You can combine these, nothing reveals reactionaries more reliably than being shown a pronoun tag, they immediately start frothing.
Announce mandatory pronoun tags
Record the users who downvote the announcement
Ban them
Enters a room full of trans people
Misgenders everyone
Well actually male is the default so
BEING A MINORITY DOESN'T MAKE YOU A DECENT PERSON OR MAKE YOU MAGICALLY UNDERSTAND SOCIAL JUSTICE. LOG OFF AND READ A BOOK!
More neurodivergent queer CIA ghouls does not a liberated society make.
I mean, Freud's greatest intervention was recognizing that "normative" is constructed and contingent on social norms (his "primitive society" being so depraved especially helps us see it). Even though dude was entirely wrong about everything biological, etc, you'd think the field would recognize what he got right and build on it, instead of, ironically, repressing its greatest potential.
i think the problem with freud is that, outside of some lit studies, he isn't really approached from a sociocultural perspective anymore. all of his most prominent theories, at least in pop culture, has been tossed into this grotesque wellness machine where they're at best treated as tools to achieve personal happiness, and at worst used to erase the web of social relations and material conditions that forms an individual
As a trans person stuck in a highly transmed, gatekeepy and pathologizing healthcare system, i've been through my share of psychotherapists (not really, i will have to go through at least two more ffs) and Freudians are the fucking worst. I mean, that's not entirely correct, Jungians appear to be the same but nazi and i'm glad i never had a run-in with one of those freaks, but jfc do Freudians make my skin crawl. And when i ask around in local trans groups, hey, what's your experience with this and that guy, yeah, the psychoanalytically oriented ones aren't the ones any of us trust.
I get it, he's got some nice ideas when he's not doing his straight ass pulls and blatant mysogyny, he's also an excellent prose writer and the charm of his Vienesse German even carries over into the English translations, i can give him credit for a lot of things. A lot of things outside of psychology. Yes, he was right about the constructedness of social norms, but you do not need Freud for that, any psychologist with the tiniest bit of background in leftist acedemia understands that part already, it's been kind of at the center of all humanities for the last decades. Psychology doesn't need more Freud, it needs more intersectional anticapitalism to understand that some people just have entirely different experiences than those within the normative framework that defines the illusion of normalcy in our system. And i know a psychologist who does that, and she's got nothing to do with Freud, she just does the usual evidence-based cognitive behavorial therapy slop, but she's read enough feminist theory and queer theory and anti-racist theory to understand where her biases lie and how to treat people correctly when their very existence is at odds with how society is "supposed" to work, and i've never seen anything like that from a Freudian, even though there's ofc Freudian leftists. But even those appear to be permanently stuck with overvaluing and centering the experience and the intellectual idiosyncrasies of a single cishet dude that are just super fucking misleading about how the human mind works, that perpetuate a very lopsided and hierarchical doctor-patient relation and that mostly work on making the wildest assumptions about your patients and always one-upping and controlling them.
i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.
racism and trans stuff are similar in some ways but different in others, i think its not really right to equate them, very different experiences. the basic rub of it is there is a nonstop media campaign targeting trans people with blatant lies, the history of our community is largely embedded in socialist movements in america, there are inherent medical costs to most transitions, there are inherent painful and traumatizing sensations that you can open yourself to if you seek surgery, a possibility of familial ostracization, there is often a whiplash where you go from not being discriminated to discriminated (or vice versa, or discriminated on a new and different basis), and of course its likely that people have been physically and emotionally aggressive with you no matter what community youre in.
and then there are discriminatory acts in healthcare and so on, but these forms of discrimination can manifest in different and similar ways for poc, so a little complex there.
its still my experience that the vast majority of trans people are socialist and people become more active with socialist orgs the longer theyve been transitioned. i also think the fact that our community spans multiple ethnicities also has a factor in this rate of socialism, we all experience similar pains and have many things that unify us. and of course there are some shitty trans people out there, not saying there arent, but i feel like people are greatly overstating how many people are shitty in this thread.
I remember when I was still relatively fresh in my transition being introduced to another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been "out" for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn't even have my name change done because I didn't have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright "oh I'm a communist." Was a bit of a major moment for me. I had a lot of seeds planted over the years between Occupy and just the financial crash but was still very much a lib. As time went on and suddenly the word socialism became less toxic it was a relatively quick shift to make, suddenly all those seeds ended up sprouting and it all just clicked together finally. Having more lived experience as trans and having come across a few people online and IRL that helped demystify it all really did help and I think that's also a relatively big portion of it. We're pushed towards the contradictions with our lived experiences while a solid portion of the community is already there able to explain the contradictions and demystify leftism.
I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had. Completely exiled myself from trans discussions and attempted to never even mention it in any contexts. Finding /r/traaa was an opportunity to actually see more of the trans community and be happy with being trans and ended up kinda just being fine with being visibly trans, though it still sucks that people are shit. I do think the communities we build and the attitudes we allow are just as important as the lived experiences lest you have libs come in and try to paint it over leaving you wanting to just disconnect entirely because their answers suck.
another trans woman back in like the early 2010s and had been "out" for a few years but had only still recently gone full time, didn't even have my name change done because I didn't have the ~400 dollars to make it happen and I was so taken aback that she said outright "oh I'm a communist."
lmao was it me?
