Dirt_Possum [any, undecided]

This is interesting but I’m extremely skeptical.

Same here. I don’t understand economics well enough to have an opinion I trust enough to criticize it, but all of this seems like it flies in the face of what I do understand of Marxist economics. There was another information dense comment about these things in this thread by u/Droplet but that one at least seemed to be in line with my poor understanding. @Droplet@hexbear.net could you respond to what u/ComradeRat is saying? Are you more or less in agreement? For that matter, do you know if Zak Cope is more or less in agreement with Michael Hudson?

To imply that abortion is the cure for poverty or that not having access to it is the cause is indeed false and a typical liberal refusal to look at the broader systems. But to deny how much unwanted pregnancy, along with the health risks and increased mortality rate that come with it, the burden on poor communities to provide adequate care for children when they are already overworked, etc, all contribute to and worsen poverty is absurd, and just as much a failure to recognize material reality.

Liberals and even well meaning progressives will sometimes fall into the trap of pitching abortion and birth control as a part of the solution to poverty.

But access to abortion and BC does help alleviate poverty. When women are unable to choose to not have unwanted pregnancies and children, it does create a serious strain on them and their community, exacerbating poverty and everything associated with it. That isn’t some idealist liberal delusion, it’s very well documented reality.

Edit, adding:

I honestly think if birth control was only available for colored people then conservatives wouldn’t have a problem with it. Abortion too

It’s just the opposite. One of the main reasons reactionaries tend to be so anti-abortion is because forcing women to have unwanted children helps to perpetuate poverty, locking communities into a cycle of impoverishment they can’t escape. Meanwhile, those who are rich and white have access to abortions whether they’re illegal or not, which is by design. If a rich old gammon-chud’s daughter gets pregnant and she doesn’t want to keep it, he’s likely to help her quietly get an abortion even as he ensures people of color never have that kind of opportunity. Wealthy white people want (and generally have) the freedom to do whatever they want while they simultaneously limiting the freedoms of poor BIPOC people, all to maintain or strengthen the white supremacist system.

There are links to alternative front ends in a comment below. Also, old.reddit is working OK for me without needing to login. You’re right, NSFW old.reddit is requiring login now.

China has recently made positive strides on a number of issues like LGBTQ rights, so there’s no reason not to hope they can also start moving in the correct direction when it comes to phasing out animal cruelty and meat consumption as well, as they continue to economically surpass the reactionary west. Their dedication to addressing climate change will also at some point demand the recognition that using animals as a major source of food is unsustainable.

Wait, what’s worse? For who? I’m not totally sure what you’re saying here but as someone who has survived by doing sex work, who has been repeatedly sexually exploited*, and who has also been more than what I think most would just call exploited, I would not say that any of that was worse for me than being murdered on a factory farm. Can we just agree that exploitation and the objectification or commodification of sentient life is very bad and needs to be abolished?

*(Side note to make clear that sex work is not inherently exploitational either but that’s a different ball of wax.)

Nah, contrary to the belief of some weirdos, poking fun at people for their supernatural woo idealism is providing a positive service.

Incredibly hurtful? Cowardly? Come on. That’s the same as a chud crying about being pasted in a bad light onto a wojak comic. It’s a dumb meme, you should be happy your pfp made it onto one that someone made for a niche leftist website to chuckle at. I have seen you tear into liberals for their bullshit beliefs (which I enjoyed watching), and I wouldn’t have expected you’d be so weirdly sensitive to being on the other side of that equation. I think most here would take this as being barely more than a comradely joshing. You weren’t even the prime character in it, your pfp (pfp for christ sakes!) was pasted over the microphone of the original pic. But given all that, the fact you got this twisted up about it makes me feel like it was all the more a good thing to do. You should take this as an opportunity to examine why you did find something so mild as this “incredibly hurtful” but more importantly why your fellow communists would be jokingly comparing you to the current poster child for woo lunacy.

As for what is comparable, well you both believe in nonsense woo that would make many spirit crystal chiropractors blush and you both have come up with absurd justifications for it. You have this strange fixation that I was calling you a zionist when it was pretty clear that had nothing to do with it, and the comparison was around the nutty unsubstantiated beliefs. In fact I didn’t know the other person in the picture even was a zionist, but I did know she uses her “spiritualism” as a justification for the dippy new-age version of white supremacy. I think you just focus on the zionism part because you’re mad at me for making a mediocre niche meme picture and you saying that I’m calling you a zionist is a way to try to lash out. But nah, I wasn’t calling you a zionist, I was calling you a nut. So please enough with the hyperfixation on zionism. By putting your pfp next to a picture of her, I didn’t call you a zionist any more than I called you someone who appropriates black culture by wearing dreadlocks, and I think you actually know that.

