Stupdpolll and SLS

 Stupidpol

The stupidpol subreddit is good in that it introduces right wingers (who might be open minded to left wing socioeconomic issues but are turned away by idpol to socialism).

Though to be fair, if one hangs around the World Wide Web for long enough he/she will come to observe that apparently every single thing is a sign of right wing creep and nothing short of full surrender will ever remove it. /s It’s a power play. Nothing more, nothing less

Even though that left wing anti idpol subreddit isn’t the most ideal subreddit since there is quite an amount of liberals, chuds and reactionaries on that left wing anti idpol subreddit, generally that left wing anti idpol subreddit is still socialist and they do bring up an important point about how socialists nowadays aren't as focused on economics (which socialists UNFORTUNATELY ARE NOT)

I agreed with a lot of economic leftist ideas through that left wing anti idpol subreddit. Moreover, that left wing anti idpol subreddit shows that there is so much more to leftism than idpol and intersectionality. 

I don't agree fully with that left wing anti idpol subreddit in disregarding idpol issues like LGBT and minority rights since as can be seen throughout my blog I feel that it is important to respect and uphold those rights. Though, I do wholly agree with OP's assessment of idpol in his/her first paragraph.

I also feel that that left wing anti idpol subreddit , since they criticize idpol should start also criticizing racism too. They shouldn’t just circlejerk about some idiot wokie on Twitter. also 

Maybe up until like a year ago that left wing anti idpol subreddit was okay, but currently it seems to have lost its way, there are better subreddits to see an actual, serious left wing outlook of the world today.

That left wing anti idpol subreddit is totally getting worse since they have been getting a lot more right wingers lately, but overall I feel like that the benefits of that left wing anti idpol subreddit outweigh the negatives, of course the mods aren't doing enough to prevent it from becoming a rightoid raging baiting subreddit

Though most right wingers that post very reactionary things on that left wing anti idpol subreddit get downvoted into mass oblivion with their answers hidden.(thank lord)

Those right wingers who do not flair up get noticed by mods who will then proceed to warn them. a lot of reactionary answers basically get deleted. So it's not all that doom and gloom. The issue is that all of these "populist" right wing chuds tailor their post to appeal to Left wingers (they go unnoticed) or the chuds are being too comfy and being like "yeah i don't agree with you guys but you're a ok”

Though if that left wing anti idpol subreddit can deradicalize their rightoid guests and teach them to embrace Socialism, maybe that is an uber silver lining. 

So the stupidpol subreddit really could have been an outstanding subreddit if they focused on things like police departments showing off how many African American women they have and saying they're progressive, however instead that left wing anti pol subreddit is filled with merely socialist versions of ‘that racist grandma/great aunt at Thanksgiving dinner’

The two classic recurring stupidpol topics are:

(1) are we soft on shitlibs because we're afraid of AHS/reddit admins/rpolitics jihadis?

(2) too many rightoids?

Stupidpol has objectively become more tolerant of the political positions it was originally founded to criticise over the years. Occasionally you'll even see people say stuff like "idpol is a betrayal of real intersectionalism" or other such incoherent nonsense that does show that the userbase has changed.

On the other hand, the increased screeching about rightoids isn't caused by an influx of "right wing" users, but by an influx of barely concealed crypto libs crying about the fact that not everyone here accepts liberal morality as having legitimacy. 

If you ever pay attention to conservatives you might notice that a lot of the "sensible centrist" IDW types will declare themselfs to have "left the left (American left most likely i.e liberal 2.0)" and then immediately decide that their preferred strain of classical liberalism is "real conservatism" and trying to tell all the conservatives what they are and aren't allowed to do; the screeching about rightoids is essentially stupidpol's version of the same thing but with temporarily embarrassed shitlibs instead of grumpy centrists.

As an early subscriber, I have to disagree. If anything, "idpol is a betrayal of real intersectionalism" was a far more common and upvoted talking point in stupidpol's early days than it is now. The orginal stupidpol was a leftie and mostly demsoc sub with much of the userbase migrating from the chapo sub. There were rightoid lurkers but their talking points were not as welcome or tolerated as they are now.

Stupidpol founder Gucci eventually went nuts trying to purge the sub of right-wingers to get it back to something more like whatever his original vision was.

