Don't get me wrong. This site's dunking culture is good and it serves an important purpose. It's an immune system that stops bad-faith trolls and fascists from getting a foot in the door. Just like a biological immune system, though, it can get overactive and start attacking its own body. This is called an autoimmune disease and it can severely damage or even kill its host body.
What's appropriate for a lib or a fascist who refuses to even consider whether they might be wrong about our fundamental ideas isn't appropriate for a comrade who, in good faith, is voicing an opinion you happen to disagree with. This is very similar to something Mao talks about in his essay "On The Correct Handling Of Contradictions Among The People." Mao's essay splits contradictions into two types:
- Antagonistic contradictions are those between class and political opponents with irreconcilable interests. There's no real debate to be had here. They're enemies. You don't engage in dialog with them. You defeat them.
- Non-antagonistic contradictions are those that occur within a class or movement. The interests of all involved are fundamentally aligned, but there's disagreement on how to advance those interests. These disagreements are resolved through discussion that improves mutual understanding and allows for arrival at a consensus.
Applying the analogy to posting on Hexbear:
- Antagonistic contradiction: A chud wanders in to lecture the site about how Stalin killed 50 quintillion people / Hamas is an evil terrorist group / the transes are corrupting the youth. You can't convince these people and it's not worth trying. Post dunks, express hostility, drive them off. That's community hygiene.
- Non-antagonistic contradiction: A comrade who's been on this site for years voices a concern that you posted something bigoted / disagrees with your interpretation of a work of media / advocates engaging with people politically in a way you don't consider effective. You both want communism, you are both anti-imperialist, you both want Hexbear to be a welcoming space for marginalized people. Good-faith dialogue is a way to share information and enhance mutual understanding. Responding to these people with insults and dunks just pisses them off and discourages them or anyone watching from engaging with the site except to post their own insults and dunks. The site becomes more toxic and hostile.
No need to apologize, you're fine.
I agree that of course there are people bringing silly arguments that don't represent "legitimate disagreement" as such, but I think we shouldn't be judging these things based on how novel it is to hexbear discourse but if the person in question is a bad actor or not. They weren't here for five years of struggle sessions, so there are lots of people who come in here being plainly wrong where the best response is to just explain things to them.
And if they're a bad actor, then regardless of how settled hexbear's view on the issue they discuss is, they should be given maybe a warning based on how severe their bad behavior is and after that just ban them.
I'm worried that I might be talking past you a little. Have I addressed what your claim or am I missing the point?
i think that's kind of what i was trying to express? idk like i said i was pretty out of it when i started talking. atp i think we're in more or less total agreement. still, it's nice to be able to dunk on the bad actors before moderation gets to them, especially because it avoids giving them the impression that they're a freedom crusader being unfairly silenced. ultimately shame can sometimes be a more powerful tool than moderator action imo.
There's an ideology here based on the transformative power of abusing people, but it's just not empirically justified for the level of acceptance it receives. I think people believe it because it's a permission structure for letting them play the bully after getting bullied in their own life (an extremely minor form of "when education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor"). We can present pat narratives about how it helps a person, but we can just as easily present narratives about how it makes them double down and decide we're all a bunch of childish assholes, cultists, etc.
The point of moderator action in the framework that I'm talking about is not to act like the Holy Spirit moving the heart of the offender to accept communist Divine Grace, but simply to remove a problem element from the community for the sake of the community, accepting that as they are right now, "correcting" the offender in question is not viable or at least not worth the effort. It's excising a tumor, not corrective discipline.
To be clear, my point isn't that we need to not bully people who are going to be banned at the moderator's earliest convenience, I simply don't think it really matters whether we do or don't. What I want to push back against are the ridiculous bedtime stories about the righteousness of abusive motivation that some users here like to tell each other. Be an asshole, I don't care, but don't pretend that it's praxis when it isn't.
maybe you're right. all i have is my own anecdotal experience. i would never have become anything more than a berniebro if i weren't always being shamed for being stupid. i come from a privileged background so at least at the beginning, i never would have started studying anything if i weren't embarrassed about getting proven wrong. then again, libs are embarrassed about getting proven wrong too and their response is to talk shit about the tankies are so mean.
That's survivorship bias though, is it not? We'll have way more people saying that people respond to shame if we're extremely reliant in shaming and thereby only persuade people who would respond to shaming. The people who were driven away by shaming mostly aren't here to report on it not working on them.
I believe there are two more errors:
Firstly, this is conflating shaming that is strategically aimed at, idk, trying to provoke a productive sense of guilt in someone with the verbal diarrhea of attacks that we usually see.
Secondly, do you know that that was the only way someone could have reached you, or do you just have the fact that it did and a few other things didn't? How confident are you that someone treating you with patience and dignity but very clearly showing you why your attitude and assertions were harmful would not have worked?
i think maybe we're thinking about different kinds of being an asshole? maybe that's what your first point was so ig feel free to skip this paragraph. the PPB shit and all the "you're stupid fuck off" comments i agree are probably not terribly helpful. but like idk. when someone's being obstinate about being a liberal even though everyone can see they clearly don't know shit, i think it might be helpful to explain why they're wrong in a way that makes them understand they're an egoistic asshole who knows nothing.
as for your second point, i definitely think it's helpful to make spaces where people can respectfully ask questions. maybe even stuff like "why is racism bad" or whatever. but there were times i was being kinda obstinate and arguing about things i really didn't know anything about and acting like i did. that's the kind of situation i think forcefulness can sometimes be helpful. i think a lot of liberals have this idea that it's not possible to be wrong about the state of the world and everyone's opinion is equal in substance so long as it's something they consider "political". that's the sort of attitude that i think it might be good to tear down this way. not by like PPB'ing them but by reductio ad absurdum or similar.