Ohh gotcha, makes sense. Thanks for clarifying. I wonder how hard of a man he is to reach (with a polite question, not implying people should mass message him or anything). Could be it’s one of those things where it was presented to him like “hey, we’d like to do blah blah blah inspired by your essay” and he signed off on it without looking all that closely. If I’m going for best case scenario explanation.
I heard that Jones Manoel wrote the preface to the new Portuguese edition which was worrying
Is there a known problem with him or do you mean it’s worrying that he’d get caught up being part of this book? The only familiarity I have with him is he’s the one who wrote the thing about factoring in Christianity’s influence into Western Marxist thought, right?
Good points and I think we are more or less in agreement.
I don’t know what you mean by this paragraph comrade, and I have trouble following your reasoning. But I’ll comment about this. The liberal propagandists should definitely be extracted from our community, but the honest liberals should definitely be heard and honestly debated. On our part, trying as much as possible to ignore provocations and try our best to dismantle their arguments in few words. I see a few reasons why:
So yeah, I meant like how membership here goes through a process and liberals who come from other instances aren’t necessarily tolerated posting whatever they want. But I do think I got lost in the weeds a little bit on that paragraph of mine. General idea I was going for is maybe along the lines of how you broke it down, that we have a certain need to reach these kind of people, or even problems in our own thinking. As opposed to a mentality where we view others as people who have to go in a corner and “fix themselves” and then we can engage with them. I guess the distinction I’m talking about is kind of like what some have termed “call in” vs. “call out”; the difference being something like (call out) “you are bad, I’m going to put you down because it makes me feel superior” vs. (call in) “if at all possible, we’re going to figure out how to improve this situation together; and if we can’t and I move against you, it’s not because ‘you’re bad and I’m inherently superior’, it’s because you refuse to be humane and/or negotiate with other human beings”.
Hopefully that is more clear. Brain is a bit fuzzy today.
Edit: Also, I appreciate you telling me you weren’t clear on it. In trying to clarify, I feel like I made it clearer to myself what I meant lol. Sometimes I write out thoughts intended more as a piece of the puzzle than anything else, so talking them through further can help crystallize.
Interesting thoughts on it. Yeah, I agree it’s rough to work with for sure. Prob the energy on platforms that big is better spent finding things to help with in RL, for the most part. I mean there are occasions it has mattered, like helping to spread info on genocide. But then it’s more a matter of boosting something already posted than posting hard about it on top of everybody else who is already covering it.
In reflecting on the points made in it, I think I understand better where western anarchists can derive from (western ultras as well, but I will focus on anarchists for the moment). I think I’ve read parts of it before, but maybe not the whole thing. Anyway, something that stands out to me is the martyrdom david/goliath dynamic and how it ties into both AES and just anti-imperialist states in general. China is big, it is more like a goliath in size and scope than a david, it would be hard to call it an underdog next to many other countries, so by the christian-mindset influence of things, “China is a ‘dangerous’ country and countries it interacts with are more and likely to be victims.” This I think is part of where you get the “anti-authority” mindset that is associated with western anarchists. “They are big and we are small, which means we are the underdog, the david, the morally pure striving for better against terrible odds.” For a person or organization stuck in this mindset, it seems likely they will unwittingly (or perhaps in some cases even will full awareness) sabotage their own efforts to gain power. And if they do gain power, they will refuse to take it seriously as a position of power, instead trying to act still as if they are an outsider who has had power thrust upon them. For them to exercise that power seriously means they can make mistakes the way others in power do and then they join the ranks of the goliaths and lose their sense of self as a member of the underdog, which eats away at them.
Then there is the point of size and scope alone. To expand on what I touched on with regards to a state like China’s, they now have a lot of global influence, but they exercise this largely in a cooperative and mutually beneficial way. They are making themselves interdependent, rather than making others dependent on them; a sharp contrast to the modes of imperialist exploitation. This itself may be a point that is hard for some of us with a christian or catholic upbringing to fully understand. Using myself as an example, even though I’m now atheist, I can tell I still have strains of catholic thinking internalized in me. And it is hard sometimes to understand the notion of large scale interdependence and collective organization as something more than a fantasy. Some part of my thought leads in the individualist morality direction that steers things toward the importance of individual behavior and individual salvation and so on, which is viewed as wholly separate from everything else. What I’m trying to get at here is, for example, if I were to go do something that most people view as a morally reprehensible thing to do, the instinct would not be to ask how society failed, the instinct would be to ask how I failed to hold back the inner demons in me (whether one views that as more literal or figurative). Just as the christian mindset creates martyrs, it also creates demons; figures in a holy battle between the morally strong and the morally weak. In the christian mindset, these are not figures who are portrayed a certain way for morale, or strategy, or increasing odds of victory, but as a true believer in the idea that the battle is an individual one for souls and not a battle that can be won on a large scale to the collective benefit of all peoples.
