He/They. Marxist-Leninist, Butcher, DnD 3.5e enthusiast and member of PSL NEO and UFCW local 880. ASAB (All Scolds Are Bastards). Plague rat settler. I administrate a DnD 3.5e West Marches server for Socialists called the Axe and Sickle. https://discord.gg/R5dPsZU

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • To analyze things from a pseudo-Marxist dialectical framework, I think that everyone appreciates art that caters to their tastes and is sometimes annoyed when presented with art that does not.

    But like with race, gender, class, etc., the difference is that one party is - or, at least, was - hegemonic within the space.

    I don’t really believe that these sorts of anti-woke gamers are different in character or disposition than others within the space, and rhetoric that portrays them as ravening, crazy idiots has ableist tendencies (not to be a scold - I think that sort of thing is fine while “dunking”, but should be avoided in serious critique).

    Ultimately, because of their hegemonic position in society they are unable to accept that the cause of the Enshittification of gaming is Capitalism, not solely “Wokeness”.


  • There is a massive gap in communication between China and the Western world that I think a lot of very “Internationalist” Marxists would like to pretend does not exist. If you are a non-Chinese leftist in America (and often even if you are Chinese), your idea of the priorities of the CPC and the general attitudes of the Chinese public and the problems they face is incredibly vague.

    To word it another way: we have almost as good of an idea of how things stand in France or Germany or the U.K. as we do the United States; and those who are paying attention have a good grasp on even Cuba and Venezuela and Mexico and such. But with China, we are still solidly in the “Sovietologist” era of information.

    Western Marxist-Leninists of the late 80s/early 90s operated on the assumption that China’s liberal reforms meant that it was abandoning Socialism in favor of Social Democracy. China’s return to stronger Socialist reforms over the past decade or so has shown that this was in fact a gambit and that it has paid off, but it is difficult to say for sure whether this was always their trajectory, how much Parenti and his contemporaries knew, and the internal currents of Party.





  • This is a completely fair response and I think I was overly broad with my original comment. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe I’m a badass, I’m a joke of an organizer - I’m just speaking from the perspective of someone active in the scene. And left-wing security culture has by far been more of a detriment to organization locally than a boon.

    If someone doesn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to do organizing work IRL I think that’s totally fine. Everyone has the right to enjoy their personal time how they see fit, and that may include posting on a niche left-wing Internet forum; and not everyone is in a good place in their life to do organizing work.

    What bugs me is clowns on the Internet spreading self-defeating paranoia-induced “privacy best practices”. Read any modern work of theory; hell, listen to a shitty leftist podcast; and they’ll tell you that the most effective weapon the Capitalist class has is not shooting you with a gun or putting you in jail; it’s the chilling effect on speech that their threats engender.

    It is asinine to consider filing a FOIA request on Hexbear a serious mistake.




  • Left-Wing security culture is paranoid and idiotic. I think it’s a bit silly to file a FOIA request about a niche left-wing online forum but it wasn’t, like, snitching lmao. It’s publicly available information.

    Just for this I will write to the CIA, NSA, DOD, as well as all my local representatives (Governor, federal Rep, state Rep, Mayor, City Council president, and county council long-term planning chairman) to inform them of the existence of Hexbear dot Net. Expect the site to be shut down and all users jailed within the week. If you require assistance smuggling a pack of cigarettes into jail up your butt, DM me.



  • I would go further to say that it’s just not really okay to single out a demographic in a glib way like this, even if they did say “men” instead of “he/himself”.

    I’m not saying it’s not “politically correct”. I don’t care about that. I’m saying it’s not healthy.

    I can’t count how many times I’ve seen the conversation play out - someone glibly insults men, or white people, or cis people, and someone (rightfully) responds to say - hey, there’s trans men, queer white people, cis WoC - the response is always “okay, I’m only talking about cishet white men”. This is almost as bad - it erases people’s identities, because badness is assumed to be an inherent trait of the identity that they are excluded from.

    There’s a clear line between light-hearted fun-poking (making fun of “White people food”) or actual reasoned criticism and the kind of instinctual other-ing of “he/him pronouns? Privilege detected!”. Mods should be removing this sort of content and issuing warnings, not participating in it.




  • To add onto your point, I think the basic disease causing these symptoms is the extreme form of Neoliberalism in America and an aspect of Enshittification in the workplace.

    The American work ethic did not die because of some innate quality of Yankdom; because Americans are dumb or lazy or spoiled by nature.

    It’s a contradiction between economic frameworks. America has, ironically, fallen deep within the Marxist framework - companies, in an effort to extract wealth, squeeze employees for as much work as possible for as little compensation while treating them like objects more than people. In response, American workers take the Marxists route as well - working as little as possible for as much pay as possible.

    The Marxist framework is incomplete, however, because - if they are treated with respect by their society and protected - it turns out people actually enjoy work. Oftentimes I think that I would love to work more than I do, but not while also being squeezed like a bloody stone. If I was treated with respect, given certain guarantees, and saw that my coworkers were treated the same, maybe I’d be willing to stay a couple hours over every now and then or work 6 or 7 days a week. But, within our current regime of “precision scheduling”, short staffing, and sub-living-wage compensation, what would be the point? Why should I burn myself out for a company that does not allow me to take pride and ownership over my work?