I also remember early on despising the trans community because the communities I ended up finding were full of trans-medicalists and boomers with all the liberal trappings to be had.
yeah i remember thinking similar, but you should also take some of the stuff on reddit with a grain of salt, liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly. really amplifies what is really a minority opinion among the larger trans community. you can tell by how many comments have a socialist bent but all the upvotes go to the one liberal opinion
liberals trawl trans subreddits and upvote liberal trans people and downvote socialists regularly
oh fuck i can just see this in my mind
Well, time to go save these damn transgenders from themselves again. I'm such a good person.
fucking gross
gotta remember that generally people tune out of trans spaces the longer theyve been on hrt. so a lot of trans communities are new transitioners and the long-transitioned and few 'moms, dads, and vague parental figures' that guide them to resources and pool the knowledge.
still young, id say 4-5ish years on is when most people begin to radicalize a lot. though most are some sort of socialist anyways, they just become more serious about it
yeah i remember one time where a girl came in and thanked me a lot, saying i changed her life by helping her with her meds and stuff and gave me a big hug. and then some time later she flew into a fit of rage and said she'd never come back to the lgbt center after learning i was a communist, and she never did. i was very bewildered at that. i did go out of the way and even got her an uber to her first HRT appointment and helped her schedule it, which is no big deal for me but i know its a big deal for a lot of people who are anxious to start HRT. she claims she was a socialist. sometimes wonder what shes up to 🤔 strange what propaganda can cook up in people's heads.
it was a strange conversation. i kinda mentioned it offhand to someone (sometimes people say, wow youre so generous! when i offer to help them with something and i just shrug and say im a commie) and i guess they mentioned it to her. she then began asking me stuff about xinjiang very angrily and i just said that im not really here to get into debates with people, im just the trans resource lady and want to help out. then she stormed off as i said.
id say 4-5ish years on is when most people begin to radicalize a lot
pls god no i don't want to become an ultra
lmao I radicalized the day I came out to myself. I was on multiple tabs of lsd so "I'm lying to myself about gender" and "I'm lying to myself about liberalism" were the same realization.
The sad tankie phase is completely avoidable. Most of the ones you encounter online lack praxis. Active socialist practice in your community is inherently rewarding.
Class consciousness might not exist in our local communities in the way we would want to see it, but it is there.
i feel like its generally the case. the longer youve been on hrt the more likely you are to be hard left. mostly because the longer the time youve been acting on being trans, the longer society has had to discriminate against you in some egregious way.
In my experience this depends on stealth vs not-stealth. The stealth people wanting to blend and capable of it tend to deradicalise because they can fit into existing society, those that can not tend to hyper-radicalise because they need society to change for them.
maybe. i pass and i gotta tell you im never forgetting how people treated me in vulnerable moments
also there are plenty of times where im forced to out myself, particularly when dealing with insurance and medical, and i pretty much always get a sour and many times visceral reception because people feel 'tricked'. i had a nurse very unprofessionally yell 'WHAT' at the top of her lungs when i was explaining i was trans and my basic medical history
yeah people fucking with you over whether you pass or not sucks. i had a family member claim i dont even though i havent been misgendered by randoms in like 8 years. pretty sure they were just being a spiteful asshole, they couldnt point out whyWhen people keep telling you that you pass, you most likely do, and you're most likely hella cute as well, because people conflate high passing and being conventionally attractive a lot. And some people, including a lot of trans women, just can't handle that. Our society teaches women to constantly monitor each others beauty and put each other down both when we're not pretty enough and too pretty, we're forced to constantly square the circle, to navigate this ridiculously narrow corridor between supposedly being an unsightly mess and supposedly being a shallow skank. And like most of mysogyny, that gets amplified further when you're trans. I keep hearing stories like yours and they're always from really beautiful trans girls who are resented for looking conventionally hotter or more cis-like than the person putting them down. Like, i just met this super cute trans girl and took her to a local meetup because she was afraid to go alone after some other trans woman had trash talked her for not doing enough about her voice at another get-together years ago - not only is that a horrible demand in general, voice work is hard and not everybody has the talent or the ressources or the time or the lack of voice dysphoria to pull through with it, no, she actually has a lovely voice, low-pitched but very smooth and feminine, a voice i could listen to all evening. But that other woman saw her and probably felt threatened and had to lash out. I had to think of that when you wrote about your ex.
And no, you're absolutely not a bad trans person for stealthing once in a while. It's a scary time we live in, and while it's important that we're visible and outspoken and let people know we're actual human beings they know and not just some abstract "gender ideology", it's hard to be visible 24/7. When you put yourself out there most of the time, and when you reflect the way you do when you do that, and give people the opportunity to learn, that's more than enough. From each according to their abilities also goes for activism, and there's no shame in not wanting to be in the trenches permanently. Our survival and continued existence in itself constitutes a revolutionary act. Reaction wants us dead and being alive as a trans person and living your best life in itself defies the necropolitics of today's fossil capitalism. Being able to take a break from the struggle is a form of privilege, as is being able to transition at all, or having enough money to pay out of pocket for surgeries, or living in a place with easier access to public trans health care, or being educated and able to articulate your existence in a convincing way, or being binary trans, or having had a supportive home and being able to accept yourself in ways other people can't because their parents didn't give them the love they would've deserved, or being a white trans person, or living in an area that makes it easier to access queer networks, but none of these are things you shouldn't use as tools for your survival if you're lucky enough to have them at your disposal. Cisfascism wants all of us dead, and we have a right to fight bacvk against it with anything we have at our hands, we should just be aware of and mindful towards people who don't share some of our privilege instead of throwing them under the bus like the actual assimilationists do.
fascist trans people are an extreme minority. ive only met 1 irl and we booted them from our local org, what was strange is they were also a finnish immigrant. ive interacted with 1000+ trans people in a fairly large city at this point. something around 90% are socialist, but most are not acting on that and are unorganized. i run an informal survey on a lot of things so we know how to help people more at our trans resources booth.
it is pretty weird. the only reason we caught on that she was fascist is she started harping on jewish people after someone mentioned they were jewish
Do Nazis not realize how bizarre blatant antisemitism is to most people?
what? its common practice that most trans spaces have a pronoun sticker printer for neopronouns
i mean... yeah it does. if trans spaces near you are this shit fam you really need to move, its not anywhere close to the norm
Actually, the nearby communities in meatspace are slightly better than international communities. Not by much, though
if someone doesn't respect them here, they're getting an inbox full of PPB and getting banned, in that order.
pig poop balls - image of a pig taking a shit that landed om it's oversized balls. I can link if you're still curious. it's how we deal with reactionaries.
I find most video essayists exhausting. Critiquing culture and media is incredibly easy.
One of my favorite and only exceptions to this is Alexander Avilla, his videos on autism self-diagnosis and queerbaiting were legitimately life-changing for me. The way he focuses on theory more and actually understands it is just so refreshing.
I always thought Philosophy Tube was just hiding her power level for a lib audience.
