Then you search them up and realized they were banned or removed 
The sword of Damocles reminds me when, if I ever turn rightist once again, may the Hexbear 
me dead
All those posters lost...like...piss drops..in rain...time to fart
I wouldn't be concerned about "ever turning rightist again" if you have a strong philosophical underpinning for what you believe.
The further left I go the further right I end up, because of the horseshoe.
I think it might just be latent anxiety about all the "left the left" grifters that exist. It's hard not to feel like some sort of elder god of right wing thought is waiting to hit everyone who turns 40 with an evil stick.
Part of that is survivor's bias. Something else that plays into it is how we often don't keep ties to leftist or left-leaning elders. But they're certainly there.
Once I got bored of podcasts so I started listening to more lectures and interviews, all the academics I listen to are much older people. Vijay Prashad is probably the youngest, along with Gabriel Rockhill and Yanis Varoufakis. Otherwise, it's Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff, Finkelstein, David Harvey, etc.
Writing this list out, I'm starting to notice a pattern, and I might need to start trying to look for more academics who aren't old white men.
Those sound great, will get to check them out once electricity is restored in my colonial hellhole
It's not hard to avoid becoming a Rightist when your life depends on it.
yeah. It's definitely a settler thing, I haven't heard of many leftists in countries ravaged by imperialism dropping the cause, or at least not nearly as many as the amount of "ex-leftists" in the US.
Ah, yeah, of course. I didn't just mean it like that though.
I just feel like there's a certain point of no-return. If it's mostly an online, armchair politics then I guess one can go/return Rightist. But if you really get into it and throw down, at a certain point there's no going back.
I think it's possible for people to get subverted into reactionaries (not full on rightists) even if they've done actual action for the cause before, because vulgar forms of Marxism, materialism, etc are unfortunately not completely unpopular
Yeah, what am I going to do, like landlords? Feel good about imperialist violence? Sign an epic pro-Israel pledge?
"I gotta be honest comrades, I had a sick ass bahn mi from a food truck. Since it was privately owned it made me think that market forces are actually... le good!"
I might get annoyed enough to stop posting, but it's not like I'll ever watch a Beanis Shabibo video instead.
My hatred of my petite bourgeousie leaving my body when I order a pupusa.
I honestly think the most likely way that the kind of person who posts here becomes more liberal is if they make enough money to be comfortable and settle
with a SO who's a lib. So as long as we keep up our volcel pledges I think we're in the clear.
im worried im going to get severe brain damage one day and be reactionary as hell or something
Yeah lol one day I just forget dialectics. Which makes me wonder, what the hell is going on with all the Trots turned neocons? Did they just... forget everything?
Some people get their values overwritten by affluent material conditions. Some people never had a strong dedication to the cause anyway.
If it matters, I see one measure of dedication as how willing you are to make compromises with comrades.
well a lot of the original trots left the USSR for the USA, where they made hating the USSR their whole deal. so you can imagine the kinds of friends they ended up making there.
What if I stay as I am, and the entire world goes so drastically left that I am now the reactionary?
you're probably fine if it's a one-off thing that you apologize for and self-crit. The biggest mistake people make is trying to post their way out of it.
It's genuinely this simple.
There's a huge gulf of space between being wrong about something (not going to get you banned) and deciding to die on a hill and turning into a corncob.(can get you banned)
Pm_me_your_Foucaults spent like 2-3 hours doubling and tripling down in the mod chat after the other person left the chat room. A ton of other people tried to de-escalate or smooth things over, Foucaults absolutely was not having any of it. They never do, and they regularly seek out arguments.
If they do some self-crit (the bar is on the floor) and want to come back, they're more than welcome to do so.
There's a huge gulf of space between being wrong about something (not going to get you banned) and deciding to die on a hill and turning into a corncob.(can get you banned)
Honestly, I don't understand why people double down, you know. It's like this quote says...
What profits {them} to bleed? Shall the dust praise {them}? Shall the worms declare {their} truth?
I still have confidence that we'll come through this a better site.
"Never stop posting! Never stop posting!" the Hexbear yelled, being buried alive in more and more sand in the morning struggle session after the Revolutionary Red Guard found their bad take stash.
That's just what happens when you're on here long enough, you get used to it.
If you're talking about Bureaucrat specifically the account was deleted by one of the users because someone else kept getting into arguments with people or making weird comments that were catching bans from various comms.
It's not only them, but prolly @PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net and prolly Awoo, judging from the modlog.
It's good for cut my ego down, lest that happens
kept getting into arguments with people or making weird comments that were catching bans from various comms.
Wait I missed something, what happened with them (awoo and foucalts)?
Awoo, I thought she was struggle seshing over Luigi Mangione lionization (on the side of lionization) (she ain't banned yet fully)
Foucault, uh, IDK why
Speaking over marginalized users and doubling down on harmful rhetoric in the Mod chat and a general history of debate pervert behavior.
info on Foucault's ban can be found here, including screenshots from the mod chat argument that precipitated the ban
Awoo harassed people in DMs and refused to apologize. Also just a hive of Anglo brainworms
Awoo caught a temp ban and it was reversed almost immediately but proceeded to go after someone in DMs, Foucault according to the log was being a debate pervert in the mod chat.
Yeah. You see two people creating a long-ass thread arguing back and forth and both of them refusing to calm the fuck down, but only one of them is supposedly a "debate pervert"? That's not how this works, and you should not be a mod.
At this point I'm really close to just leaving this place behind. The vibes fucking suck.
the other person left the mod team discussion and the site
The fact that users like a frauddogg can run around sephiroth posting like the protagonist in an action movie for divorced dads, but I can't tell people to suck my ass is incredibly telling. My issue is inconsistent moderation and favouritism.
The moderation team reminds me of that years old video of the DSA meeting where people kept coming on with "point of order". The mod team are like the people who reduced Gloria La Riva to "a cis woman". They're the kind of people you hate to have in an org, the kind of people you suggest of being a fed because they follow the fed playbook to a T (which we can't point out here). It's rancid and it sucks and it's gotten really bad over just a few months.
I'm sure these idiots are celebrating the fact so many news mega posters are gone, considering the fact several of them hate it is there. What I said in the old struggle session remains true, they're going to end up being on a site of 7 people where they blame 3 for being bigots that scare people away, never once stopping to consider if they maybe are the ones who suck.
If two people having an argument and after a third party chimes in, someone recognizes they're getting too heated and uncomfortable, chooses to explain why they're uncomfortable and then take an extended break, I think that's valid. Removing yourself from an argument is fine. You can always disengage.
If the other person in the argument then spends an additional two hours making wild, hyperbolic statements and doubling down in the face of multiple people trying to de-escalate, that's not a great sign. If that person has a long history of doing this, it's an even worse sign. Foucaults didn't get a ban for this one single incident of an unreasonable argument, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back for a user with a long history of starting and escalating arguments.
The fact that this is your perception of events clearly illustrates the issue this sites moderation has with favourites, cliques and power users.
I only knew about Foucault from checking the mod log, I generally shy away from the struggle sessions because I left reddit to stop getting wrapped up in multi-day arguments with strangers.
