selfcrit

Even if those people are fascists

Edit: i should have clarified im talking about torture and sadistic pleasure. Ie injecting hydrochloric acid into the eyeballs and seeing what happens

I think I'm doing it wrong. I get so angry when I see people writing comments that show even a little bit of effort but the content is pure imperial propaganda. It's been getting worse as the years roll on.

The latest bouts of this involve Venezuela and Taiwan, but the topics can vary. My worst behavior is when the commenter is posting total hypocrisy or thinly veiled white supremacy.

What bothers me about my behavior is that I know the commenter is unlikely to considering themselves a white supremacist or a hypocrite. And yet, I insult them and demean them and berate them all the same.

An example might be a comment evaluating Chavismo against Umberto Eco's checklist of fascism. For example, the commenter claimed that Fear of Difference was characterstic of Chavismo, when it was in reality embracing difference by bringing together the various oppressed peoples of Venezuela against the white supremacist neo/colonial culture there.

I said things like "Do you even believe the bullshit you're writing?" And "At this point I can't tell if you're a troll posting deliberate propaganda or not, but I'm just gonna chalk it up to your white supremacy".

By the time I was done writing my reply I was saying things like "Just fuck off".

The thing is, a part of me feels like the anger needs to be presented to these people. A part of me believes that having civil discourse with people who say Venezuela was red fascism need to see that this is not civil discourse, and a part of me believes that lurkers reading the comments also need to see it.

But I don't know if that's correct, or even if it is correct in some cases whether I should be acting on it. I also greatly embody the anger. I ruminate on my writing when I'm mid discussion, often carrying it with me in whatever activity I'm doing. Sometimes when the anger is particularly bad and either I'm tired or caffeinated or whatever I feel a lot of tension in my body and even get shaky.

I welcome your feedback, and I will answer any clarifying questions you have. Thank you for your consideration, comrades.

I have a history of being notoriously demanding. Because of the circumstances I was living in I had became politically minded by the time I was entering middle school, but because I didn't have an outlet to make a difference and all I could do is personal lifestyle changes. My life has become an endless critique of exploitation, both internally and externally.

I have effectively removed myself from society, as much as I'm able to, and continue to remove myself more. I spend most of my time trying to push others in the same direction. It never really works out. Nobody really likes being around me, either because they don't take me seriously and assume I am faking it to get attention or because I'm so harsh, it's just not fun at all to be around me.

I can't critique myself out of being too critical. I have to actually go out there and get a hobby, actually learn what's it like to be a person. What keeps me from doing so is the idea that if I let myself enjoy life, I'll abandon those in need. But in reality I end up dehumanizing the very same people, who I claim I wish so much to protect. Just because I don't do it for personal gain doesn't make it any better.

I need to be better. Also I'm stepping away from the keyboard now, to try to do something different, so if I messed up somehow that's why I am not responding.

A whole bunch of things, but even the way I talk about myself and my struggles has collateral damage. Calling myself a “basement dweller” just puts shame on people who share my struggles, even cursing myself for getting excited about Zohran’s win and then posting “fell for it again” dismisses the hard work leftists still put in.

Apologies to the community, still working on being less of a bitter asshole.

Hey Hexbear. It’s me, Nakoichi. If you can some take time to read this post then I will be grateful. Thank you.

After I was banned my heart sunk and I felt like I was having an arterial fibrillation. I’ve been on this site from day one, no exaggeration here, right after r/Chapotraphouse and all its sister subs got banned on :stormfront: user u/Bone-Dash who I’m still friends with gave me a link to what used to be chapo.chat which was the name this esteemed website used to go by.

Since the start I’ve posted almost everyday except for the time I injured my arm which made it hard to type but not too hard to shoot a ban here and there, for those who deserved it of course. I’ve accumulated over 3.1 thousands posts and 27 thousand comments. I won’t be able to add to this number and that’s fine, but when I look at those numbers I think if it was worth it the end? Don’t get me wrong I love this community and the people in it but being 40 and having spent five years of my time on this site I think I have the perspective that it was all a waste of time.