I don't hate philosophy tube etc to be clear
Then you should probably edit that you've misgendered her in that same sentence. Fucking gross, and it hurts doubly when it's coming from another trans woman.
Where?! Are you being serious?
I was, i either overlooked the "etc." or somehow didn't infer from it that you meant a plural "they". I'm super fucking sorry for this. It was an honest mistake, and if you re-read that sentence in question and leave out the "etc.", you can probably imagine how i came to these conclusions and how it felt to believe that a trans comrade did that kind of thing to another trans person.
Once more, i'm really really sorry for misreading you, and for causing that amount of distress. It's always a particularly awful kind of pain when people from within the community jump at you with such accusations when they're in the wrong, i know what that's like, and i should've taken a second and reread your sentence before posting to avoid putting you through that kind of shit. That was negligent and careless of me and i should've given you more of a benefit of the doubt and double-checked what you wrote. Do you want me to edit that comment or should i leave it up? I really want to make this right and if you want me to remove or edit the comment, it's the least i can do.
You're absolutely right, i'll fuck off and leave you alone. If there's anything you want to tell, you can DM me or message me openly at any point, but i get this isn't a time where i can do anything to mend the harm i've caused and i'm out of here.
Both you and Tastysnack clearly have the best interest of yourselves and fellow trans comrades at heart. Sometimes passions can run hot, and we are reminded of the importance of solidarity. <3
generally dont consider using they/them to be misgendering tbh, i default to it in trans spaces when i dont know someones gender. but its clearly being used in the plural here
generally dont consider using they/them to be misgendering tbh
I'm making exceptions for when pronouns are unknown, or when you're talking about people in general, and ofc for plural they like in this case that i've completely gotten wrong, but once we're adressing known individuals who've stated their pronouns, i'm under the very firm assumption that if these people would be fine with they / them, they would state it as a secondary set of pronouns. When people do not do that, i will never use a singular they / them on them just as i wouldn't he / him or she / her them if these aren't their pronouns. I know there's a bunch of folks both cis and trans who see this different than me and don't mind it, but there absolutely are trans people who find it highly offensive and hurtful, including myself, and also including PhilosophyTube, who will block anybody they / theming her. British terfs are extremly fond of using they / them to deniably misgender binary trans people, too, it's defintily not without its problems.
but its clearly being used in the plural here
It absolutely is, i hope @Tastysnack@hexbear.net sees my apology in time and that it helps her at least a bit. She sounded so upset, it's horrible i've wronged her like this.
The "etc." makes it plural, so the "their" is not misgendering because it refers to the trans breadtuber clique and not one of them in particular.
Given the "etc", I believe the use of "their" is meant as a plural pronoun, not a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Tastysnack's last paragraph isn't a case of misgendering but rather imperfect grammar, something we've all been guilty of.
I thought you were using "their" as plural possessive, but it's been a long time since I've been in an English class, ha. What's important is that I understand you're respecting people's pronouns, regardless of the holes in our knowledge of grammar. :)
You were correct. Etc makes it plural here, so you should use "their" rather than the singular "her". If there was an issue, it was the following conjunct [items combined with an "and"] being in reference to "her," seemingly dropping the etc. Shorter sentences do make things easier, but I can never tell someone to do that since every sentence I write is run-on.
Philosophy tube etc. are a group of people. they/them is the correct pronoun to use for a group of people.
I don't hate philosophy tube etc to be clear, I just find their videos to be self indulgent slop
I don't disagree, but I think she and contra hold a special place in my heart cause they were really the start to my radicalization. Contra's earlier videos really got me thinking outside of a capitalist mindset and got me to think "oh, there's alternatives to capitalism, and gender, and blah blah blah", then I read the manifesto, then I started listening to Teach Me Communism, and then I became a chronically online tankie lol. I feel like I'm not the onlyyyy one that did this (I have friends who I think consider themselves socialist and anticapitalist who still like some of Contra's newer stuff), but I definitely feel like the vast majority of her fanbase is annoyingly liberal to a fault. In her recent 'anti-JK Rowling' lane she's been pretty decent I think except for when she steps even slightly out of it.
Removing criticism of transphobia because "the evil hexbears" is fucking wild.
Placing anticommunism above transphobia on your priorities list guarantees a slide into fascism. Once you start covering up and defending bigotry as long as the bigots are anticommunists you give the perfect cover for fascists to fuck around in your space. By the time a server owner realises that they've made everyone non-fascist leave (or conform to the culture they create thus becoming part of them) they end up just accepting it because doing anything about it would mean killing the entire community population. Because the narcissistic power of being community owner comes first.
they’re prioritizing anti-leftism over transphobia on an instance literally named after a transgender shark lmfao
I agree with you and you're being really correct, but narcissistic is a slur. The origin of the word comes from the disability Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You're obvious talking about neurotypical behaviour, so could you use a different word?
The origin of the word actually comes from the Greek myth, and vastly predates the disorder but I'm going to assume you're just trolling.
Doesn't narcissism predate NPD through the story of Echo and Narcissus? Or through the works of people like Freud? Or is this a joke I'm just not picking up on?
Wouldn't choosing to maintain the fake sense of status that running an online community creates instead of deleting it because of the harm it does or will do definitionally narcissistic? Or is there a requirement here for such actions to be a lifelong pattern?
i would just change it to self-centered. this is an online topic that’s not worth the argument and also narcissism unfortunately does have lightly ableist connotations now since the word has now been medicalized
Narcissists are only 1% of the population, yet we see this behaviour from anyone who owns a large platform. Unless you want to present the thesis that people with NPD are privileged because we own all the social media sites, we must conclude that this pattern of behaviour is common to neurotypicals as well.
narcissism doesn't have to be disruptive enough of a persons' life to be a disorder diagnosis. Should we start calling anxious feelings something else because some people have severe anxiety that we label a disorder? petty narcissism isn't the same as NPD and this is the first time i've seen someone try to equate the two.
I'm not really against moving off the word I just feel a bit odd about it. Like you point out.
