Memes

The conversation has gone stale while I've been swamped with work, but I'm going to respond anyway.

Looking back at the modlog, what you actually said was that their pronouns "look like an alt-right satire of pronouns" and that anyone using those pronouns must be a "basement dweller." And people with those pronoun tags were right there reading your comments. Why the fuck would you do that? I actually got mad reading it. Whatever your motivations, you walked in and made it very clear you had no respect for people's pronoun tags and no interest in understanding them, right to their faces.

At one point you compared neopronoun tags to being trans-species, whatever the fuck that meant

You also seemed dismissive throughout the thread, on every topic that came up, which was frustrating to read because first you made all these assumptions about people and then you showed so little interest in what they were actually saying! The one exception was maybe when you asked for a source on Cuba — but did you even expect to get one? What is just rhetorical? Maybe you got banned before you could respond, I don't fucking know. Did you even click on the information you asked for? In 2022 Cubans themselves democratically drafted the country's new progressive family code in over 80,000 citizen councils around the island. Hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free since 2008. I think this is interesting information that you might want to know. People also brought up trends in state regulation of farming around the world, neocolonial cash crop economics, Iraqi food imports and exports, IMF policies toward food exporters in the global south, the British planned economy during WW2, Chinese agribusiness and farming co-ops, soil exhaustion, and grammatical gender, and you seemed to show zero interest in any of it. You responded to these comments with paper-thin truisms about liberal values and basically tuned everyone out, called people misinformation trolls, and somehow managed to conclude that all the people in that thread were fucking nazis pretending to be queer communists for three years with no audience on a defederated site.

And for the most part, the worst thing anyone called you was "liberal," except for one trans user who called you a fascist and told you to post hog after you said the trans-species thing — probably because it kinda sounded like one of those right wing "gay marriage today, bestiality tomorrow" talking points.

Reading that thread, yeah I understand why they were mad.

For the record, on hexbear, pronoun tags are not only a list of “things you can call me” but also a casual way for some users to communicate their identity and personality. Having two pronoun slots and an extended set of options not only allows for more flexibility in conversation (like them vs comrade) but also more granular self-expression, which is nice when you can’t fucking see or hear each other. In practice, the default thing people call each other is "they/them." Someone with "love/loves" as their pronoun tag isn't gonna get mad at you if you call them "them." It's the sort of thing you pick up on if you take the time to actually understand the site culture.

There's not much more frustrating in conversation than when someone has their mind made up about you incorrectly and superficially, and they're not interested in understanding who you actually are or what you believe or why you believe it. Maybe you were just bewildered by unfamiliar takes and you shut down a little. I don't fucking know.