this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations
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The purpose of this community is sort of a "work out your frustrations by letting it all out" where different leftist tendencies can vent their frustrations with one another and more assertively and directly challenge one another. Hostility is allowed, but any racist, fascist, or reactionary crap wont be tolerated, nor will explicit threats.
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Is there something we can do on Lemmygrad to limit Shea's impact? It feels like we moved the reactionary memes into a single community to stop their spread, but now we have this brain rot coming in elsewhere. Maybe we can ping @[email protected] to opine?
Maybe the best approach is to just dissect this stuff when it gets posted and explain why the takes are bad. Maybe can start aggregating common tropes and addressing them on prolewiki or something so we can just link to an existing article when something comes up repeatedly. I think it's particularly important to deal with people who claim to have a Marxist position and argue in bad faith because they ultimately end up driving people away. It has to be clear that they don't speak for us, and why we disagree with their position.
Well, there is no article on Rainer Shea. This might end up being a project for a bunch of people to do the research into Shea, gather his works and appearances, and then attempt to build a map of his positions, and then dismantle his problematic positions thoroughly. Sounds like a ton of work.
I'd be happy to help contribute to it :)
I'm not trying to be pedantic here, especially since I'm new to posting here, but I have to ask: why can't we just ban them? Would we not ban Matthew Heimbach just because there's a picture of him holding a communist flag? To anyone paying attention, Rainer Shea has been a long-standing problem in virtually every active communist community on the internet. He polemicizes anyone who doesn't support allying with the US far-right. I saw this post 2 months ago and he's gotten so much worse since: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/comments/139750w/petition_to_ban_rainer_sheas_blogaccount/
Do we just not have the resources to enforce a ban? I think he should be treated the same as Wisconcom.
I also support a wiki page and would contribute to it.
Personally, I'm not against banning stuff like that either, but there is educational value in discussing it critically as well. A lot of people here are well informed and are able to intelligently address such articles which helps others learn in turn. I'm not a mod though, so would be good to hear what our mods views on this are. :)
I used to disagree with this take, but I'm honestly kind of coming around to it; especially the more bald-faced the pleas for legitimacy from opps become. The minute we turn our eyes away, that's when they'll burrow their heads beneath the skin.
I don’t think we need to ban Shea posting. It’s not like he’s a griefer or spammer, he’s just someone who writes blogs that sometimes get shared. It’s true he should be delegitimized, but that can be done through having struggle sessions like these better than outright banning him.
I think he's fully delegitimized among those who know his name. The problem is that he's not gonna stop posting literal made-up bullshit and new people will upvote and uncritically consume it because he uses headlines like "Why Anti-Imperialism is Good". While I will bully him at every sighting, I can't commit to being online as much as him.
As long as it's confined to the infighting comm I don't think it's a problem. But he's clearly strategic about where and when to post each article to trick the most people into reading.
I don't think my proposal is unreasonable. This site is not a big tent, there's already a separate site for that.
"Why Anti-Imperialism Is Good"
seems like the left version of "Why Protecting Children Is Good" to defend an anti trans law
Shame IMO the same dishonest rhetorical tactics can be found on both sides.
I think it’s fine as it is. Most of the Rainer Shea posts recently have been in the leftist infighting community, as a place to criticize them after OP found the sort of reaction they got.