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DeathToAmerica wrote

He has a youtube account?

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tanattyn OP wrote

Well, he does that podcast and they post to YouTube. You'll see links to it on his /u/.

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tanattyn OP wrote

I'm reading this ragefest he had with Enkara in r/met@, lol. "I just wanna smoke weed and talk deep shit with my bros and mercilessly alienate/isolate anyone that gets upset over anything at all in a world that genocides pretty much everyone below me" but then he's a fucking r/drama king?

I think a few things would get us past the point where shit-flinging contests with total reactionary bullshit like this, is such a struggle.

A. An unofficial, flexible, non-monolithic, but widespread codification of etiquette.

A+. Someone can say, "I follow [insert version of leftist code]" and people know they can keep this person accountable to that code.

B. Training oneself to live outside of family/housed life, if one hasn't had that life already.

B1. Homelessness, celibacy, and panhandling is what they used to do with Zen novice monks. That would do part of it.

B2. I.e. combat training to the extent possible without, you know, signing up to kill for an empire. Martial arts, minority-friendly gun ranges, wargames with friends, studying strategy/tactics, etc.

B3. On its own this would be lifestylism at best and slumming at worst, but I insist that being able to personally live outside a suburban family house, should be a minimum expectation. How can one understand a path to abolish the family, rent, etc, without knowing any existence outside of it?

B3+. And one might say well, what about someone that uses a wheelchair? Do they just up and leave their family? That's a fucking great problem to have with this requirement, and the solution is not to throw it out and forget about it, but to educate a comrade that's wheelchaired on how to transition into i.e. welfare/low-income life and disability housing. Cause being dependent on an abusive family is Hell, and I know that as someone that was stuck in a few very abusive situations cause I was disabled and had no better options until I knew better.

C. Initiation process into organizations.

C1. "Rules" about what conditions must be met to be initiated into organizations (i.e. what the 3-month wait to get into r/met@ was about, but more thorough).

C2. Obligation to educate/train initiates.

D. Formalized accountability process.

D1. This is a lot harder outside of groups with regular membership - which is why I think groups with regular membership need to be emphasized again.

D2. At some point there'd be a lot of leftist-ish or even friendly single-concern groups that agree to cooperate in an inter-group accountability network in some way, even if their aims or group emphases are different. This might require a sort of universal minimum code.

~~

This would accomplish a few things:

  1. Leftism would have some level of widely-accepted conduct that someone can quickly point to. It would be much easier to point out misbehavior as belonging to newbies or outright opponents. And this way no one can just say "well these are rules you made up cause you're a blah blah blah", lol no, no one's gonna stand for that particular shit anymore.

  2. Undoubtedly it would alienate crypto-reactionaries like manarchists/brocialists. There's absolutely no way this process wouldn't include a left-wide agreement to deal with i.e. sexual harassment.

  3. There'd be a difference between i.e. hobby historians of USSR history that make memes, and actual socialists. There are undoubtedly actual socialists that know USSR history like the back of their hand and make memes. But a minimum behavioral component is the border between a socialist, and a creeptacular weeaboo that is consuming the USSR/PRC/etc like another colonial product.

  4. Liberal standards of conduct would be alienated as well. Say it's widely, explicitly agreed that i.e. punching (someone that acts like) a comrade, or someone that's trying to be good but doesn't know anything yet and has a finite grace period to learn, is a very different thing than punching a fascist or MRA. In a situation like that, liberals, middle-class pacifists etc, have a lot less ability to mask themselves in leftist language while stealing leftist emotional and social labor for capitalism (and by extension, fascism, or the feudalist component of capitalism). You might think this is a trivial point, but a large list of rules like that makes a big difference. In fact, I daresay this is the crucial point where a leftist is distinguished from, say, a liberal academician that gets vaguely good feels thinking about leftism.

  5. All this put together, bullshit is handled a lot faster, when possible openly and transparently, and more frequently, allowing us to do more things that are not handling the buildup of bullshit.

  6. This immediately kills the "anarchy = chaos" strawman, and leaves the capitalist feeling like the chaotic one - which, you know, is the point, they control through forcing a chaotic/wasteful social structure on almost everyone.

  7. It provides a starker contrast between leftists, and people that empty leftist signifiers and commodify and consume them. I hate to say this but, buying all the expensive lefty books in the world is kinda like this, unless it comes with at least a dramatic change of personal behavior, if not more.

  8. There is no in-group without this. Without it, a left/@ group or circle is just isolated individuals fighting godawful behavior from anyone that feels like showing up and sabotaging everything, doing sexual predator shit, and everyone just kinda looks around awkwardly, makes excuses, tells you you're acting crazy/divisive ... but, that's exactly what happens in "apolitical" (unrestrained capitalist) interactions.

  9. It helps autistic and otherwise socially disabled folks to have a list of unchanging rules they can rely on.

  10. The more social standards between leftists/@s that are based on leftist/@ goals, are less social standards between leftists/@s that are based on capitalist goals.

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