I will be very honest but it all got to my head, like all of it and the fact I was making a name for myself on the website meant that I treated people unfairly and this is wrong. I wish I could take it all back and i apologize for the threats I made to people. If I’m honest I’m a very insecure person offline so when I’m online I’m who I want to be. I used to be admin and I used to be a mod and I think these are the greatest achievements in my life and I’m proud to have held those titles, but at the same time they were never earned because I abused my power and harmed the community I’ve been a part of because of my own selfish insecurities. I truly am sorry to my friends because even though I’m still in contact with some of them, I’ll never be able to interact the way I used to with them, on this website.

Part of me died when I was banned. I still feel the shock of it and find myself trying to log on. The other day I teared up a bit when I tried logging in again and say the “you are banned” prompt.

I won’t be coming back I just wanted to make this post to apologize and to make up for everything bad I did. I love you all. So long.

Hello Hexbear! I was a (Catholic) theocrat until about 2009, when many factors pushed me into a gradual leftward conversion. I now support Marxism-Leninism and already identify as a communist apprentice, but am still learning feminism and gender equality.

When Pope Francis died, I lectured Hexbear not to show disrespect. People interpreted my carelessly written comment as something much worse than I intended, and dogpiled me. I reacted angrily to the dogpile. An awesome comrade kindly explained:

folk are emotional creatures rather than strictly logical. Some people have been hurt by Christianity and they’re going to be rightfully distrustful or outright hostile.

That helped me realize I misread the context, perhaps because of my autism, depression and anxiety. Hexbear has a strong LGBT majority, and Christianity has been inhuman to these comrades. I am ashamed but it was a learning opportunity. Francis had mostly nice words (sometimes not even that!), but sweet talk is not enough. Malcolm X comes to mind.

I hope you accept my apology.

Now, going philosophical, perhaps the contrast between sweet talk and harsh reality is a feature of idealist ideologies, including religion? For example, in feudal theocratic Tibet, Buddhist monks wanted to impose the death penalty on disobedient serfs, but Buddhism prohibits taking human life. The solution: some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die.

Capital punishment remained prohibited in the realm of ideas, but, in material reality, Buddhist monks killed serfs -- like Christianity says sweet words about loving enemies and serving the poor, while the faithful (including clergy) contort themselves to rationalize the opposite behavior.

Christian scripture condemns the Pharisee who gloated about following all the rules and not being like the Publicans. Many Christians are just as bad or even worse, because they do not come close to even following the rules. For example, Christian cishet males grossly violate Christian sexual moral, often even secular sexual moral, "but I am not gay, so it's OK. I am pro-family, I hate feminists and gays!" It is worse than discrimination. It is scapegoating.

This disturbs me.

I said Netenyahu resembled Nosferatu or rather Count Orlok. Really did not want to evoke the image because he’s Jewish but more because he looks like a bloodless fucking vampire COME ON. But I understand how it can offend people and I apologize if I’ve hurt anyone, especially with it causing friendly fire with the body shaming aspect of it.

I would also like to show contrition for the other instance of antisemitism I was accused of, which got me banned from c/news. I mentioned that the US was cucked by Israel, which is not only entirely wrong but also using language I find distasteful and would never otherwise use. But I said it for ‘comedic’ effect…. I must have been really drunk.

Apologies

Yeah, so it looks like the post I made is based on a graph that was generated by AI and is probably just made up bullshit. I believed it blindly because of confirmation bias. Also it was posted by a racist account, and I didn't even check to see who posted it before I stole the picture of the graph and posted it.

I got 126 up-bears. But at what cost? A piece of my dignity. I will reflect on these matters and attempt to post more responsibly. My namesake would be ashamed... So it goes.

It is still racist even if you're quoting someone else's racism and the racism is window dressing for a joke about having a small penis, the "it's okay to tell a racist joke because I am not racist" justification may have some flaws in its logic that the shrewder users of this internet web forum might be able to discern

I looked through my moderation history and yeah I gotta cut it out with the edginess. Mild instances of misogyny and sexual humor in comms where it's not allowed, etc. This is not a web forum for the podcast with the laughing Greek man. It's a web forum for the podcast about the dark cowboy who doesn't get in helicopters.

I apologize to those whom I have offended or made uncomfortable and wish to share the wisdom that sometimes it is indeed good to log off and have a think

I made an off-color comment I fully regret intending to just target chuds, and had some VERY bad implications like something straight out of Idiocracy. Sorry to anyone who read that and apologies to the mods.

