Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I’m exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.
Edit: the rant wasn’t clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I’d like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.
Rant/effort post coming:
What’s the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?
history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context
We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.
There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there’s been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I’m super appreciative of you all, doing work I don’t want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don’t hate any of you–including previous ones I’ve argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).
We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won’t speak on here. I didn’t see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don’t want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)
Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don’t spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you’re working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that’s the goal, it’s a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. “3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes” is better than nothing.
I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the “dunk” discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven’t been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I’m frustrated I don’t think of leaving. But that’s not universal
The right spark at the right time, that’s what.
Not trying to say the outrage was justified, but I saw there were a lot of prior outrages, and there was almost zero communication. The gunpowder of unresolved grievances meeting the lit match of a minor struggle.
What unresolved grievances? What outrages?
You’re doing the same generalisation as OP.
Did you read the recent poc concerns thread, and the admins had to ask everyone to stay on topic and that the zionism concerns would be dealt with later? That’s my guess
No. Completely missed it. But I completely miss a lot of things on this site despite being one of the most active users, many things happen lightning fast and do not get enough time for people to notice them.
No all good, sorry if my comment sounded snarky I am at work and was in a rush to type it out. But you should check that thread for context.
I agree things go very fast. Even though everything is ostensibly recorded, it’s washed out by the volume of general stuff. It’s easy to lose track of stuff even if you don’t miss it.
I think this is the thread you missed: Open-floor meta post on Hexbear for our EM/POC comrades [To be concluded at 8:00 PM EST today 30AUG25] (FYI as it is in /c/den only logged-in hexbear users can see it)
I can’t imagine it would be a fresh idea to keep a list of these threads somewhere?
keeping a list of admin announcement/discussion posts would be nice. Not sure how to implement it but it wouldn’t be a huuuuuge burden for someone (wouldn’t even have to be an admin) to maintain it manually either.
The double edged sword of the pinned post, is that if the posts are left up longer, the arguments tend to just continue indefinitely and get more and more bitter. But otoh, if they stay up for only 24 hours, probably half of the userbase never sees them. Idk how to resolve this besides having some semblance of rules of decorum and enforcing them. But that has to be squared somehow with both people’s mistrust of the mods and the general anti-civility stance here (personally I don’t think this should apply to comrades, but clearly its not settled)
Well, off the top of my head, people were REALLY, and I mean REALLY pissed off about the whole Dunk Tank struggle session.
Also, sorry if I’m causing any trouble, not the intention, but I do apologize if I am.
I was banned in that whole thing, which also spilled over into Luigi stuff. It was a hidden ideological conflict between a divergent group on the site that believes in the theory that America should be treated as a settler state like Israel vs MLs who have a different view. The ML group won, things got resolved later and I got over my ban. Everything is fine?
I genuinely don’t get it.
I don’t think the issue here is about the emoji, or the dunk tank, but the way the mods operate behind these types of decisions and those are just the most recent examples that people can point to. In those posts and many others the convo seems to evolve into mod accountability and distrust from the user base, but the mod team has never seemed to give an open forum to that problem specifically. These grievances are only ever broached in posts which have different specific focuses, but the mod/admin team hasn’t made a space for very specific discussion about this underlying issue. So I think OP is trying to take it upon themselves to try to open that discussion up, however I don’t think itll be productive unless mods/admins join the conversation publicly instead of just talking amongst themselves in the private chats.
This is just my assumption and sorry if thats all obvious to you I may be misinterpreting your comment
Thank you for writing this. Before you started posting in this thread I thought I was just imagining shit or something. But yes, I was hoping to have some mods/admins come to talk generally.
Felt like that was promised anyways, on more than one occasion, with only the EM/POC thread to show for it. Was a good idea to start there specifically for the Zionism stuff, but then I didn’t see any response with any sort of changes? Seemed like once it was said that “we’re already 40% EM/POC” that that was taken by mods/admins as just enough for the entire discussion. I hope it’s not that way, but I have seen pretty much nothing to indicate otherwise.
