i think it is good to try to get more people involved who want to help but have difficulty fitting in culturally (such as having some unexamined bigotry that causes social friction). the number one skill you will need is distinguishing between people who honestly want to help but they are having a hard time analyzing their own biases and people who think their biases are fundamentally correct and will not change. one of the important reasons to make those alliances will be helping distinguish those difficult cases.

2 points from what i’ve read and seen about the general problems such spaces have:

1. watch carefully who bounces off your space and who sticks around longer. you will often be able to at least tell you have problems even if it takes a while to figure out what is causing them.
2. you need explicit alliances with local feminist, anti-racist, etc groups, and you might consider making participation in those mandatory for inclusion in your space. if relations with those groups shift negatively, that can also help you head off problems before they get bad.

they are just the latest in a very long line

'round these parts, we call that the Texas Top Hat

https://youtu.be/CduA0TULnow

A bully as a child…

yeah, that tracks

He leads the children’s ministry at his church

he loved bullying children so much he never stopped

My thoughts are that… I don’t know who this book is for? The complete title is The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, but it doesn’t really talk about Western Marxism as a movement. The author expects you to be familiar with western marxism already, i.e. having the same definition he does, and he never really expands on it.

This is pretty common among conservative books (and other media more generally). It’s produced to give people who already agree with it confirmation that they are right (“It’s in this very authoritative book!”), not to convince anyone or convey new or interesting information.

and the time necessary to dig into a bunch of dubious claims by a politician who is likely lying to you is beyond what’s reasonable for a person working a full-time job with a family or anything vaguely resembling a social life

in the context of this guy being a large part of the “alt-right pipeline” (look, the name is bad, but he was a big part of feeding people that way), this looks like a way to say “look, the left may have some good arguments and seemingly reasonable proposals, but anyone can have those”

i don’t see the problem with this tweet (assuming that it’s true, which feel free to correct me if it’s not)

a very cursory search shows Rage Against the War Machine is a Libertarian Party event, which means at best right-wing libertarians and more likely outright fascists who are cynically using calls for liberty to immiserate and oppress minorities. good on the PSL for attacking them.

that’s a whole bunch of words for “trans people don’t deserve medical care because i’ve decided that’s the wrong thing for them to do”. maybe if we change society a bit the number of people seeking hrt and surgeries will drop, but that doesn’t mean that those of us who want them should be denied.

he has been doing the maga communism grift for several years now, and recently thrown in with the “American Communist Party” along with Infrared and Midwestern Marx. literal nazbol shit

kitty

have you met many quants? a large number of them are like that, in much the same way that crypto currency people are (in fact, i think the crypto people are like that because they are poorly copying the quants).

usually the bits here are somewhat over the top, but this is a very modest proposal.

apologies for not memeing on this, but the parallel that immediately comes to mind is when Kavanaugh was getting confirmed, he said that Roe v Wade was “settled law”. she is absolutely going to enact some anti-trans bullshit.

here is a partial critique i read of whipping girl many years ago which has stuck with me Deconstructing Whipping Girl By b. binaohan

these issues that you highlight seem strongly tied to Serano’s bioessentialist understanding of gender, which (iirc) is whatever in-born tendencies that you have one way or another. once you start trying to find gender in biology, you quickly end up reproducing the biologization of gender that is the basis of modern era misogyny because gender was one of the driving ideologies that shaped the biological study in the first place.

once you make that connection, it becomes more clear where the “binary-phobia” stuff comes from. it’s literally just a reformulation of colonial era justification of eradicating native genders that the colonizers didn’t like. and to get out ahead of the obvious misreading, white non-binary people in the US/europe are not colonized. capital would just generally prefer to be able to easily sort everyone into 2 easily distinguishable categories with pre-defined social positions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Navarro

i’m so tired of libs (especially “leftists”) saying things like this are a win, or even that this is a “pretty significant shift in the status quo” (literally quoting one of them) because they might consider restricting arm transfers. another one i saw mentioned potential domestic military raids as a reason not to vote for Trump. the american left is fucking cooked. willing to vote for a genocide to save themselves is pure cowardice.

the process, in brief, goes something like this:

1. you write something (if this is the first time through this sequence for this work, it will definitely be bad. that’s ok and expected)
2. analyze that, which will reveal some significant flaws
3. figure out some ways that may help with those flaws
4. go back to step one with your improved understanding

this can be very frustrating to begin with, but after a few tries you will start to see some improvement, and maybe even something you actually like.