Yeah, that’s it. That was dickish of me, and I know misanthropy’s a real problem of mine.

The comment that broke me out of my reactionary idiocy:

After taking the time to calm down from a PTSD flashback. I will try to explain this calmly.

The argument is that the legal and professional structures around healthcare are in direct service to capitalism. You said yourself, you have to violate the law to provide healthcare. That's proving the point every one of use in that thread is making.

Why I'm angry with you, personally, your actual person: You didn't talk to us, you disengaged from the only person you made any motion to listen to in the thread and then came here to subtweet to people who aren't of the marginalized communities in question. This is bad form, at best.

My argument about the medical establishment:

I was strapped to a table. I was tortured. It was Legal. A teacher put me there and a doctor did it.

I was a queer child and that was my crime.

For the love of god. Listen to us, don't just get offended we don't respect your profession because you, personally, may do truly good work. You and 1000 other people aren't enough. The system must be abolished and replaced with something humane.

I am sure most of you saw the ACAB post, if not here is the link: https://hexbear.net/post/4475400

I reacted personally and negatively to this thread. I did not see the criticism of the medical and educational establishment through the eyes of those who are forced to endure it, but rather as a perpetrator. As I say in the thread, I am committed to uplifting and providing care to those who are trapped and abused in this system. I took criticism of the system as criticism of myself. I was too close to the issue from my side, rather than standing in solidarity with my oppressed comrades.

I am sorry. As someone who purports to be working in your favor, I fell into the classic patriarchal and imperialist mindset. This is something I thought I had overcome, and thus could never be wrong.

I would also like to personally apologize to the comrade that I disengaged from then immediately subtweeted on a comm in which I am a mod. That was inappropriate and a clear abuse of my position. As someone as mod on multiple comms, I should not have let an interaction from one comm spill over into another, especially with hostile intent in the context in which I did.

Hi all, hoping you're having a good day.

I'm currently towards the end of my undergrad journey in philosophy and I'm moving towards a masters in political science. It's kind of difficult to find professors that are interested in this thing of ours, but I managed to survive in that ideologically hostile environment. I'm currently on a commission to review the undergrad program and I'm sitting on the board with both professors and some studen colleagues of mine. We had our third encounter this past week and I've been confronted with a personnal dilemma that I wanted to ask the community about.

Since I'm mostly a masc, cishet presenting guy, I try to be careful in spaces that are meant to be safe for people who want to study and do their own thing. Gender/race/decolonial studies are very popular topics inside of the department where I study, but it's also firmly ideologically commited to the analytic tradition of the anglo-saxon world and as such, it's extremely liberal. We don't even have a course on Marx or any authors that are of the marxist tradition. The board mainly wants to introduce more diversity in the course offers, and I'm all for that, but of all the intersting women authors, she proposed Hannah Arendt. I've been kind of shocked by that proposal since Arendt isn't exactly a feminist or a leftist, it feels like they did the meme. I decided to say something and I said that it's important to note the contribution of the marxist tradition in the feminist struggle. I said that the Venn Diagram between feminists and marxists overlaps in kind of a big way and I made a point that tokenising diversity while ignoring the overarching ideology that made these movements successful is not a good approach. I got a weird reaction and it kind of reaffirmed a lot of what I've felt in terms of ideological alienation inside of that department.

So yeah, I'd like some feedback from the community. Since this department is very into feminist theory and has all types of radfems that vary in terms of political allegence, it's hard to bring up such things. I've picked up some hostile vibes from two of the women inside that board since then and it's not the first time that my leftist speeches kind of throw off women when they feel I'm mansplaning or something. I can totally understand women wanting spaces and being so-fucking-tired of dumbass trash men. Y'all go full volcel and queen off I support you 100%. But like, can we also stop ignoring history and the immense contribution of the leftist project to feminist emancipation? This is the education we give forward to the next generation and I'm not sure more racist-warlike-women in philosophy is exactly the thing that will solve those inequalities they pretend to care so much about.

Going after users asking for mutual aid is just purely reactionary, and I take full responsibility for my actions in making the world just a bit worse by being an asshole.

I risked causing real life harm just to kick someone asking for help. It's pathetic. All I can say is that I'm sorry @allthetimesivedied@hexbear.net for attacking you and I beg your forgiveness. I'm sorry to everyone else I let down by saying such things.