I will say that I think they take time, like a week or two, to discuss the content of those posts amongst themselves and then they will come back with another sticky explaining the changes to be made. I really do hope that they engage with that “40% mod/admin” thing, simply because many EMPOC users stated that having POC on the mod team wasnt enough because the same problems kept arising. makes sense since that acronym doesnt and shouldnt serve as a monolith for beliefs and such.
The problem is there are many comments expressing their emotion but there is not many ideas for concrete change. This is now the forth post discussing this, after the initial post, a post made by hellinkilla, the post for the EMPOC community, and now this one. From all these posts what changes could be made? I will remove inactive mods, we have a very diverse admin team with multiple admins directly nominated by the EMPOC community over a year ago. We have committed to having more meta posts to engage the community in changes, we discuss every site-ban and often correct error in moderation. We genuinely want to engage in good faith and with the most charitable interpretation of the community.
Ack I read this earlier and had a lot of thoughts that I thought were good and constructive but now that I’m in front of my laptop my mind went blank. Still, I’ll try to make some coherent points lol. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be thoughtful while typing this out so I’m sure people have already covered a lot of what I’m gonna say but I’ll send it anyway.
Direct Responses to your comment:
So besides the EMPOC improvement post, I don’t remember any of the other posts that you are talking about. Which one was the inital post? The one that got removed with the modchat screenshots? The first site improvement post? I went through hellinkillas post history and didn’t see anything resembling a post that has to do with what’s going on here. I don’t want you to go through the trouble of finding them for me, but I think this is kind of the problem. People bring up their concerns about mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. but those things are brought up in the shadow of other posts that are meant for other discussion (ie. the ND and EMPOC improvement threads), or through user posts that you brought up. But there has not been a big Community discussion explicitly about these grievances that is stickied and facilitated by the mod/admin team, and that is really what people want and why it keeps coming up over and over. I think that it is kinda different to have posts that say “how can we improve the experience for x or y users” and “we need to address the concerns you have about admin/mod behavior”. The first type of post, imo, only serves to get feedback on how to moderate behavior of average users, as opposed to the latter, which serves to discuss how to moderate admin/mod behavior.
So I think this problem stems from the feedback I gave above. When these grievances are aired in threads that aren’t explicit about accountability, I feel like a lot of that content can be glossed over and forgotten about, because that’s not what is being asked of in the post. This can make it difficult to have a structured, productive conversation when you feel ignored, and that compounds the problem of distrust. I think that giving a structured, focused forum for people to bring up these concerns may yield more concrete ideas.
I believe that the changes that you all have made have been great, but they do nothing to address mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. A lot of people have expressed that when they do air grievances, it’s nothing but radio silence OR, when it is not ignored, replies to these grievances only address the very specific example that a user might make. For example, someone expresses frustration about an unwarranted post removal, and a response might be “we restored that post”. Another example is someone asking why “User X” was banned but NOT “User Y”. The response might be “we ended up banning user y”. But really, it’s not only about frustration around the specific instance, but frustrations at the patterns of behavior by the mod/admin team and that is never directly addressed by the replying mod/admin.
Again, I think that changes y’all have made are excellent, and I think that even the strongest critics of mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. agree with that. I can sense exasperation here and that totally makes sense. I think you all are doing a lot to try to get community input and improve things! But since this specific topic doesn’t seem to have been addressed directly, you’re just going to continually hear these complaints in every community improvement thread, and that is gonna make it feel like no one appreciates the effort that you all put into this. And that fucking sucks and I can understand if it might make you or other people on the team feel frustrated, bitter, whatever it might be. And that might make people go to the mod chat to blow off steam. That’s a reasonable reaction to being continually criticized. But having those shit-talking sessions does nothing to try to fix this problem. It seems like no matter what it’s just a matter of time before chat logs get leaked and that just pisses people off MORE because instead of their very valid complaints being taken into consideration, they are being shown that they are just being mocked behind closed doors, and that reinforces the whole cycle.
