming. Hmmm, we can all guess what comes next can't we

after this vent, the only time you even give these redditors a fleeting thought will be to laugh at them. meanwhile, they will engage in mental landlordism forever. you've already won.

Do you think some internet strangers can automatically re-write 10 years of the US school system's imprint on my brain?

This is something I think a lot of annoying-ass liberals miss: the only way commie propaganda wins anybody over when they're otherwise inundated with pro-capitalist and anti-communist perspectives, is if it resonates with existing experiences and attitudes. It has to click with something already there.

They have to think you just haven't seen what they're offering, because they can't stomach that you've seen and compared both, and their shit just comes up short for more and more people.

back in 2023 I had this instance blocked until a nice bear had replied to me on some thread earlier this year. I don't remember what it was, but I remember in the moment looking through their posts and deciding to unblock hexbear to look around, and over time you all really taught me a lot. not just about American politics, but about a lot of things in the world. everyone here has always been nice to me too. I spend more time on here now than a lot of other places. you all on the bear have helped me start seeing things for what they really are elsewhere too.

old chapo subreddit did kinda radicalize me lol. I found it during bernie 2016 and never left. I considered myself a liberal that wanted universal healthcare back then haha

They brainwashed me. I used to be white boy from the midwest just hitting baseballs and chewing tobacco and now I'm a minority immigrant from . I steal from grocery stores and poop on graves in Arlington National Cemetery. I wish someone could wake me from this nightmare so I can go back to watching football and disliking my wife. Mr. Hexbear... you're fired!

Why does .world even exist? I just spent a few minutes scrolling through the first few pages and it's literally just reddit.

So you're saying that a bunch of Hexbears didn't kidnap you and force you to watch a bunch of yellow tinted Parenti videos until you renounced America and/or all cishets?

Shit, comrades, I think we nabbed the wrong person.

The reason they saw the first one is because they've got (I think) one dedicated person trawling through Hexbear pretty frequently, since .world can't actually see this instance, and then that one dedicated person picks out what they think is good to share and they share that.

While that user spends a lot of time on here just to seethe and take the occasional screenshot, they can't possibly be spending so much time that they see all the threads (let alone comments), so it was probably the fact that your old post got to the top of the front page that made the difference in them seeing it. Unfortunately, I think they're too much of a coward to play ball with you and forward your current post so other .worlders will see it. That one person is pretty likely to see this though, so at least your message will probably reach them.

Complete aside, but did you see the part where they called you racist? I'm still baffled by that. Like, I can do a pretty good job of imagining how a lib would perceive this or that statement, but I looked through your whole post again when I saw that and couldn't find anything that could be misconstrued that way (nor could another user I mentioned this to).

Edit: I double checked and the poster is on sh.itjust.works, it was just a portion of the commenters (including the big comment that got highlighted here) that're on .world

Seeing the way libs blame "tankies"/Russians/insert-enemy-here for radicalizing people reminds me a lot of how abusive parents react to being cut out of their child's life. They'll blame one of the child's friends, or their new significant other, or their therapist, saying the person in question "poisoned their child's mind," but the one person they will never, ever blame is themselves. The entitlement, the infantilization, the complete blindness to their own wrongdoing, it's all eerily similar.

Nah here is fine and it made me happy to read on my last break tonight at work.

Also read Palo Alto.

Dw it's libs malding that their world order is ending. The jewel of imperialism, the US empire, built by slaves on stolen land had to expand and colonize to sustain itself up until now. When there is no more Destiny to Manifest, when there's no more false flags to blame on Spain, when your vassal states turn on you, you're running on fumes.

As the amount of foreign, global south workers to exploit decrease, the empire starts cannibalizing their own population. Wages stagnate and cost of living rises. No concessions to the poor. No upwards mobility. Half the population are buying into a fantasy of a misremembered past sold by an orange steak salesman, the other half are trying to keep the decline to "steady" rather than "freefall" by doing the exact same liberalism over and over.

They'll bitch and moan and point at the flaws of China or South America or anything that doesn't align with their worldview, they'll blame any shortcomings caused by their own ideology to Russian disinformation or entitled Millennials or ungrateful workers or idealistic college students who are simply opposing a genocide.

They truly lost libs are living in a fantasy, the end of history, if they get over the hiccups that are Trump or a couple bad egg billionaires, they can continue in perpetual growth and prosperity like their parents' generation. They're unwilling or unable to look at themselves critically. Why is Germany pivoting hard right? Why France? Why are polls showing the NI and Scotland leaving the UK next chance they get? Why does liberal "democracy" keep spawning right wing nationalists everywhere? We have regular self crit and struggle sessions, and unless interacting directly with Libs, are able to critically support. They don't have introspection, they barely have hindsight.

