i finally successfully made a reddit account for hobbies and tried to get reaccustomed to an onslaught of political illiteracy from the algorithm (and sparsely in spaces i otherwise enjoy) and good lord, i keep forgetting to most there is no neo nazi problem in ukraine, i keep forgetting to most stalin is a black demon and that the ussr was an evil regime

Wishing everyone a great week. I need to get off SM+YT. I finally have days off and I can’t go anywhere or clean anything… Like the first few days were fantastic. However, a neighbor did come help me get out of the house, gave me two fresh peaches, and helped me back in. They promised me a couple of ears of silver queen corn. Fur baby enjoyed getting outside for a while too.

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I’d bet they’re taking cues from youtube moderation: opaque algorithms rife with confusing rulesets and false positives.

It would make sense if they started ramping that up after the fallout from the mod protest relating to API changes, as a way to moderate more with less people.

Not to say it is unbiased at all. I’m sure it’s biased toward imperialist politics to one degree or another.

It took a month of mass reporting to take down a Steam forum post openly calling for a Second Holocaust to “finish the job” from some Nazi prick crashing out because some company was being scummy as usual while I got forum banned within the hour for telling the guy to follow his leader.

Telling one person to kill themselves? Steam mods say that’s completely unacceptable no matter the circumstances.

Calling for mass genocide on a global scale? Steam mods think that’s okay unless you literally harass them into doing their job.

I don’t care that I got a ban for it; I accepted that as a fair consequence for telling a fascist scumbag what he deserves to be told. It was the fact they didn’t do anything about the guy calling for killing all Jews everywhere until multiple people bullied them into taking care of it that left me livid. The moderation of nearly every major website online is almost exclusively dominated by the Far Right and their collaborators. Rules only apply to Leftists and the marginalized.

It’s so baffling how these same losers think mods persecute them when mods consistently let them get away with saying truly vile shit. I just recently got harassed on the Gothic Remake forums for asking the basic question of whether or not you could choose your character’s gender; immediately assailed by a flurry of transphobic and misogynistic abuse that went on for several pages over a span of two days before mods finally closed to thread for being “unproductive”. Nobody got banned. Absolutely hideous behavior. The worst part is one of the first response was from a moderator answering my question honestly - that same moderator was the one who locked the thread! They were there the entire fucking time, saw everything, and did nothing!

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with Steam Forums. That place is like a mini 4chan sometimes.

At the same time i find this to be a very open place that doesn’t stifle discussion in that obnoxious way that liberal/ultra-leftist spaces with purity fetishes do, which is very good for encouraging newcomers to ask questions and learn without feeling like they are in a sectarian echo-chamber. So long as there is no apologia for fascism, imperialism or genocide of course…

Why just 1 point? Have it be a 7-0 demolition for maximum comedy.

I’d never move to Sweden or Norway. My climate change escape fantasy is buying a small farm in Russia and just planting some potatoes and beets, raise a few pigs and some chickens, make a deal with the neighbor for some milk every now and then (because even in my escapist fantasies i can’t afford a whole cow)…

Then i remember i have no skills and no capital to do any of that… :(

Nazi germany and imperial japan were neither the imperial hegemon, nor neocolonialist. Equating the people of usa with those of nazi germany, just because both are/were fascist, doesn’t make sense.

Marxism-Leninism without a third-worldist corrective is just Trotskyism.

Marxism-Leninism with too much third-worldism is just Maoism.

In all seriousness I think it’s an analytical mistake to assume the proletarian identity or category is homogenous, and the most stark differences you’re gonna find are between imperialist-proletarians and colonized-proletarians. Trotskyists imagine some revolutionary essence that they think exists equally in an Israeli worker as a Palestinian worker, for example.

It would be an overcorrection, though, to then essentialize the category of imperialist-proletarian as homogenous and static. A corporate worker with a home and 401(k) benefits more from imperialism than a service worker that rents. And the first subclass is shrinking while the second is growing.

Maybe the settler-colonial or imperial incentives played a part in revolution failing in the West (for now), but it’s an influence that ebbs and flows among other influences that ebb and flow.

Its a very shrewd and well executed maneuver by the imperialist “Marxist” theory project. By teaching Marxists in the global south to hate workers in the global north they push the left in the global north into either supporting their own death or supporting imperialism. It completely destroys international solidarity. Instead of international capital having one large enemy they have 2 small ones that hate eachother.

I have mixed feelings about all of it. I think on the one hand, it can be helpful for understanding why a western prole can easily be so reactionary in spite of it seeming against their own interests to be that. But then on the other hand, the general tactics the capitalist class uses–encouraging belief in electoral reform, allowing performative concessions through as “proof”, whitewashing local violent struggle as peaceful protest–are worldwide, not confined to any particular nation. Lenin was complaining about misleading reformists back in his day and he was living in a place with far worse living conditions than the “western left” tends to be in.

From this standpoint, I’m inclined to say it is more important to call out the duplicitous tactics of the reformists no matter where they may be than it is to overly focus on what’s different about the conditions of imperial core. Those differences do matter, such as when understanding why patsocs are a thing and why they are a bad thing. But the differences are not all important every time somebody in the west is trying to move the needle at all.

For example, every time a western “leftist” leans toward reformist camps, is it necessarily because they are fully aware of what imperialism is and they want “more of the spoils of imperialism” rather than dismantling it? I’m sure those cases exist, but it can also be more general ignorance; they still believe in the system enough to think the exploiting classes can be constrained through voting, which can happen to proles anywhere; they don’t necessarily understand the dynamic of exploitation in the first place and we need to make sure that they do, not for them to internalize it as shame, but so they understand yet another reason why reform is not enough.