This missed the historical context for why downvotes were disabled on Hexbear in the first place. Moderators were trying to implement trans-friendly policies and features like pronouns, and reactionary weirdos kept downvoting the shit out of people who agreed with and wanted those features. Mods tried to ban based on upvotes and downvotes, but it didn’t work.

I think the assumption that any site’s general culture will be correct on an issue is a faulty one. Yeah, it’s going to be generally correct about international politics or Marxism or something everyone researched on the site probably (when it’s on Hexbear or Lemmygrad at least), but anyone who’s part of a smaller or more fucked over minority has to basically fight an uphill battle to even be listened to even with downvotes off. With downvotes on, someone asking for accommodations or sympathy in a radical or surprising way that other users haven’t seen before will just be shut down entirely. I think a good example of this is how I’ve seen people constantly make fun of others for stuff like not showering and, when people talk about how those with depression often do their best but can’t manage it and so making fun of someone for that can be hurtful, they were just ridiculed. If downvotes were enabled most complaints about ableism or more obscure forms of anti-queer oppression would be pushed to the fringes and ignored.

The main issue with downvotes are that they allow those with hegemonic beliefs to enforce them without considering why they hold those beliefs in the first place.

So ultimately, it’s a trade off between if you want to be open to more radical theory that people would have a knee-jerk reaction to and downvote, or be more closed to that theory but allow site members to enforce the popular opinion more strongly

The landlord fucking charged me a cleaning fee for the sheet left on the bedbug infested mattress

Um, isn’t this like an undebatably violent action? Who approved this with the full knowledge that it could literally lead to nuclear war???

Russia? But Ukraine is way more of a puppet state than Russia is. Russia was created as a U.S.-backed coup, which makes me suspicious of it, but it isn’t an active puppet like Ukraine is. Russia has somewhat broken free of those strings. It doesn’t really change it’s roots as the country that existed because of Y*ltsin and the cold blooded murder of the USSR though. Just means it’s opposing the right country for once, now.

I mean maybe? I guess what im saying is pretty irrelevant. Nobody trusts each other in global politics anyways. I wouldn’t expect it to be that controversial, though. I mean we’re talking about the country that was instated as a coup by the US.

Like, I wholeheartedly support their opposition of NATO and the US, none of this changes that

Yes but Russia is still sussus amongus Just because there is no choice but to accept the sussus imposter as part of the group doesn’t mean they’re not a sussus amongus

this specific image is good and upsets that actually

At risk of coming across as a lib, I am super skeptical of Russia, but more in an Imposter Amongus sense than a “Russia bad!” sense.

Like their desire to attack NATO is based asf, but I don’t trust a capitalist country to be a good member of an international socialist coalition for long

So this is good, but North Korea should probably watch their back in electrical

What?

Marxism is completely falsifiable and it’s why I like it. I don’t know if that’s relevant here.

It would only be non-falsifiable if Marx said that it would be impossible to measure or predict the mechanisms of social change. We can totally measure social habits and most of our measurements tend towards Marx being correct.

If it’s during a revolution and people are being held at gunpoint to give up their property, I would counter that an extremely large portion of wealthy people would give up their wealth without much issue at all.

I meant spoiling

mods please ban OP they’re (or idk what @pancake ‘s pronouns are) spoiling deltarune

I feel like the person had legitimate spiritual beliefs in the thread

oh it’s like with how “rationalists” think theyve invented ethics when recreating it for the 69420th time

look at me over here, assuming any part of hellworld works. what a stupid

Do popsci authors have a reputation?

My mental health has been repeatedly ruined by scientists reporting similarly ground-breaking and kind of shaky findings. Am I supposed to… not freak out about any supposed scientific fact that gets more than 1000 upvotes on Reddit?

Fuck

Just because something is “marxist” doesn’t make it objectively correct. I don’t limit myself to things Marxists did because that’s a silly bastardization of Marxism.

I can take inspiration, but that’s a different thing entirely.

I care much more about the well being of humans than insects.

There is no reason to care about a human being that provides you no benefit more than an animal, other than pure prejudice. Human beings do not have “greater moral value” or some insane shit like that. The only possible justification we could use to prioritize human beings is some variant of “might makes right” bullshit which is just fascist schlock and leaves no room for the human beings that aren’t “mighty”. Or some weird pseudo scientific argument that animals feel less pain than us or something, but everyone agrees that’s highly suspect anyways.

Either all conscious life is sacred, none of it is, or the life that you care about or directly benefits you is sacred. So, it’s valid to care about humans more, but don’t pretend it’s an objectively correct belief, because there is no such thing in that field. I could claim that crickets are way more important than human beings and have about as much grounding as you as long as I legitimately believed that.

Does it make more sense to prioritize human beings because we’re all human and want to be prioritized? Yeah, that makes sense. But hurting animals is still sus under that logic.