A factoid is basically a junk food proposition, it can be false or it can be true but insignificant. Just like how junk food refers to both foods with a lot of empty calories (and so are unhealthy) as well as ultra-processed foods (which need not be unhealthy, but aren’t beneficial either). The individual you’re replying to is using the term correctly.
Oh right you had by two years ago encountered one of its swine names, okay, yes. it thought you had only known it as edible by that point.
As for you/your, it is generic in the same way they/them is generic, but it/its is what affirms its identity so you/your serves as degendering in the same way that they/them’ing transfems is. And because it’s often done punitively for transfems it can be intensely triggering to be you/your’d or they/them’d. In fact, a local Queers for Palestine chapter punitively degendered it and doubled down on it, which split the group into those who supported transmisogyny and those against it, just the other week (obviously with most members supporting transmisogyny). Such things are common enough in its life and often fresh that it’s a pretty fresh wound whenever it gets referred to with you/your or they/them, and in general it’s found that others who use it/its first and third person are anywhere from ambivalent to preferring second person it/its.
That seems to be a reasonable inference but one rather unfair thing it’s noticed with neopronouns is that inferences that we make naturally with traditional pronouns don’t really apply to neopronouns. A lot of folks who use fae/faer have noted how people make all kinds of bizarre assumptions about them on the basis of these pronouns, like that they’re deceptive. And then, we naturally infer that if someone uses she, they also use her, hers, herself, etc. But a similar kind of extrapolation is someone using certain first and third person pronouns to using a corresponding set of second person pronouns, like if someone refers to faerself as “this fae thinks…” then it seems like a reasonable inference that fae may want “would this fae like to…?”
You may have noticed some of this yourself, but these are some of its own observations of neopronouns and the current state of affairs over the past few years.
Oh its second person pronouns are it/its now.
it had no idea it was so recognizable? What about the name is reminiscent of it?
Neat! it may be something that ghosted you several years ago due to leaving behind its Discord due to abuse. Was very astounded to see you again in another life.
A question that’s been burning for half a week now: Are you the same naeva that was on the VFCJ Discord once upon a time?
Use it/its, please!
Arcs is too new! Not appealing to the tastes of a patient gamer! But also, it is a bit biased against Cole Wehrle :)
Will check out those two games some time, thanks for the recs!
If you think that’s the worst of it, you’re in for a surprise! But yeah, people do lose out on a shitton of science and production because they think generating Great Merchants doesn’t come with a completely random opportunity cost to their science and production. Nonsense game design decision.
Use it/its and not you/your, please. its heard Stellaris has great narrative elements but it’s very hard to play in a reasonable amount of time and there’s some balance issues that can make competition feel really unfair. Maybe will still get around to it some day.
Civ 5 was fun but despite its harsh review Civ 6 is kind of better in every way. The lekmod for Civ 5 is so pervasive and totally changes the game, which is necessary for balance and so the game is a bit more reasonable. Civ 6 on the other hand has the BBG mod which changes far less and remains basically the same game. Civ 6 also makes certain things more intuitive, like movement. Initially, moving from 5 to 6, it had a lot of trouble with the movement but once it understood it it loved how intuitive it was. You can only move if you have enough movement points left. Simple as that. No “ending on a hill” or other counter-intuitive tricks you have to remember and do in Civ 5 every single turn.
Civ 6’s big big flaws are that on release it was broken due to infinite production exploits they wouldn’t fix, and it came with spyware which they did not apologize for so you shouldn’t buy it or anything from Firaxis from that matter.
Civ 5 was fun though. it wrote a huge, one hundred page document on how to play it well to catch its friends up. A lot of it was just detailing random counter-intuitive bullshit. That’s the big issue. Both games are fun, but their limitations require just so much patience it isn’t really sustainable and pretty soon, competition becomes more frustrating and a chore than fun.
Also, one thing not included here is the AI problem. The 4X games with the best and most challenging, clever AIs, perfect for training competitively when you can’t get together with all your friends, are also single-player. Ditto for 4X games that randomize tech trees and policy trees and the like to make the game more principled.
Edited:
“On the other end were historical materialist-style communists (henceforth histcom) who were largely distinguished by their opposition to the other prominent histcom tendency of the time, Leninism.”
“On the other end were specific tendencies among historical materialist-style communists (henceforth histcom). These histcom tendencies were largely distinguished by their opposition to the other prominent histcom tendency of the time, Leninism.”
Not really a correction, but someone pointed out privately that it can be misread like ‘histcom’ refers to leftcoms, rather than leftcoms being a specific contingent of histcoms, the communists following in the tradition of Marx and Engels.
it does not understand what you’re saying or where you’re coming from. Not sure what tankies have to do with this. You’re interpreting and speaking from a context that everyone else is missing and so what you’re saying does not make sense to anyone else. Like apparently there’s a tankie and an anarchist involved and there’s some kind of internet drama you’re referring to that involves your irl friend? But from its point of view it has zero point of reference for what you’re saying or what tankies have to do with either this website or your friend who runs the discord.
