I’ve come to two realizations recently:
One
The sudden tankie willingness to believe that Trump cares about a cease-fire in Gaza, and got tough with the Israelis and then they capitulated which Biden could have done at any time, sheds some interesting light on how the tankies think. They accuse anyone who disagrees with them of shifting their realities around, such that anything Biden does is good, anything the State Department says is always true, even if it contradicts itself or basic common sense or reality. I always thought that this was just a lazy reality-free arguing tactic, but in retrospect, I should have realized that it’s a tell about their own thought process. Just like it’s a warning sign if someone constantly suspects their partner of cheating, or is constantly on an absurdly hypervigilant lookout for scams and people trying to cheat them out of money, this is a key revelation about the way Hexbear itself looks at reality.
Trump is a capable diplomat, if believing that lets them trash Biden. Trump cares about Palestinians, if believing that lets them trash Biden. The cart is firmly in its place in front, and everything else including the horse can follow along depending on what the cart dictates.
Two
Hexbear’s censorship, and wild hostility to anyone who comes to “their” place and tries not to toe the party line, really does do a pretty effective job of distorting the view of reality and consensus that their users are able to experience.
Take a look at these and compare:
Authoritarian is a meaningless word and I am convinced it was invented by the CIA
authoritarian is whenever the government does something that might negatively affect my class, pragmatic necessity is when the government does something that might negatively affect the people I employ
Even worse, it was invented by western academia, much like ‘totalitarian’, and has never actually had a solid definition that didn’t also apply to western countries (and the only real arguments that it doesn’t are the west both pardoning and the giving back the property of literal Nazis, many times people who were directly responsible for the Holocaust, effectively meaning that authoritarianism is when liberals actually adhere to the legal systems they pretend to hold as sacrosanct).
Dishonest (typically liberal) state/regime which distances itself from de facto policies/laws by several degrees via privatized intermediaries that they require to preserve their ideological center: “FREE SOCIETY” replete with rampant racism, secret police, prisons, and pornographic poverty.
Honest (typically AES) state/regime which owns up to their laws/policies and directly enforce them rather than laundering them through obfuscated state organs: “AUTHORITARIAN/TOTALITARIAN PRISON-STATE” replete with constitutional labor, housing, education, and healthcare rights.