never leave the news mega folks, it’s not worth it

I’m not gonna lie, the moderation in the news mega is so tight that I think I’ve only been the person to ban that guy once out of all the times he’s been around. He’s almost always gone before I get to him and even see what he said, though I get the gist of it from the replies dunking on him

There are multiple summaries out there, such as this one here

The short of it is that the mod team, as part of an initiative to shift site culture, shuttered the dunk tank and dredge tank and opened up c/gossip and c/counterpropaganda to generally, but not entirely, replace the two comms. This was, depending on your position and level of knowledge, either a brave attempt to encourage better values in a time of massive upheaval where organizing will become more important, or the mods being bitter wet blankets who think they know better and are dictating to and patronizing independent adults.

This was pretty unpopular, especially because there was no democratic vote; the comms were just locked out of nowhere. A series of massive communication errors from both the moderators and admins alike culminated in responses that failed to address the concerns of the users and made remarks that were offensive to the userbase (saying that the users gave off “white cishet vibes” when the userbase is not largely cishet) especially without the context of knowing who said those remarks (thereby making people think that some clique of bioessentalist transphobic moderators existed, when none in fact did).

TC69 returned and was getting re-acquainted in the middle of this chaos, instantly promoted to admin, for better or worse. This gave TC69 the power to just start waving the banhammer left and right like Sauron taking out soldiers without actually considering whether this was helpful, or perhaps even completely counterproductive, and there was a mixture of irony-poisoning and patronizing statements basically stating that those who objected were just widdle babies who needed to take a week off.

Eventually, other admins stepped in and stopped this, apologizing and unbanning most people. TC69 decided to resign and leave the site again, after doing far more harm than good. I also resigned from the mod team for my (small but still non-zero) impact during all this, though will stay on the site and keep doing things pretty much how I’ve been doing them, so no significant changes are expected in the news mega.

I think Cuban leadership and to an extent the people of Cuba know what capitulation to the US means: a future more bleak than anything they are going through now.

I agree, I think this is Cuba’s real strength in that regard: whatever domestic situation they’ve created, it withstood what the USSR could not. It wasn’t just the Soviet citizenry becoming disillusioned (or perhaps, a better word is “illusioned”) that led to the fall but it was a big factor, and Cuba has managed to mitigate that despite living mere miles from the US.

Though it’s still possible that the US tries something in their increasing desperation and attacks Cuba, and even with the US’s profound lack of military ability to perform competent invasions they could still just bomb the shit out of the island for a year until there are no structures left standing.

Trump may cut off all aid to Ecuador and Peru, which would be very funny if he just threw away everything Biden did. And he might even tell Milei to fuck off, which would mean the end of Libertad Carajo man

I can honestly see it now:

“folks, we’re getting a very bad deal out of Peru and Ecuador. they want us to send our soldiers in to help them. lots of trouble there, many incidents, most of them very bad. I keep hearing it, they’re saying it’s bad. we need our soldiers elsewhere, like helping Israel and fighting China.”

meanwhile Laura Richardson is sitting behind him, visibly distraught, her life’s work crumbling before her eyes

thank you very much for your take!

As stated in my post in selfcrit, I’m staying on the site to host the news megathreads and will keep posting as normal.

I already completely made up my mind. My post there wasn’t to try and get people to beg for me to return, it was just to be transparent about why I felt like I was a subpar moderator in light of recent events and therefore why I left. I’m the only mod on self_improvement so I can’t just leave (literally, the site UI doesn’t allow zero moderators AFAIK) so once we’ve sorted that out, I will no longer be a part of the mod team and I’ve already left the mod chat.

Next megathread here.

I lurked on the subreddit, I lurked on the discord lifeboat (and left it as soon as the site went up) and then started posting occasionally. went through a few accounts with a dozen or so comments on each and then stuck with this one just in time for the Ukraine War to start

my upbringing in relative poverty primed me to accept genuinely left-wing ideas but remained in the liberal bubble until Corbyn and the movement that brought him to power came around and exposed me to the concept that ideas left of Obama existed. I was still kind of in that I’m-a-very-smart-and-respectable-and-civil-politics-understander zone but all it would take is a push, and that push came from the subreddit. I didn’t really have any background or knowledge of anarchism nor possessed any particular drive to distrust authority as a general concept so I slid pretty easily into Marxism-Leninism (though I do definitely like and respect anarchists and don’t really have any reason or background to be sectarian against them, so this website’s non-sectarianism fit me quite well).

I think the biggest part that attracted me was that people actually gave a shit about politics, there was actual passionate energy there, after years of lukewarm boring shit about how we just need to gradually introduce ranked-choice voting and shift taxes around and we’d create the perfect society. The only people I’d heard yelling about politics before was people yelling in support of reactionary policies, or sort of just yelling into the void about how they wished things could be better but offering no solution, but hearing people yell in support of policies that would help people was this big moment where my latent frustrations felt validated. Hearing somebody say something like “LET’S JUST GIVE HOMELESS PEOPLE HOUSES!” instead of liberals going “Hm, well, first we need to introduce a means-tested system of soup kitchens that utilize tax breaks to attract social workers…” was just one of those moments where you realize that problems can actually have (relatively) simple solutions and not everything has to be this stupid fucking 53-stage system which inevitably fails at stage 11 when a new president takes over and the parliamentarian says that there isn’t enough money or whatever.

also, I hate to say that the chapo podcast was a big part of my left-wing turn as much as the subreddit was, but it kinda was, so I’ll always have a spot in my heart for Felix and Matt even though I’ve outgrown them politically and don’t listen to it anymore. It did kinda Americanize me but I made up for it by becoming the Ultimate Geopolitics Understander Who Knows Something About Most Countries later on once the Ukraine War started.

yeah, it’s intentional total gridlock. any candidate for meaningful change has to battle through a dozen layers of increasingly impossible barriers, while acceptable candidates like Harris are just plucked out of semi-obscurity and made the presidential candidate with popularity being no problem. the current third parties are probably dead-ends in terms of using them as a vessel for change, but I reckon there will eventually be a point where organizations and parties arise organically out of the working class and those will have actual staying power. That the left and its ideologies are mostly kept in higher education and academia (which are places where liberalism can be instilled and intellectuals either isolated or co-opted) is not an accident, as it seeks to prevent the working class gaining class consciousness. But there are vast populations of exploited people who have the potential to form a revolutionary base; not only those who still work in factories where the means of production are accessible to seize, but also more generally among groups like native Americans, black people, those of Central/South American descent, and so on.

that being said, I think many of us here hypothesize that a working class uprising is unlikely until imperial relationships break down, if by nothing else observing the historical fact that revolutions rarely occur inside the imperial core. the timeline for this is very hard to predict - most of us prior to 2022 and definitely prior to 2020 would have said many decades, but now we’re looking at glaring failures at American military projection with its navy vulnerable to even very poor nations, and the pace will likely accelerate, so it’s good to be prepared as SkimmeringKoi says.