Permanently Deleted
One of the first interactions I ever had with cth was in the old subreddit. Some guy was being really racist somewhere and I saw a bunch of people pinging him and calling him a dipshit asshole and telling him to post hog. The guy tries to retaliate and ultimately deletes his account. I'm a POC who has been bullied for it before. I found it super heartwarming that there'd be people being so unabashedly on my side. Hell, when they were sure that the board was about to get banned, they talked about how much they wished death upon slaveowners! I felt incredibly accepted - and not in the way a company might try to tokenize you. Legitimately I felt that being part of the gang meant let's fucking go: if I win you win and if you win I win. So no, upon first exposure, I felt that leftist spaces held a handful of universal ideals that I felt very close to. Trans rights are human rights, fuck slave owners, everyone needs a roof & a full belly, and death to America, of course. The rest is either organizing, history lessons, or small talk.
One of the first interactions I ever had with cth was in the old subreddit. Some guy was being really racist somewhere and I saw a bunch of people pinging him and calling him a dipshit asshole and telling him to post hog. The guy tries to retaliate and ultimately deletes his account. I’m a POC who has been bullied for it before. I found it super heartwarming that there’d be people being so unabashedly on my side. Hell, when they were sure that the board was about to get banned, they talked about how much they wished death upon slaveowners! I felt incredibly accepted
This mirrors the reason trans people fall leftwards too. When trans people finally reckon with their internal thoughts, crack their shell and say to themselves that they're trans they then come face to face with the fascists wishing death on them every single day. Their reaction is to seek out people who oppose the fascists. They quickly realise that the centrists don't oppose them, especially if they were one the whole time, a person who really didn't care about it and did nothing to oppose the fascists. So, who do they find that opposes the fascists? The anti-fascists. And this leads them into the left.
Oppressed groups want to hear a completely shameless and honestly faithful opposition to their oppressors. When they receive this they feel the safest and most accepted they ever have and want to be around these people. We should all strive to shamelessly and ruthlessly oppose oppressors, not timidly. Slaveowners should be killed. Terfs should be thrown in the sea. Racists belong in Siberia. Colonialists should be shot into the sun. Return indigenous land.
Terf is a slur meant to silence you? Damn, I wish it worked. Shut the fuck up!
I'm pretty anti-woo, but honestly the media did a disservice to orb mommy. She always came across as cogent and at least interesting in the debates, whereas the MSM had portrayed her as ready to sage the fuck outta the stage.
There's spiritualism and there is woo. The left can use some spiritualism. The ultimate goal of our project is to elevate the human condition, and there is something about cold, calculating industrialism and economics that leaves an empty hole in that project. On the other hand, new age occultism was a mess.
I have the same gut reaction of anti-woo, then I remember that their beliefs are no more outlandish than generic American Christianity and am fine again, but it does require active self-reminding on my part.
yeah, there's a difference between talking about things like "positive energies" or "vibes" or whatever you wanna call it, which is an actual real thing even separate from any spiritual mythologial new age nonsense, and then on the other hand there's straight up woo shit, which honestly is home to some of the most capitalist predatory soul seeking leeches I've ever come across. SO much shit from healing crystals to salt lamps to fortune reading and other methods of divination are straight up scams to take advantage of the most desperate people who are at their worst, telling them exactly what the want to hear (regardless of how true or incorrect or even damaging it is) to feel better in the moment, for a price of course. One of my friends worked at a psychic hotline, and they had so many stories of shit like a woman spending away her life savings and retirement because she desperately wanted a baby but was having fertility issues, and would spend hours and hours on the line just to have someone tell her about how her baby is "right around the corner" and all the lovely things its gonna do as it grows up and how amazing it'll be. Honestly in some cases its no different than a drug dealer trying to get someone hooked on their product so they'll have a steady stream of income.
Really, we'd all be much better off if part of our education addressed propaganda, deception, manipulation, cognitive biases, and common fallacies and the like. So much woo shit plays on very basic fundamental things like hindsight bias, the barnum effect, confirmation bias, apophenia, survivor bias, and the like, that much of it turns from mystically profound to embarrassingly predictable just by having knowledge of the existence of those kinds of thought mistakes.
The early 2000s skeptic movement turning into the alt-right, tradcaths, etc., really sucked. We really could use some popular figures exposing all those fallacies and logic traps rn
Yeah, the inherent issue is that as a leftist, you just kinda gotta assume that everyone is acting in bad faith, or trying to further fascism. You have to always be on the defensive, and for many it’s hard to reconcile that in a healthy way. Dash don’t need to worry about that, partially because they have a much bigger presence, but also because their always on the attack. Their only trying to protect themselves, never others.
There's some gatekeeping. I like how this place specifically tries to push back against it. But still yeah, there's some gatekeeping.
There are also a bunch of groups that folks are willing to just throw under the bus for aesthetic reasons or because they ran into a few assholes, too. I notice it a lot aimed at rural folks and tech workers. I doubt that's the end of it, but it's what I notice.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing about swipes at tech workers. Just a couple days ago someone on here tried to explain the number of conservatives in university tech courses as tech attracting a certain "personality type" and it made me want to scream.
