They/Them

  • 18 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • I quite liked it. You could recognize users, everyone was generally nice, you could leave for a month without feeling like you missed out, conflict wasn’t worth it most of the time so you’d see it to a lesser degree than compared to the conflict generated in just the past week, and the vegan community thrived. I actually started having conversations with some Lemmy users outside of Lemmy!

    I remember how exciting it was when federation was enabled and the handful of instances could finally hang out together.

    It was quiet and peaceful, but drama would happen once every couple of months that was both entertaining and annoying.

















  • The English writer Wells went to the Soviet Union a few years ago and visited Maxim Gorky, a great writer who is gone today. He proposed the creation of a literary club from which politics would be excluded, for, to his mind, literature is literature and politics is politics. Gorky and his friends, it seems, began to laugh and Wells was annoyed. The fact is Wells saw the writer as being outside of society, while Gorky and his friends knew full well that it just is not so in life, where, in truth, all things are linked together—whether we like it or not.







  • Sure! Here are a couple of books that discuss some of the history of liberalism and its wrongdoings:

    One’s I’ve read:

    • Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend (this has sections that describe the genocidal history of liberalism. You don’t have to like Stalin to read this, and if you want just skip to the parts about liberalism’s history)
    • Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
    • Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (this is a more US-centric book that talks about liberalism’s shortcomings in the US rather than its genocidal wrongdoings. I’m assuming you’re from the US.)

    Ones I haven’t read:

    • Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History
    • William Blum’s *Killing Hope

    For a starting point in learning about Marxism, I’ll point you to a comment I made the other day. I very very highly recommend reading anything in these lists that discusses historical or dialectical materialism, including Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy. Dialectical materialism is the tool Marxists use to analyze the world. Marxism without a good understanding of dialectical materialism won’t do you any good. Huey Newton said as much in his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, so I think more importance needs to be placed in teaching newcomers dialectical materialism.

    On the topic of Huey Newton, I think reading about his life and the life of all other black revolutionaries is incredibly important to understand liberalism’s wrongdoings. They all had to live through those wrongdoings and were able to understand them well.


  • When you say “extremist” belief, while you may assume a view is extremist based on how far down some imaginary political number line it is, that’s not the case. What you truly mean is someone whose ideas are outside of the acceptable list of ideas put in place by liberal hegemony.

    From my perspective, however, a liberal is just as much of an extremist as I am. Liberalism has left in its wake untold destruction, death, and genocide and done a very good job of obscuring or whitewashing that history to declare itself the superior moral ideology. To support that is extreme, in my opinion, but to go around declaring liberals extremists outside of communist spaces would only get me funny looks.

    At this point, anything I say or learn about communism and history outside of the mainstream liberal interpretations of it will get me labeled an extremist, so why stop trying to learn about these different perspectives? It’s not like it makes me close-minded. On the contrary, it takes a pretty open mind to even begin to learn about communism in good faith.

    I do self-doubt and self-criticize what I believe in, by the way. You would assume I don’t because why would “extremists” do such a thing? Well, think about how much self-criticism and self-doubt pave the way when learning about communism in a world dominated by liberalism. You learn the Cold War narrative of communism all of your life and it’s not something you can easily escape, so I always have self-doubt in my mind about what I believe in, but that’s why I have to keep an open mind and be both critical and self-critical when I learn. It’s self-criticism, though, not present-your-criticism, so it’s a private process, but that doesn’t mean you should assume it doesn’t happen.

    Anyways, I didn’t address any of your specific points. I really just wanted to paint you a picture of why some people may be the way you’re describing and how the term “extremist” in this context is loaded with a lot of assumptions about people and politics. People like to immediately jump to psychologically profiling “extremists” and I think that’s rather annoying.


  • Honestly, I’m tired of discussions of Lemmy from outside the Lemmy community. It’s always the same stuff: “blah blah slur filter so use Lenny, blah blah against free speech, blah blah full of leftists and not centrists like me, blah blah admins are anti-diversity.” For as much as HN complains about Reddit sometimes, these HN comments essentially mirror Reddit comments about Lemmy.

    All these topics have been done to death at this point, but it’s even worse when it’s clear that some of these people aren’t even a part of the community and yet there they are criticizing it in the same way everyone else has already.

    It would just be nice to see discussions and criticisms of Lemmy from other angles. Something like talking about its place in the current iteration of the Web, or about its UX, or even its community, but from an non-reactionary angle. To me, Lemmy is an experiment, a social one that’s currently seeing how communities form and change through federation, moderation, and community feedback. It’s not perfect, but dismissing it as a project and experiment just because of something as simple as a slur filter is reductive and ridiculous, to be quite honestly.

    Ultimately, though, I’m not obligated to read what these people write, and they’re not obligated to write how I want, so my complaints are useless, unproductive, and mostly me being defensive because of criticism thrown toward a community that I’m a part of. Still, though, it would just be nice to have something more refreshing.