You happen to be lucky in that despite adamantly believing in wacky things that there is zero proof for and has been demonstrably proven false, you still arrived at the correct conclusions about politics, capitalism, imperialism etc., which I think most here would agree is by far what’s important. But again, I think you got there in spite of having some massive brainworms about the supernatural. Having wacky batty woo beliefs isn’t a crime but it is one hundred percent on the table fair game to be made fun of, and it needs to be. Because uncritical belief in magic is not something that should be present in a healthy society, the society that we as communists and materialists should aim for, where we examine reality with a scientific mindset to come as close as we can to modeling reality instead of making up just-so stories that fit our conception of how we wish things were instead of how they are. It is only through brutal honesty with ourselves and how the world works (as opposed to how we wish it worked, like with magic telekinetic, telepathic or prophetic powers) that we can find the way towards true human flourishing. Going the route of ghosts, demons, telekinesis, astral projection, crystal powers, star seeds, or whatever, it’s all different facets of the same bunkum and it is anathema to a materialist conception of reality (in whatever way you want to define materialism, strictly Marxist, more broadly philosophical, but any meaningful definition of materialism).

This Shanin person (who tbh I didn’t know existed until the thread here about her and that chud singer) has also followed this path of going down the rabbit hole of unsubstantiated spiritualist nonsense that “makes sense to her” despite all these things she believes being obvious, provable bullshit. She arrived at much more odious conclusions about people and supremacy, and that’s not surprising. I know the concept of the “slippery slope” is often abused, but in this case it’s very fitting and actually happens a lot. I’ve watched it happen with people, the new age woo to white supremacy pipeline. It’s not uncommon that it is tangential to Joe Rogan. It’s not always a bad trajectory, but it often is. When you start believing in this kind of antiscience wishful thinking, you can follow it to all sorts of conclusions, literally anything imaginable, including the truly horrible and antihuman. I think of the esoteric alien origins horseshit that many of the inner core nazis made foundational to their beliefs. I think about the batshit mormon beliefs that were based on the whims of a known charlatan con artist, and how interwoven all of that became with the white supremacist “security” apparatus of the US, the most evil organizations that ever existed. Magic underwear is innocuous and even funny, but it’s part of a sort of larger complex of beliefs, a structure founded on woo supernatural mysticism, self referential and self reinforcing, that is used to justify some of the most heinous crimes. A failure of critical thinking, which in my opinion is a form of a failure of self crit, is dangerous in the long run, and belief in magic is without a doubt a failure of critical thinking.

There, does that meet your criteria for being “said it to your face”? I don’t see how anything else I posted before wasn’t saying it to your face. I don’t even know what subtweeting is, as I fortunately never got sucked into that brand of social media. But stop implying I was doing something underhanded or sneaky. That’s absurd. I made a dumb meme pic and posted it where you and anyone else could see. Just like with the zionism thing (that didn’t happen) you keep twisting me into this strange caricature that has nothing to do with… well, anything, and assigning to me these nonsensical intentions that simply aren’t there. It’s weird, comrade! Don’t do that! Now, if you want to take my pfp and paste it to compare me to some scientism nerd like ND Tyson, or even a bigger asshole like Dick Dawkins, that would be a fair reciprocal and I’d have to laugh even. But I wouldn’t suddenly think you were, for example, accusing me of SA just because they were (I think?) I definitely wouldn’t come back and call you a coward and make up all these off the wall accusations about your intentions.

Whatever though. I feel like I’ve said my piece and I’m pretty sure also answered your questions, mostly by trying to straighten out the misconceptions about me you glomed onto. I know this was long, but that’s mostly because I think you’re still a decent poster and commie, so I’m taking the time to lay it out there. If you were just some random chud which I’d assume you were if this thread was all I’d ever seen you post, I’d roll my eyes, PPB you and move on. Even though the hostility you assumed I had wasn’t there in my original image post nor this comment, I do feel like your response with demands of posting “to your face” and calling me cowardly, etc. really was hostile. And I don’t like that. So this is the end of the conversation at my end. I expect you’ll respond, and I hope it is about things I actually said this time. But I won’t know. Tomorrow is my scheduled day to touch grass and be away from the internet entirely, and I won’t be touching this pile of internet drama with a ten meter pole. Again, I’ve said my piece, I went into great detail specifically to answer your hostile questioning, now I’m disengaging.

What are you talking about, no they aren’t. Besides, when did it become not ok on hexbear to treat harmful and false ideas with the condescension and disdain they deserve? You do know about the Posting Policy Bulletin at the bottom of every hexbear page, I hope. Also, telling someone to relax is pretty condescending, just fyi.

