Green_Mountain_Makhno

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Reply to by !deleted2159

Perhaps.

Perhaps most people would want freedom. I don't think we can know that because we are so brainwashed, our imaginations so limited, our worldview so incredibly truncated to just include that which has been force-fed to us for so many generations now that we can't even really imagine freedom. Even those of us who have shed much of that brainwashing/capitalist paradigm struggle to imagine that world and put it into practice. Those who are still deep in the kool-aid....no chance.

4

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Reply to comment by celebratedrecluse in by !deleted8445

Thanks. I did get to rest Friday night, and then it's back on the grind. At least some of what I am doing is going towards the life and future I want, and not all of it goes to enrich some asshole.

2

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Reply to comment by ziq in by !deleted8445

Yeah, it's been rough. We don't have real extended family, but we have each other and we have our kids. Life's taught me that sometimes it's just awful, and there's nothing to be done about it, no way to fix it, and no, it's not going to be ok.

But we keep on. There's still love and beauty to be found, connections and relationships to build, mutual aid and solidarity to be practiced....just not today. Today is for mourning.

5

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Reply to by !deleted8445

My wonderful partner miscarried on Wednesday. We spent all day Thursday in the hospital so she could have a D&E procedure to remove the remains. It was our 3rd miscarriage in the last calendar year. I haven't slept since Tuesday night. Today is gonna be a long day at work, and I am physically and emotionally spent. This is one of those times that one just has to grind through it. I'm on the grind, comrades.

12

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Reply to by !deleted13192

I've only fired blanks through real guns (with a stopper screwed on the barrel). In those cases it was as easy as unscrewing the blank-fire adapter from the barrel.

1

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Come on, that's not a fair representation of what I said.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I wrote what I wrote originally because I haven't seen that stuff there. I have admitted that perhaps my outlook was naive or too optimistic, and that I'm sorry that others have not had the same experience, and that hearing of other's experiences has changed my view of that sub. That's not the same as if I don't see it, it isn't real.

2

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Perhaps my glasses are overly rosy. I do tend to be surprised and hurt by presumed leftists being bigots. It hasn't been my experience either with the podcast or the sub, but it's such a huge subreddit with such a huge base that I can't possibly speak to everyone's experience. I am sad to hear that others have experienced hate and bigotry there, and that does affect my opinion of it, so thanks for everyone who shared.

1

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

I totally get that, I've quit the podcast several times.

Some podcasts I've enjoyed lately:

Kino Lefter. Canadian movie review podcast whose premise is that all movies/media are propaganda, so we should treat them as such. Sounds dry, but I laugh uncontrollably several times an episode. Not sure if it's just that they're extremely my shit, or if they are universally funny. I think they're legitimately funny.

The Final Straw has put out a lot of good content lately, but not much of it will make you laugh.

Sorry I don't have more, I'm struggling to find really good podcasts as well (which is partly why I keep coming back to Chapo despite my problems with their electoralism and the limits of their viewpoints and problematic stuff).

1

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

Yeah, as a casual user of the sub, it seems like the tankies took over after the quarantine/threat of deletion from reddit admins. It was pretty damn rough for a while, but seems to be getting more inclusive at a meme level, but I guess that's the difficulty in such a huge sub, it's hard to tell if anarchists are quietly being purged behind the scenes.

1

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote (edited )

We all know that reddit is full of bigots trying to be edgy, and their subreddit has that too. At this point in our broken society, it doesn't seem to be possible to assemble a group of 100,000+ people on the internet without bigots and edgelords showing up. They have also been the target of multiple targeted attacks by the worst sections of reddit. I don't think that makes this type of language ok, I just don't think that's necessarily something you can throw at the feet of the podcast, or the subreddit. From my experience on their sub, this is not behavior that is tolerated, nor speech that I've seen there.

0

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

I gotta push back a little bit on this. First, what it gets right - there have been several examples of the hosts using ablest language, Amber is legitimately problematic at least once every time she is on the podcast, and I cannot defend her or her views, but I don't think it's a fair characterization to judge the whole podcast by an interview of the most disliked host on the podcast.

Moreover, class first leftism allows the dirtbags to imitate reactionary right wing media’s essential grift: posing as champions of the downtrodden while kicking the marginalized. Attacking women, the disabled, or antiracists, is presented as heroic socialism, since all those people are trying to distract us from the only real nexus of oppression. Thus, Frost in a since-deleted Medium post called disability advocates in the Democratic Socialists of America a bunch of “wreckers” when they said they wanted a bigger voice in the organization’s health care policy planning. Frost has a direct psychic connection to the workers; she doesn’t need to listen to experts, or marginalized people directly affected by policy.

The podcast does not embrace class-only viewpoint, they consistently recognize oppression of gender, race, identity, the struggles of our trans comrades, they have stopped using ablest language as far as I can tell, and they definitely do not attack the marginalized in the name of class reductionism.

To sum up, I do think there are legitimate criticisms of Chapo, but these are not them. These criticisms ring hollow and do not reflect what is actually talked about on the podcast.

If you wanted to say that the Chapo gang are far too caught up in the horse-race aspects of elections, the minutia of US politics and behind the scenes actors, and centrist editorial writers who have no actual audience, I'd say, yeah that tracks. If you wanted to say that they should be much more militant and have calls for action outside of the political system, I'd totally be with you. If you wanted to say that the show suffers from having an over-representation of young, white, males of privilege, I'm in total agreement. This is probably more time and effort than a kinda dumb and very imperfect podcast deserves, but there it is.

2

Green_Mountain_Makhno wrote

eh....they're closer than the average american, but the vast majority are DSA "activist" types who are much closer to starting a petition than doing anything truly revolutionary.

With that being said, their fan-base is large enough that there are probably a good chunk of them that are more militant and ready to become more militant.

5