QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

Oh! One more thing to add. Back when the hexbear code made it so comments and upvotes updated in real time without needing a manual refresh, I would sometimes upvote and de-upvote a comment multiple times over like 10 or 20 seconds right after it appeared. If the comment was freshly made as I was reading the thread, I knew the person who made it was probably still looking at their screen with the comment they just made. I always hoped they’d see their upvote count flashing up and down repeatedly, and it would be like my way of saying “hi! I see you there! I’m here rn too. Nice comment.” I kinda miss that.

Only on the news megathread, really.

Here’s my breakdown as one who mostly lurks, for whatever it’s worth: Aside from the news mega, I would guess maybe around 70% of threads I only give a once-over, or maybe twice, so there is really no point or need for a “read/unread” mark.

Some interesting ones, maybe 20% I’ll come back to to refresh and see what’s new, but usually not more than a few times and I can remember at first glance what I’ve read. Also there will still be lots of upbears on the stuff that was good or that I agreed with (I hand out upbears pretty uh… sigh… “liberally”) so it’s not hard to tell if I’ve read through a thread. I don’t usually sort by “new” so when I see the thread for the first time, it’s usually already been up for a bit.

On maybe 9% that are very interesting or are struggle sessions and whathaveyou will I keep refreshing. On those, using upbears as an “already read” marker would be helpful, but I still don’t want to just give them out totally freely, especially in struggle sessions for obvious reasons. And the very last 1% are ones I comment in which I will also refresh a lot but will depend on the context, where sometimes I will upbear nearly everyone especially if they respond to me, or in other cases if it’s argumentative, commenters definitely gotta earn it.

But the newsmega, when I read it, I almost want to be a completionist about it and will do exactly what you describe. When shit is going down, I will scroll through multiple times a day, even several times an hour if it’s hopping. I will upbear everything simply to know if I’ve already read it so I can scroll through it fast for anything new without having to even re-read at all. Only comments I really don’t like and would feel angry or dirty if I did, don’t actually get one. But I also go through phases where I don’t read the newsmega, or much of any news, just as a mental health break. And sometimes those breaks last longer than they should, and I feel bad for not keeping track of what’s happening, but that’s a different topic.

Thank you for reading my dissertation on my upbear habits, I’m sure you found it deeply enthralling.

As far as relating fascism specifically to the Neoliberalism of the US, here is an insightful comment by @Droplet@hexbear.net:

Fascism is fundamentally characterized by 1) mass privatization and 2) vicious anti-communism.

The fascist counter-revolution first saw its success in 1920 Italy when the post-WWI nationalized economy gave rise to a strong socialist movement that nearly overthrew the bourgeois government.

WWI ended laissez faire capitalism when it found itself unable to ramp up war production and suffered from inefficient output, and this was a disadvantaged position during inter-imperialist warfare. Instead, state run capitalism became the norm as the imperialist powers were dragged into a protracted Great War during which vast resources and war production could only possibly be organized efficiently with state intervention. Such dramatic changes shifted the leverage to the working class, whom the ruling class became dependent on to win the war. The consequence of this was the explosion of labor and socialist movements throughout Europe, and culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that subsequently ended WWI.

As they found themselves unable to resist against the tidal wave of workers movement, inspired by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Europe, the liberal capitalist class turned to fascism with the hopes that such extreme brutality could crush the seemingly unstoppable socialist movements. They succeeded, first in Italy in 1922, and then subsequently in Germany in the early 1930s.

One of the first signs of a fascist regime was the mass privatization of the previously nationalized industries:

Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister in October 1922. Nazis rose to power in 1933 in Germany. Mussolini convened a meeting of his cabinet and immediately decided to privatize all the public enterprises. On December 3, 1922, they passed a law where they promised to reduce the size and function of the government, reform tax laws and also reduce spending. This was followed by mass privatization. He privatized the post office, railroads, telephone companies, and even the state life insurance companies. Afterward, the two firms that had lobbied the hardest: Assicurazioni Generali (AG) and Adriatica di Sicurtà (AS), became a de-facto oligopoly. They became for-profit enterprises. The premiums increased, and poor people had their coverage removed.

After the trains were privatized, the services became slower and more irregular, contrary to the popular myth.

In January 1923, Mussolini eliminated rent-control laws. His reasoning ought to be familiar since that is the same reasoning used in many contemporary editorials against rent control laws. He claimed rent control laws prevent landlords from building new housing. When tenants protested, he eliminated tenants’ unions. As a result, rent prices increased wildly in Rome, and many families became homeless. Some went to live in caves.

