this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.

Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.

Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.

So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It was absolutely not obvious at all to Americans back then. Or more accurately, they wanted to believe the lies so they did

73% of Americans were in favor of invading Iraq

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago

Some of us saw right through that shit immediately though

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Not sure if I made it clear enough, but I meant it became more obvious once the war started going badly and the weapons of mass destruction had not turned up.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same thing happened in Vietnam. In fact, public opinion only really changed after the politicians started saying that it was 'time to scale down US involvement' or whatever, which only came years after many people in the Whitehouse realised the war was unwinnable. In the meantime, and despite all the famous protests and anti-war marches, the public was pretty happy to follow the official line that America was the good guy and that communism had to be stopped.

You could do an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using Gramsci's idea of Cultural Hegemony as a framing device.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yep, I also feel like many people have inserted their own reality of history where all the anti war protests and fraggings were because the Americans wanted to stop killing others

But if you actually read the sentiment from people back then, the seemingly strongest sentiment was to stop the war because too many Americans were coming back in body bags and American soldiers were heavily demoralized from the nightmarish conditions of guerilla warfare against the Vietnamese

They just didn't want more Americans to die for a reason they've never been told about