IDK, I used to talk up certain parts of Hexbear (art@hexbear seemed quite good) but your perception of their political views is not what I’ve observed. I tried to talk with them and they more or less instantly threatened me with physical violence and then defederated my instance.

There is a reason they are so widely defederated. They are deliberately obnoxious to “outsiders” in a way that makes it seem unlikely that they’re positioned to succeed at any kind of leftist progress. Usually, attacking everyone around you is not correlated to long-term victory.

I see people say stuff all the time like oh they are tankies who love putin, oh they are against human rights.

https://hexbear.net/search?q=putin&type=Comments&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New

They’re not really “against human rights” per se, as far as I can tell, but at least 50% of them seem to be fanboys for authoritarian regimes, and construct insane frameworks where those regimes aren’t actually violating anyone’s human rights, or “but ‘libs’ believe X Y and Z, those are wrong, and so by contrast with those wrong things, I must be right.” I think more than 50% of the comments in the above link fall into that latter pattern.

Here are some examples of things from the above that are pro-Putin (or at least pro-Putin-adjacent) and also hilariously wrong:

They’ll say this then unironically say that Putin just invaded Ukraine to be mean

Putin is genuinely popular and his party is bolstered by the fact that both the economy and the Ukraine conflict are going well.

Describing United Russia as far right is also not entirely accurate, it’s more like a catchall for anyone who is not a communist and not a western stooge. It includes some very right wing and nationalistic elements, but they are generally quite careful to marginalize those kinds of far right elements that would be destabilizing for the Russian state:

Ethno-nationalists who would create conflict and friction with Russia’s many ethnic minorities, outright Nazis many of whom defected and now fight for Ukraine in Nazi units like the “Russian Volunteer Battalion”, etc.

(That is a hilarious juxtaposition)

It is also one of the most consistently and prolifically vilified countries, due to decades of Cold War propaganda, both during the height of the Cold War and after the USSR’s fall. It is not surprising then that some people would have a hard time wrapping their head around it as neither hero nor villain and as part of a complex dynamic on the world stage, with an even more complex history, grappling with challenging material conditions throughout. But embracing that complexity is an important exercise in getting used to viewing the world beyond the binary lens of good and evil that anti-communist propaganda loves to do.

Got it. (And actually I agree that “good” and “bad” are very poor frameworks for judging state actors from the POV of the individual.) So what do you think of Ukraine? “Pure evil, Nazi government, why do you ask?”

Zelensky knows that Putin is basically a moderate and is hoping for a hardliner to take power afterwards, eternal conflict is the only way to preserve his position and prevent nazi elements from merking him

IDK. I looked over Hexbear for a while after what you said, and as long as you steer clear of certain topics, I think I can agree with you. (And, that was my experience before the defederation.) The same can be said of most Republican uncles at Thanksgiving, though, so it’s not really a solid endorsement of their good nature.