Once more, these policies allowed landlords to increase their profit and holdings while they severely hurt the poor.

To remove “government waste,” Mussolini removed the federal government from remote areas in Italy. This meant that rural farmers, peasants, and workers no longer had the protection of the federal government against abuse from agribusiness. Instead, they were entirely under the mercy of big businesses.

The austere economic policies in fascist Italy were studied closely by the British marginalists, who were the precursors to the neoclassical economists that eventually found the Chicago school and brought neoliberalism to the forefront of economics.

As such, there is a direct connection where fascism and their austerity economics directly contributed to the development of neoliberalism. Combined with a vicious anti-labor and anti-communist thrust, the models of fascism being replicated in Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s (Russia being a special case because they didn’t go all the way, as Putin re-nationalized a lot of the key industries since in the early 2000s) under the guise of neoliberalism, during which hundreds of thousands if not millions of communists and left wing activists were brutally murdered.

Within Europe itself, mass privatization began in the UK as early as the 1960s, and began to become part of the European center left/social democratic platforms in the 1970s. Interestingly, most historical account of privatization in Europe conveniently left out the earliest forms of mass privatization that took place under the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

In other words, neoliberalism is simply fascism rebranded. By all accounts, the neoliberal model of the United States is as close as you can get to fascism - what is missing here is that violence against communists, labor activists, minorities aren’t becoming prevalent yet due to the relatively high living standards of the US being sustained by its foreign imperialist policies.

But don’t let that fool you, just like in the 1920s, they really can turn to fascism in an instant when the situation becomes dire enough to call for it. It took no effort at all in convincing an entire class of liberals in Italy and Germany to support Mussolini and Hitler.

Variations on this question get brought up every once in a while, which is good, I think it’s important to rehash these kinds of discussions even for people who have seen them come up before. But if anyone is interested in skimming over some past hexbear conversation on exactly this topic, here are a couple threads that I think had some good responses too:

I want materialist definitions of fascism please - 1 year ago

What is your definition of fascism? - 2 years ago

edit: Just came across another post from 2 years ago asking specifically what Stalin’s definition was, and @Alaskaball@hexbear.net turned up an answer, found in a 1941 Speech Stalin gave.

I know. But what I said above is true regardless, ftr.

Definitely not. If there is actual talk of instance wide defederation over this then something has gone horribly, hilariously wrong. No, I’m just saying how funny the language and framing of this has been, and that they already defederated from the dunk tank.

And you can’t view deleted posts from lemmy.ml by clicking on them in their modlog the way you can with hexbear. This is just the standard there.

In other words, people logged in to an account on lemmy.ml who see in the modlog that a post was deleted will only see “error_couldnt_find_post” if they click on it hoping to see what it was. For a lemmy.ml account, none of that post content or the comment thread it generated is visible, just gone.

To see what used to be there, you have to get to it from a hexbear account.

Hmm now that it’s been made obvious that c/the_dunk_tank aren’t oathbreakers and didn’t in fact go rogue after all but still bend the knee to Hexbear, will there be talk of full scale defederation?

(I don’t think they will, it’s just so funny how this has been framed as “going rogue” and now that they’re essentially pulling out of an alliance with a hexbear comm! It’s Just

a complete 180 of my previous impression of him.

Honestly I don’t get it. Davel has been on of my favorite members of the broader lemmy-lemmygrad-hexbear commentariat when it comes to knowledgable anti-imperialist takes in the posting trenches. He has consistently been among the best at having pertinent (even lib-denialism-proof) sources on hand and ready to go for when the libs, much in need of being owned as always, start clamoring for them, and then correctly pointing out their own debate bro perversion. I have unjokingly thanked him for his service before.

It is so odd and discouraging to see him on the other side of that gulf.

Truly, no one is immune to the occasional need of touching grass.

I loved loved the Pumpkins in the 90s. Certain eras of my youth were defined by their albums. I actually learned guitar mostly to play Nirvana songs, but soon after that when learning what Corgan wrote, that’s what got me to where I would consider myself a fairly decent guitarist and of course it heavily influenced my own style and the kind of stuff I liked to write. And actually Billy Corgan is still a fucking amazing guitarist, even if I think musically he had said all he was really gonna say by the time Machina came out and the song writing which had once been like you said, real masterpieces, fell off dramatically into the mediocre or worse range.

