That’s hard to believe when it’s basically almost the only thing (and other serious and aggressive trolling and not trolling.) I’ve not seen any calm reasonable and rational responses from hexbear users until this post threatening to get rid of them
Comment on Hexbear federation megathread
Awoo@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.
Civility@hexbear.net 1 year ago
🥰
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s not true at all. Look at any post about landlords or Zelenskyy or “bourgeoisie”. Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.
I’ve already personally blocked the whole instance because it’s not worth arguing with people over and over.
Awoo@hexbear.net 1 year ago
There is a difference between calling someone subhuman which is the rhetoric of people that believe that various races of humanity are more human than others vs calls to eat the rich through the use of guillotine memes. The latter is just radical and militant activism. The former is fascist rhetoric. The latter also has a place in mainstream society already as a tool of art.
NuPNuA@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The fact that you’re here in our meta thread for our users to discuss the situation arguing the really doesn’t help with the image of Hexbear users brigading other communities.
jackmarxist@hexbear.net 1 year ago
I can literally see the post on my feed. It’s not brigading. Image
Also the admin hasn’t said that this is an exclusive thread for lemm.ee users so we have the right to defend ourselves against accusations some of which are false.
I would be upset if people in our instance started spamming random shit here with no intention to engage in a conversation and agree that they should be reprimanded by the servers admins/mods.
Awoo@hexbear.net 1 year ago
I was already having a conversation with Sun when he made the post. Which is why I was one of the first here.
Kuori@hexbear.net 1 year ago
there’s no such thing as brigading on lemmy, this post pops up at the top of our feed by default
Lols@lemm.ee 1 year ago
there have been half a dozen hex users in this comment section so this accusation doesnt feel warranted
oregoncom@hexbear.net 1 year ago
If you’re going to cry about “brigading” like a redditor then you don’t understand what federation is and should go back to reddit.
oce@jlai.lu 1 year ago
It appears posting memes about assassinating people for ideology is something that both extreme left and extreme right tend to do, and that’s something that non-extreme people, unsurprisingly, don’t seem to be fond of.
kneel_before_yakub@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Don’t liberals love to joke about wanting political assassination? See any comment section about Putin for example.
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ChestRockwell@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Awoo has already noted some important refutations, but I want to unpack something here.
Landlords and Bourgeoisie are class identities. Importantly, these are not the result of things outside of your control (i.e. ethnic origin, nation, etc.) but instead determined by actions in the world. While one can’t say that one is subhuman because of where they are from, isn’t being a landlord (and thus extracting rent from people for shelter) a behavior? A series of actions and choices? And can’t we characterize a behavior or action as evil/immoral? Basically, when I say “landlords are evil and deserve to die or surrender their assets to the collective” what I’m describing is a particular set of actions. It’s not different from having an opinion on if murderers deserve capital punishment.
Btw, I believe in rehabilitative punishment. However, if we’re going to talk about people who deserve to die, I think capitalists and landlords are up there. A person who kills someone else – either due to mental illness or a crime of passion – is far less damaging to our social fabric than people who, through institutions, contribute to the death of our world and the immiseration of many. For instance, how many unhoused people have gone hungry/died because of the executives at Starbucks who decide that food thrown out should be covered in coffee grounds to be inedible? We don’t have the numbers, but shouldn’t we call this behavior subhuman/evil? I think you’re missing the distinction between saying the executive who designed that policy deserves the gulag – a specific inhuman action that deserves a specific response – and calling all insert ethnicity/nationality here subhuman.
steltek@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is highly offtopic flamebait that will trigger a protracted argument of little substance.
Further, how you’ve casually slipped into a debate about capital punishment for enormous swathes of population is disturbing and disgusting. This is the lack of self awareness that others have mentioned here.
ChestRockwell@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Clearly you missed the “or”? Or is the choice to redistribute resources (rather than having billionaires like Bezos accumulating wealth by theft) odious to you on the merits? I don’t mind if Bezos were to turn Amazon into a worker-collective, for instance, rather than accumulate wealth extracted from his workers. Indeed, I would prefer this outcome (and it is in fact the original Marxist approach - the dialectical aufhebung of capitalism into communism).
Catradora_Stalinism@hexbear.net 1 year ago
lots of big words there sir that don’t really have relevance besides dictionary waving
Firemyth@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is the kind of thing I really hate to see. It’s the reason I’m going to be leaving. You guys make a blanket statement like all landlords are evil because they extract rent for shelter. You don’t give any further reasoning. I’m sure you’ve collectively decided that through some illogical conversations on your home instance but you fail to make a valid point in the wild.
For example:
where are you expecting people to live?
These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.
Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?
Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?
Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”
How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a *insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain"?
alcoholicorn@hexbear.net 1 year ago
In houses. There’s dozens of vacant homes for every homeless person. Just as capitalism requires some people be hungry to maximize profit of food, it requires some people be homeless to maximize profit of landlords.
The people who build houses deserve to be compensated for their labor. Owning a house on the other hand, is not labor.
Rent isn’t compensation for the construction of a home, otherwise the renter would own the home after 20 years of renting paid off the mortgage.