Well it does seem like you two started two communities with different and incompatible principles. That’s all it was pointing out. it isn’t in there so it’s not like it affects it but it’s just an interesting observation. it was confused but it wasn’t planning on dwelling on it.
it was super into this game as a teenager and it still comes back to it after getting a philosophy degree. Really, really bizarre experience.
it’s only ever been sent like three or four videos from Ed and they were all rather bad. It’s always possible the people who sent those recommendations just had terrible taste but nonetheless it has an aversion.
it would be happy to hear your thoughts if you read it, or have read it, once the month comes around. That said, it finds that convincing people to be vegan has gotten easy enough, and it usually has very little to do with forming good arguments or whatever. Where a lot of vegans seem to be lacking is the rest of the strategy. Okay, you’ve convinced a few folks to be vegan. Now what? Tons of different vegan organizations have tried developing their own strategies, like Anonymous for the Voiceless, or Vegan Effective Altruist orgs, or DxA, and their failures are well-documented. So what should we try instead, knowing that those are dead ends?
But that’s just its own interest. it’s happy to hear about what others end up reading or what they make of it.
A good theme for the next month could be “strategy” since this is a theory instance after all.
Ah okay. Understood, thank you for clarifying and sorry for misunderstanding.
One thing it will say as a critique is that while there is a lot of misrepresentation of anarchism online, it’s worth being careful not to go to the opposite extreme of being a terminally offline anarchist, as it were. In its experience with organizing, there’s a lot of anarchists out there who are intensely insecure about not wanting to be one of “those” anarchists online. The consequence is that they don’t just resist NATO propaganda, but genuinely important additions to structural analysis because they basically assume anything new is like, terminally online stuff that doesn’t matter. it’s had to waste a shitton of time and energy organizing to resist anarchists who will not get with the times and end up being incredibly chauvinistic because they’re too busy throwing out dogwhistles abt how the other anarchists are children with no experience with REAL organizing, when everyone would’ve been better off if they sat down and listened and evaluated things they were being educated on instead of desperately trying to detect and avoid “terminally online” elements of anarchism.
For that reason it pretty much never tells anyone to be wary of “internet anarchism” because they overcorrect into this incredibly out of touch terminally offline anarchism that really slows down organizing and causes a great deal of harm.
lmfao wtf if you don’t recognize them as a legitimate country then what is your argument with @josie@vegantheoryclub.org like even if you think Israeli is a national identity, if you agree there is no such country as Israel and the image is listing COUNTRIES with the highest veganism rate, then what is the problem
You’re saying the list is correct. Like…?
You don’t really need to read something as specific as anarchist theory to challenge a bias towards Leninism.
If Leninism itself leaves comparatively too much to be desired, or plenty of other strategies have something sufficiently desirable that Leninism lacks, that’s enough to challenge Leninism.
Anarchism is a very specific strategy, centered on prefiguration, as well as effective and horizontal power building that developed in Europe in response to an increasingly industrial society. But of course, plenty of effective and horizontal power building movements arose in response to different conditions and weren’t anarchist. The Zapatistas are explicitly anti-anarchist (though another commenter in this thread you were interacting with seems to be implying that they self-identify as anarchists and it’s the rest of the world that refuses to acknowledge them as such???), and are an anti-colonial movement centered around a national identity of being colonized.
What distinguishes anarchism is that, because it is in response to industrial society, it developed strategies specific to a structural analysis befitting industrial society. Even if nothing about anarchism turned out to be compelling to you, there would still be plenty of room to challenge Leninism. The organic centralists of the ICP have plenty to say about Leninism, as do councilists, and all of these theories share with anarchism all kinds of desirable things that Leninism lacks.
But that said, a pretty comprehensive reading to get an idea at least for what contemporary organizational dualists are up to these days is Turning the Tide which was published May of last year.
As for why it shifted to anarchism, so for background, it was for a while just sort of sympathetic to both historical materialist-style communist strategies (what you call ‘Marxism,’ henceforth ‘histcom’) and anarchist strategies. Namely, a lot of left-communist doctrines and anarchist doctrines had a great deal of predictive and explanatory power, and seemed to provide a plausible way to combat the ubiquity of domination (especially the domination of nonhumans, which was of particular interest to it). So it was never a Leninist histcom, but it was pretty sympathetic to histcom approaches.
