

I make electronic music. (she/her) 🏳️⚧️
Best posts after 9:00 UTC+3 (I need my coffee first)
В школе говорят, что мне пора бы поумнеть (Чё?)
anytime 🫡
Earnest response:
I was in middle school, just gaining political awareness at the time of the nato intervention in yugoslavia. I was in the US for that experience. The difference between what was said about the bombing campaign inside the US vs what I heard from my family outside made it clear to me that there’s always two narratives at play. When 9/11 happened I was made extremely uncomfortable by the open jingoism, then with Iraq I was primed to distrust the WMD line. I got involved in anti-war protests, then I quickly became aware that democrats were not faithful opposition when it came to war. The Kerry campaign pitch was essentially just to run the war better than bush was. When I wrote my democratic senator/reps expressing opposition to the war I got boilerplate responses.
I pretty much only hung out with the punks and theater kids through high school because being opposed to the war would get most anyone else to respond with ‘what are you a terrorist?’ I was reading political theory at this point, but legitimately found it hard to engage with marx or lenin at the time because it was the end of history and all I could really see was that avenue being closed off entirely. I’d get lots of exposure to that sort of politics from listening to my grandfather rant though. While I wasn’t really drawn to organizing at the time I was perfectly happy to go onto conservative forums and rile up/dunk on the fox news watchers.
What I did develop at a young age was a really critical eye for the media, it was jarring whenever I would travel to visit family, leaving America really felt like leaving a bubble. Not just leaving the rat race, but for example when not visiting touristy areas, if I was speaking in English I’d get people being like “oh you’re American? why are so many people in prison there?”. I still remember as a kid trying to wrap my head around just why so many people were in jail, the result was a deep disappointment in the US, and any politician upholding ‘norms’.
At the same time as being totally disenchanted with the US I realized that I still needed to survive somehow, and living in the US gave me better options than anywhere else so I opted to stay. I knew I was trans at this point, not that I really had the words to properly describe the feeling, though I also felt that pretty much everyone I would interact with would be hostile to me if I expressed them, which made me avoid discussing it at all. I did know that I couldn’t afford a prolonged encounter with the American medical system. I also hated the prospect of having to be the sickest patient in the mental ward just to be able to get medical support. I concluded that it just wasn’t to be and instead I opted to repress and went to college. My degree selection based on a cold calculation of what degree that I could stand would make good money and graduated in time for '08 financial collapse. Putting off transition felt like a wise move as I then needed to move back in with my parents while looking for work.
I remember being actually hopeful that something might change after that and the occupy protests, only to be monumentally disappointed by Obama.
I was actually hopeful for Bernie too, it was nice to see what looked like the pendulum swinging left for a change. To then have whatever youthful energy there was so callously shut down to prop up the old guard democrat fossils really made it clear to me what side they were on. COVID also got me to to re-evaluate my life and political commitments. Organizing with my local anarchists was great for connecting with other trans people who were also COVID-concious, many of whom would probably also be considered tankies by lemmy users at this point. It also motivated me to read more theory, anarchist and marxist. Parenti was actually a great entrypoint for me on the marxist side, while Graeber was my original favorite on the anarchist side. I opted to start transitioning late in life when I finally had both financial independence and the social supports.
COVID also made it really clear to me that I couldn’t count on the democrats being honest about something if they saw a political advantage in lying, that they would tolerate the final solution if it was on a long enough timescale. Gaza confirmed that realization. I could talk your ear off about that in greater detail, but this isn’t the place for that.
I went on reddit for easy dopamine hits pretty much since the digg migration, but after october 7 I just kept getting banned repeatedly and that motivated me to finally move over to lemmy.ml and I’ve been here since.
The tankie triad
making a bunch of forums seem so dark and mysterious
have you considered that some of us are just silly goofy girls
This this is on hexbear via ml, here’s a whole comment thread complaining about neoliberal brainworms re: welfare in China and a bunch of people talking about how disappointing the fiscal conservatism is, one person pointing out that this type of wealth inequality is ultimately the result of government policy.