I’d categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it’s more complicated as we live under capitalism.
Are you talking about the description of the cultural revolution in that one province in China people post? In the context of generations of peasants seeing their children die of starvation-related disease or conscripted never to return, the people were more merciful and practical than just. It’s easy to criticize any change if you ignore the violence of the status quo. To quote Mark Twain:
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
It’s not.
a_talking_is2@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Amazing logic. I worked so hard to buy this minigun, surely it’s perfectly ok to unload it into a crowd. Don’t tell me what to do with MY money!
GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Most of those questions are full of tacit assumptions, but I’d like to answer the general question “Why do you commies dislike landlords so much?” You may restate any of those questions or present new ones if you feel them to be relevant in response.
You complain about people citing Marxist literature, so let’s try citing the central figure of classical liberal economics, Adam Smith:
Wealth of Nations, Chpt 11 -- Excerpts
>Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more. Whatever part of the produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of its price is over and above this share, he naturally endeavours to reserve to himself as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. Sometimes, indeed, the liberality, more frequently the ignorance, of the landlord, makes him accept of somewhat less than this portion; and sometimes too, though more rarely, the ignorance of the tenant makes him undertake to pay somewhat more, or to content himself with somewhat less than the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This portion, however, may still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent for which it is naturally meant that land should for the most part be let. > >The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions; for it can scarce ever be more than partly the case. The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. > >. . . >The rent of the land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give.
Obviously, Smith here is discussing a different type of landlord here, one who rents land for farming (etc.) rather than just habitation, but this contrast is largely to the detriment of the modern landlord as they leave it up to the geographic location of the rented property (i.e. availability of jobs within commuting distance) rather than have the possibility of issuing improvements to the farmland or otherwise assuring that rent can be paid by that individual.
The apologetics around landlords would have a chance if not for the basic fact that they operate on the principle of monopoly, as all of the land has been “accounted for,” it is all publicly or privately owned, and there are extensive efforts to keep people from sleeping on public land. There’s often no camping in a tent, there are specific “public awareness” campaigns encouraging private citizens to report those for destruction, and the settlements that remain are at any time liable to be cleared out by a police squad for the crime of existing. Sleeping on benches, when the benches aren’t specifically designed to prevent this, is “loitering” or “trespassing” (many public sites are officially considered to be closed at night), and in any case is immensely dangerous even if one only considers things like precipitation. Landlords make their profit from the fact that renting land and buying land are the only possible options for someone who doesn’t want to die of exposure or state violence. If there was land open for grabs and it wasn’t being bought up by land sharks, there would be very few homeless because they could at least have little shacks on such land.
Without the power of monopoly, rent would be drastically less, in proportion to the actual maintenance and management labor performed by the owner (or their property manager). We communists have nothing against paying for maintenance or management, but merely owning a vital resource that is monopolized is not a job.
ChestRockwell@hexbear.net 1 year ago
If someone’s living in their own home, I don’t have a problem with that at all. The problem is purchasing a home just to extract rents and profits.
And btw, I think all those things should be collectivized and socially available. Landlords contribute no value (as shown by their unwillingness to do maintenance/repairs), and merely extract. After all, what really is the benefit, to society, of a landlord? They serve no purpose (hell, even a CEO has more purpose than a landlord, and they – as Elon shows – don’t really contribute much either). It’s entirely extractive. Your “why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves” is because of how they’re using it. Just like how if you own a gun and defend your home, we consider that moral, but if you own a gun and shoot a person on the street, we consider it immoral. If you build a house and live in it, that’s moral and fine(though, in a perfect world, this would be produced through the government/taxes rather than individual accumulation, but we’re not talking about utopia, we’re talking about moral judgments on our world as it exists). If you build a house or purchase a house, then use it to extract ever-increasing rents from people for a thing we require to live (shelter), that’s immoral.
I think it’s a pretty simple distinction actually.
To return to the starbucks example, the company “produced” that material. Is it “moral” of them to throw it away rather than donate it? After all, they made it - just like your example of houses.
Finally, I’ll just note, the very idea of private property when applied to land, etc. is odious to me on philosophical grounds.
betelgeuse@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Houses and apartments. Like they do now.
Nope. Not worked/paid/built themselves. The vast majority of homes are made by people paying others to build homes for them. Labor is the source of value, not investors. This is like billionaires claiming to be job creators. You’re extracting the value of their labor to make your investment property. You’re paying them a fraction of what it is worth to you because you happen to live in a society where that is normal. Your lack of imagination beyond your current circumstances is not my problem.
Oh yeah, and even if you happen to build the house with your own hands, it is owned by someone, the bank where you got your construction loan.
Why do you think people who work and toil away should pay your mortgage on an investment property and then some?
Because helping themselves comes at the cost of someone else, and everyone else.
You can say what you want about the rest of Hexbear but I can actually explain myself. Yeah, I’m one of those who have actually thought about stuff. In fact, I know more about real estate investing than you do.
It’s not. They all belong to those who actually made them, the workers.
