QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

The highly scientific term for this phenomenon is “blep.”

If I remember right, he did have more to tell the interviewer about the workings of magnets but much of it was about how they’re just a specific peculiarity of something that happens all the time with literally everything we see that we don’t question because we’re used to it, only that we think the same thing is strange when we see it lined up a certain way on a macro level, so we try to look for analogies that make us feel like we’ve made sense of it. But that ultimately there is no analogy that he or anyone could make to the macro human-experiential world that would be adequate. It’s like rubber bands - well no, it’s really not. It’s like the solar system - well no, it’s really not. And that while he could tell you a bit more about what was going on at a deeper level, which he did, eventually you and everyone else just has to accept that yeah, this do be what it do, and there truly is nothing further that we can say about why it do. In the same conversation he talks about how physics, rather our understanding of it, is like peeling an onion, and we don’t know if there is a final deepest layer we haven’t reached or if it just keeps on forever with more layers (either way it’s fun to try to find out).

He was something of an idol to me for a while when I was young. “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” was one of my favorite and most often read books. But the chapter where he spoke of his experiences at bars, infamously referring to women who would accept drinks from him but not sleep with him as “bitches” always really bothered me. I remember being shocked by it and trying to rationalize it with things like “well, he came out of it realizing they weren’t and that he was in the wrong,” (yeah right, that’s a stretch) or “when his wife died so early when they were both so young it broke him, damaged him emotionally, and he lost the ability to relate to women,” (non-sequitur garbage excuse). But no, he was just deeply infected with misogyny like so many other shitty men.

It also bothered me, not as much then, but a lot more now, how involved he was in the creation of the nuclear bomb for the US and his cynicism about humanity (fully expecting we would all die in a nuclear armageddon). On the one hand, he expressed some modicum of regret, and if I remember right, spoke of feeling only sick when his coworkers were celebrating its use in “ending the war,” on the other hand, he never actually tried to understand let alone criticize US imperialism and the role he played in cementing its dominion over the world (hegemony).

humans in power will always want more

That’s the kind of bullshit “human nature” argument that liberals use to justify bourgeois “democracy.” No, not every person who has power develops some inevitable insatiable thirst for more. Power structures will always exist, certainly within socialist movements but even within anarchist movements. Just because we live within a capitalist structure that rewards greed and sociopathy while punishing empathy doesn’t mean we can’t build power structures that truly benefit the whole of society.

Once checks and balances disappeared

“Checks and balances” were always a lie. Those so-called checks and balances may have played a real role in maintaining the status quo class hierarchical structures (helping ensure class cohesion among the bourgeoisie), but they never served as a genuine check on the power of those who have it in their rule over those who don’t. The ones in control could always do whatever they wanted, but liberal theatrics like “checks and balances” helped with the facade that protections for the people were in place where they never actually were. The only difference now is the mask is slipping. As the rates of profits fall, the imperial core is beginning to cannibalize itself so there’s less and less need or incentive to maintain that increasingly obvious false facade. The vast majority of regular people, the working class, only ever had one “check and balance” to use against the ruling class and that is noncompliance backed by a willingness for violence, more specifically the threat of revolution.

Well as a human, if they learned just a little bit more that panic should melt away to be left only with awe.

It’s what all of us really are at hexbear: circle bears. We only developed the hexagonal shape from pushing against each other over time - the result of countless struggle sessions. But at heart, even now we’re still just sweet, circular bears once you look beneath the hard hexagonal edges wrought by all the outdoor cats and stacked rocks.

It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.

100% this^. Even if they aren’t actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people’s privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.

More and more I’ve been running into the full-page error “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it’s not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to “fix” it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it’s usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it’s getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It’s also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.

Fuck cloudflare. They’ve wormed their way into most of the web now but they’ve managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you’re not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.

Or not even a stupid ass one but just some innocent kid out playing around where they were told they’re not supposed to.

We arguably ARE the most lgbtq instance that isn’t specifically about lgbtqia+ (it is about radical leftism which is inseperable from lgbtqia+ rights and liberation). And nah, my reaction is 100% appropriate here. What’s more, hexbear is known for taking long and difficult looks into the mirror, to a degree liberal instances could never hope to do. Our resolute dedication to rooting out and correcting misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and even just plain unrecognized privilege is well known and easily confirmed by looking at our history. Whatever lgbtq instance defederated from us was not because of homophobia or transphobia or anything like that, but rather their unwillingness to address the chasers infesting their community and our subsequent unwillingness to tolerate that kind of behavior and keep it from eroding the safe space that has been built through hard work and the dedication especially of the many trans people that make up our community. Trying to paint hexbear as anything other than in complete full support of lgbtqia+, which the vast majority of us are, is absurd and insulting.

Yeah, the instances that are most dedicated to fighting fascism and providing a safe space for lgbtqi+ and other marginalized groups are the “toxic” ones. Those are the instances that need to be contained so you can block them, huh? HMMMMMM…

Seriously, why not just stay on reddit, or (same thing) move to .world? If manually blocking things that are shocking to your precious little sensibilities is too hard for you, there has always been other places that pander to echochamber-seeking dorks like you.

Hexbear as a community was never going to leave. We almost lost our domain due to some silly bullshit but thankfully it didn’t happen. Even if it had though, we were just looking at a name change, maybe becoming hexbear.ml (or something like that) or possibly rebranding as some other name entirely. But we were never just gonna cease to exist like it appears lemm.ee will.