Removed by mod

Bouldering and parkour.

Cool story

I love when hexbear users just make shit up about what I say.

I love when hexbear users demonstrate not only a complete unwillingness to do bare minimum self crit, but deflect around the reason they’re being criticized and then pretend the people criticizing them are “making shit up.” “I’m getting ratioed because hexbears are making shit up about what I say!” is the kind of comment I expect to read from .world lemmitors, but its especially disappointing to read it from a leftist I would have thought should know better.

I said “you should just block me if you don’t want to see it”

Do you think blocking a user lets people unsee something they already saw? Does blocking on hexbear allow for time travel now?

Intentional bad faith misreading of what I said as well as an unwillingness to even try to comprehend what I did say. Also, you don’t get to decide for other people what is traumatic for them. The self centered lib-brained gall of some people to think they’re the arbiters of other people’s trauma… Just wild.

Because they’re literally given the power to not see it if they don’t want to

Can you really not see why this is just a bad argument? Not to mention selfish? The exact same thing could be said about literally anything that we require content warnings for. Talking about SA? “Bro, just block me if you don’t wanna see detailed depictions of assault!” Traumatic gore (which is actually what “meat” really is)? “Come on bro, it takes no effort just to block me when I post gore images, so I shouldn’t have to figure out how to use spoiler tags late at night for your delicate snowflake sensibilities.” Even then it’s retroactive, people are not given the power to not see it if we don’t want to the first time around. Blocking you comes after we’ve already been forced to see something we didn’t want to see and only works in hypothetical future occurrences.

I’m not saying it was massive. If that was what it read I was implying, maybe my language was a little hyperbolic. But I actually am aware of the downvotes and am including that information in talking about this.

17 up and 10 down on my first and very mild comment. 22 up and 11 down for his long, swerfy response. The support is in his favor. This is really splitting hairs though, and the exact numbers don’t really matter. Just that there are quite a lot, even a slight majority of people supporting SWERF garbage. I also think that moderation says a lot about a community, what it really stands for. To me, it’s telling that I got banned for rule 2 (bigotry, sexism, etc.), which is what I was calling out, while the actual bigotry and sexism still stands with a bunch of upvotes, does speak to the general vibe of what is ok and what isn’t.

Also, the user who felt ashamed and was calmly defending herself just commented here in the megathread further down, saying that she’s getting downvoted.

Ok, I see. Yeah that doesn’t surprise me after today. It’s too bad her post is gone.

You got banned from genzedong not lemmygrad,

You’re right. Fixed.

yeah that’s a problem with lemmygrad, they’re not really swerf as much as not read up on feminism

Disappointing. Not being read up on a topic is one thing, but when actively spouting misogynist SWERF rhetoric, I’d say that’s a deeper rot than simply not being read up. I know for a fact there are a number of lemmygraders who are not like that, and are very much feminists and support sex workers because I’ve talked to them in the past. But judging by that thread and the support there for the SWERF, it really does point to it being a real problem with the site culture.

Looking around a bit I see there have been long-time and well known trans hexbears that wanted to defederate from lemmygrad due to the transphobia too.

I don’t understand, they had a post talking about their position on sex work?

I just got banned from lemmygrad c/genzedong on lemmygrad for calling out blatant sexism where a user was shaming sexworkers (as said by someone else, a sexworker, who literally talked about the shame a SWERF lemmygrad user was making them feel). But a comment where I expressed solidarity with that person and told them they shouldn’t feel ashamed of the work they do was removed for “rule 2” which is… bigotry, sexism, etc. So rule 2 states you aren’t allowed to call out bigotry and sexism I guess? These losers call themselves leftists?!

I’m sickened to see sexism and sexphobic rhetoric getting more upvotes in a place I thought was supposed to be progressive and not a reactionary shithole where misogyny is allowed and encouraged and people who call it out get banned with their comments removed. Yeah, I’m mad. Fuck lemmygrad, at least the SWERFs and apparently the SWERF-supportive mods.

I guess I’ve been spoiled by hexbear usually being so good about these sort of issues, I forget that other leftist spaces are often still rife with sexist bigoted SWERF assholes. Lemmygrad and hexbear overlap so much these days (which 99% of the time is great) I wasn’t remembering that lemmygrad really does have its own distinct site culture, and at least one aspect of it is really… not good. I will not be shamed by SWERFs and I will not allow my comrades to be shamed by SWERFs when I can do anything to help it.

Sorry, just had to vent somewhere, but this wasn’t worth a whole post.