I can’t. Investors have inflated the cost of construction and increased the barrier to entry. They snuff out competition. Capitalism is built on lies. They don’t actually like competition. The whole idea is to consolidate and monopolize. If I did try to build low income housing I’d be ran off by all the investors who own everything. Housing poor people next to their investments lowers the value. This is multi-family 101 kiddo. Read a book.
The arrow of history disagrees. You probably should study the past sometime. Capitalism creates the conditions that make people want to join our club. It’s pretty much a law of human society.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Well the Communist argument is that the government will provide all of the infrastructure and services. In real life, a good chunk of infrastructure are provided by the government. However, as far as services are concerned… It can be a pretty mixed bag depending on how functional your government is.
When I was young, edgy and anti-business I used to believe that government was absolutely the answer to all of our problems. Did I voted for something like 15 tax increases and saw my quality of life and the city itself just go down the drain. Wait no, it became a dumpster fire. Cost of living has skyrocketed about 500%, crime and homelessness are up 300 to 1,000%, and there hasn’t actually been enough housing constructed to house people. We still don’t have a social safety net and medical prices are astronomically high as well.
The fact is that the world is a complex place and whenever there is a disproportionate amount of economic disparity between classes, it doesn’t matter who’s running the show but there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 year ago
On topic, but I’ve actually had a couple of good landlords over the years. One guy would stop by once a month to check on the house and do landscaping. We used to have really good conversations when I saw him, and we would talk about how the neighborhood was doing, any issues with the house and so on and so forth. Whenever I had a maintenance issue, he would be there within a few days to handle it. He even kept rent increases to below inflation.
On the other hand, I’ve also heard people denigrate architects, lawyers, engineers, and tech support people. But landlords and lawyers in particular make great punching bags.
ChestRockwell@hexbear.net 1 year ago
I mean ironically, the guy who kicked us out’s mother was totally fine. Just an old lady who needed the rent to supplement her fixed income. When she died, 6 months later the “I’m selling the place, you need to be out by X day” email came.
Slacker@marsey.moe 1 year ago
LodedDiaper@marsey.moe 1 year ago
JackBruh@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Landlords/Bourgeoisie are not ethnicities.
And Guillotines are not even Socialist references, they reference perhaps the most important part in late medieval European history.
Putins head should be stuck inside one and saying that doesn’t dehumanise anyone.
Outdoor_Catgirl@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Agreeing with something a ukraine flag pfp says? Truly the world has gone mad.
AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 1 year ago
This isn’t appropriate for this post, the OP asked that conversation stays on topic
Thymos@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The guillotine is best known for its use in France, particularly during the French Revolution. The French revolution was late 18th century, long after the Middle Ages had ended.
kristina@hexbear.net 1 year ago
spoiler
putin-wink get-in
oce@jlai.lu 1 year ago
Not only are you wrong on calling it medieval as stated by others, but you’re also wrong about saying it has nothing to do with Socialism. The French Revolution, the Paris Commune (name rings a bell?) and Robespierre are major references of the European left culture.
HornyOnMain@hexbear.net 1 year ago
In addition to doing hate speech against protected minority groups such as landlords and factory owners we also discriminate against other minority groups such as: war criminals, slave owners, Nazis, and fascist paramilitaries
kristina@hexbear.net 1 year ago
dont forget about the most oppressed minority, games 😥
Bongles@lemm.ee 1 year ago
To be fair, I see those memes about guillotines and “eat the rich” all over the Internet.
420blazeit69@hexbear.net 1 year ago
With varying degrees of seriousness, people call for violence against others all the time all over the internet. Go on any pro-Ukraine thread and you’ll find tons of bloodthirsty comments calling for the killing of Russian soldiers (you’ll often find variations of horrible stuff like “any Russian who isn’t in open revolt is a fair target,” too).
So first, what you are describing is not unique to Hexbear, and is in fact common. Second, if your response to my comparison is “well they’re talking about a war!”, so are we: every year capitalists wage war on the poor, killing millions by profit-driven deprivation of housing, food, medical care, etc. (see social murder).
Jesus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It is pretty unique to hexbear and .ml on Lemmy from what I’ve seen. Even if what you just said was true (it’s not) that doesn’t excuse it
420blazeit69@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Do you disagree with this? Have you not seen all the pro-Ukraine threads on reddit and here the last few years?
And when a type of conduct is common but punished selectively, that’s a sign that the ones swinging the hammer don’t care about the conduct so much as they care about harassing the target. It’s like the War on Drugs.
swagforpigeons@lemm.ee 1 year ago
420blazeit69@hexbear.net 1 year ago
“Your parents should have beat you” – classy
GreenTeaRedFlag@hexbear.net 1 year ago
killing someone does not remove their humanity
mashbooq@infosec.pub 1 year ago
The reason dehumanizing someone is evil is, among other things, because it makes it easier for non-psychopathic people to kill them. If you’re ok with killing people even without dehumanizing them, that suggests very troubling things about you.
projectmoon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Is there a way to block instances as a user now?
Bongles@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Soon™ It is being worked on.
projectmoon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
What’s the GitHub issue for it?
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 year ago
On the Connect app there is
Slacker@marsey.moe 1 year ago