#about them and their potential leftist-ness

[mariacallous]

[side-blog-for-politics]

people doing idea genealogy on movements has to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks of leftist theory. it's not materialist in the slightest and while marginally useful I have never seen that usefulness realized, it's always some deeply superficial analysis intended to guilt-by-associate groups / individuals / movements with one another, the most common example being TERFs and historical radical feminism. like Sheila Jeffreys probably cited Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan as influneces, but Judith Butler would also and so might Julia Serano and McKenzie Wark. Which is obvious when you consider how fundamental radical feminism was to the development of feminism in our society, especially the academic variety which you see used most often in media studies (the apparent past time of feminists on the internet).

the answer is not to be broadly damning or hypervigilant of the "wrong kind" of feminism as if you were dealing with some kind of dangerous idea that might somehow infect your actions and cause you to become Evil, this is reactionary and completely misunderstands the situation of these utterances in power. the few actually existing TERFs with large platforms are not there because of the broader flaws with a political articulation, they are well-connected opportunists taking advantage of the flaws in that articulation, which arise necessarily from the fact that nobody can know everything and explain it perfectly, least of all about the future and especially when they're dead.

reactionaries who wear the mask of movements or people who might not have even liked them when alive are given the ability to do widespread violence against political minorities by the simple nature of political minority - Audre Lorde spoke on this when she stated that oppression was defined by the ability to do violence on the oppressed, that you cannot use the master's tools, and so on.

i would go on to say that mass mobilization is flawed & insufficient (but not entirely dismissible) in the way that anything which touches a large number of people has the ability to direct or incentivize the movement of those people however the reality I think is that more often than not this is only because the node in question is understood to be large, and therefore misarticulations (even if malicious) are accepted as this is seen as an acceptable way they could be realized, however only insomuch as better articulations might be simultaneously suppressed so that e.g. a news publication can maintain its monopoly on a particular kind of conversation - presented as a good to be consumed in the free marketplace.

a crucial skill that is used far less frequently is the tracing of well-connected-ness in question, that is, to seriously examine why particular agendas are promoted, exacted and orchestrated and the mechanisms by which they do so, to be more precise, the literal connections between individuals *with power* is a *potential* part of the web that can be targeted but cannot be the sole or primary form of action against an institution. other potential considerations might be the flow of resources to the institution in question, or the isolation and de-networking carried out centrally within the institution i.e. anti-union activity. also worth consideration is the role that institution plays in a broader context, such as their relationship to the government, and how that role might be transformed or eliminated.

[itstwothirty]

Your girl when she

Sees a photo of me holding a big fish

Is it making fun of nerds

Or is it nerds making dun of themselves

Or is it nerds making fun of everybody

Using the image of an anime girl stripping to tell a story about what women will do for sex

Is it communicating the desires of the woman? Assumed desires? True desires? True according to who?

Or is it assigning meaning to a sexualized body as a vessel of power dynamics

What is want? What about the wantedness of unwanted touch? Consent falls into moments of unwanted ness being claimed as wanted actions

Until a point where the wantedness may become an unwant once again

And so do I ironically think this is funny Bc it makes me think of men on tinder who post pictures of them with a big fish? Bc the literal joke Is just a meme? And the best way to understand the metaphor is to inspect its template

The expectation?

The model?

Your girl when she - alpha position, dominator, assumed property owner, irresistible masculinity

—but can be turned on its head to make fun of something quirky a girl might do and the entitled masculinity becomes a moment of witness and potentially even self reflective moment

—can be used to make fun of yourself by positing your interests as unpopular but subculturallu relevant or even sometimes communicating authentic passion

—easily comes back around to the need for external validation and the need to come after other men and assert dominance through acts of humiliation and honestly perform some made up roles but dance and dress nonetheless

-fish joke-tinder dudes. Unwanted nudes. Or maybe a heart of gold. But really truly an inevitability. They represent the zeitgeist. The disciplined self that seeks no individuality, but pursues life and is inescapable for one confronting the world of desperate men.

-everyone loves using anime girls half naked. Eye catching. Complicated. Why are you still looking? It’s always about forcing u to see something else (italics) something other (Italics) than the message. The something else? Hyper sexualized feminine body. She’s blushing and she’s not human. She’s cyborg. You wanna see a joke about something you see across Facebook, tinder, and Instagram? And it relates to Guys being dudes? Well you have to witness softcore fetish art too. Call her vanilla if u please, but she’s still a 2d girl. What would your mom think? And the woman in lingerie is there and she’s giving herself completely. But the byproduct is youre seeing something made by someone. And the other thought your having is what other things have been done w these girls? What kinds of jokes are being told?

And they feel harmless. Usually a few layers of irony and it’s funny Bc it’s almost intense but then you think about the leftists And the queers and the amount of trauma and advice and perspective on the world is communicated using this hyper sexual used anime girl. I’ve read some serious political theory block text memes with anime girls as the background. It’s like a sigil or in some ways

Claimed aesthetic? Is it just tht these girls are so ubiquitous that no one cares about the implications—we’re a few layers of irony in and so the answer is obfuscated by taste … whatever that is…. And trends.

Memes are visual trends. But they’re also textual. They are a medium. And they matter. Far more complex than the others. Anonymity first, naivety second, curiosity third, and full stop - embodiment. You’re making a claim. A specific claim to the meme when you make it. And that claim is easily lost, but infinitely replicable. And what does ir do when it’s telling the witness so many things at once? It loses its order. It is an agent of chaos. Fractals and more fractals and still a universal language. Language because it shares the same basic units. But ultimately confident in its unstable form. And so it domesticates the users, it teaches us that we are talking in tongues and copper tubes. We all see different things, so we are shown different things, even if it’s the same old anime titties.

