Dare I suggest that the reason for twitter becoming so right wing, is that it’s a centralized social media website, subject to the crazed far right whims of the capitalist who bought it…

Gotcha! So, I started a lefty book club with a couple friends, when I was in university. So in that sense, things were easier. But if you’re starting with just yourself, you’re gonna have to kinda start with boring stuff.

Come up with a name for your book club. Advertise it around campus. Make posters! If you see someone with a leftist sticker on their laptop or something, strike up a conversation!

Get at least 2 or 3 other people on board first. Then, if you’re not a big theory-head, see who is. Or at the very least, see who’s good at talking to people. Let that person start facilitating discussion. Have a few informal meetings, and see how they go!

You’ll start to learn how things will work, the more you do it. This stuff takes practice, and you’ll gain a lot of skills doing it, but don’t assume it’ll all go smoothly the first, or even the 5th or 10th time.

On that same point though, relax and have fun! Everyone is there to learn and talk about stuff.

If you’re lucky, you night also develop opportunities to collaborate with other student groups, or community orgs, and do some activism as well. I know with the group I helped start, it grew over time to a full fledged campus activist org that held film screenings, talks, protests, mutual aid, and more. And that’s because we kept making ourselves known on campus, and in the wider community, and put in the work to make that happen.

But, also don’t feel like you HAVE to grow it that way, if you don’t want to. You’re free to just let it be a small reading group between you and some friends!

Are you starting this from scratch, by yourself? Or do you have some friends who are helping you start this thing, as well?

What are you having trouble understanding? The theory material itself? What to pick? How to facilitate discussion?

Shout out to Leslie Feinberg. Everyone go read Transgender Warriors.

There are plenty of early leninists who were deeply intersectional. Alexandra Kollontai jumps to mind immediately.

But yeah, there’s definitely a vulgar strain here that nutomic is clinging to.

Jesse…What the fuck are you talking about?

Nothing in @Doorbook@lemmy.world’s comment implied that.

Also…Why do you think so many American cities in the south west have spanish names?

tbh, their funtion isn’t all that objectionable. Mixed use buildings are cool and good, actually. But the fact that they’re made of cardboard and duct tape, look like ass, and are signifiers of gentrification are what suck about them.

Prozac and Benadryl, the two drugs that supposedly killed Nex, interact at high doses, in the form of Serotonin Syndrome. Serotonin Syndrome kills you relatively slowly, and has a fatality rate of about 1-2%. It’s very easy to treat, and the symptoms Nex had, did not match those of serotonin syndrome.

Serotonin Syndrome symptoms from Mayoclinic:

Compare that to Nex’s symptoms, from Vox:

“The assault was so violent that Benedict says he ‘blacked out’…Benedict texted a relative later. '[I] had to go to the ER… if I’m still dizzy and nauseous in the morning I might have a concussion.'The next morning, Sue Benedict placed a call to 911, stating that Benedict had fallen unconscious and appeared to be ‘posturing,’ exhibiting involuntary motions that can indicate brain trauma. Benedict returned to the hospital but was pronounced dead soon after arrival.”

Additionally worth noting, the cause of death which was released made no determination on the levels of the two drugs that were in Nex’s system, nor made any reference to Serotonin Syndrome, only a “Toxic interaction.” Both of which feel like strange things to leave out, if this was the cause of death.

I remain Pretty skeptical, all things considered

I don’t think it’s that complicated

:3

“The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

• Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

This is pretty straightforwardly an accelerationist tactic. It might not have been called that at the time, but strategically pushing crises over the tipping point, in order to take advantage of their fallout, wasn’t invented by the boogaloo boys in 2017.

The prefix trans comes from Latin and means “On the far side of” wherever you’re currently standing. So transportation takes you from one place to another.

To be transgender, your gender identity, expression, etc. Moves from one gender to another. So that could be in a binary way, from male to female, or vice versa.

Or it could mean you’re going from male, to something in the middle, or otherwise not related to the traditional gender binary. You’re still trans, you’re just moving to a less expected part of the proverbial map.

The word transgender was pushed heavily by Leslie Feinberg, who was nonbinary. They also considered themselves a lesbian, and even transitioned to living as a man for many years in their youth.

I bring this up because I find that cis people, and even some trans people, want to put everything into nice neat little boxes, and queerness has just never worked that way. A term like LGBT implies that each of those letters is a discreet identity box, when in reality, all of these ideas and labels are a complex overlaping series of ven diagrams and umbrella terms.

Source: am Nonbinary and Bisexual.

I keep seeing reports that Nex walked into the living room the next day, complaining of a headache, collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital where they died.

Everything about that, and their initial state, immediately after the fight, are classic head trauma symptoms. If what ultimately killed Nex was something like a subdural hematoma, then I guess you could argue that the death was not directly a result of the trauma? But the causal chain of events is incredibly obvious.

I mean, in this specific community? Yeah… Just look at the name.

The thing that sets off alarm bells in my head for “Tankie but not communist” is someone who uncritically upholds Russia and/or Iran. Take, for instance, one Caleb Maupin. A guy who calls himself a Marxist, but hangs out with noted fascist Alexander Dugin, and was recently outed as a creepy sex pest.

Exactly. While certain dietary habits will most certainly have to shift if we’re to adequately tackle climate change, the framing of this as “everyone should just go vegan” falsely puts the onus on individual consumers to solve what is ultimately a systemic problem of production.

And Hitler was a Vegetarian. Does that mean vegitarians should simp for Hitler because “he had at least one good idea?” I should hope not! Furthermore if they do, even if they only simped for his vegetarianism and not his “political career,” it is gonna come off a bit different than they intend to most people.

Hitler being a vegetarian had nothing to do with his fascism. Mao’s Epistemology was built on Stalin’s synthesizing of Marxism-Leninism from the works of Lenin and the experiences of the Russian Civil War, etc.

There’s actual political philosophy here that we can think through, debate, apply, update, and revise. Mistakes or outright malicious behavior can be learned from or discarded as necessary, because Marxism has within it mechanisms for self criticism and recitification.

You can ascribe to that philosophy or not, I don’t care. But this kind of kneejerk reaction isn’t in line with the way these discussions actually happen within Marxism.

Do dogmatic Marxists who blindly defend bad shit exist? Yes. But they’re commonly denounced and criticized for their garbage analysis.

You’re taking a small subset of, mostly online weirdos, and stawmanning my position, and an entire branch of political philosophy.

By all means, keep those subs dedicated to defending all those atrocities and simping for despots, but people likely won’t be fooled into thinking they only care about epistemology while they say nothing happened in Tienanman Square without a shred of irony

Buddy, I’m not trying to pull wool over your eyes or be sneaky. I literally said to not do this shit. I’m trying to get people to engage with these topics with nuance and critical thinking skills. Not blindly screech uniformed praise or condemnation based on kneejerk, emotional, preconceptions.

Mao and Stalin (though to a noticably lesser extent) actually had insightful things to say though. Mao’s essays on epistemology are genuinely really fantastic. And that can be true alongside all of the show trials and sparrow murder which was genuinely really fucking bad.

Pol Pot meanwhile admitted to never having really ever read Marx, and his faction of the Communist Party of Cambodia was more concerned about Khmer ultranationalism and anti-Vietmamese sentiment that had been brewing over the course of French colonialism, then with anything to do with building socialism.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that we ought to take a nuanced, grounded view of historic socialisms that accounts for their success and failures, and doesn’t fall into either mindless exoneration of awful shit, nor reflexively screeching “TANKIE TANKIE!!!” Every time anything vaguely socialist oriented comes up in discussion.