Anarchism

Well, as far as I'm aware it started with that awful "tankie" meme posted by db0 that portrayed MLs/MLMs as inhuman monsters rolling out the firing squads at the earlier opportunity. That thread blew up when our users saw it on our feeds and voiced their opinions with it. Since then, there's been a few more threads posted by db0 and they keep blowing up cuz it's usually something our users take offense to (like posting this essay by ziq, famous terminally-online "anti-civ anarchist"/ecofascist). I have only seen one thread by our users about db0 but that came after a few days of db0 posting threads like this intentionally calling out MLs or "tankies" in a bad-faith and provocative manner.

To be blunt it seems like the magnitude of the hexbear response seems to have more to do with them being federated and given tacit permission to keep commenting about it here than anything else. There is a lot worse going on elsewhere that hexbear users don't invest this much energy in because it is less convenient to do so.

Well, we are aware of places like lemmy.world with much worse politics. These threads just keep coming up in our feeds that we can reply to with our usual accounts. Db0 is free to ban us all or add a rule saying MLs can't comment in this community but that does sound a lot like "forcible suppression of opposition" lol.

None of that really helps me understand this attitude/behavior that seems like whiplash between humor and hatred.

If it helps, that's just kinda what Hexbear's site culture is like lol. People are very passionate about politics here and can get upset about people behaving in a manner like db0. That being said, I have seen a lot of constructive and calm conversations between our users and other instances' users about politics even when we disagree.