Had some time to sleep on it and think in regards to the he/him situation and menby on hb saying some shitty things. While I stand by my original statement that blanket blaming all men as bad is reactionary I crossed the line a bit in some statements that could be interpreted instead as "not all men".

That was not my intent and I'm sorry if anyone thought otherwise. My main point last night I was trying to make was that assigning blanket blame to a set of pronouns for bad actors isn't healthy and I think most would agree.

Thanks for putting up with me and thanks to the users who checked me.

this is probably going to be a whole lot of rambling stream of consciousness kinda stuff, but please bear with me. also, this isn't in connection to any public mess; i want this to be my first thread on the site, to ensure that i won't forget or try to deny accountability.

i've found myself locked in this vicious spiral of breaching spaces that are ostensibly welcoming to minorities, only to find out that it's all vibes-based, to the extent of making these spaces unsafe in general, but even more frustratingly, leaving the very groups they're supposedly protecting especially vulnerable. i say minorities, but i need you to understand that i am very much white. more specifically, from a very white country, brought up in an environment where not participating in racism would lead to your being ostracised. while this was always unacceptable to me, being perceived as some kind of lunatic extremist in such environments says much more about the culture you're immersed in than it does about you. i've finally realised my dream of leaving this place behind, but i suspect it's going to take a whole lot longer for the place to leave me.

i'm also predisposed to certain things that can easily cloud my judgment in various ways. it's much more manageable than it used to be, but i've long since accepted that it's something i'm going to have to be keeping in check for the rest of my life. however. i believe i've been stumbling a bit as of late. there's certainly no shortage of libs / wreckers / fascists / what have you, but i believe all of this stuff i've been laying out thus far has merged into this colossal monstrosity in my head. it seems to me i'm on the verge of being carried away too far, too close for comfort to becoming someone whose "righteous fury" will cause them to confidently speak out of turn, achieving the exact opposite of what i set out to do. but if there's something i've learned in this life, it's that the learning is never over; you're not going to be any more of a finished product sitting on your porch in your 70's than you were celebrating your 18th birthday. it's just a matter of priorities.

thank you for your time i can't exactly stop anyone from commenting on this, but i'd like to please ask you to refrain from doing so. either way, i'll have to be logging off under the assumption that my request will be granted, as otherwise i'm afraid i'll be fixating on the what-ifs, thus taking a further toll on my already somewhat fraught mental state & making it extremely difficult for me to focus on the work that needs to be done.

First of all, let it be said that I'm sorry for causing harm and distress to all the femmes on Hexbear. The holiday season is very stressful (I'm dealing with a bunch of real-life bullshit myself), and I'm sorry for ruining what should be a place to escape from the bullshit. I hope this apology and explanation would restore at least some faith in this website's ability to be a safe space for members of marginalized communities.

Second of all, let it be said that I consider incels to be nothing more than another type of reactionary like the racist and the transphobe that must be crushed. They are the enemy, and for the sake of undying love for marginalized communities and for the sake of undying hatred of all those who chose to humiliate, exploit, bring harm, or attempt to destroy those communities, we must bring ruin to the wretched enemy by any means necessary.

Third of all, let it be said that I flipped-flopped between posting some self-indulgent whiny bullshit, posting some juvenile "fuck the admins the admins can kiss my ass" temper tantrum, and not bothering with this apology and fucking off, but after seeing the other "self-crit" where OP just spend the whole tl;dr post defending his actions and yet another dumpster fire thread full of cringey incels by people who learned absolutely nothing from the previous dumpster fire thread full of cringey incels, I realized that I needed to pull my head from my ass and stop centering myself. I was falling into the trap of individualism, to view my temp banning purely from the perspective of me as a individual who got temp banned by an individual admin. But the temp banning was given within a particular social context and within a particular collective body. The real question is not whether the temp ban was justified from an individual perspective, but what does this collective body called Hexbear need and what actions should I pursue for the sake of fulfilling that collective need. The answer becomes crystal clear when I discarded individualism: I ought to draft a post in /c/selfcrit for the sake of supporting the admins' drive to rid this collective body of incels-in-hiding and for the sake of hopefully being a better example of what a /c/selfcrit post ought to look like.

