I mean, it's not a huge problem to read Marx or Gramsci before arguing about Marx or Gramsci. You don't have to read all they wrote, of course. To form an opinion on Gadamer I don't have to read everything he wrote.
That’s different than what I said though, which is that you can’t disagree with me without reading Gramsci. And is also typically how these authors’ names are invoked in arguments which are not about the authors themselves.
To build on this point: I don’t get the whole “anti-echo chamber” thing and this demand we entertain said assholes. We select people to be friends we generally like and agree with. We often don’t associate with people we don’t like or disagree with. Why should our forums be some totally egalitarian social exposure? That’s literally never been the case ever. We read what we want to read. We talk to who we want to talk to. I’m not going to be guilted into listening to some jerk who thinks gay people shouldn’t marry and belong in hell. I don’t want to share a beer with them, I would never invite them to dinner in my home, so why should I have to deal with them living rent free in my mind because I saw some ignorant post of theirs and they called someone a slur? Hell, why should I be forced by some arbitrary, inconsistent moral code to deal with people who are simply disruptive/obnoxious?
I have plenty of work colleagues and family I disagree with, I read sources I don’t always love. I get plenty of exposure to other ways of thinking and ideas, at least no less than anyone else does. Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially? Sure. But come on. How many of us actually spend equal time with people we both agree and disagree ideologically with?
The only people whining about defederating either don’t understand what it is or are butthurt because people are collectively showing them the door, and there is little they can do about it. 
Yeah you're right. It's not a binary choice between echo chamber and non-echo chamber. It's just an open community where trolling antisocial behaviour is discouraged. If admins of an instance are encouraging antisocial behaviour then the only solution is to defederate.
You might wish to be aware that your instance's top-level domain was chosen because ML stands for "Marxism-Leninism", and that the main admin of lemmy.ml has a photo of Mao as his profile banner. So you're probably going to have a hard time convincing your instance's admins to defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, all things considered.
Hexbear is known for trolling, regardless of their political stance, unless there is a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow.
I'm just saying that if one wishes to be defederated from Hexbear, then one should migrate off of lemmy.ml first. The admins of that instance are not going to be open to defederating Hexbear.
thats totally fair. I'm not actually on lemmy.ml, and my instance sees no real reason to talk ibout hexbear. Their trolling isn't disruptive to our communities, and is fairly easily filtered
thats totally fair. I'm not actually on lemmy.ml, and my instance sees no real reason to talk ibout hexbear. Their trolling isn't disruptive to our communities, and is fairly easily filtered
While I do recognize the difference between defederating and blocking, this is so close to equivalent for my personal experience that I spend no time thinking about whether .ml has defederated from them or not.
Also, regarding "a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow" — basically ever since I first started seeing this sort of stuff coming from Hexbear in the brief time when they federated with Blåhaj Lemmy, I thought of stuff like pig poop balls in kind of the same way as, like, the climate/vegan activists who throw soup cans at paintings or pour milk jugs in stores or trespass F1 races or break fuel pumps or so forth. A lot of people express a lot of anger and frustration and annoyance at these sorts of things and say "How can these activists be so stupid‽ Don't they know that this hurts support for their cause‽", but... ehhhh, being goddamn annoying as all Hell is honestly a more effective form of political action than a lot of people consciously believe it to be. The video essayist Ponderful once said about this,
People criticize actions like milk pours and soup…chucks? Because it “gives the right something to criticize”…but it seems like that's the point! And at the same time, it makes other climate activists look extremely reasonable and "good, actually" in comparison! If pouring some milk on the ground will mean that Daily Mail readers might hear some messages about how messed-up the dairy industry is, and then also maybe even consider old enemies like our Greta as good in comparison, then…yay! Yay, I say! And if it makes the public look kinder upon activists who actually target oil infrastructure, in comparison to what they see as random and annoying publicity stunts, then f*ck!gn ay!
Whether all of this applies in the case of Hexbear is something that people can argue about — it feels like kind of a silly comparison given that Lemmy is just an obscure social media platform, which doesn't exactly seem like the type of place where meaningful praxis can happen... But it's at least a thought that we can keep in mind. Hexbear has certainly succeeded in getting people on Lemmy talking and thinking about them and their beliefs, pushing the Overton window leftwards — especially if other, less annoying leftists look "good in comparison". I'm kind of reminded of my own path towards leftism, honestly: I'd certainly been annoyed by communist interlocutors plenty of times over the years, but I think that without that annoyance, I probably wouldn't agree with those selfsame interlocutors on so much today. That was just one of the many tactics that collectively led me down that path.
I don't think that this is necessarily Hexbear's intentional strategy in the same way as those aforementioned climate/vegan activists, but nevertheless, this is at least my spitball of a material analysis of why Pig Poop Balls actually does advance the cause. This is just a little advocacy for the devil, as it were.
I'm not a communist but I think it's a welcome concept in discussing economic theory as I'm sure there are things that we can learn from.
I'm glad people like you exist who are not tankies. I wish that your group would be the actual face of your movement on Lemmy instead of those obnoxious Hexbear users.
But at the same time, there are also a lot more people on Lemmy now who came from Reddit and aren't communists, right? So maybe it isn't pushing leftwards so much as it's trying to prevent a push rightwards. Does that sound more correct?
i could certainly see that argument having same weight, but the practical application of it isn't as a protest, but as a thought ending cliche. PPB is linked when the interlocuter has decided the thread is over, independent of whether they actually had much participation.
I agree, there is certainly a place for confrontational protest, hell, if your protest doesn't make people upset, then its not working. But as you say, this is lemmy. Its not a good context, in my estimation, for a soup pour, particularly when that soup pour is in defence some pretty controversial stuff. Many will say this is milquetoast waffling, which is probably fair, I guess, but I am here to relax and I don't find threat of disgust for mistepping someone's Bizmarkian statist realpolitik to be relaxing.
And, ultimately, I advocate more for a filtering than a complete removal, simply because the discussion is important. There are forums here where conversation is ecouraged, and there ar forums where circle jerk is encouraged, and if the former is done stridently but in good faith, I want it to continue. I personaly don't need the circle jerk, however.
i do appreciate your analasys, and it does make me view that stuff a little more charitably. I also appreciate your use of the interobang. This open source phone keyboard can't do that yet, and I feel its a loss.
I also pay for a ml domain now, 11$ a year. Used a free one, set up my mail server and some other stuff, now I need that domain because of the mail adresses I and others from my family use. Lemmy.ml has lots of users, it's the main devs instance after all. I don't think that the marxist-leninist thingy is the reason for that.
Though I disagree with dessalines political views.
I hadn't heard of that, but you're probably right. It's still mighty coincidental that 3/4 of the admins have Cuban or Soviet historical figures as their profile pictures.