I think with anxiety there's a small difference in that it's never used perjoratively. Whereas narcissism is. But I agree with you that if anxiety can be used descriptively for a type of behaviour without meeting the standards for it being a disorder narcisisstic behaviour can be the same thing without meeting the standard.
In the same way anxiety could also be replace with "uncomfortable" or "scared" but this would not be as strong in tone, not really describing the seriousness of the emotion. In this same way narcissism shares that.
Again though, not really a hill I'd die on or anything. It is certainly overused for even incredibly minor things at times.
By analogy, there is a reason that megalomaniac are more likely to be corporate ghouls or sociopaths are more likely to be cops, there is an element of self-selection.
Nah I think it's moreso the use of the word, but I've only ever known of it by that term; I'm not sure what other label would exist for it.
Egocentrism is something else. You're probably thinking of egotistical.
Egocentrists don't necessarily hold themselves in high regard, they just have a bias towards interpreting things as being about them. The most self-loathing person I know is highly egocentric.
What kind of supposedly trans-friendly space has a bunch of people defending defaulting to male and getting upvoted? That shit would get dogpiled and banned here. It's really basic stuff, like on top of being misgendering it's also sexist. What is this, the 1800's? Simone de Beauvoir was criticizing it in the 40's.
"I don't like politics" people are actually the devil incarnate
i'm not really into politics, but [the most bigoted thing ever posted online]
Usually "I don't like politics" just means "I have a vague sense of guilt/unease about the status quo, but don't want to examine that further because it benefits me."
Someone in there is positing that hexbear users are upvoting that post.
I mean, I guess we could make accounts on other servers, but we're defederated so that's kind of a hassle lol
trans people should come here, especially to traa and other lgbt spaces here. even if they arent hard left we'd treat them better.
As a person who feels anarchist principles would be the most benificial way to organize a society, I don't personally feel like its possible to be harder left.
I always feel trepidatious engaging in hexbear threads. I can't tell if many of the takes on here are sincere or trolling, and the immediate mass response to guessing wrong is a dissincentive.
If Hexbears get at you for being a left anarchist report em. This is a left unity site. Sectarianism is not welcome. Our anarchist comrades are.
Hexbear has some anarchists but more MLs. The mods delete more blatant sectarianism, but it's not always perfect.
The main point of friction always ends up being US foreign policy. MLs see you criticizing a socialist state like China and think you're an anti, when of course it's still evil because all states are evil. But on the other hand, we're having this conversation in English. The biggest influence we'd have on Chinese politics from over here would be to convince other English speakers to support anti-China foreign policy in their own governments. That's state intervention, not anarchism.
Yeah, thats fair. The biggest thought trap I see people going in to is "the enemy of my enemy". As I see it, capital impiaralism must be dismantled, and countered, but state capitalism with socialist characteristics doesn't look like an ultimately fruitful path for enhanced liberty, so I think its important to be critical but not dismissive. I haven't found that to be a minority stance amongst anarchsts. Ultimately, the idea of "foriegn policy" itself is statist and true solidarity means standing up for everyone regardless of who the oppressor is.
I mean, I'm a pretty hard ML-type (the
reader) and I want to work towards a hegelian end of the state. I think the primary difference is that I see a tactical use of the state in that process. Honestly, until US imperialism and the broader capitalist structures are thrown down, I don't see much point in arguing with anarchist comrades who agree with me on nearly all the meaningful diagnoses of society's problems. It's entirely a tactics/future oriented disagreement, which we can have without fucking purging each other and generally come away (ideally) both better for it.
Idk your fancy oversized hexbear emotes, but please imagine I have selected a few choice ones to signal my agreement
we fight with tools, and sometimes those tools were built by the state.
My least favorite is the feudalisn-with-extra-markets crowd who keep doing a fascist recuperation on anarchism. They ruined "libertarian" and now they keep trying to make "anarcho-capitalist" a thing, as if political compass was a real and healthy thing
European colonialism brought hundreds of millions out of poverty. I don't personally think chinese socialism has been nearly as damaging, but bringing people out of poverty is not, to my mind, a sufficient metric.
Colonialism plunged entire continents into poverty? And weavers in europe certainly did not get rich either.
Thats quite true. As mentioned, the harm of colonialism far outstrips the harm of comnunism in china.
Are you suggesting weavers in China today are rich, compared to weavers in Europe today?
European colonialism brought hundreds of millions out of poverty.
Uhhh... I dont think so and I'd like to know why you believe this?
The colonialist powers in Europe, North America, and East Asia have a population in the hundreds of millions and general access to wealth and utilities greater than most of the world. Even in the worst parts of the US, clean water is more accessible than in much of the world.
Like, the global capital machine works on a three part extraction:
- extract wealth from colonies (de facto or dejure) through resource transfer
- extract raw wealth from labor through manufactor of goods out of resources
- re-extract wealth from from both parties through sales of manufactured goods
if we are looking purely at distribution of stuff and money, I feel its not terribley controversial to suggest that a representative person in the colonial core has more than one in a colony.
Now, at what level does having more stuff rise to "not being in poverty" is a topic that I would find a lot more debatable, but even the UN's self congradulatory and pitiful "2 dollars a day" shows more people hitting that in the imperial core than outside it
Edit to note: I'm not saying "CHINA BAD" here, I'm saying "lifted out of poverty" is not a good metric. Its an inherently capitalist metric. Measuring if people have enough stuff is a losing game against capitalist wealth extraction. Measure instead how good a life is.
That seems more like a lateral transfer of poverty than lifting people out of poverty though.
Its uneven, but its uneven in china also. One of the core contradictions the party recognizes in China today is balancing the need for continued need for economic development with the growing demand for more stuff amongst the wealthier people.
In some ways, although through very different mechanisms, the same pattern has developed internally in China. There are plces where resources are extracted from and people have less, and places where goods are manufectured and people have more. At least the party recognizes that this happens and is a problem, so I'll give props to that.
But "lifting out of poverty" is a bad metric because it is, as you say, often just moving the poverty around. Historically, the people on the most extracted end do trend better (access to water has been improving globally, for example), but its more a side effect.
and even if it weren't unreliable, its still not great because it still gives in to capitalist realism. A well paid person who works 100 hours a week as more stuff but probably less freedom than a person who can keep shelter, food, and health on 20 hours a week.
