I felt the need to share something personal about myself to one of the most welcoming, great communities I’ve ever had the honor to call myself a part of. You can make posts lamenting my radicalisation all you want, but seriously that shit is none of your business and the fact that you decided to deride me for being “tricked” or something makes me really mad. Do you think some internet strangers can automatically re-write 10 years of the US school system’s imprint on my brain? The people on hexbear were everything the people on your instance claimed to be and more, these “genocidal tankies” showed patience, compassion, and empathy to me, 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.
fuck you and never post about me again.
(what community do i post this to? cth should be fine right? just delete it and dm me if i have to move it :P )
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.
Minor quibbling for the sake of post engagement clarity: The term “brainwash” is a literal translation of a term coined by Mao, itself a pun on a ritualistic “heartwashing” that was customary to spiritually “clean” yourself (before? after?) entering a temple. Mao was using it as basically a jocular way to refer to political reeducation. The literal translation itself was first produced by some niche orientalist author who was making theories about chicom mind control powers. It was then adopted by the establishment after those soldiers in the Korean War were, in fact, rehabilitated by China* and renounced the war, confessed to using chemical and biological weapons (which never happened according to the notoriously honest US State Department), and in some cases even fully refusing to be brought back to America, instead choosing to live in the PRC or DPRK.
Another “fun” one is “Ostalgie,” a German portmanteau of “Ost” (east) and “Nostalgie” (nostalgia), which is the way that German popular culture characterizes the feelings of the former East Germans who preferred East Germany. It’s another instance of pathologizing popular sentiments by treating them as some bizarre and peculiar psychological phenomenon rather than accepting that people have reason to think what they think.
*I think it was mostly by China, since China had a pretty dominant role late in the war, but that’s not to say there was no Korean involvement or that every case with every supposedly-brainwashed prisoner was the same.
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.
My little self enjoyed videogames, and hearing that someone wanted to take that away got me mad
So mad that they never bothered to find out if that was what was actually happening before helping ruin a bunch of women’s lives.
They used to have career feds monitoring ML and Anarchist groups, this capital G Gamer is doing it for free.
Was COINTELPRO also affected by enshittification? This guy who’s unironically a walking Ctrl+Alt+Del comic character whose only identity is apparently “Gamer” just full on believed one of the Baldwins that video games were under attack by milqoaste liberal Anita Sarkeesian and he turned alt right??? Was she going to break into your house and take your copy of Call of Duty Modern Warfare and delete your Oblivion horse armour DLC? Room temperature IQ with no critical thinking, I’m assuming his gullible ass just went all in on a different online movement like Destiny or Asmongold or Vaush.
I was repeatedly told that the revolution will happen any time soon
revolutions don’t just happen
I don’t get it, are we as Hexbears Putinist Xibots pretending to be leftists and trans, or are we woke transes? Lemmy is very confused
I’ve seen libs frame it in the incredibly patronizing “chickens for KFC” kind of way.
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.
