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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • As one of said assholes, the biggest problem I have with Lemmy is that it’s stuck trying to be both the Old Internet in which directness was prized and encouraged no matter how acerbic, and Comfort Internet for nonpartisans.

    When these two crowds mix there’s going to be discomfort.

    And freedom from participation in politics is hiding in privilege to some very real extent, so in some ways I don’t know how to be sympathetic to your plight.

    But all politics is ragebait, isn’t it? I’ve come back to this general feeling that we need more rage, not less.

    The doctrinal conflicts on the Internet are yet to be resolved. We still have the disaffected rightwing types who haven’t really had it sink in yet that they failed and their loser is and was always a loser. We still have moderate idiots who think that ‘both sides’ need to curtail their extremists.

    It’s an irony that one of the Left’s strengths is dogmatism, because I do think there’s dogmatic leftists here that I find insufferable. I didn’t used to dislike male feminists as much as I do now, but let women represent women’s issues.

    In the meanwhile, the leftist dogma of No Platforming Stupid Rightwing Shit needs to be more formidably advanced.





  • I don’t think I shall commit to the insane proposition that humans use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors when climate change is currently killing the planet’s ecosystems off. To some extent I think you’ve got a high bar to clear for that proposition to be accepted!

    Jokes or half-jokes aside, it’s not a new observation that people rationalize their politics after having decided what it is they feel. I’ve seen too much consensus reality with completely reasonable paragraph after paragraph to take reason all that seriously.

    But I do believe that people are ‘reasonable’ in the way that you say: we don’t go around doing things just because (and to the extent that we do, it’s a good thing!). It’s when a group of people gather around a list of reasons that become an ideology that I start to get twitchy.

    Feminism is a great movement but men who apply it as an ideology have missed something fundamental about the basis for reason in the expression of emotion.



  • And what I do is speak with anti-women men online without trying to convert them to an ideology which is based around helping women.

    Don’t gatekeep assistance by setting an arbitrary bar. It’s unhelpful.

    fuck off? like do you understand how incoherent you are here? no, how could you, your entire ideology is based on the incoherent contradiction of feminism-for-women and feminism-for-everyone.

    This is weak.



  • We’re men helping men over here.

    No, you’re posting online.

    Do you personally volunteer at a battered women’s shelter? Then you’re a male ally.

    Do you personally volunteer at a suicide hotline? Then you’re a man helping other men (when those men call in).

    Otherwise I suspect, admitting that I don’t know you, that you think that you’re on a team that’s the good guys, and that you’re the only game in town, and you’re threatened that I don’t expect feminism to be something that it can’t and shouldn’t be, no matter how much ideological gymnastics are performed to try and convince men that feminism is on their side.

    If you (or your ideology) profess a belief that you’re capable of being on everyone’s side you are grandiose and delusional. Help the people you can help, especially offline, but don’t be an ideological evangelist online because that isn’t meaningful participation in our society.

    Yes we should try and make a society by everyone, for everyone. Intersectional feminism teaches us that the way to do this is to listen to the people with the experience, not to listen to the ideology which you, @surewhynotlem, are centering.


  • I am taking some rhetorical leeway towards a more radical presentation of the perspective, for clarity.

    Solidarity can only be achieved once people can recognize one another as equals, and “women tell men how men should advocate for themselves” is not equal recognition. Of course women don’t think they’re womansplaining the oppression men experience.

    I don’t believe in reason-based argumentation. Reason is how consent is manufactured. I trust reason only within the confines of the emotional message a so-called rational actor is emitting within the performance of the ritual of discourse. Too many women have been told to shut up for being ‘unreasonable’ for me to take reasonability all that seriously.

    Certainly mothers should perform their motherhood within this lens. Their motherhood is centered, not the primacy of their opinion. The mistake the essentialization&monopolization type feminists make is centering feminism, when an ideology is not a cure for anything except the nagging sensation that if we come up with and communicate the right ideas the problems will go away.


  • I understood this perspective already. You’d rather process suicide into a pipeline in which “reasonable” suicide is more common than deal with the factors driving people to suicide.

    Your need to control the “problem” is part of the overbearing control driving people to suicide. It’s my opinion that you’d be better off accepting the choice and not trying to second-guess men who shoot themselves, even if they’re drunk, impulsive, or any manner of “irrational” about it. (Rationality is a myth designed to sell more socially approved behaviors.)


  • In my left leaning circles it’s pretty well understood that feminism is about helping women. And that’s a good thing. Trying to make feminism an ideology which serves all genders is problematic because it implies an omniscient perspective counter to proper intersectionality. Men experience oppression but only men can represent their oppression in discourse.

    Women can’t and shouldn’t feel like they can have an opinion on men’s issues. “Stay in your lane” comes to mind.



  • Expecting women to help men is like expecting men to give women the right to vote suddenly on their own initiative.

    If you’re essentializing the left you’re stuck in meaningless ideology. “Kill All Men” is a good T-shirt and let’s not pretend women shouldn’t look out for women. Intersectional Feminism might have good ad copy but expecting an ideology to cure all problems is a broken (and male-oriented) way of viewing the world.

    “If we just get the ideology right the hard work will disappear!” No, men are still going to have to help other men and “Intersectional Feminism” is still going to be either 1) a way to a more nuanced feminism (a good thing for those feminists to develop, don’t get me wrong), or 2) an Extremely Online project of no real consequence.