I appreciate the clarifying question, I actually have an Iranian friend that explained to me that in Farsi, that the slogan ‘Marg Bar Ameriki’ or ‘Death to America’ (farsi does not contain ‘down with xyz’ in it, ‘death to xyz’ is the linguistic equivalent), it’s is not commonly intended as a literal death threat, but an expression of political opposition, or opposition to a state of affairs.
One might say ‘death to traffic’ for example, that doesn’t mean you want to literally kill everyone blocking your car or whatever, it’s more a statement of exasperation and opposition. As a political slogan it isn’t intending to mean death to Americans, but to the American government. It does sounds edgy in an english translation though.
To your question, ‘white’ is not a race, it’s more a self-identification and class signifier. Non-white ethnicities (Irish, Italians, etc) have a long history of assimilating as ‘white’ by becoming cops, landlords, and other active participants in American settlement/ westward expansion. That’s not to say there aren’t poor people who also identify as white, but if they are ever going to really have solidarity with other nonwhite people they really need to kill that white settler in their head.
I read ‘death to whites’ in this context as a poster complaining about, and expressing opposition to the bias in narratives/social media platforms - the thread was originally someone venting about racist comments on reddit, and white lemmmy users felt the need to get defensive about the most surface level reading.
For reference I said ‘death to america’ just the other day in a reply to a post about how florida prisons are going to be forcibly detransitioning prisoners, because it’s a fucked up situation and at this point I don’t see a way to really fix the bigger problems at play without some fundamental changes to what ‘America’ is.
next up: field trip to the GWAR concert
I agree, no need to get into a new issue this deep in a thread. As you found in the modlog I am gainfully employed and do need to get to work lmao.
I CW it because it’s a moderated .world comment I’m reposting to .world in a different context, just being courteous to the mods here.
Liberalism is a center-right wing ideology, that’s why so many communists and anarchists have issues with liberals and will call liberals (for example social democrats) the left wing of fascism.
I have some bangers, it’s true
Here’s me getting censored for saying a .world mod was being pedantic
CW: removed .world comment
this was apparently a rule 1 violation for some reason:
It’s super easy, and I tend to find the funniest content that way. For example any time some lemmitor is crying woe about authoritarians censoring them, it’s almost 100% of the time that they’ve just been spewing vile shit and redbaiting gets them sympathy.
I have a handy little button right inline with comments that brings all the history up for the user directly from whatever comment they happen to be making.
I know all this because i actually interact with humans in the real world.
could have fooled me, also really funny that you claim to be non-american yet are really invested in spreading African American vernacular to Americans/online? You just sound like a chud who wants to say slurs - liberals will tolerate that shit as long as you’re anti-communist.
This nuance is typically lost on the left and is why i identify as centrist nowadays.
wow, shocking, nobody could have predicted this.
ACAB
There’s still plenty of instances run by people willing to tolerate misogyny, racism and transphobia in the name of extreme centrism and defending capitalism.
I actually laughed out loud reading this in the modlog “triggered far left liberals” OK Ben Shapiro
I think the first two as commonly used are more homophobic, the latter more misogynist
It’s over having a community wide hard line on pronouns. Even if a suspected troll is using neo pronouns (or any pronouns frankly) that’s not a license to misgender them.
The user that sparked the recent controversy (drag) has a history of being pretty volatile/offensive but that’s still no reason to compromise on neo pronouns.
I for one would rather put up with someone ‘trolling’ while using neo pronouns (until the inevitable ban for saying something shitty) rather than tolerate anyone getting misgendered in a trans-inclusive space.
being able to browse all of them at once.
/all + new + comments is like my main use case, yet it’s frustrating because I can only view a tiny amount of comments at once, and only the first page of them. Hoping that gets fixed at some point.