I also want to bring up the banning of LY here as another example. So LY, an EMPOC, was commenting in the EMPOC improvement post with a criticism that they put a TON of effort into crafting which explained how EMPOC voices were being silenced and not taken into consideration. What happens? They get banned, with no explanation, in a post that is meant to address racism on the site. That ban was a perfectly ironic example of just exactly the problem of racism on the site. Nobody cares that you unbanned them, they decided to leave anyway because it upset them so much. It never should have happened in the first place. Unbanning someone does not mean that people within the admin/mod team has reckoned with mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. The unbanning happened as a reaction to MASSIVE backlash amongst the users. Having EMPOC admins/mods is very important and it is great that they were elected by users. That does not fix this problem, though, as CommunistCuddlefish pointed out.
FInal Thoughts: People do not like that they do not seem to get engagement directly with mods/admins beyond a “we fixed that problem” comment. People do not feel that vague apology posts after the fact are adequate. People want DIALOGUE. People seem to prefer that problems that many have agreed are systemic get dealt with, instead of the admin/mod team having to play defense and clean up every time something shitty happens. I think that Maoists got it right with criticisms and self-crit. I totally get not wanting to take seriously comments that are unnecessarily hostile, but I think many people do not feel like their criticisms are taken seriously, and do not feel that the admins/mods have actually tried to engage in self-crit because they do not see these problems as systemic and are issues in the imagination of many users. I think that part of demonstrating that you have engaged in self-crit is not just relying on users to give you “concrete examples” of how to fix things, but to really investigate these problems amongst yourselves and suggest ways to improve trust and transparency specific to mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. Some people have actually given concrete suggestions, and I have seen those shut down, so not sure how much users can really give that will be agreeable to you all.
Concrete suggestions:
💯 agree it’s good but we can’t then expect our emotions to be implemented
It is very difficult to think about concrete changes because the foundation seems so gooey. If I had an existing thing to amend I could do that. It is real Tyranny of Structurelessness sitch. I’ll give it a shot.
Friendly amendments welcome. Counter-proposals welcome.
This is for discussion only. Of the concept of concrete proposals. Making a proposal should not be taken seriously deep in the
|||||||||||of some random thread. It’s kind of a demo proposal. 🤷 I kind of lost my juice towards the end. But this is intended to be something for people to go against. Even though it’s kind of my sincere idea too.motivation
In every functional organization I have been a member of, meetings are announced in advance and agendas as circulated for review. There is a process for amendment and approval of the agenda. Then the meeting begins. Generally there are bylaws that govern all this. You don’t need to be an f-ing political party to benefit from this. Arts and culture organizations and other “frivolous” purposes run by all kinds of people have this sort of setup.
I think a post like Open-floor meta post on Hexbear for our EM/POC comrades [To be concluded at 8:00 PM EST today 30AUG25] is a meeting.
The agenda was extremely vague, confusing and changed over time. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. If it was for EM/POC then why did so many “crackers” not understand that and make contributions? Did they fail to read properly or was it not clearly stated? Each time I returned to the thread it seemed to change purpose. If the thread was just for EM/POC then the “crackers” should have had their comments deleted or challenged ASAP.
I suggest that by allowing community feedback on the nature of the discussion prior to the discussion actually starting,
question
Has it ever been attempted to discuss the agenda before the meeting actually happens?
Proposal
Admin/mod-initiated site wide meta posts (known as a “Meeting”) shall be formally announced 3-10 days (72-240 hours) in advance of formal discussion. This is the “announcement period”. The purpose of the announcement period is to a) allow interested users an opportunity to think through the issues; b) get feedback on the proposed questions and discussion guidelines.
announcement subject line
🐻 [start date/time] - [end date/time] META: "TOPIC"the announcement will include
links to the most relevant posts/threads/URLs, if applicable
discussion guidelines, such as scope, context
the question at hand
he kind of answers being sought: long form, yes/no vote, survey, etc
usernames of responsible mods/admins/users
the announcement will be stickied during the feedback period
the feedback period shall be the time between the posting of the announcement a specified time 12-72 hours prior to the Meeting
no other posts (such as parodies) will be allowed to follow the same format for subjects. ANY and ALL posts will be banned. People who want to shitpost about it can make their jokes in the body of posts.
the proposed body text of the OP discussion shall be included in the announcement
Amendments to the announcement post
~~strikethroughsDates and times shall be in GMT [or Moscow?] time.
