I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They're a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It's weird to say the least.

My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they're humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.

It seems to me you want magic. You don't want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that's completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?

For me, oddly, it's The Ring. The shitty american Ring that everyone agrees is really not very good and the ridiculous color filter slapped over the whole thing just makes it dreary and washed out and bad.

I know why this is, too. It's because I watched it in middle school before I had any experience with horror movies. The Ring was the first actual horror movie I ever watched and I didn't watch another until after college. As a result, I can't watch The Ring without being transported back to being a scared middle schooler. If I'd first watched it later, after I had a handle on the kinds of scares to expect from a horror movie, it wouldn't have affected me the same. Objectively, it's not that scary and is mostly just kind of bad, but fuck me if Samara climbing out of a TV isn't an image that scares me to this day, every time I think about it!

There's so very much wrong with this, but the part I noticed that I think is funny is this person is incensed that non-americans treat the US as a monolith but in this post they are treating Europe as a monolith! "Euro beer", "I love Europe and have friends there", "smug Europeans". This very post is hypocritical in the extreme! Hilarious

meat is such an unreplaceable source of easily digestible nutrients

Are you being serious right now? This isn't true, like, at all.

On the off chance this is true and not just an antivegan bait post, I'll give you two pieces of advice: if you're hungry all the time, eat more. If your poops aren't solid, eat more fiber. Beans, tofu, whole grains, they're all your friends.

Oh, and take B12 if you're not already. It's the one nutrient that's harder to get as a vegan than a carnist, because the animals carnists eat have been supplemented with B12, and some of it is still present in their dead flesh

Yeah, there's one who's a regular at the bar extremely close to where we live. He frequently leaves the bar when it closes in the extremely early hours of the morning and I swear he makes his bike as loud as possible on purpose. I get woken up by this asshole like two or three times a month and I hate him with a fiery passion.

Also, and this is a bit of a different issue, but there is absolutely no reason that "meat" has to mean animal flesh. Historically the word "meat" has been used to refer to all sorts of things. Nutmeat and sweetmeats are the two examples that spring to mind immediately, neither of which is dead animal. I support taking back the word "meat" from the carnists. Yeah, I eat meat, it's soy meat and it's delicious! No dead animal involved!

Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you're defining democracy as "a system in which people vote", then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don't think that's a great definition and I don't think China is a "liberal democracy" like the US is, but at this point, we're getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don't think now is exactly the time for that.)

Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the "all" feed aren't going to be the ones where we're talking theory, they're going to be the ones where we're dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That's true. It doesn't mean that theory posts don't exist, just that they aren't as contentious as dunking posts. That's an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.

Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It's probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say "libs suck", we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it's not that we ignore republicans, it's just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think "liberal" means "democrat". It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think "liberals" and "democrats" are synonyms.

And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn't mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It's to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It's fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make "communism" a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?

even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?

There isn't any discussion on political theory

There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there's a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I've learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you're reading, you'll get engagement and answers. It's pretty cool.

the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

Yes, we're communists. We aren't going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you're an actual leftist and not some "just vooooote" liberal, you'll probably enjoy hexbear.

Radlib isn't one I've heard yet! Would you mind saying a little more about why you think hexbears are radlibs?

What is event meant by man and women being "equal"?

That we're all human beings who deserve to not have our gender determine what we can and cannot do? I think that's pretty obvious. In practice, of course, we're not there yet. Misogyny is rampant and insidious. But the goal in my mind is for gender to just legitimately not matter at all, outside of, like, romantic and sexual relationships.

I'd urge you to consider the fact that we are explicitly, radically pro-trans. Our mod team is over half trans people and our userbase heavily skews that direction as well. I myself am trans. And I'm a communist, partially because of the experiences I've had as a trans person living under neoliberalism. I didn't start out as a communist, I slowly drifted that way as a result of learning, specifically learning more history. I'll recommend the podcast Blowback here, I think all 3 seasons are really good, well-researched, informative, and entertaining. They give a lot of context to various US actions abroad and it's a very approachable podcast. Season 4 is coming out soon and I can't wait!

Also, check out Cuba's family code if you want an example of a communist country being extremely socially progressive. It's cool and good!

I really thought we were going to get to the end and have a "wait, im american, this is america". Because the places I know that have infrastructure literally collapsing are all in the US. I can think of a parking garage, an apartment/condo building, and an interstate off the top of my head.