NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


its not so much that I got jaded, as much as I've seen so many ways people end up squandering their efforts due to intractable internal political strife. in every field I've peeked into.

and mostly I just want people to know that those particular efforts failed for similar reasons to what they're currently doing.

the world sure is fucked up and so much of it feels like no one learned anything, actually, from school and university and you often have to start from 0 on a lot of concepts they've just been cargo culting because that's all school taught them to do.

Which isn't their fault -- in the US, strategic defunding and strategic over-testing means that you don't learn much on the critical thinking for yourself side. Or the 'you're going to have to continually learn even after university'. So family and community and religion can take advantage of the gaps. Which is what we see in the US extreme-right evangelical cults.

i don't have many solutions but an important thing to realize is most people aren't "playing dumb", they really do not know, and also were never taught how to find out. There's a lot of work ahead of us and very little of it is posturing. I wish more people would get that instead of going "its capitalism" to every post when all their followers already know. I wish more people would get that instead of training with their rifles. I wish more people would get that instead of doing more infighting around those misunderstandings than realizing you can't help there and need to be elsewhere. Because the left isn't where your efforts, as a leftist, have to lie. They're already over the rubicon, it's your job to help the rest get there. And even if they don't, your job is to help 'em. Whatever forms that takes. Even if indirectly.

Completely incomprehensible neo-kautskyite politics? just leave, you won't get through to them and they'll do everything in their power to gain power. If you don't give them a foil they have less platform and will be laughed at once people realize they're constantly contradicting themselves. Go find ways you can help around you that aren't meetings that lead nowhere, or group DMs that lead even less far. Most people aren't on t'internet in places they'll see your flare lit in a dense forest.

the vibes are rancid and have been since before 2017.

postscript: The problem with everywhere is it's incredibly hard to be an informed voter, because the sources that are most trustworthy still constantly play an angle that factions that want power will align themselves to. Because those are the concepts most are likely to know, even if they're weirdly contradictory.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

I think the fear that certain leftist group have is "once we gain power, who is going to betray us?" It has happened in the past, for instance when the Social Democrat Party of Germany sided with the state of Germany during the Spartacist Uprising in 1918.

Now, we are not in 1918 germany. I can't advocate that we cut ties with social democrates, because sometimes they are useful allies to have in local parliaments. My point is that part of this leftist infigthing is caused by similar worries.

The other parts are: to appear more respectable (which I don't think we should bother with), and to push out bigots who think "We shouldn't alienate the working class with gender politics!" and that one is necessary.

But in the end I agree with you. It is way more important to help other people than to ban everyone who doens't prefer the right flavour of marxism. I just wanted to show that leftist infighting is a multi-faceted problem, with not one easy solution.

yep. A big part of the problem anywhere is when politics is involved, you can't trust the people reporting to you, so it causes various pathologies of delegation.

People don't report up when things are going badly because they fear retribution, and people dont report down because they dont know how it's going on down there, and anyway, everyone seems to resent them.

And then you have what the soviets had, almost invariably -- people in the delegation chain will start lying, knowingly or not, to further their goals. Sometimes it's understandable -- they or the team need more slack. But often it's to try and get ahead, or whatever.

All sides succumb to corporate forms of organization.

I Don't think the answer is 'go out and do things individually', tbc. especially if there's a big group near you doing similar work. But that the act of doing it on your own, even if it is just that, is the first step to building a network of support and from that neighborhood group if there isn't one there. Or if it seems the ones there aren't meeting the needs of the people there, just trying to win them to their cause.