I didn’t even think about Smashing Pumpkins for years, and was of course disappointed but not entirely shocked to learn how chud-adjacent he turned out to be, though I knew he had always been a dick at best. But just a few years back, I watched some videos of him just talking about gear and a few techniques to get certain sounds, fiddling around doing some demonstrations. The dude really is a virtuoso I think. Like in ways that I didn’t realize back when I was a big fan in my teens and early 20s. I also used to listen to a lot of Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, etc., and while Corgan may not be at quite that level, he’s closer to it than any other 90s popular rock or alternative guitarists I can think of. There are plenty of Pumpkins songs where that isn’t even evident, but of course certain other songs and their solos it does get revealed.

I’m surprised no one has pointed out what an appropriate name this clown has. Goddamn dronies.

Also,

(mostly because I no longer have a working PC, so I had to switch to playing on my roommate’s PS5) and am about 40 hours in now.

Would you say the experience is significantly better on PC vs PS5? I’ve been really wanting to play Elden Ring after finally playing Bloodborne a few months ago, but I only have a PS4. I’ve been holding off with the hope that at some point in the distant future I’ll have a PC capable of running games like this, or less likely, a PS5 if I luck into one on absurd sale.

Oh yeah, it would piss me the hell off too. If it really does end up breaking uBlock and there is no other work around, I will be one of the ones to simply just not ever watch youtube videos, regrettably.

Since it does seem limited to just some people right now and you are one of the unlucky ones, I’d suggest just using youtube frontends (like Invidious or Piped). They also seem to still be blocking ads just fine and have a bunch of other benefits. If youtube ends up implementing this new ad-forcing bullshit for everyone, I’d expect the frontends won’t be immune from it either, but for now, I can’t recommend these enough. When I was testing uBlock earlier of course I was using youtube directly, but generally speaking, I don’t use youtube directly at all anymore and will only watch youtube videos with an Invidious or Piped instance. If you’re not already aware, it’s as simple as replacing the youtube-dot-com part of the url in your browser with the url of a frontend instance (that’s what hexreplybot does for us!) That’s going to be easier and less time consuming than using a downloader for every video you want to watch and certainly easier (and less costly) than a VPN. Youtube hates this of course (one of the reasons I love it) and so instances will sometimes get blocked or rate-limited, but it’s always just temporary and all you have to do is use a different instance. Today piped.yt was working well for me, so whatever video you’re trying to watch, just replace youtube.com with piped.yt, leaving the rest of the url the same. If you have issues with that, try inv.tux.pizza (which is an Invidious instance).

And since you mentioned using an extension, another thing I’d recommend if you want it automated so everytime you click on any youtube link you see the video via one of the frontends, get the extension LibRedirect. It’s an unfortunate name for an otherwise pretty great extension. It works for a bunch of other websites too if you want it to.

They must be doing a limited or selective rollout again to test the new methods on only some accounts. Because I’m not getting any ads breaking through uBlock Origin. I’ve tested with phone and laptop on multiple videos and it’s still working as it always has for me.

I have no spare money (I’m also seriously struggling) but I do have spare buprenorphine I could donate. I realize you’d have to share location details (or better, a PO box) and mailing that to you would be a little sketch for the both of us, so hopefully other people will come through with the funds you need for it, I expect they will. But if not, I’m willing to send what I have, and depending on your daily dose, it should be more than a month’s worth. So at least know that there is another option that doesn’t include the horrors of bupe withdrawal, if it comes to that.

Sorry to hear about the situation with your mom. That’s a tough position to be put in, but as I’m sure you know, you did absolutely nothing to betray her by refusing to fucking scab, even if she feels like you did. I hope after a while she’s able to see that it’s just her son being a good, principled, thoughtful person in such a way that she should be proud of.

I commented in another part of the thread, but here is a thorough collection of links (that another hexbear put together) about what really happened including direct refutations of the US narrative: https://tiananmensquare.carrd.co/

Thank you! Just to add even more sources regarding the reality of the 6-4 incident, here is a carrd with a whole slew of good links with descriptions. Some are redundant with the links you posted, but there are a lot of others, including things like the full “Tank Man” video and a section with “Mentions in State-Owned Media In China [refuting the “censor” narrative].” I believe our comrade @robinnn@hexbear.net put it together (along with other ones on Xinjiang, DPRK, and the Holodomor).

Is this even a tiny bit about “reaching out,” or is it simply that these democrats really are just fascists doing what fascists are wont to do?

However… still also very unsure about some things. I’m totally alone which feels like it makes it harder to figure certainthings out. So also

You can always check the modlog for recent bans and post/comment removals. They don’t even have to be recent if you know the username. If you’re viewing from hexbear, the link is always at the bottom of the page (the link in the sidebar is strangely unreliable). It works like this for a lot of instances but not all. You can probably do it there from your lemmy.ml account, but it might show different recent activity, since it’s a different instance.