The Meeting
I kind of read that as more of a reply to people who were suggesting that things would be substantially improved by diversifying the mod/admin team. That it isn’t enough to address the concerns being raised.
Fully agree that that’s how it reads! But when that’s pretty much the only concrete engagement (and other explanations for how things already worked), it begins to feel that the explanations were considered enough to not make any changes. Meanwhile, the thread identified some problems.
An explanation of why a problem doesn’t exist never works. That then means there must be another problem: either the fact that people misidentify a problem (could be a misunderstanding, but then it’d be nice to have it explained) or that there’s a separate problem that the explanation doesn’t touch.
It’s like in systems theories, where someone says “oh no, don’t worry, corn is distributed as best as possible with the market, and I have proof you have corn” as an answer to “I don’t have corn”. There is a connection there between the answers, but there’s so much room for situations to explain the problem! Maybe the corn isn’t openable (canned), maybe it’s rotten, maybe they get 1 corn kernel because the market is so fair.
Idk why I went so deep into the analogy, but I feel like I’m losing it in general. I gotta take a break
I believe there used to be a users union comm here but it was before my time and it no longer exists. Since it’s not something people are constantly bringing up I guess it isn’t missed or the removal was for a good reason.
The user union community was a constant source of unproductive site-drama that was abused by wreckers. We have allowed meta posts in the !hexbear@hexbear.net for over a year now as well as the sidebar matrix channel
good info thanks.
any proposals should be made with past lessons in mind.
I 100% agree, thank you
I have heard a few different people bring that community up, actually. Twas also before my time as well, on paper it sounds great but seems like maybe it was a breeding ground struggle session. I’d love to know though
MLs view America as a settler state. Not sure what divergent group you’re talking about; it’s generally agreed on Lemmygrad that America is a settler state.
Yeah you’ve misunderstood what I’m saying. More explanation was here: https://hexbear.net/comment/6469490
At that point, I literally just don’t know. I wasn’t even trying to argue in the original post, I was just trying to explain why it happened, and I guess my explanation wasn’t thorough. If my guesses aren’t good, then I’m clueless as to why this post was made ig.
Also, adding onto this, I think I might be getting myself into something MUCH larger than myself. I tried to make it a point that I observed these kinds of things, but unfortunately I’m not the best historian. And, by communication, I don’t necessarily mean that people weren’t talking, it’s just that not much was being transferred to my observation.
There are constantly unanswered questions about “why” something happens. The dunk tank is also my best example, where I was in total agreement with the decision w.r.t. the name, and was even pretty open to getting rid of the concept entirely (this is another example of the “making us better” mentality), but how the admins/mods went about it didn’t work. And then why that idea was scrapped and the new slop sub was created wasn’t clear. It seemed like there was just enough disagreement that the mods stopped pushing for it, but what was enough pushback? Should that be how it works? I didn’t get how it happened.
For the emoji, what was enough pushback to allow it? Is it always something that can only change by democratic vote? Why this time was it done that way? I sure didn’t understand any of that, nor why there was such intense pushback and banning during such a process, up to and including doctor owl. Was definitely good to ban eventually, and probably at first comment, but I don’t know how its decided that it’s too far/much for new van rules/types
There are others but I’ll digress.
Wait I legit logged off for 10 months and we’re still in the exact same struggle session I logged out of? god this place rules
Lol well as funny as it is, yeah. I was hoping to make a difference in how it was approached by going up to systemic/process level to discuss it, hoping that would make it not just a repeat but a way to approach it together and understand, but that seems to have failed, so we are going quickly back to exactly 10 months ago.
So… You’re relitigating this? Now? Why?
It was renamed because “dunk tank” has historically racist roots nobody had realised until it was raised. Simple as that.
