Having been off for here for 6 days, I have been extremely surprised that the veganism debate wasn't immediately treated by the same rules as sectarianism*. That's been a pretty successful model for this site.

I remember before that we'd regularly have the anarkiddies/tankies threads that did nothing but drive people away. Once the rule was put in place, those tendency fights ended.

*Functionally on this site it's a political tendency, you're welcome to check out this sticky if you are unsure, even though there are arguments to be had about it being a philosophy/practice.

there is no assumption of good faith at all here

There's a good amount and the community does a solid job.

There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site and that is an entire level of fucking loser I never expected to see continue this long after launch.

It can be difficult to have good faith discussions when people internalize the "bullying works" meme a bit too closely.

Now that you're a sitemod from this particular comment specifically, I sincerely hope you'll work to change the part of the PR post yesterday that excepted the vegan shit-stirring from rules governing sectarianism.

This site has long had a lingering uninterrogated colonial mindset across a good chunk of the userbase (myself included!) which has been brought up multiple times, so for the admin/dev team to respond in that both sidesy way yesterday to a specific, high profile instance of it was incredibly disheartening.

There was undoubtedly wrecking that took advantage of the original, legitimate concern, and the response from some to double down on the assimilation take just fed into that. But the response from the admin team stood in stark contrast to the way transphobes got the wall a few months ago.

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people see someone who disagrees on a fairly complex issue and jump immediately to the worst fucking mindset possible in the person they’re debating with.

veganism is one of the various positions in which you will rarely see unity in any given left group that doesn’t organize around it. so literally the only way to address it is for both sides of the issue to decide either their comrades are still their comrades despite a differing position on it, or that the differences are irreconcilable in which case the other side needs to be fought at the expense of the community itself.

Yeah this sort of thing is really scary, and I know I've done it already myself a bit which I regret like implying they would throw slurs at me if I partaked in things like fishing/hunting that my grandpa and his community took part in, I realize that was unfair and rude of me to just assume. I still think it has a veneer of racism behind that but I was probably too hostile and assumptive about the level. At the end of the day, arguments around all these topics have been in leftist discourse since practically forever. And I'll also admit, I've probably upvoted a few rude comments in my haste that I shouldn't, which doesn't help cause it shows "support" for them that I shouldn't have done.

And besides, there have been vegan communists, they have been omni communists, there was probably a lot of communist thinkers who couldn't make up their mind too all throughout history. Accusations thrown around like "Vegans are actually neoliberals!" or "You can't be leftist without veganism" are just silly because of that. It's so unnecessarily aggressive.

Also uh, this is a problem throughout the whole internet but minorities can disagree with each other is a thing too. I posted before about how I don't want to talk over my indigenous comrades, but we do need to keep in mind that the term is broad and can refer to a lot of different cultures with different histories behind them. One culture might have a lot of emphasis on hunting and still actively teach their kids how to, while another might have veered away from that in the past few generations. One holocaust survivor might think eating animals is a fair comparison, while other survivors might find it disrespectful of the pain and suffering they went through. Someone who's ancestors were slaves might think that the comparison to slavery as unfair and rude, while another person with slave ancestors think it's an apt comparision. People can disagree about these things even in historically oppressed communities. But I do think, the only people who should really be speaking up about that are the ones who go through it. A holocaust survivor can call something similar to the holocaust, but you, someone born 50 years after, shouldn't be. You can point to the person who did say it, but that's really it. It's not your job to latch onto one oppressed person's words and use them to shove your own non experienced thoughts into a conversation.

I appreciate all the work that the admins here do, I know that moderating a community like this is difficult, especially one that has always been rather prone to splitting and tearing itself apart. I have a lot of issues with the way that moderation is done here sometimes (like how people have mentioned the mod log needs to be more detailed), but I'm also trying to fight back against the hostility that some of the users are bringing up with it. I critiqued that one dude who was like "Admins do better challenge" for being too passive aggressive, but at the end of the day I know I can't control anyone. It feels like a losing battle to try to keep civil discussions up.

I loved this site early on for having challenging discussions that made me double back and think "huh, maybe I was being shitty with those things". I'm trying to work on stuff like my internalized fatphobia, and calling things "dumb" or "stupid" as a go-to insult that I don't think I would have challenged myself on if people here weren't nice and kind over it and willing to have discussions. But that magic is fading, and I don't know if it will ever come back.