I'd the stupidpol sub used to be more "brocialist" than anything, a sort of mix of a generally socially libertarian atmosphere but hatred of idpol which was treated more seriously as wrecking rather than just a vaguely distracting mistake or something. I certainly remember you'd get people saying that "idpol was a betrayal of real progress" or something like that, but I feel like people had a much clearer view of what intersectionalism was back then.

"Too many" rightoids? stupidpol is literally majority rightoid now."

My reply: 

If by "rightoid" you mean "Reddit shitlibs" (infecting stupidpol) I agree. There are so many brand new accounts there now that it's not even worth calling them out anymore.

For example.see "https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1096qct/comment/j3xk68l/" (LOL at that shitlib you linked, those dolts can’t help themselves. They’re like a eight year old with a hall monitor sash.)

But even if stupidpol did have a lot of right-wingers and conservatives, christian identitarians and MRA apologists it isn't a shock

It is not too strange of a phenomenon, anyway, and has been discussed here many times. Reddit essentially went death squad on any place in which those sorts of people could congregate, shutting their boards down one by one. Stupidpol remains one of the few places where liberals and "SJW" shit can be criticized, so they came here.

In order for the quality of stupidpol to remain decent, IMO, it has to be more than a place to post ragebait tweets from some Blue Check about White people needing to sit down, etc. 

If at least 51% of the stupidpol sub isn't primarily focused on economic equality and references idpol only insomuch as it is used as a weapon against the working class, it becomes a lot less appealing. It isn't so much that rightoids are taking over; it's that rightoids generally don't care about economic equality and they're primarily here to focus on the kind of idpol they don't like. I don't want the stupidpol sub moderated to hell but it would be nice if the userbase was naturally working class friendly.

That used to be true, but now, you would do well to do outreach to rural Americans. If you couch the terms correctly and promise to address the very real discrimination they face , you could have a full-blown rural revolution on your hands.

This, however, is not the aesthetic most academic Marxists want to cultivate, so they won't do that. 

Counter: Rightoid is an ideological position. I definitely think there is a lot of economic justice outreach to rural Americans that would be very effective. 

But I have right leaning people in my family etc, and I pay attention to what right leaning people talk about it, and the influencers on the right, and the vocal people on the right, and the talking points on the right, or not friendly towards economic justice, at least as a socialist would see it. That doesn’t mean that we couldn’t get there, but it’s still an ideology, dominated by low taxes and high profit and freedom of association.

Say this is true, are most working class rural Americans ideologically committed conservatives, or is conservativism just the ambient cultural background of rural America? Would the scenario you describe be proof that right-wingers cam be won to economic or equality, or that the rural working class could be won to the left?

Reddit's dying off more generally from what I can see of the comment numbers across subs. I've been banned from a few for innocuous comments and basically, Reddit mods are slitting their own throats by blocking off the most prolific posters who are statistically more likely to "offend" just due to the number of posts they make. 

You see the same thing in large corporate environments. The person who makes the trail-blazing decisions gets axed when one doesn't pan out and you get left with a room full of head nodders.

The problem is, Stupidpol is one of the few places left on Reddit, if not the entire internet, where you don't have to feel like you are walking on eggshells 90% of the time.

Every other post of one leftist on durr/politics gets automatically shadow removed. It's a really frustrating experience. They have to keep logging out and logging back in and deleting random words, guessing what the bot doesn't like until it appears again. Reddit is kind of a dumb website if you think about it.

But yeah, I probably stick around lurking stupidpol because there's less of an implicit threat of a turbolib immediately jumping down the stupidpolers throat with something insane and detached from reality as soon as they post.

Disagreement is good. Discussion is good. We don’t want stupidpol to become like virtually all other political or news subs on this site.

One unique subreddit drama on stupidpol which is interesting;

work class schill :Having more rightoid posts is not going to build a movement on reddit lmao. It just makes browsing this sub as a leftist that isn't interested in 99% of other political subreddits on this site less appealing.