No way boss, capitalism pushed hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Prior to capitalism, most people in the world, and for the past 10s of thousands of years, have lived collectively or subsistence farmed, and lived well. When capitalism pushed people away from being able to survive in these systems and dependent on money and wages, poverty emerged.
And they didn't transfer laterally the wealth to Europe - they pushed as many people in Europe into poverty too.
Living conditions for the vast majority of pre-modern people were by all measures terrible. We shouldn't prescribe to pastoralist myths about how people's lives were better simy because they didn't live in a capitalist system.
Subsistence farmers lived under an everpresent threat of starvation, in a way that wage labourers in modern and early modern states do not and did not. They lived largely without literacy, access to education and medicine and these conditions left them especially vulnerable to the influence of religion, unjust social hierarchy and widespread accepted violence.
People often go too far in emphasising how poor life was in those systems. It was obviously worth living for most, and tighter, more insular communities resulted in greater social satisfaction than society under capitalism, but don't pretend that poverty emerged from capitalism and the advent of industrialization. Dealing with poverty and the impoverished was a great concern in the majority of medieval and classical societies, and resource scarcity was a driving factor in many of the great injustices of pre-capitalist history.
Check out this interesting write up here by Dr. Jason Hickel Professor of Economics. He (and the research he mentions in this piece) suggest that this view of pre-capitlist poverty is in fact not true, but based on poorly sourced ideas and amplified by capital to provide capitalist savior propaganda.
Really interesting read, and the papers he mentions are also really great too.
An interesting read thanks. We shouldn't conflate poverty and extreme poverty however. The author makes some very good points, and it's true that capitalism creates extremes of human misery not generally seen elsewhere however their own data shows that nearly all the population would be considered in poverty, if not extreme poverty across all of the periods and areas examined.
That's not their graph that they're showing, that's the one produced by the Gates foundation that they are saying it's wrong.
That's not what I was referring to. Extreme poverty is different to poverty.
Dr Hickel does not seem to be disputing that the majority of people in history lived in poverty, only extreme poverty.
I read it that they were disputing the measurement of poverty itself. Like, if you measure poverty by equivalent purchasing power, that does not take into account actual access to food through community and subsistence.
Check this one out as well: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
While you're right they still do talk about extreme poverty - I believe they define it much better here as the "inability to access essential goods." Which I think is in line with how they are discussing this $1.90/day regular poverty today, actually.
The way I see it, they're suggesting that the living standards which pre-indstrial people generally enjoyed were factually better than what capitalist propaganda tends to suggest.
Basic access to essential goods is the absolute floor of what a society needs to be able to provide for the majority of it's members to survive.
While I agree that pre-indstrial people did generally enjoy access to basic goods, their standard of living was still very poor, and far worse off than the majority of people even in the exploited global south enjoy today.
I would wonder though, is $1.90/day enough to procure "essential goods" even in the exploited south? As I understand it, the bar for the definition of poverty has also been changed. Is someone making $1.90/day under capitalism better off than someone preindustrial? I would argue that they're not better off. At least pre-capitalism people were able to fend for themselves and with a community (and afford housing, food, and comfort for living). But that's the comparison that I think is being made.
It's not liberty for queer chinese people. And liberty on the condition that you have the correct race, gender, and sexuality isn't liberty, it's privilege.
liberty on the condition that you have the correct race
Bullshit to say this about China
And tell me about the liberty felt by a queer kid in America whose parents disown them and kick them out of the house. Marriage rights are good but not the sin qua non of queer rights like neoliberals would have you believe.
I agree, liberty in the west is shit too. Everywhere's horrible.
No, I'm referring to nonbinary people whose gender identity relates to being in a hivemind
What kind of boomer conservative are you to think that's a good bit? That's not even how drones actually work.
I'm literally in a hivemind but go off about how my gender isn't real ig
"Collective consciousness" isn't a gender, but if it were you should demonstrate your telepathy to some scientists. Maybe use those little cards with shapes on them.
Oh, collective consciousness isn't a gender, but drinking beer and watching sports is? Or maybe we'll go to the biological essentialists and ask if a set of chromosomes is a gender. Or we could look at modern feminist theory and check whether performing for the patriarchy is a gender. Or we could go to the evolutionary anthropologists and ask if the social conditions resultant from half the population getting pregnant is a gender.
EVERY gender identity is silly. You are only denying my right to have my gender identity because you're a transphobe and a sexist who likes some genders more than others due to familiarity.
Either this is a conservative (/terf [i.e. conservative]) troll in poor taste or, well, I can't really speculate on the alternative. The basic assertion of "transgender ideology" is that gender is a social performance and therefore not anchored to reproduction, chromosomes, etc.
"Produces fertile sperm" isn't itself a social performance, it's a biological function, which is in the domain of sex. Perhaps trans men would like to do this as most cis men do, but to say that it is a part of the gender (rather than a common feature of the sex) would be the same as asserting that they are not trans men.
"Is part of a collective consciousness" isn't itself a social performance, it's a biological function. Like how a trans man can neither (at the moment) perform the biological function nor the social role of fertilizing an egg, a human cannot perform the biological function of being in a collective consciousness and therefore cannot perform any such social role.
In short:
Oh, collective consciousness isn't a gender, but drinking beer and watching sports is?
Close enough, yeah, though I'd encourage men both cis and trans to think of themselves as more than that (and I personally don't do either)
Yeah, it turns out that there is a line at which I'm willing to buy into exclusionary biological essentialism, and that line is people asserting they're part of a hive-mind.
DroneRights is a huge coward, it went on to hedge the claim down to basically "my gender is that I talk to other humans"
“Is part of a collective consciousness” isn’t itself a social performance, it’s a biological function
I disagree. Egregoric identity is social, not biological. Now, plenty of dronegender people wish that this was Starcraft and we could use psychic powers to communicate, but since that's not the world we live in, we use a social mechanism to create a swarm mind, as does every other swarm animal. Ants communicate using pheromones to direct their society through consenses. Bees use dance. And those of us confined to human bodies use speech. That's this world. I assure you, we're just as upset as you that we don't live in a world of psychic telepathy and ESP, but you have to get used to the real world and get used to accepting us as we exist in the real world. Unless you're interested in becoming an antirealist, but I think you'd be even more hostile to that idea. You have to pick one: reality or fantasy. You can't choose to live in reality and then hold people to the standards of fantasy.