Two things make histcom approaches extremely unappealing. First, histcom texts and discussions are extremely unconducive to filling in holes in their structural analysis. Be honest, how much success have you had explaining suicidism to a group of Leninists who’ve never heard of it? How much success would you expect if you did this: Go from Leninist group to Leninist group. They aren’t antecedently anti-psychiatry. Make them listen to mad people about why therapy and psychiatry must be smashed at all costs.
it can tell you from experience that your success rate will be very low. Leftcoms have this problem to a great extent too. This is a problem. At the pro-Hamas actions where it is, a Leninist group that hates queer people keeps trying to infiltrate the actions and capture members, the majority of whom turn out to be queer or queer allies. That is truly how far behind their structural analysis is, putting aside the fact that they’re a well-known abusive cult here. This is not cherry-picking, it is par for the course for large Leninist groups with local chapters everywhere to have no cognizance of anti-queer violence, sanism, suicidism, speciesism, no conception of what heteropatriarchal slurs are, no willingness to understand the transmisogyny of punitive degendering, just a total lack of analysis of our objective or subjective conditions.
Second, histcom texts and discussions are extremely incapable of recognizing abuse, or even conceiving of what abuse even is, and it’s often downplayed! Abuse is, to be clear, a huge issue in anarchist spaces, especially Food Not Bombs chapters. It’s not specific to any tendency. But after starting a pro-survivorship specific organization nearly a decade ago, what it’s found is that anarchists have the tools to unlearn abuse and learn what abuse is. To recognize that abuse is ubiquitous, that we are all born fascists and colonists and must unlearn that violence, that to address abuse is to assume it will occur and to study, analyze, and plan accordingly.
Histcoms, and especially Leninists, are not in a similar position. And this seems to be a phenomenon that owes itself to the origin of both traditions. Where anarchists are incredibly willing to recognize Bakunin’s treatment of his Jewish comrades and the incredible trauma and pain that must have caused, histcoms are generally extremely unwilling to admit to Marx and Engels’s pattern of forming abusive relationships with those more vulnerable than them and forcing them into isolation. Or, they’re unwilling to really put themselves in the uncomfortable position of really sitting with Lenin’s choice to harbor Bauman after Bauman drove a woman to suicide by abusing her over a long period of time. To really sit and internalize what she must have felt, what she would have felt knowing Lenin upheld Bauman to the point that he is today memorialized with a statue while she is forgotten, having gotten to achieve nothing.
it thinks it understands why Leninists and mainstream Leninist texts so frequently do this. This denial is a way of maintaining social strength. If you admit to atrocities, it makes your ideology less appealing. But it sees it differently. If you are willing to sit with the atrocities and the pain of your ideology, and really grapple with the mistakes in analysis and action that made those atrocities possible, then you’re willing to do the work to ensure you don’t immediately drive off victim-survivors. Abuse denialism doesn’t wave a red flag with a yellow hammer and sickle, it just raises a red flag. One that says “you’ll be victimized here too.”
Addressing abuse among revolutionaries is such a pressing issue, and over and over histcoms (including some leftcoms!) glorify their favorite figures, deny the historical record when it says these people are abusers, even to victim-survivors. How could anyone reasonably conclude that a tendency that consistently does that over and over could ever be the right path forward?
Abuse among anarchists is just as ubiquitous, but if you talk to an anarchist about power dynamics as being central to abuse, they won’t hazily quote Engels’s “On Authority” at you and say the concept of ‘power’ is reductive or whatever. They’ll understand. And they’ll genuinely improve and do better next time when figuring out who to deplatform and who to empower. They’ll recognize anti-survivorship, they’ll recognize when some org refuses to center a victim and is kicking out an abuser for appearances without actually listening to what the victim wants or needs for their safety. Anarchism just has a better fucking track record at being a bulwark against chauvinism and abuse.
it was never really sympathetic to Leninism in particular, but it was sympathetic to other histcom tendencies, and to some extent it still is. But a lot of love’s been lost from these experiences, and hopefully that answers your question of how it shifted from histcom-leaning to anarchist-committed.
But as it said above, if you don’t find anarchism convincing, it would far sooner you gain an interest in the ICP than sticking with Leninism.
There are surely more options than causing burnout and encouraging everyone regardless of what they’re doing. If someone creates yet another veganism organization with conditions conducive to abuse and oppression, obviously they should be criticized regardless of whether they ask for it or whatever. Like if someone is stomping on someone else, it makes no sense to let them because they don’t consent to you stopping them.
Be supportive, yes. Show solidarity, yes. But never if it is only reinforcing and instantiating dominance structures.
It’s hard to say much more without a concrete example of what you mean, but there are surely ways to be supportive of your peers without uncritically supporting literally anything they do. Sometimes you need to let a friend know they’re doing something fucked up and they need to cut it out. At some point you have to look at the fact that every Food not Bombs chapter is run by abusers and think, maybe aversion to criticism makes like no sense. Not to mention that many of the things you should criticize and resist would themselves cause burnout for more vulnerable activists if they aren’t.