Before the train posting was banned, a good chunk of submissions were about it - purely culture warring submissions with nearly zero to do with anything related to materialism. Just 'trains bad' over and over and over again.

reply:

No one was really saying “trains bad” not even the rightoids. People have a problem with how the movement censors information and doesn’t treat it as a medical issue

dk how you could've read that and interpreted it as advocating "more rightoid posts". Like why not focus the posting on good working class issues that are popular across the spectrum for the purpose of drawing people in/movement building, then have specific threads with just approved people for the purity test stuff? We used to have the dougtoss reading group threads that were totally open and some of the most interesting stuff on here, where no one got banned or scolded because someone thought they did a rightoid.

The pretense here is that this is a Marxist board; that runs up against the problem of the paucity of actual Marxists on here to participate in discussions of more than 5 people. The current strategy is 1 way of dealing with this, and if you think that's great, I'm glad you're happy. But I think its pretty obvious that this strategy is very consciously not geared toward winning over outsiders. Like, if your take is that everyone online is fully formed and at their personal end-state politically and any "rightoids" are unreachable regardless of message, then you can't get pissy if someone points out that this is an exclusionary strategy.

Like why not focus the posting on good working class issues that are popular across the spectrum for the purpose of drawing people in/movement building, then have specific threads with just approved people for the purity test stuff?

work class schill: I'm not the flair = restriction architect so I don't know the original idea but from my observations not having restrictions always lead to more culture-war and low-effort posts. Just saying "lets focus on posting working class issues" doesn't do anything - either we have active moderation that removes culture war stuff (that some ppl erroneously say is working class issues) or we have the passive moderation flair restrictions.

But I think its pretty obvious that this strategy is very consciously not geared toward winning over outsiders. Like, if your take is that everyone online is fully formed and at their personal end-state politically and any "rightoids" are unreachable regardless of message, then you can't get pissy if someone points out that this is an exclusionary strategy.

personally I've always treated this sub as more of a conversational hangout with mostly similar minds, not a proselytizing sub for outreach.

not a proselytizing sub for outreach.

There's proselytizing, and then there's focusing on issues where there's already agreement with the type of rightoids who come here (including plenty of non-culture war issues like war, the MIC, the drug war, civil liberties, unions, etc). The tension here is between purity and popularity; the mods' chose one way of resolving this tension - the bans, flairs, hidden scores, "curation" of posts, etc - that (IMO pretty obviously) prioritizes homogeneity over reach. I'm saying there are other ways to resolve this, but the mods don't want to do them, partly because their goal isn't reach or movement-building in the first place.

to work class schill: You are exactly the type of hidden neolib, idpol loving masquerader people are calling out. No wonder you’ve replied in this thread so much. 

reply:: "Yeah bro I was posting here almost immediately when it was founded after getting banned from chapo.

You're absolutely right, guy that can't hold an account longer than a few months lol"

Right the hidden neolib that has been posting here since the beginning and somehow wormed his way into the mod team tricking everyone!

You're bitter for some reason. On redscarepod subreddit you can get away w/ posts like that, but I'm genuinely curious as to why you're being such a brat here towards me

My main point is that this sub doesn't really matter at all, and certainly not for coalition building. Do you disagree with that? Imagine siding with the guy (OP) that thinks being online, esp. on this sub, is for being a "big tent" and "movement builder". The neolibs on .r.neolib are the ones that think their subreddit is doing that lmao"

It’s easy to think of the stupidpol sub as left on economics and right on social issues, but that’s not necessarily anti-idpol.

level 1

working_class_shill

·

3 mo. ago

read Lasch

There's still pockets of good discourse but there's also a lot of really dumb comments lately:

-taking anti-idpol too far

-quippy contrarian comments; one-liner dunks as ""rebuttals""

-the weird threads/comments that seem to LOVE small business owners and vehemently deny 1) the term "petit-bourgeois", 2) that they are capitalists, and 3) they are different from the working class (b-but they work hard!!)

-taking anti-idpol too far

It's really easy to get carried away when you find a space like this (given almost every other public online lefty space seems to have swung in the other direction). The danger is the sub gets used as a tumblrinaction replacement, especially for the people who aren't invested in leftist politics to begin with.

Also clowning on cringe is easier to do than developing thoughts about wider discourse or praxis.

-the weird threads/comments that seem to LOVE small business owners and vehemently deny 1) the term "petit-bourgeois", 2) that they are capitalists, and 3) they are different from the working class (b-but they work hard!!)