That said, I am a little sad lemm.ee is going. It may have had its share of asshole users, but there were(are) definitely some cool people on it too. And whatever anyone can say about it negatively, lemm.ee is a hundred times better than fucking .world. My god THAT instance is a cesspit. .World is vehemently, aggressively trying to be reddit 2.0 along with all that implies including amplifying everything that makes reddit a shit website and corrosive lie of “community.” Lemm.ee may have had its issues, but if nothing else, it was a solid alternative to .world and that alone is enough to make me sad to see it go. There are even a couple users on it that I hope to see make an account on hexbear and plenty of others that would fit on .ml or one of the the other more generic instances.

Edited to fix typing mistakes.

his nonchalant attitude that Palestine and Ukraine need to just surrender because being in the news cycle is inconvenient to him.

Motivations aside, if he really does want Ukraine to “just surrender” (which remains to be seen beyond rhetoric) then it’s one of the only good positions he has. Ukraine 100% needs to surrender. Absolutely nothing good comes from it continuing to fight. It only means more death and emisseration of working people and more profits for the military industrial complex. It’s honestly rather repulsive when people lump Palestine and Ukraine together like that as if they’re even remotely the same thing. One is fighting a deeply asymmetric struggle of survival against their own genocide by a settler colonial ethnostate that seeks to eradicate them from the earth, the other is a nazi coup government fighting a proxy war for imperialists that uses their own working class as cannon fodder in a conflict that could have been resolved years ago with no loss of life.

In addition to what everyone else has said to point out how absurd it is to put Trump in the top 5 worst presidents, there’s also the fact that almost every significant Trump policy was continued or worsened by Biden. Even the ones that democrats pretended to care about when it suited their agenda like kids in cages, building the wall, and increasing fossil fuel extraction. So if you want to talk about all the ways Trump is an evil piece of shit (which he most certainly is) to put him in the top 5 worst, then you had better make sure Biden is even higher on that list.

Imperialism much?

Wut? Oh, you think that’s imperialism? Stating the fact that Taiwan is part of China and that Hong Kong is also just a region (SAR if you even know what that is) of China? All this shows is you have no fucking clue what imperialism even is. You literally don’t know what that word means. Not by ML standards clearly, but not even by general layman standards. And it shows you know absolutely nothing about the history of this situation, which is typical of the sinophobic liberal. Taiwan is ran by a fascist nationalist government that tried to wipe out the workers movements and that still claims to be the “rightful” rulers not only of all of China but also other sovereign nations like Mongolia. And you’re saying that China allowing them to continue to operate while slowly working towards future reunification is “imperialism.” That’s just sick. Take a look at what the US via the IMF and World Bank does to impoverished global south nations (that are impoverished solely because the US impoverished them for the purpose of subjugation and unequal exchange) to begin to understand what imperialism looks like. Then come back and tell me China’s lenient position on Taiwan is “imperialism.”

The US being bad doesn’t make China good.

Never said it did. BUT part of why China is good is because it is overtaking the US which is unambiguously bad. This is one of the many things China is doing (in this case passively, but it does a hell of a lot of active good too) that is beneficial to humanity.

There is no nation in this world worth simping for.

I don’t know what you think “simping” for a country even means, given it’s a slang term involving romantic attraction, but if by “simping” for a nation, you mean “expressing vocal approval and ideologically supporting it,” then yes, there are nations absolutely worth “simping” for. Cuba immediately comes to mind as the obvious one. But China also deserves the vocal approval and support of leftists since it is in fact a socialist state and is in fact doing much good in the world, both for the masses of people living within it as well as for most of the rest of the world through BRI and the fact that it is undermining the actual imperialist’s ability to beat the global south into submission. Russia deserves critical support for the latter bit as well, seeing as it is doing more than any other state to actively fight imperialism and the monopolarity of US hegemony.

If China is so great then why does it feel the need to dictate over Hong Kong and Taiwan?

It doesn’t. Taiwan and Hong Kong ARE China. If anything the high level of autonomy that China allows reactionary regional governments to have is what should be criticized.

Does China have gay marriage? Trans rights perhaps?

China allows for civil unions for LGBTQ. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1162943.shtml It made civil unions legal across the nation before USA made gay marriage legal in every state. Like all places in the world (some more than others) China has a long way to go on LGBTQ rights. But that’s just it, China is improving along those lines, while the US is rapidly regressing. China is improving with trans rights and has been punishing companies that violate them. So yes, we should absolutely support China in continuing to move in the correct direction.

It’s a nation state (a far too big one at that), which are by definition tools of oppression.

Lol, by whose definition? A state is only as good or bad as the ruling class that wields it. A bourgeois (capitalist) state will always be oppressive. As a socialist state (and China is a socialist state), the CPC uses its power to suppress the constant attempts of the bourgeois to oppress the working class.

tankies claim to be communists but spend all day parroting their favorite Russian or Chinese state propaganda

Tell us how these “tankies” are “parroting” propaganda and we’ll tell you exactly how your geopolitical opinions align with the US State Dept.

When did I say I agree with US propaganda?

For starters, right here where you showed your whole ass and said: “If China is a socialist state worth supporting then I’m a donkey with a laser dick”

You do seem to be quite a donkey but clearly it’s just overconfident false advertisement about the laser.

I honestly would have thought it was a bit making fun of dipshit libs if they hadn’t gone mask off in other comments and proving once again the validity of the “scratched liberal” saying.