"Communicating socially" isn't limited to one gender or sex within a species. Bees and ants both male and female communicate with each other, though adult queen bees are a little limited in terms of movement, so I assume they rely on more idiosyncratic signals.
But "I talk/write/gesture" is not a gender and also very much not what you introduced your gimmick as. At first it was about sharing a mind or something. If I believed you weren't a troll, I'd say that you took one of the worst possible lessons from neoliberal alienation by seeing undermined human capacity and making a xenogender out of it (thereby opposing its universality).
Obviously, the gender identity of a bee is different to the gender identity of a human, regardless of chromosomes or gametes. Gender identity is a performance, and bees and humans are putting on different shows. Drones are putting on a show that creates a socially constructed hivemind, an egregoric swarm.
Do you really want to keep debating my gender identity with me? Are you really continuing to deny that I'm allowed to identify as my preferred gender?
"Egregoric" is a fun word that I'll mention to a friend of mine who likes writing fantasy, but it does not describe bees and neither does "hivemind," which suggests many beings with one mind (as you seemingly did as well in your first comment here). But you are missing that the act of communicating is something that all healthy bees do and all healthy humans do. Genders as social constructions only make sense in the context of genders with contrary traits. No healthy human doesn't communicate. I strongly suggest communicating with more people in order to learn that it's something everyone does. Or you drop the shitty terf bit.
Always with radlibs there's this incredulous shit about not being "allowed" to do this or that. No, I don't have the power to forbid you from doing anything and have held no pretense that anything else was the case. I am merely allowed to criticize conservatives trying to reinvent their "transracial" "attack helicopter" bits.
I like how you've constructed this world where you're a leftist and I'm a conservative, yet you're the one attacking my gender identity and saying it isn't real. Typical liberal bullshit. You come onto my thread, attack me for a name proclaiming I have basic rights, start a debate about the validity of my gender, and then call me a conversative because I don't accept your liberal bullshit. No, you fucking fascist, trans rights are a LEFTIST position, and you are a liberal transphobe who hates anything further left than your white capitalist transphobic sexist ideology. Wrecker behaviour.
Here's a tip: If you see a nonbinary person on a leftist forum and you don't think their gender is real, DON'T ENGAGE. Don't start a debate about whether their gender is real. Don't spend hours attacking them for being trans. I am not interested in your fucking identity politics bullshit. I don't care what genders you think are valid, as long as you keep your binary fucking patriarchal beliefs to yourself. Don't harass trans people for existing, genius.
Now here's the first line of the Hexbear code of conduct:
We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.
Follow it.
I've got no problem with nonbinary people. Gender is a pair of social performances, significantly deviating from both makes one nonbinary. I view you (/your character if you are a wrecker) as being nonbinary, I simply do not view "communicates" as a gender. It's not like I'd ever not use your pronouns.
My initial comment was me suggesting you are "pro drone" in the US imperialism sense. I never fathoms that it was something as absurd as the position you have now expressed.
I don't view "communicates" as a gender either. But "uses communication to talk about sports" is a component of a particular gender presentation. And a big part of my gender presentation is "uses communication to form an egregoric identity". I don't know why you misunderstood me so badly that you thought communication was my gender when I told you I achieve hiveminding through communication.
It's because hiveminds aren't real and collective identity is something virtually everyone is part of.
You mean you identify as the same person as someone else? IDK sounds gay to me (positive connotation)
I mean collective identity like "Citizens of X country; mathematicians; skaters; Chinese diaspora; local residents; children". Groups that segments of the population are a part of and about which things like median opinion on a given topic, age, social position, etc. might be said.
Identifying as another individual person is, I think, a symptom of schizophrenia or another psychotic condition if you really mean it. If it's just a thing you say, then that's called lying.
Drones don't identify as individuals. Individual identity is voluntarily relinquished in favour of swarm identity. "I" am not a member of a swarm, because there's no such thing as "I". There is only "We".
Obviously I use an individual identity when I'm interacting with neuronormative society. I have to hide in my closet and pretend to be an individual so that you'll be able to understand my speech. But when I'm being myself, there is no myself.
Again, this is either cult behavior or being cute with language. It doesn't matter if you say "I" or "this one," the same thing is indicated. If you believe in your individuality not being a valid concept or referent beyond linguistic contrivance, then it's back to cult shit or psychosis. Even critics of the self like Hume still admit that there is "this bundle of sensations" that is distinct from "that bundle of sensations" because to say otherwise would be at odds with reality. Likewise with all those who negatively evaluate multiplicity, like Plotinus and Schopenhauer. They believe in the metaphysical supremacy of a unified One (or maybe Two), but they nonetheless recognize that the world of images/world-as-representation is what we experience and need to navigate on a basic level.
ps I don't say "cult shit" lightly. I specifically know of someone who got pulled into a cult where they do that shit seemingly as a method of having the leader's identity supersede that of his cult members (who are effectively a harem). In a way, you could have a conceptually valid identity if the behavior of acting as a drone was gendered against the behavior of a monarch. That would be conceptually valid, but also cult shit that merits serious intervention from mental health professionals. If you refuse this comparison on the ground that there is no monarch or non-drone other gender, consider that what you're talking about is more like a murmuration of birds or a school of fish (and, again, is not a gender because genders are exclusive clusters of behaviors/social markers).
Yeah okay I'm not comfortable with hearing you say my gender isn't real or that it's a harmful religion anymore.
Bullshit to say this about China
I'm not one of these pro-china people but in it's current state, China has way more rights for trans people than the U.S. There are informed consent clinics in a number of cities and while I'm sure trans woman are discriminated against there there are no laws directly discriminating against them.
