Ukraine

Watching .world libs talk about Hexbear is always entertaining because it's like a bunch of kids sitting around a campfire swapping stories, with the bear growing 5 ft taller with each retelling.

You want to know why they think Putin's a communist? You know you can just go there and ask them. They'll tell you 1) they don't, 2) what they do think about Putin, and 3) why they think what they do. It's not hard, it's not like it's some big secret.

But I want you to bear with me and embark on a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you're a full on MAGA chud, like, you believe George Soros is the communist CEO of Antifa aiming to kill all white people. But then you're like, "Maybe I should try talking to these people so I can understand why it is that they want to kill all white people," and you leave your bubble and seek out communists and antifascists all over the place and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspectives (regardless of what you think of it), and then you come back to Truth Social or whatever and try to share what you learned. How do you think that'll be received? It'll be received very poorly. They'll say you're a communist trying to spread lies or that you were duped by them and what they actually believe is what they're said to believe, in the MAGA lore. If, on the other hand, you just repeat what everyone else in the community is saying about Antifa, putting no effort into understanding the actual beliefs of the people you're talking about, you'll receive praise and agreement, and those oh so precious upvotes. This is how their collective fiction is maintained, growing ever more divorced from reality.

Now, if you step away from lemmy.world and go to hexbear.net and make a genuine attempt to understand their perspective, and then come back to your community and try to share what you learned, how do you think that will be received? As opposed to just repeating what everyone in your community says? It's the same shit, it's the exact same social dynamic at play. If you want upvotes on .world/truth social, you have to accept the collective fiction about hexbear/Antifa and then develop and expand upon that fiction. Saying the truth will only earn you scorn, exclusion, and downvotes (see: this comment's ratio, soon).

But like, at least internally, you should have the self-awareness to realize that obviously there isn't any logical rationale for why someone would think Putin is a communist, in the same way that there is no logical rationale for why Antifa would want to kill all white people. Because it's not based on any real thing that people believe, it's a strawman created as part of a collective fiction that you're not allowed to challenge if you want to be a part of a particular in-group.