So why did I made those two posts? Essentially, I wrote those two posts in a very poorly executed and absolutely terribly timed attempt at understanding and feeling compassion for incels. I was in "bouncing off ideas with other people and throw shit at a wall to see what sticks" mode, which makes me a lot more careless in how I post, careless in the sense of not paying attention to tone, not paying attention to the audience, and just throwing out half-baked ideas that I sorta but not really believe but that I throw out there just to see how people would react. One fundamental problem is that I didn't specify that I was mostly describing the wretched state of the incel from the perspective of the incel, which was made even worse by me using the "reaching out to a person stuck in a hole" metaphor and virtually skimming past the 100+ comments where the incels were showing their asses. Due to my poorly written and completely untimely comments, people in the thread thought I was like the other cringey incels there advocating for some shitty Incel Outreach Program^TM^.

Those comments were a failed attempt in understanding their degradation towards reactionary politics from their perspective. From the perspective of the incel, their salvation lies in some fuckable mom who's willing to provide hundreds of thousands of hours of free emotional labor as a therapist, but because women are naturally repulsed by those pathetic incels on top of not wanting to risk dying from a murder-suicide wrought by those incels, incels will never find the salvation that they so desperately want but absolutely do not deserve. Denied of their undeserved salvation, they will lash out even further and sink even further into reactionary politics, where they can be recruited by fascists and slotted into organized fascist formations. Therefore, femmes and nonmascs in general ought to organize their own formations. They should not focus on "converting" incels but instead focus on building collective power that renders incels powerless so that incels can do nothing but seethe in their little corner. Needless to say, the fact that I have to completely rewrite those comments meant those comments were trash and should have never been posted. It's one thing to shit out some half-baked poorly thought out unhinged rant about the best Fallout game (it's FO1 btw), but it's completely irresponsible to have the same cavalier attitude about a current social crisis that's happening in real life and on Hexbear.

As a final point, why did I feel that reactionaries like incels deserve compassion? I feel that we must have complete compassion for the enemy and incels are no exception. We must be able to truly feel what the enemy is feeling, to truly understand on an emotional level the enemy's thoughts, the enemy's dreams, the enemy's desires, and the enemy's fears. The vast majority of people will read this and say that I'm advocating for us to be like Jesus who turned the other cheek. No, I'm not advocating compassion for the enemy from the perspective of Jesus and Christianity, but from the perspective of the Art of War. We must understand how the enemy feels so that when we stick the knife, we'll stick it where it really hurts. We must understand the enemy's dreams so that when we crush them before their eyes, we'll understand that their spirit has been broken and more vulnerable to even more attack. We must understand the enemy's fear so that we can become even greater than their worst nightmare. This is the spirit in which I made those comments.

Unfortunately, virtually no one here would have picked up that, and without this understanding, it just becomes fascist apologia. If I say something like "That fascist has a broken leg. Look at how he's almost completely immobile. Imagine the pain and sense of helplessness he feels right now. Is there anything we can do?" the vast majority of people wouldn't pick up my implied response: "He's almost completely immobile, so he can't run and defend himself when we go and break his other leg, rendering him completely immobile. See how much pain and helplessness he feels right now? Good, now he'll feel even more pain and helplessness when we break his other leg, and since he'll be in a spiral of pain and helplessness after we break both his legs, we might as well break both of his arms as well. Don't want your limbs broken? Don't be a fucking fascist." Given that the vast majority of people wouldn't pick up this point whatsoever, it's my responsibility to clearly state this in order to avoid misunderstanding and hopefully push people to internalize approaching the enemy in this way.

Regardless of my intentions and sincere beliefs, I became part of the fucking problem, and I hope that with this apology and explanation, I would make up some of the harm that I have caused.

I made a joke about him having matching butt plugs with Nick Fuentes and how gross that is. My cishet ass didn't realize how wildly offensive that is to lgbtq comrades and I feel like a total shit for doing it so I want to apologize to the community and promise I took it to heart and will self crit on doing better.

Love y'all

I was part of the group that got banned yesterday, and I need to apologize to you all.