They're just deluded as the Maga dumbasses who truly think a second Trump term will somehow make their lives better because there's a wall along the US Mexico border and their Hispanic neighbor gets deported and every school teacher has a gun and there's no regulation in a Tesla factory. Its just as delusional to think if another feckless Lib is in the white house, somehow healthcare will get cheaper, climate change will be stopped before the point of no return, landlords will charge less for rent, and the Yankistani government will stop meddling in the middle east.

They will say you'll look back in this period and cringe. But they won't have a place in the future to look back from.

They don't see any posts by hexbear users or on hexbear communities. You'd have to make an account on .world or an instance they're federated with if you want them to see it.

IDK about all of that but glad to have another comrade margbar America

I'm not sure what happened but I'm sorry that they are so dismissive of your experiences. As others said, it's sadly a common and ancient slander and, as usual, projection for their own unquestioned beliefs.

Glad you're here, though, Comrade!

Lemmy.world is home to the most rabid radlibs on this platform, they have no coherent platform. Pure Liberalism taken to the extreme.

Welcome, comrade

I love my Hexbear comrades, but sorry comrades, I actually became radical before I found this community. I started calling myself an anarcho-commie, then a year later someone was like "you might like this place". And I did.

Definitely not fucking creepy seeing a radlib write a goddamn essay about a 16 year old socialist. But sure we are the "groomers" I guess. Fucking hell. I'm sure there are plenty of fash fanfic sites around the web if that dork wants to larp as a pedo.

I am not directing this at you blakeus12

Since I didn't see your first post when it happened, welcome

And I couldn't agree more. None of us are here, at the political juncture we are, because we wanted to be. People don't want to live in a world that is so fundamentally broken, nor to be exploited and live precariously, etc... most people don't want to experience racism and other bigotry, they don't want to have their countries destroyed by war or their people genocidally slaughtered, and so on. We were driven here because of the material conditions and societal contradictions (racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism, etc) of our lives, and having either empathy or at least finding rational common interest/cause with others after seeing the material conditions of others' lives (up to and including the sheer destruction, deprivation, and genocide currently being waged- by the western system- on Gaza).

We're here because their system, the system they protect and circle around is a hideous, genocidal, hyper-exploitative one, and many of us (the overwhelming majority of humanity by a wide margin, really) are the human detritus they have left in their wake. We're here because we have either the principles or at least understanding (once again, of common cause) to not look away from the death, destruction, and deprivation their system causes around the entire world, and the decency to stand against it- whereas they are complicit with it, defend and support it, like with their posts about you, and some (probably more than we'd suspect) are directly participating in it. We are the product of their collective actions within their system, and because of their denial of guilt and assumed self-interest (for social acceptance, economic interest, etc) they hate us for it.

I certainly didn't start off here, rather I was raised to be the opposite in many ways. And I wanted to be optimistic, I even wanted to be and was ignorantly patriotic and hopeful for a time. I certainly don't want to live in a country which is actively and directly supporting industrial genocide, which is a racist and exploitative hellhole doing its best to instigate a 3-front WW3, and in which I see poverty and hopelessness all around me, and where any rational and informed understanding of the system I live under will show that it only serves to perpetuate and exacerbate all of these issues for its own gain.

Fuck the libs, may they burn in hell, if one exists they will surely be going there. If they had barest minimum human decency so as to stand against genocide, they would not be where and as they are. Even many children, even the "apolitical," etc... have considerable ability to realize and stand against such horror, and yet they refuse- I would even say that they fight against their basic human instincts of social empathy (or lack it altogether). With the exception of those too young (and even then, very sheltered) to have seen and understood the real world, none of them have any excuse; they have made retaining their place of privilege (or ambitions towards it) relative to and in support of the exploitative, genocidal, warmongering meat grinder of empire the hill they want to die on. And they will be damned for it, whether directly, by history, or their causing the end of human existence and history altogether.

Semi-related, I think one reason we stick in their craw so much is not only that we bluntly reject their delusional browbeating, but that we use teamwork when doing so. Someone here said there's about a Dunbar's number worth of hexbears, and that means that we know each other, we're familiar with each other's styles, and we dunk as a pack. They don't have that, they're too big, so every big argument with us is like a bunch of conscripts who don't know each other vs a well-drilled and experienced unit.

Like genuinely, as much as their presence annoys us, they seem to actually...well, maybe fear is a bit too strong a word, but they seem so hyperfocused on us Like shitposting Sarduarkar, our dread-mythology precedes us.

People like that use condescension to try to whip people in line, it's so gross to hand wave away people's agency. I could write a book on this kind of shit, but... Nah.

Instead, I'll just say welcome comrade!

What the actual shit lmao what did these idiots do now?

Worldists are the worst I swear

goat@sh.itjust.works is constantly dropping transphobic comments, I would stop being a vegan just to turn them personally into kebab