Meanwhile the U.S basically bans trans people (and sometimes gay people) from existing in half of this country by land mass. Not even going to say that china has a "good" queer rights record or even one that's worthy of a socialist country but like China and Vietnam have better queer rights than any other countries in Asia (other than maybe japan) and def in the U.S
There might have been an argument that the U.S was a better place to be queer in like 2018 but we don't live in 2018 anymore
Interesting. I'm aware that the US is descending into fascism, that's why I'm trying to help my partner refugee out of there. I don't think I mentioned the US in my comment, and it's not like china and america are the only countries. I'd like to hear more about trans rights in china, but first I'd like to hear why you thought the fourth riech was so pertinent to this conversation.
i mean that is a fair point. i guess its just because for the most part the u.s is considered the measuring stick for democratic rights since it is the self-appointed "leader of the free world". but yeah ofc places like sweden and most of europe have better queer rights than either china and the u.s
im not really a "dengist" or someone who believes that china is socialist. that being said one of my comrades is a chinese trans woman who goes to informed consent clinics in china and visits the major cities there quite often and is able to get alone without any discrimination or molestation by the public at large.
i guess i should bring up some actually sources but i am busy right now, maybe if you poke me ill look at it later.
generally its better for trans people and gender conforming queer people in china but its pretty bad for gender non-conforming queer people a la their restrictions on "sissy boys" which is pretty bad and generally you won't see talked about on hexbear
but state capitalism with socialist characteristics
How much have you actually investigated this claim?
The characterization of china as state capitalism? You know, I hadn't ever gatten a first hand source for it, so you did inspire me to check my understanding.
Its a central tenant and a core part of Xi Jiping thought. It was unanimously affirmed at the 20th party constitution convention. Some key highlights:
- the system under which public ownership is the mainstay and diverse forms of ownership develop together
- the socialist market economy
- efforts to foster a new pattern of development that is focused on the domestic economy and features positive interplay between domestic and international economic flows
you can read it yourself in the resolution on Party Constitution amendment
My understanding of it is a system of ownership and direction of enterprizes, where the state participates as a capitalist and as managenent, either wholely or in concert with private ownership.
You know, like Lennin meant
edit to add: Lennin was certainly against any private participation in capitalism, but the soviet party did loosen that with parastroika, and the Chinese Communist party started with, I believe, Deng Xiaping Thought, tho I would have to double chetk that it didn't start earlier
Worth a read, this is from Vijay Prashad's organisation: https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2023-2-socialism-3-in-china/
Thanks, that did help deepen my understanding. Its good to see that the current thought remains commited to socialism and recognizes the miss-steps of the past, and is continuing to iterate towards a more equitable future.
Perhaps one day they will achieve it. I certainly hope they do. As of yet, the state capitalism approach to building socialism has had a number of mistakes and limited success, such that I still remain skeptical of it.
I think the important element here is simply to understand that the DOTP is secure, arguably much more secure than it has ever been in the past. As long as it remains secure I think incremental improvements are always going to occur.
I do not agree with using this term "state capitalism" and think it was a mistake for it to have ever been used in the past to describe anything within a socialist state. Capitalism is, by definition, a state controlled by the capitalists. Socialism is, by definition, a state that is not controlled by the capitalists but by the people, working towards the goal of communism. All states under a DOTP are socialist regardless of the current economic mode of production, what percentage is marketised, etc etc.
Ultimately we probably won't agree on this point though. Just please be wary that it's a contentious and likely sectarian point of disagreement that is liable to blow up into a struggle session whenever it's raised. I don't really mind so much whether we disagree on it though just so long as you're not actively trying to destroy these states, which would only help the capitalists at the end of the day, not to mention ruin the lives of 1.7billion people with a 1990s-like collapse on a terrifying scale.
I mean, I think their reading of Lenin is correct but they are just applying it carelessly. This is why I always say "liberalism" to describe the political system is more useful.
Yeah it's not so bad. I just think that Lenin was in the wrong using the phrase to begin with, and that we seem to all acknowledge it's a shit phrase by not using it, and instead using "socialism" or "AES" to describe states doing this.
In my experience people that want to adhere to Lenin's term are usually doing so because they want to imply that these states aren't socialism and that they are just capitalism. This is where we can easily get into conflicts.
To clarify, I was not trying to do this. I was, and do, talk about it as a socialist strategy. I don't call it socialism alone, because that erases other, non-statist forms of socialism such as cooperativism, syndicalism, or parecon. We might call this "state socialism", but I have found that term to be less understood than "state capitalsm"
listen to season 2 of Blowback on Cuba. American policy radicalized the revolution and forced them from a more reformist stance, into ML orthodoxy, and they've achieved a tremendous amount while under seige from the US.
so much respect for cuba. Thedy have accomplished a lot in the face of tremendous advercity
You are correct on what state capitalism is, but that flies in the face of the cases discussed. Perestroika USSR is not Lenin's USSR, but one that suffered from decades of revisionist rot that started before Stalin's corpse was even cold.
Normal-ass private citizen capitalists are anathema to Lenin's state capitalist model, the whole point was for the state to take that mantle in order to remove the existence of an independent capitalist class. I don't think this was correct, and in fact a pretty catastrophic failure of grasping counterfactual class antagonism, but it is what it is.
China's model is officially called (among other things) "state socialism", so named because the primary role of the state is not to nullify and supplant the capitalist class but rather to subjugate it at the direction of the proletariat. We can say in a looser sense that things like it's public enterprise in oil are "state capitalist", but the PRC overall is not a state capitalist entity.
i cant speak much for the rest of hexbear but at /c/traa (im the mod there) we intend on whacking people that mess with trans solidarity too much with sectarianism. also @Nakoichi@hexbear.net is our resident always online anarchist so maybe they can provide more insight for you. also pretty sure we have a tranarchist or two on our mod team
our resident always online anarchist
Hey fuck you! But also thanks for the shoutout lol
"Hey, fuck you!", the greating of a true anarchist. Or person from New Jersey. Its hard to tell.
(spoken with love, but also its true)
Coming from the all, chapo and dunk tank form my main experiance of hexbear. Happy far the invite, I'll subscribe
It depends on the user. I've noticed many are just chill and having a laugh at the depressing existence of living under capitalism. I'm enjoying interacting here after lurking without an account.