It wasn’t removed entirely because there’s an absolutely massive number of people that use these spaces and anyone that doesn’t like it has the option to not subscribe to it, or to block it entirely. You don’t have to see it.
I don’t see a problem. If you don’t like it, block it?
I’m not relitigating that situation itself, I’m personally fine with how it turned out and just click whatever I feel like.
Again, it’s just that it was entirely unclear how the decisions were made. When is it massive enough to make such a decision? Why is there sometimes a vote and sometimes it’s just “the masses have spoken” without such?
I could agree with every decision and still be frustrated that things just happen without me understanding if my input had any impact, right? Was it yelling into the wind and nobody should’ve bothered? I don’t believe that, but I haven’t been told why anything was ever decided! The original decision to not do the emoji also just happened because there wasn’t pushback (again, not relitigating that decision), but is that also a policy that things are allowed until someone complains? If so, fine I guess, but how many people do we have to have complain to change rules? How many to get a person banned? How many to reverse a change?
We don’t have to have perfect answers for everything, but its constantly frustrating to only get a whiff of an answer to half of the stuff, with seemingly no reaching out to bridge that gap. I made this post in the hopes to discuss that gap and how it works.
Maybe this all stems from me not being a forum person, because I only ever cursorily participated as a child/young adult and never did Reddit except to read the top 5 posts every once in a while. And only found hexbear a few years back after Chapo because I was searching for a place to be a commie.
And how to raise issues in an orderly and comradely fashion that doesn’t result in a giant shit show fight.
From what I have briefly observed the best way to get things done on this website is to stir the pot in the most dramatic way possible.
Law of the Forum
If this is just acceptable, I guess so yeah. Then we just have to do struggle sessions every time there’s anything needing changing. I find them really annoying, and hated my first participation last time. Got dragged in because I commented early without knowing it would become such a shit show.
But if that’s what we’re just saying is how it works
Oh right I see.
The impression I have is that consensus in the team is the preferred method used until something occurs that threatens the integrity of the site, at which point it becomes an authoritarian dictatorship to resolve the issue in one direction or another because SOMETHING has to be done and doing nothing is never an option.
I don’t have special knowledge though and am not in the admin team.
What I do know about part of this was that one of the issues in the past was a hidden ideological struggle between MLs and another group that considers the US to be settler-colonialist and that the only position to take against white people in america is the same position that palestinians take against israeli settlers in occupied Palestine. This disagreement is pretty well described in this article: https://fightbacknews.org/articles/marxism-leninism-and-the-theory-of-settler-colonialism-in-the-united-states
The hardline ML side of that conflict ended up winning I think. Partly because I was unbanned and wouldn’t have been unbanned if the other side won.
Information about that conflict was probably largely kept internal because it wasn’t well known in the community, had occurred in a very hidden way with MLs not even realising it was ongoing until very late, and ultimately probably felt an internal thing didn’t need litigating too loudly publicly or else it might’ve been picked up by wreckers and expanded upon.
My understanding is that issue is dead now but I don’t have internal information, I’m pretty content with how it ended though especially as one of the people who attacked me the hardest was literally a US troop.
I had no idea about this example! Interesting. I’ll have to read the full article.
But even if I agree also, if there’s just a wider acceptance that it’s fine not to know, and the admins get to act as benevolent dictators (to the best of their abilities and ideologies), I’m fine with that! But could it be at least told when that’s the way it’s handled? Just a “if you disagree, become a mod, it was a backroom decision and it won’t be changing”. I’d appreciate it more than having threads about input and struggle sessions where nothing is really stated about this.
The way it went down on the site was that a group who believed in the Settler theory were essentially calling everyone who advocated standard ML theory racist. Because MLs are generally very willing to be open to issues framed around making poc comfortable on the site this resulted in nobody noticing it was actually an ideological conflict between a divergent group and the ML position. This went on for months unnoticed. Once the MLs realised that this is what was actually occurring a real turnaround occurred on it and the ML side won. Basically MLs were losing a sectarian struggle because they didn’t even realise they were in one.
