it’s not easy to write a tightly worded PSA about a sensitive topic with a lot of tricky nuances, and I think sometimes it’s more important to just get something posted promptly in the moment while the topic is getting attention in the community, and then let people hash things out in the comments, hopefully converging toward understanding through dialog. Also, I hope that on hexbear most of us are on each others’ wavelengths enough not to assume someone’s asking for “blind deference” to any group or person.

But yeah I agree it’s one of the big challenges in communication, that sometimes discourse moves faster than understanding. In the worst cases you get a spiral of compounding misunderstandings and personal slights until people hate each other lol, the gap widens faster than communication can bridge it. But imo that’s why it’s so important for people to be patient, read between the lines, and ask for clarification instead of lashing out defensively. Communication is like trying to force your brain through a straw.

And sure, while I agree that we should never offer anyone blind deference, we should offer a fair bit of deference to people from marginalized groups, because they can see things the privileged are often blind to. They are looking at privilege from the outside, and it’s always easier to understand something from the outside. And we should offer even more deference to leftists from marginalized groups, i.e., the people who voice complaints on hexbear dot net. A communist who’s been posting here for months and written a lot of great, thoughtful comments in this thread is especially unlikely to be asking for blind deference. Not saying it’s wrong to ask for clarification though, quite the opposite, as long as there’s patient dialog.