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Moonside wrote

I always took the Fempire in jest and had good humor about it. I never mistook dunking and posting for activism. To an extent I got to live the moralistic online social justice posting before it spread elsewhere in like 2014-2018 era and later started to fizzle out. I myself never got into the moralism of it but didn't see it as problematic back then. Now I do.

Imo the good novel thing was advancing trans rights in the mainstream, the bad things have been left behind for the most part. Rising stakes has forced things to evolve, that representation is much less important than material gains and access to transition and formal rights are pretty good too, even if insufficient.

I got to read a lot about many different social justice topics. I remember this user - like liltiger or something - who posted loads of effort threads with readings and I took many samplings. The brearth of exposure was good for later development even if nothing went hard-core into praxis, history or sociology or other theory.

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Moonside wrote

That said, later I moved in Dirtbag Twitter and Reddit circles like /r/chapotraphouse. Didn't care for the podcast at all nor (the occasionally floated idea) that we should relax about slurs and such lest we alienate the working classes. It was definitely a reaction to moralistic libs and Clinton fanatics. It just seemed like a space where people could laugh at themselves. Alas, this too devolved into silliness over time and some Medicare for All Only people turned reactionary. /r/stupidpol and such were terrible. Made two comments there and some lib scold posted me on their blog.

/r/chapotraphouse really was the best leftist subreddit before being banned, the only place where progressives, demsocs, socdems, anarchists, left libertarians and marxists commingled. And once again, not too self serious.

Anyways posting isn't that important for left-wing goals like 2020 taught us. Things seem difficult but at least we can learn what hasn't worked.

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flabberghaster wrote

The chapo sub hated the podcast and the podcast hated them. It was kind of funny.

But it was one of the best leftist sibs on reddit (low bar). It was completely immune from right wing brigades and trolls because any time they came in trying to stir up shit people would just all post "show hog" and they'd get mad that no one was taking the bait.

It being banned was sad but also not that sad. Reddit sucks and km barely on there anymore except to argue with people that homeless people are human beings and not vermin. I don't know why I bother anymore.

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Moonside wrote

You could have actual substantive discussion on /r/chapo which was good. The combination of being relatively lax and not trying to establish orthodoxy and not giving trolls and bad faith right wingers anything they wanted broadly worked. It avoided fiascos like /r/antiwork and socialist cat girls.

I'm only on niche hobbyist, academic and bdsm subreddits, of which the latter kinda suck - there's a lot of easy moralism there. Small enough groups and you can drift to your favorites over time. The wider culture is either mundane or bad.

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cowloom OP wrote

I never visited the chapo subreddit; all I heard about it was secondhand complaining about the liberals on it from /r/ShitLiberalsSay. When SRS was starting to wane, I migrated to other leftist/socialist subreddits for a while. Then I got involved with IRL organizing, and realized half the stuff people were making a hullabaloo about on the internet wasn't really important.

I guess some of my criticisms of SRS are that the community was too quick to dogpile ignorant redditors who came across the sub and simply didn't understand things. Maybe it's hard for other people, but it's easy for me to tell the difference between an actual concern troll and someone with ignorant views who's attempting to engage in good faith, and I think flaming the latter did a real disservice to our movement. I understand the conditions that led to this state of affairs (the sub being constantly brigaded by trolls), but if someone's genuine questions were met with hostility, they probably wouldn't be giving feminism a second thought, and may even double down on their reactionary views. I also think rule x may have caused as many problems as it solved; IRL organizing has taught me the vital importance of principled criticism & self criticism, and by disallowing that, it meant that actual problems within the community couldn't be addressed (cowloom was benned for this comment). There were a few other things, like the prevalence of identity reductionist politics, liberal feminism & liberalism in general, SRS disco turning into SRS drubbing every second thread, but I digress.

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Moonside wrote

I actually think the circle jerk part was fine. One sub for dunking and nothing else? If the targets were bad enough whatever.

The rest of the fempire could have been in better faith and lose the reading lists. (Reading lists for online groups are self flagellation and came out of the liberal feminists shakesville scene, which was basically a blog cult.)

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cowloom OP wrote

I wasn't trying to say prime shouldn't have been a circlejerk. More like when non-troll redditors showed up on SRS and said they didn't understand why X was bad, I think it would've been better to say something like "This isn't the place for learning, please ask your question in SJ101," or directing them to resources instead of the benhemmer. Also when you say reading lists, do you mean a list of required texts to read before being allowed to participate, or just a list of texts relevant to a certain topic? And yeah, better faith 100%

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