The tl;dr of this conflict is basically that one side thinks america is like israel and palestinian settler theory therefore applies to poc fighting in america (against white americans). Hardline ML theory finds this reactionary and incompatible with marxism, it is emphatically stated in Stalin’s “Marxism & the National Question” sections 4+5.
have you investigated Indigenous Land Back movements within Turtle Island?
Not familiar enough with the US struggle for indigenous people to say anything except that indigenous groups like the one with Nick Estes are probably right. If the interpretation of Stalin is in line with those, I’m probably down.
Thanks for the description. Is it also clearer what my problem is generally in this thread? You’ve been very engaging and I’m not feeling like many are picking up what I’m saying
When did any of this happen? Every time I’ve seen that reactionary article mentioned literally everyone is dunking on it
The only people that dunk on it did nothing except read quippy social media titles framing it badly and relying on people not actually reading it because the article is largely correct. If your position is that you think white americans should be fought by poc in the same way that israeli settlers need to be fought by palestinians you will lead people in america to ruin because that is a blatantly absurd and unwinnable theory.
This is all I will say on this. Sectarianism is not allowed on the site and this is a sectarian struggle between the ML position and a maoist / ultra divergent idea from marxism-leninism. The people advocating for this have been, in my experience, maoists, gonzaloites and anarchists. ML orgs have taken positions against it quite rightfully.
I’ve never heard anyone suggest this position, ever. The idea of settler colonialism doesn’t advocate for the elimination and removal of settlers, we’ve already seen this play out in South Africa where white people still exist. I’d be interested to see where these conversations happened and who was advocating for such a thing. This is always the reactionary white position when this topic comes up, “so what you want to kick all the white people out?” No, this isn’t what people who understand settler colonialism advocate for by and large, again I have never seen a serious person who is involved in this movement suggest such a thing aside from maybe joking behind closed doors after being annoyed by cracker shit. I can’t speak for random people on the internet but just because those people suck and have bad takes doesn’t mean that the US isn’t a settler nation.
and no, I read that article when it first came out and made a long comment on why it is bad. It literally asserts an inherently racist notion of a Chicano nation, erasing dozens of Indigenous nations in the process. I am an ML who has argued with ultras, maoists, and anarchists here nearly every month and the US is a settler colonial nation which needs to be decolonized. If I remember correctly you are from the UK, maybe that’s why you don’t have any context for this reality, but as an ML organizing with MLs from colonized nations in the US, I know very well about this subject, have taught about it extensively after learning directly from the leaders of the movement and know very well the nature of settler colonialism and the importance of understanding the settler colonial context of the US and why it is still affecting our organizing here and now.
This isn’t the topic of the thread so no pressure to have this conversation here but I don’t know a single self identified American ML who rejects that the US is a settler colonial nation. The only people I’ve ever met in the real world of US organizing who have rejected this idea are DSA members and anarchists. I’ve never met an ultra in real life, only on the internet. FRSO is a tiny organization that barely exists and just because they wrote an article doesn’t mean they are correct.
edit: Also the Black Belt theory was developed by Harry Haywood while he was studying in the USSR and so the idea that settler colonialism is anti ML is just incorrect. Harry Haywood was advocating for the Black (New Afrikan) nation at the time with the approval of the soviets while Stalin was still running the show. The terminology of settler colonialism wasn’t developed at the time but the idea that there are colonized nations within the US that have the right to self determination was not controversial for the Soviets, it was in fact the CPUSA that rejected it which caused a big split at the time
edit edit: here’s my comment breaking down why that article is trash: https://hexbear.net/post/4043628
edit edit edit: comintern’s resolutions on the Black national questions : https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1946-1956/roots-revisionism/chapter-13.pdf http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/CR75.html#s2
slop (and fake news and badposting) leak into other comms. we know from the reddit studies that quarantine doesn’t work and banning subs does.
They do. Mods of those comms should remove the slop though.
The correct argument to make here is for more mods in the spaces with the leaks. Ones that care about containing the slop spills.