I think this is a case by case thing, but sometimes we simply cannot afford to be too much critical. Think of an actual communist, politically isolated, representing a small city in the bourgeois state, or something. If the opposition found out bad stuff about that guy’s past, of course the bourgeois media would create a campaign to hunt them down. In such cases should we join the hunt? This is the challenge of having the correct historical understanding of your time and place, so these choices become clearer. Over the time you start acting based on the political outcome, instead of an abstract moral value which you do not adopt yourself in your life. Then you criticize any mistake in private if possible, outside the eyes of the opposition.
Something that comes to mind here is the importance of applying this thinking to non-leaders, not just figures who have a significant reputation. That part of opposing the current system means recognizing the humanity of each person; they are never “just a number” but a whole human being with a history to them. And when the time does come that we must act against such a person, it needs to be done, as you put it, “based on the political outcome.” Better known figures tend to get more of the attention in discussions like this, but I think the “abstract moral value” thinking can definitely come for the “little individual” as well—and they tend to have little power to oppose it, which increases any sense of a “leftist” leader acting more like the existing system than something different.
To try to put it in example form, not allowing obvious liberals to run rampant in lemmygrad is easily recognized as a political outcome focus; by keeping them from doing so, it becomes a more pointed and focused anti-imperialist and communist space. On the other hand, if lemmygrad were to wage a campaign against “still lingering liberalism in its communist users”, that could very quickly get into abstractions and grandstanding that are difficult to concretize into something to act upon. Which brings me to a point of existing system vs. otherwise, that such an approach would likely get lost in individualist thinking. “It’s not our failure that this person is still too liberal, it’s their moral failing and so they must be cast out.” In other words, is what “we” want being cultivated/encouraged/rewarded or only watched for violations of from a tower. (To be clear, I’m not saying this as a vagueposting reference to something that happened on lemmygrad. Just using the site as a basis for example to try to be more clear in what I mean.)
The tough moralistic thinking mindset might have us thinking that the harder it is to be moral and still be it, the better the person is or some such thing. When in practicality, we get the best outcomes when it is as easy as possible for people to be aligned and act ethically, and when it is made systemically difficult for them to do otherwise. And that is an area where working amid the existing larger system presents a challenge, since people are constantly being pushed at from the pressures of a system that often normalizes or even rewards selfish or predatory behavior of one kind or another. Hope that makes sense.
Rest well!
I hope all this shit is entertaining to the Lemmygradians at least lmao
I just hope you get a resolution that is to the benefit of hexbear users. 🙏 I know for some people, these places are a serious part of their lives, no matter whether it involves some shitposting too, and I wouldn’t want that to get messed up by mismanagement or irony poisoning or whatnot.
I’m gonna need the original poster to confirm it’s a joke, not a secondhand read because I don’t see anything joking in the tone of it and I’ve seen at least one other comment that also implied putting this person on a pedestal.
Huh? What about the context of that post sounds like joking to you?
That’s why TC69 had a cult of personality. Because she has a point.
Look, I don’t really have a stake in the particular disagreement here about affirmations, but the one thing does not follow from the other here. People don’t deserve a cult of personality because they are right about things sometimes. That’s how you get literal cults. Even figures who have contributed an enormous amount to the global struggle of liberation, such as Mao, Lenin, Castro, they still don’t deserve a cult of personality. They just deserve respect for their contributions and it makes sense to look at what they did that worked to see how it can be applied to a modern day context, within a person’s specific locale. And depending on where you live, it might make sense to honor them as a representation of liberation and the ongoing revolutionary struggle. But no one, living or dead, is above criticism and people who are right some of the time are also wrong at times too. Some of the most effective revolutionaries can still make terrible decisions.
Resist putting people on a pedestal in “great person theory” style. People can in very rare cases be symbols of an example to live up to, but in the day to day, they are still normal human beings. It’s healthier to elevate a process or technique as exemplary and maintain people’s humanity as something realistic and grounded. A cult of personality perspective would have us rejecting hand-washing if it came out that scientists who figured out germs were terrible people. I think of that satire article “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point”. Whether someone has good ideas sometimes or does good things sometimes, does not necessarily mean anything about what they will do going forward. We are human, not a computer program. There are computer programs that can predictably do the same thing each time they run. Humans just aren’t built that way and we will never be industrial factory-grade machines, no matter how much we get dehumanized and portrayed that way.
