Erika2rsis

"You know, that 1% of annoying radical leftists will drive away the rest of Lemmy's user base."

"YES, IT'S BRILLIANT, KATHLEEN, AND FAIR PLAY TO THEM! GREAT LADS!"

Columbo addressing his ancestor, lol

Meanwhile, deaf-blind people:

"What is or isn't politics is itself a political question" mfers when my politic is that nothing is political, there is only what the Irish call craic

Thoughts on George Habash? —He was a good doctor innit

Thoughts on the GERD? —It's a marvel of engineering innit

Thoughts on indigenous language education? —I like flicking through the Dakota dictionary sometimes. I don't understand any of it but yeah

Thoughts on the South China Sea? —yummy fishies there innit

Thoughts on trans people using public restrooms? —I'll answer your question with another question: why's it called a "public" restroom when you aren't shitting out in the open?

Thoughts on the world's interlocking systems of marginalization, exploitation, and oppression, including the core contradiction between the working and owning class, causing the slow demise of the planet under a world order which can only justify itself through unsustainable constant growth? —Them systems can't be reformed innit (※this opinion is apolitical because I have declared it to be common sense.)

Honestly? Based. I've always thought that the idea of building a car at home sounded kick-ass.

Also, regarding "a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow" — basically ever since I first started seeing this sort of stuff coming from Hexbear in the brief time when they federated with Blåhaj Lemmy, I thought of stuff like pig poop balls in kind of the same way as, like, the climate/vegan activists who throw soup cans at paintings or pour milk jugs in stores or trespass F1 races or break fuel pumps or so forth. A lot of people express a lot of anger and frustration and annoyance at these sorts of things and say "How can these activists be so stupid‽ Don't they know that this hurts support for their cause‽", but... ehhhh, being goddamn annoying as all Hell is honestly a more effective form of political action than a lot of people consciously believe it to be. The video essayist Ponderful once said about this,

People criticize actions like milk pours and soup…chucks? Because it “gives the right something to criticize”…but it seems like that's the point! And at the same time, it makes other climate activists look extremely reasonable and "good, actually" in comparison! If pouring some milk on the ground will mean that Daily Mail readers might hear some messages about how messed-up the dairy industry is, and then also maybe even consider old enemies like our Greta as good in comparison, then…yay! Yay, I say! And if it makes the public look kinder upon activists who actually target oil infrastructure, in comparison to what they see as random and annoying publicity stunts, then f*ck!gn ay!

Whether all of this applies in the case of Hexbear is something that people can argue about — it feels like kind of a silly comparison given that Lemmy is just an obscure social media platform, which doesn't exactly seem like the type of place where meaningful praxis can happen... But it's at least a thought that we can keep in mind. Hexbear has certainly succeeded in getting people on Lemmy talking and thinking about them and their beliefs, pushing the Overton window leftwards — especially if other, less annoying leftists look "good in comparison". I'm kind of reminded of my own path towards leftism, honestly: I'd certainly been annoyed by communist interlocutors plenty of times over the years, but I think that without that annoyance, I probably wouldn't agree with those selfsame interlocutors on so much today. That was just one of the many tactics that collectively led me down that path.

I don't think that this is necessarily Hexbear's intentional strategy in the same way as those aforementioned climate/vegan activists, but nevertheless, this is at least my spitball of a material analysis of why Pig Poop Balls actually does advance the cause. This is just a little advocacy for the devil, as it were.

I'm just saying that if one wishes to be defederated from Hexbear, then one should migrate off of lemmy.ml first. The admins of that instance are not going to be open to defederating Hexbear.

You might wish to be aware that your instance's top-level domain was chosen because ML stands for "Marxism-Leninism", and that the main admin of lemmy.ml has a photo of Mao as his profile banner. So you're probably going to have a hard time convincing your instance's admins to defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, all things considered.

Edit: While .ml is often used as a free TLD, lemmy.ml paid for that domain. Whether the use of the .ml TLD was then a deliberate reference to Dessalines' outspoken political views is... evidently less certain than I thought. This was just a claim that I heard, it seemed right, I took it as fact, I repeated it here, I'm sorry. That was irresponsible.

"Oh, no, I just got this flag from my cousin, Chucky Arlaw."

Way ahead of you, buddy.

The video, for anyone interested (+YouTube link)

I put a Kbin and Lemmy community in the sidebar of /r/vexillology shortly after the beginning of the API protest.