I've never seen it offline, but I organize tech workers so, you know.
Yes, my reason is because i am so fucking stupid I genuinely can't contribute
Well comrade, what you struggle with is alienation. Remember this, no one is born a communist who has read all the theory, or as an intellectually-minded person who frequents academia and so on. Everything takes time to do, and recognizing you're not as you wish to be is the first step.
Here's an anecdote. I was considered a smart kid (lel), but a lazy one. Things got worse and worse for me, to the point I became an absolute failure at university stuff. And like a week ago, I got back to it, saw old professors, and met my class. HALF of them prepared specificially for this class I managed to get into, and I am literally the ONLY one who had failed it in the past 5 years existence of this curriculum. And so I felt inferior, rather inevitably. And yet I wasn't dumber than the other guys and girls of the past year. I sometimes struggle with the sensation of being an imposter, while it's not entirely true, since I could integrate this fucking thing in the first place.
All this to say that your feelings aren't always correct. And in this case, they might be wrong. The left, unlike the right, isn't a community of Strength, but a community for undesirables, for the alienated, the rejected, the poor and sick. We are united in the fact that we know we are weak alone. Look around you and ask yourself : is a 20-something pasty white nerd who studied IT stuff going to have the same skillset as a disillusioned veteran ? Of course not, but here's the thing. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and that's ok. Just because you think you're worthless, doesn't mean you are.
Agreeing politically doesn't mean you'll automatically be friends. Don't need to feel bad about not fitting in with a random group of people
There's a lack of seriousness in a lot of leftist orgs. A lot of the people in them are weak reeds to build socialism with right now, but they're what we've got.
I'm in an in between zone with them (well, I'm not really active in any, I'll show up for the occasional action if some folks who remember me invite me, I moved out to the country a few years ago). I respect their passion, but none of the leftists I've met locally have passed the "would I commit crimes with this person?" test. Like, it's great that y'all have really well drawn signs, but if they're drawn by a bunch of flakes, they're just targets. The people I've buried friends with, shot guns with, and gotten chased by cops with, those are the people I trust. They might not read Marx, but they generally know who's pissing on their pant leg and telling them it's raining.
A local org that turns out more people to their theory reading club than to an organizing event is just a performative book club for people with radical politics.
I'm not sure I have a great solution for you, other than don't be afraid to speak up. When I was active in the local org, I was regularly the only "No" vote on various votes, even though I knew it was obviously a lost vote. Partly to make my voice heard, and partly to let other people know they could say no too.
The problem there could be that leftism in that org is more associated with a particular subculture than as a movement.
It sucks, and the left has been wrestling with it for a while.
Yes, absolutely. I am a Large Son and am a Straight White Male (tm). I often feel out of place in leftist spaces because I have strong opinions and l tend to show them. I dislike radlibs (woke segregation, etc.) as well and come across a lot of them where I'm at in the Northeast.
I'm pretty sure that its taken out of context, but since the school posted an apology it was sort of real I guess.
People in academia these days are very weird about race, while the rest of us are still getting by fine with the old "treat other people as ends" method. I think that's the "radlib" that op is reacting to.
In my experience, the whole American upper middle class does indeed have a racial neurosis, increased by the recent BLM protests. An example from my profession (software): there has been an effort to remove the terms "master" and "slave" from all software libraries. A "master" in the context of computer science is usually a computer or process whose job it is to divide tasks up for other worker programs. CS academics and professionals lauded Github (important software company) for renaming master to main, but entirely ignored the fact that Github is owned by Microsoft, supplier of software to the DOD and probably every police department and jail in America.
"POC students" is a very diverse group in America, and I can't really say anything about them as a whole. Often its black or latino students leading efforts to bring about actual political change (certainly was at my uni). In the context of a uni that might be things like improving student worker wages, decreasing tuition, adding programs to help struggling students, turning out the student body to swing elections, divesting uni funds from bad corporations, and defunding the fucking police. Usually the middle class administrators and professors are more interested in the performative stuff.
A complete bastardization of intersectionality with zero class conciousness that pits people against each other and destroys solidarity. A few examples:
-demanding segregated spaces for POC
-"white allies", not comrades
-"it's not my job to educate you"
-"black power symbol is only for black people, don't use it"
-"pay your poc for their emotional labor"
I just feel alienated in general.
...Ok, and I'm waaaaaaay behind on reading theory considering that I've been shitposting for years now.
I mostly avoid any org that doesn't perform a specific function for this reason
If there's work to do I can prove my worth, but if it's just people hanging out I'll always be an outsider
Too many white people who think they're the center of the world, I'd never hang out irl with most leftists I encounter online to be honest
but phrased in a less idpolly way
Too many dog-haired, spoiled milk colored, melted wax lookin, adderall addicted crackers who think they're the center of the world, I’d never hang out irl with most leftists I encounter online to be honest
See that's what I was thinking about, leftoids are a bunch of hipsters stuck in their own little individual worlds of petty grievance fantasies. So to me it's that, but in a less idpolly way. Go ahead, I don't care if you wanna soil your diapie in front of me
It would be nice to have some kind of leftist space in physical reality to begin with.