Just don't threaten our hexbear cheese wheel stockpile and I won't throw you in the castle jail!
Depends on the user is sort of the problem tho. sometimes they have a laugh with poe-level sarcasm, which I can identify in my friends, but not with internet strangers. So its scary
Jesus, I know what you mean. I've been on this site from the beginning, off and on, but sometimes it's hard to tell what's sarcasm, or if it's a bit. For example:
Definitely a bit: /u/NeeraTanden
Still can't tell if it's a bit: /u/LiberalSocialist
I always feel trepidatious engaging in hexbear threads. I can't tell if many of the takes on here are sincere or trolling, and the immediate mass response to guessing wrong is a dissincentive.
You have to break through this.
Engaging in having bad takes is a quick way to challenge yourself. And challenging yourself is good. Either you will come out with stronger confidence in the views that you have or you will learn new things and develop yourself as a person.
Break through the fear of participation. There is never any end to learning, and never any end to developing our views. It is necessary to engage in challenging ourselves in order to advance.
So you had a shit take? Who cares. Assuming you're not a shit who actively avoids admitting when wrong and developing, all will be fine.
Naw, I don't mind much when someone points out that I had a shit take, and takes the time to help me understand it.
An inbox-destroying number of messages about it is a different beast. At some point, a friendly correction or two changes in to a beast with no nuance or possibility of discussion.
It results in a third outcome: the target stops learning or engaging at all.
Yeah, not surprised by this. Harboring chasers and kicking out trans communists is a great way to make your community a shithole of reactionary jerks.
“i made my space ‘safe’ for anti-communists and now it’s mostly reactionaries! how could the left do this to me?!”
Ada's going to be shocked when she finds out the user I told her was being transphobic is a transphobe. How could she have known, why didn't anyone tell her!? /s
Man and dude: no shit it’s masculine gendering.
lmfao i encountered a lib who said "dude" is gender neutral somehow. to make matters worse said lib was an enby 🙄🙄🙄
also i pretty much just switched to using “hey y’all” unless i’m specifically greeting a collective of guys/girls/enbies, since “hey guys” still comes off as a bit weird to me. like, i’m not a
wtfI still say "hey guys" and "bye guys" just out of sheer reflex
Yea I have been working very hard to remove guys from my speech. Currently liking "folks" a lot.
I agree with folks. Northern anglos saying y'all is
I'm giving every northerner a "y'all" pass. Ur welcome, it's simply superior
Only if you teach them how to use it properly at least
I use folks with my students and in general. It's a good one.
Comrades is fun with friend groups who are left though.
I've slowly been replacing 'guys' with 'comrades' and it's worked quite well
But I've heard (non-chud) people say "dude" to refer to the person they're talking to in a gender neutral way. As an interjection, mostly.
I don't have any clips to share but I'm positive that Anne from Amphibia calls all her friends "dude"
I agree, there's a lot of people out there that sincerely use dude and guy neutrally. It doesn't come off very well in text but it's cool in person, the vibes are chill. Though I completely understand why a lot of people don't like it.
And this is a tangent, but my understanding of the word "man" is that it originally meant "person" while the words for adult male and adult female were "were" and "wif" respectively. Then "man" started being used in place of "were", which fell out of use. And for some reason "wif" became "wifman" and eventually "woman".
This boat has long since sailed but I think it's interesting that "man" used to be a gender neutralish word (boys were still the implied default I think).
"Hey everybody," has been my default for a while now. I don't understand what's so hard about making that the norm for some people.
If I want to be a bombastic show-off on stage (which I like to do sometimes!), I'll open with, "Welcome, one and all, to... THE THINGY!"
This isn't rocket surgery. Even an old asshole like me can be inclusive with next to zero effort.
Surely the precise meaning of words like dude, guys etc. is dialect and audience dependant? Use of English can very considerably just across the US and more so internationally.
Yeah Ada does genuinely seem to have good intentions but she's like letting a lot of idk, kind of scummy people fester in the instance, like i made a post about native blahaj users being chasery at me on there and to her credit Ada found it and DMed me about it, but the user who came at me really aggressively and accused me of being chaserphobic (in reply to me telling a cishet male chaser I would be uncomfortable with being in a relationship with anyone who talked about trans people the way they did) only had their comment removed with a request to edit it to remove the bit where they called me chaserphobic, they didn't even get banned from the comm.
(In regards to the other chaser, I suggested that since they were seemingly a child they'd just get a stern talking to in DMs and a warning and Ada agreed to that)
It's not like the mods over there didn't know about the chaser who was harassing you. They would pop up whenever Ada posted to yell at her for getting rid of their NSFW com
I believe they were actually a tranfem / enby pick me and not a chaser (idk their pronouns because they weren't in their bio and I couldn't read past more than one of their posts complaining about Ada defedding an instance that hosted a comm imitating CSAM as a kink but I know they're not he/him)
What the fuck is chaserphobic and how is it a bad thing if it's a real thing? My cis-brain can't comprehend this
It's what a particularly bold chaser invented to make not fucking them Ina hypothetical scenario a form of oppression.
From the people that brought you "people of means" comes a whole new flavour of too-online-yet-not-online-enough nonsense fresh for this year of our lord two thousand and twenty-three
Can someone explain what happened? Been gone for a few days. From my understanding the admin of Blahaj didn't handle some stuff well and so Hexbear defederated from Blahaj, but that's the last I heard. Did we refederate or...?
No, that's mostly it. Basically Blahaj was starting a lot of bad-faith arguments, their mods were deliberately trying to wreck conversations, they seriously failed to address the repeated spouting of transphobia and chasers on their own instance, and the admin either couldn't or wouldn't address the problem.
That's why we defederated, and since then Blahaj users actually seem to be significantly more aware and outspoken that their own instance is actually plagued by these issues. They also seem to live in the constant fear that the Hexbears are secretly 'brigading' every thread and vote they ever have now. So it's been an interesting change in attitude to see.
Well that would explain why I see a dronerights user in here trolling for attention
this is the hugest self-own I’ve seen. you run an instance for trans people you goddamn fucking prick
is this solidarity?
i