Off topic, but despite reading a fuck load of marxist/socialist literature, I'm still not fully clear where small businesses would land in a realistic implementation of marxism/socialism what have you. I've gotten everything from "small business would exist in co-op formats" to "no, state owned everything"

Would people be unable to undertake individual ventures? If I invented something, but I not have ownership of it? Etc etc."

I like how the mods of stupidpol sub hand out flairs to people they disagree with and then act like refferring to the flairs they handed out constitutes some sort of epic dunk (like mra/incel simp flairs for male TERFs)

"Of course not, which is why the mod team hands out these flairs as a way to delegitimise people they find disagreeable while maintaining the pretense of open discussion.

You might not flair people yourself, but you are part of the team that does, and you are acting as if the flairs are in some sense meaningful, so you don't get to weasel your way out of that.

For a while there was a selection of flairs you could pick from, but even thats been removed, these days you either have to go ask on the thread, or you are stuck with whatever is picked for you by the first mod that gets pissy at you.

In any case, the flairs system has always been more about janny powertripping than anything else, and this is as true now as it was under Gucci. 

I could go grovel for some sort of socialist flair but even if they gave me one I'd just get changed to something else the second I say something that pisses off one of the mods because I flat out refuse to accept the absurd pretense that mirroring PMC progressivism but sticking the words "anti idpol" onto it and occasionally making crude jokes in any way constitutes serious working class politics."

I don't think the problem on this sub is the self-censorship so much as the fact that it has attracted a very large number of folks who are not here to discuss "identity fetishism...from a Marxist perspective" but are instead just here to "dunk on those stupid left-wing identity politics people and Democrats in the USA."

Basically, our focus against identity politics and attempts to critique it have attracted a very large group of people that outnumbers those like myself. I would think that the first reason to criticize identity politics is that it distracts the populace from focusing on and demanding economic reforms and material changes to their lives, but to many others the main reason to criticize it is that it doesn't fit their own personal world view.

So that leads to lower quality content and comments overall. Not that I consider myself helpful in this regard - I have hardly taken the effort to make threads, as I rarely do so on Reddit anyway, and I pretty much just participate in comments.

"I have not been banned at stupidol yet so it can’t be as censoring as compared to some other subreddits. I am often hostile towards Establishment conventional wisdom that is wrong."

Shitliberalssay

A subreddit called “shit liberals say” sounds like a great sub in concept even though the actual sub is bad since it considers "liberal" anything that's not bootlicking the CCP, Vladimir Putin (and especially his bourgeois oligarch neoliberal inner circle) and the DPRK

I think one way to make the shitliberalssay sub better is for that sub to not be so tankiesh and to also call out all the NIMBYs and the like...

reddit idpol other

A Reddit mod declared that it is ok to have anti white and anti male subreddits, here is my takes and reaction to that

This is a fine article on Liberal 2.0ers embracing inequality (take it with a grain of salt though)

I love this AMA by Ryan Grim here and I echo the ideas expressed in it by Ryan and his questioners 

In particular I love the question and answer here: 

"I will add my own question. How do you think we can keep left movements from being hijacked by these types of inward focused debates? How can we keep environmental or labor groups from being forced to spend time on the latest culture war fad? Did any organizations that you looked at succeed at sidelining the people who cause internal strife?

User avatar

level 2

RyanGrim--Boomer

·9 mo. ago

 Special Guest: Ryan Grim

Good place to end here. I think many groups and leaders know how to do it, but it takes courage and will. And everybody has to do it together: donors, leaders, deputy managers, and factions of staff all have to unite, have to hold hands and jump together and say no more with the bullshit. And managers should immediately recognize their unions and negotiate good contracts, and staff should empower the unions to shutdown BS rather than elevate and amplify it.

And we HAVE to stop this racist stuff of saying that performance reviews or being on time are qualities of white culture or white supremacy. That's evil stuff. And if people try to make those arguments, they should be told by their colleagues that it's BS and to knock it off."  (RYAN I AGREE 100000 PERCENT AND I WILL MAKE SURE THIS TYPE OF WOKENESS IN PARTICULAR IS ABOLISHED FOREVER)