[wedontcareaboutyourbinary]

hey so we just kind of wanted to let you know about our blog! It's feminist and leftist and run by three nonbinary mods and the url is thisistheateam(.)blogspot(.)com and we think your content is great and very similar to a lot of Mod Ari and Mod Lex's posts about being nonbinary.

Crying shame that you seem to be taking a whole bunch of cues from REGs when it comes to your politics. And there I was hoping this BS had restrained itself to Tumblr.

Some highlights from the definitions page, just to consolidate why I’m being so sharply dismissive (bolding is mine):

Aphobia: Microaggressions and prejudice, stemming from misogyny, toxic masculinity, ableism, racism, misdirected homophobia, and/or intersexism, directed at aromantic- and asexual-identified people. Not a form of oppression.

Bisexual: in nonbinary people and debatably in binary trans people, the (sexual and/or romantic) attraction to two or more genders. In cis people, any attraction that includes both men and women. Short form is bi.

Heteronormativity: the systems of power and oppression upheld by straight, cis, and dyadic people that marginalize people LGBT(+) people while enforcing straightness, cis-ness, and dyadic-ness as the ‘norm’. May be misdirected against aces and aros who aren’t LGBT.

MOGAI: an alternate version of the LGBT(+) acronym, standing for Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex. It has been criticized for potentially allowing pedophiles, kinksters, cishet crossdressers, cishet women in general, and others into LGBT spaces.

MOGAI hell: a subset of the LGBT community known for embracing the split attraction model to an unhealthy extent, believing that straight cis acomm people can identify as qu**r*, believing in monosexual privilege, making homophobic jokes, demonizing lesbians, calling gay people elitist, believing in allosexual privilege, believing in binary privilege, being ahistorical, sexualizing SGA** identities, ignoring or not believing in compulsory heterosexuality, shaming gay people for feeling uncomfortable and unsafe around straight cis people, telling LGBT couples not to kiss in public in case they make aromantics uncomfortable, comparing trans people to TERFs, sexualizing children, downplaying homophobia, encouraging young and newly out gay people to believe that their sexual attraction is predatory and oppressive, and calling people homophobic slurs. MOGAI hell and its inhabitants, known as mogais, mostly express their harmful beliefs online - usually on AVEN, Arocalypse, or Tumblr - but they have unfortunately begun to infect LGBT spaces offline.

Split attraction model: a theory of sexuality which states that romantic and sexual attraction, and sometimes aesthetic, sensual, and platonic attraction as well, are separate and can be mismatched. It’s known for sexualizing minors and promoting compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia by encouraging young wlw and young mlm to not recognize their same gender attraction as actual attraction, splitting up their orientation and forcing themselves to feel m/w attraction, and pressuring them to describe their sexual attraction when they may not even feel ready for sex due to their age. It should only be used by aros and aces.

So, with all due respect… unless this definitons page turns out to be horribly, horribly out of date, I think we’ll pass.

*acomm, from a brief search on the rest of the blog, appears to mean a-spec community. I don’t know if that’s a standard abbreviation that I just don’t see in my corner of the Internet or whether it’s one that’s primarily used among people with dodgy opinions about a-spec issues, but it hardly makes a difference.

**Obligatory reminder that S/G/A originates in Mormon conversion therapy and why holy creatures does anyone think it’s a good unifying term for the broader community I do not understand

- Cade

[tomlennard-blog]

Two Tribes

Sometimes when you go along to leftist political meetings it feels a little like there are two distinct tribes, talking past each other (perhaps my choice of the word “tribes” here is somewhat contentious - it’s assuming that where there are “tribes” there’s “war” - whereas a lot of the time tribes may peacefully coexist close to each other, however the word factions doesn’t quite cut it).

The two tribes I’m talking about are 1, the “Contradictionalists” (as I will call them) and then 2, the “GetOnWithIts” The former tribe like to contradict everything that anyone else says. I know a lot of left wing theory is rooted in the synthesising of contradictions. But there’s no need to over egg the dialectical pudding. Ok - I am being slightly facetious in this post - but really - when people start to shoot things down like this it clearly presents itself like a bit of fetish. The latter tribe tend not be so nit-picking. The ideas they present are usually less tied up, but more open for someone else to take on board. What they are really trying to do is subtly suggest that it would be best to move from theory into practice. Unfortunately the general thrust of a lot of left wing meetings involves navel gazing theory. There is also the problem of members of the second tribe who promise to do things, and then never do them. . A series of meetings of a new group can, when not well managed, turn from an evenish number of 1 and 2, to a concentration of mostly 1s after a while.  Thus this second tribe rarely have as much long term influence on the flow of meetings

So what to do? Everyone, one guesses, wants things to change and get better. One could:

- Try and modify the flow of traffic so that a host or facilitator allows Tribe 1 to speak and then 2, and then 1 again (and so on) 

- Change the whole dynamic of the meeting in some way, to make everyone mix their Tribe 1-ness with their Tribe 2-ness

- You could limit the number of meetings and/or banish deep theoretical discussion to the internet.

Democratic accountability is something that will always crop up with this suggestion. Of course decision making should be fair, but we do need to ask ourselves at which stage a decision needs to be voted on, as well as the potential we’ll ruin spontaneity if things are too torpid or protracted. Option 2 is also something that sounds viable, but would take a lot of planning and good facilitation skills. In this text I’ve ran with the rather resigned pitch that you are always going to have a group of “Contradictionalists” and “GetOnWithIts” in any given meeting. The left is terrible for looking in its own ranks for traitors because it holds itself, rightly, to high standards. Which is why to progress, we need a strategy for getting ourselves.