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.)
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.
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.
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.
Imo he's one of the "M4A, hates Clintons" crowd that haven't achieved much and aren't good on queer liberation, racial equity, immigration and drug and carceral issues so I don't particularly care to align myself with him.
The Queer Community(tm)(?) seems to have started using "amab" and "afab" entirely in the same way people uses "boy" and "girl" 100 years ago. It's the same gender binary. (Also, reference to the same person before.) ("Erm... What the sigma?" is a new quote the younguns are saying)
Lmao yes. People just want to make gender into a taxonomy.
Update: Tim posted an update on Patreon. Only a small portion of the footage needed for a video was lost and will be reshot soon. Delay is thus minor compared to the time we've spent waiting already.
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Moonside wrote
Reply to comment by cowloom in I miss the old days of SRS by cowloom
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.)