I have seen people mention previously that sometimes mods take upvotes for agreement, but I haven't trained myself to stop the reddit habit of voting on "food for thought" things, useful-addition-to-the-conversation-but-not-my-pov posts, and placemarkers in active threads, and there aren't downvotes here to easily mark the shitty stuff I want to come back to and learn from. I should always be opening things in new tabs instead.

I foolishly upvoted this comment as a "food for thought" comment and planned to come back to the thread yesterday evening to find it and read the responses and learn from them. instead my upvote counted as agreement and got me banned, which I know is my fault for not adapting to site culture and not foreseeing how that would be interpreted.

I totally understand, feel like the worst kind of fool, and spent my ban time thinking about what a piece of shit I am. far worse than that is the thought that any of you might think I agree with that comment, so I am posting here to apologize profusely and publicly for my upvote. I'm really, truly, terribly sorry, and idk what to do to about it except fuck off and try not to be such a fuckhead in the future.

you didn't know that was why I upvoted it, it just looked to you like a bunch of your alleged comrades liked that post, and I was one of them. I hope you can forgive me, but I understand if it made you think differently about me. I get it, and I'm just really, really sorry.

as soon as I figured out that I was banned and why, I sent a version of this via DM from my old account to an em_poc user who is very near and dear to my heart, but I don't feel right only apologizing to one person when so many of you could have been hurt by my upvote, hence this post. I'm sorry that my apology to the rest of you wasn't that immediate, but I was worried that posting it from my old account would be seen as ban evasion and make my contrition seem insincere.

I appreciate very much the kindness and compassion so many of you have shown me, and it is devastating to know that I have repaid it in this way.

I'm very, very, very sorry.

please heap your scorn and excoriation here.

My previous stance on veganism was completely incorrect, and I didn't allow it to change for so long due to personal gripes with a few users on a niche internet forum.

I wish to apologize to any vegans or veganism supporters if any of my previous statements offended them or made them uncomfortable.

Looking back, many of my arguments were reactionary nonsense, and I had almost a nonsensical derangement syndrome about the whole thing. Getting into repeated fights with users even mentioning it, and generally being an asshole. I caused lots of unnecessary trouble with dear friends and comrades, who had to deal with the effects of my deeply unserious obsession with fighting specific users.

I let my personal feelings get in the way of a nuanced evaluation, which is very unmarxist of me. My issue with singular people turned into something that warped my common sense.

Although I recognize that I still have many brainworms about it, I want to remove them, and not let pettiness control my thoughts and actions.

A big part of me unlearning was reading through many of Angel's great posts, accidentally happening across some of the old threads (cringing extremely hard over them), and close friends calling me out leading to self evaluation.

I came to this opinion weeks ago, but only now I've publically renounced my previous position to my friends and hexbear.

Hello all,

Since @CARCOSA@hexbear.net has done me the courtesy of reversing my temp ban, I am taking @kristina@hexbear.net up on her invitation to self criticize (although we now know this comm is NOT for inviting others to self crit).

In short, I was BIG MAD because some of the statements put out by the mod team during the tank comm debacle hit way too close to home for reasons I won't get into here, and I took them extremely personally. In the midst of posting furiously about this, I repeatedly misgendered CARCOSA (I've now edited what I can of this, but the modlog contains a record for anyone who would care to see). I assumed that I knew their pronouns, when I should have checked if I wasn't sure, because I was focused on posting and my own outrage. This is bitterly ironic, because I was angry in particular at what I felt were invalidating statements from the mod team regarding my own gender and sexuality, and yet this led me to invalidate the identity of someone else. In doing this I failed in a basic courtesy that I owe to people in general, and the other members of this site in particular. I would like to therefore apologize to CARCOSA and anyone else who was harmed by witnessing the misgendering. I further regret that I was unable to make this apology in a more timely fashion due to being temp banned.

I promise to do my utmost to do better in the future and hope that everyone here will continue to hold me accountable.

Hey everybody!

The site has been on fire for a few days now in the aftermath of the dunk/dredge changes. While I was not deeply involved in the process of that decision, I will admit that I was one of the moderators that signed off on that decision in the end, with my belief, or hope, being that it would foster a healthier site culture. I was ultimately neutral on whether a third comm alongside c/gossip and c/counterpropaganda should be created, as I wanted to see how the situation would develop and whether it would be ultimately necessary. This was not just my own isolated belief - other moderators who pay closer attention to the broader site culture than I do (as I stay in the news mega 95% of the time) were adamant that these changes be made, as they have repeatedly said that comrades from certain minority groups have been turned off from joining or staying on the site due to the site culture. I am being purposefully vague about this in order to maintain their anonymity and prevent any brigading.