Sry if you already know all this, I’m not sure how visible this has been to other instances lol
I don’t know any of it beyond what I’ve been able to gather in this thread and the linked threads, I appreciate the context. Tbh, I’m probably overreaching on having a take at all, only going off of what I can gather about it. But I am also kind of biased, I think, against anything that seems obsessive over the minutiae of forum structure in a way that can fail to see the forest for the trees. I’ve been on a number of forums over more than a decade, including from before I had communist views, and I think sometimes the ease of exercising sweeping power gets used as a justification to be more rushed in decision-making and execution than the circumstances warrant. Most things in the tangible world have to go through more of a process, even after a decision has been made, to make them a reality; and that makes the cost of a decision seem higher. The internet has costs of a kind too, but some of them are harder to see. Like understanding how people engage with a website in the first place, why they come, where they come from, what makes them stick around or leave and for what reasons, whether what they’re doing contributes to the goals of the forum, if it even has clear goals in the first place. All things that could get lost in overthinking if taken too far, but also seem to get neglected chronically across different types of leadership and subject matter of forums.
Yeah I wouldn’t have guessed that at all. My only familiarity with the idea of a dunk tank is white people doing it to each other voluntarily as some kind of fair/fundraiser thing. I always thought the idea of it seemed kind of sadistic (not that I knew the word sadistic back then). But I’m taking it to imagine hexbear’s dunk tank is similar to the shitreactionaryssay that lemmygrad has, where it’s posting takes of people who aren’t even present, and in that sort of context, it seems more like throwing fruit at a picture of someone than anything akin to putting down someone who is trapped there and has to take it. There’s also “dunking on” in the basketball meaning, which is sometimes used to refer to putting someone down on social media, like ratio’ing a person on twitter. That one is more directly humiliating, but doesn’t use the term “dunk tank” and so unless the basketball meaning also has racist origins I’m not aware, we’re looking at phrasing that can quickly overlap and could be confusing to people to take as inherently bad or racist to use.
If it was just a name change and it was an easy thing to change the name of without messing up links and existing activity and so on, I’d say, whatever, make it a name they don’t feel icky about. But the internet often doesn’t function that way. Screwing over logistics of user activity for the sake of feeling better about a name most people won’t even know the real origins of seems like an odd decision, to say the least.
British Wikipedian, Stuart Marshall, made the final ruling in September, decisively supporting the article’s inclusion. “Based on the strength of the arguments … and it’s not close … I discarded the argument that scholars haven’t reached a conclusion on whether the Gaza genocide is really taking place”, Marshall wrote in his decision. “The matter remains contested, but there’s a metric truckload of scholarly sources linked in this discussion that show a clear predominance of academics who say that it is.”
Marshall concluded his ruling with the straightforward statement: “We follow the scholars.”
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they did it even if it took a while, but this being their reasoning sounds so ridiculous. Gonna need an academic to tell me that it rained here today. Guess a ton of primary sources don’t matter? Gotta have the scholars weigh in first. But who gets allowed to be the scholars, hmm? Who gets the positions at the institutions and the funding and so on. Science and history are not supposed to have a special interest group that warps or buries important truths, but they sure as hell can be captured by such an interest group. Failing to account for that in how you present information is a failure to be scientist or historian. The west’s fetishism of neutrality makes even well-intentioned analytical people into blind agents of imperialism. It took them this long to break through it for what is probably the most documented in real-time and proliferated of that documentation genocide in human history.
I’m not familiar with what goes on there, so as an outsider, the fact that in skimming, some of the replies make more sense to me than the admin/mod posts doesn’t seem like a great sign for their leadership. Comes across like they’re acting based on vibes and don’t want to provide substantive examples to back up what they’re doing.
Thanks for sharing your experience with it. It’s insightful to read.
There’s been quite a lot of fingerpointing, from what I could tell, from the parts of twitter I’m tapped into. A lot of people doing the voter blame game and then the occasional person with any sense trying to explain how absurd it is to be blaming voters for a process that is, well to use your terminology, bankrolled by billionaires.
Would you prefer the term malignant psychopath? Or sociopath? Same general outcome in meaning, just more clinical. The way it comes across to me in a context like this, is it’s trying to convey how shockingly deceptive and anti-social a person is. It would be a different kind of thing to say “people with white hair are demons” or something. Bill Clinton can choose not to say victim-blaming things, but he can’t choose what his natural hair color is.
I know I’m talking a jokey commentary point too seriously, but I would say “I can haz cheezburger” is a decent equivalent if we’re going by generation: also makes little sense on the surface as the skibidi stuff.
One of those things where I get the sense that even the people proliferating it aren’t entirely sure what it means or why they like it, but something about it is funny or interesting to them. But then, the same could be said about a lot of internet humor. Without the meta explanations of a website like KnowYourMeme, it can be hard to follow even if you belong to the generation that is spreading this stuff. I think there’s something about the meme format/communication style that is supposed to be able to go beyond having to get really explicit about what it is you meant. The internet in general can be hard to explain to someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time on it. I guess in a way, memes may be an answer to the fact that so much of the internet is so text-heavy and a lot gets left out when that’s all you have. So memes, gifs, emotes, etc., try to get at the more nonverbal stuff.