I regret several of the actions that took place after I posted my approval for the idea.

Firstly, and most obviously, there should have been some kind of democratic input. Even merely asking the community what they thought of the issue and whether there were other potential avenues to fixing the problems should have been what happened, rather than immediately jumping to locking down two highly popular comms and then making a post about whether you all think it's a good idea. I should have spoke up about this prior to it going out. Carcosa saying that the decision was not merely an admin decree is entirely true, there was moderator input.

Secondly, we should have more closely vetted and better communicated the statements made, both those made by us through Carcosa, and also my own. I wrote a comment in the original announcement post that sought to explain the situation, and a user brought up my wording around the use of "gossip" as a comm name. I apologize, as I depicted the arguments as to why it was chosen (and again, I did not suggest "gossip" originally) as if I thought that gossip was a) feminine and b) therefore frivolous. I did not intend to portray it this way and don't believe that at all - in fact, users in the mod chat have pointed out that "gossip", far from being frivolous, can be a way for people dismissed by systems of power to protect each other.

Thirdly, the whole business with the bans and tempbans was entirely unnecessary in 99% of cases and was immature and vindictive, and just spread further confusion in an already confusing time. And Alaskaball banning themself didn't really help. As a moderator and not an admin, I was not part of the decision for this part at all, but I still feel like addressing it.

For those who may be worried, I can confirm that the Hexbear moderator chat is not a place dominated by a clique of hostile authoritarian mods or anything like that. It is made up of largely LGBTQIA+ people who want to make the site a better place. I do hope that improvements can be made to the process to further formalize it and entrench more democratic decision-making, but it is also true that Hexbear is a relatively small online forum and that the moderators are volunteers, and so it can be difficult to properly coordinate things in a timely manner. Things sometimes get rushed through, unfortunately.

I get that there is considerable frustration about the lack of real specifics of what we were even complaining about and that many people just want a straight answer, but as I said before, I will maintain vagueness on this point because their anonymity is not mine to take away and I greatly respect them. I hope there is more transparency on the whole issue from this point onwards, but I cannot be the one to grant it.

I do not plan to leave the site. I will - if the admins and moderators allow it - keep posting the news megathreads and generally being a presence on here.

Semper post,

72T

(as of posting this, I am going to sleep, so I won't be around to respond for a while)

I think that this would be the perfect post to get this community going.

Under my direction as admin of Hexbear I restructured the internal admin/moderator order. A large part of this restructure was to shift the majority of the site decisions to a larger collective of people dedicated to the site.

At the time I also reorganized the new moderator protocol to make it easier for new mods to be added and for those mods to have the power to appoint mods at will based on a vouching system. Only moderators who submitted an application were invited to an off-site moderation discussion room.

This room is where the proposals for the site were made, discussed, and voted upon. After a proposal was finished I would often write up a statement and post it for feedback and approval so that the entire process from proposal to post had as many opportunities as possible for the moderators to give input or present changes.

In light of the most recent decision I am taking responsibility as I established this decision-making process, I drafted the announcement post, I collected and edited the followup statement.

It is clear to me that I was mistaken in the effectiveness of this approach and that a more transparent approach is needed. As well as, creating more opportunities for user input need to be added.

I am more than happy to return to the admin team if the users want me to do so, but I am stepping away from all decision-making at an admin level. I will continue to be involved with Hexbear in any capacity I can and will not be leaving as a user.

Chapo.chat/Hexbear was never my project nor did I ever intend to take it over. My hope was to keep it going another day so the people that spent hours developing, coordinating, organizing, and educating on this platform could continue to do so. Everyone that has donated to mutual aid, organized fundraisers, wrote effort posts, and bad posts have done just as much if not more than I have.

I have faith in all the other admins both new and old to keep this place going and while I am happy to give my thoughts on any aspect of the site I think the best way to self-crit is to accept my mistakes and to let the other admins take the lead.

Thank you to everyone who has sent me kind comments and to those that continuously strive to make this place better.