We got banned for saying slave owners and landlords should die, they got banned for promoting white supremacy? Idk you decide

I thought this was going to be a bit lmao

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If those five people are all of the neoliberal mindset Americans have by default, you’re in a bad spot. If those 5 people are all on this site, you’re also in a bad spot.
If you’re concerned you aren’t being exposed to enough chud viewpoints go spend 5 minutes on a YouTube comment section. The difference between us and Donald is that most of us can’t live in an echo chamber in the real world like they can, so this site is a relief from the real world and not a force of intensifying nascent beliefs of capitalism and racism that people grew up with.

It’s impossible to be completely in the bubble as leftist - the establishment narrative is all around us.

Comparing the Chapo sub to t_d is pretty disingenuous and I think really downplays how t_d was moderated, and to a lesser extent passively supported by Reddit’s admins. T_d was run top down, any dissent(edit for chud_apatow) was banned immediately whereas Chapo is a constant struggle session about the podcast or any possible tendency.

Sure there are memes but generally they speak some truth to power whereas t_d was almost entirely facebook tier harrassment of marginalized people. Also, it took years of rule breaking, brigading and general fuckery before admin at reddit did anything at all about them even though, and I don’t have proof of this but after watching 2016 play out, much of the subscriber base there were probably bots/astroturfers(I don’t mean Russians to be very clear, I’m talking fake grassroots lobbying groups in the good old USA).

Like, there’s gonna be groupthink on the internet but to say, how is this inclusive weird-left community loosely affiliated with a podcast not unlike a heavily moderated ideological meme propaganda mouthpiece for a candidate and now sitting president, seems like some real evil bullshit.

Further, if your asking whether it’s ok for Chapo to create a new community somewhere other than reddit after being purged for “reasons”, yes it’s ok because the people that run reddit are awful. Just because this place exists doesn’t mean you can’t go argue with fash enabling libs on reddit or look at really zoomed in pictures of assholes or whatever else comes up on r/all. You know, don’t let them take this from you too.

This is a bad take, chief, and here’s a few thoughts on why.

TheDonald was a cesspit of hatred, bile, and classism that went unchecked for years. It wasn’t only tolerated, it flourished on reddit and turned the rest of it sour. If not for Chapo providing a counterweight to their incessant raids and subtle gaslighting of local community subreddits, it would have been even worse. You want echo chambers? TheDonald already was one. They could exist unchallenged in their space despite sorely needing it.

The left has rarely been afforded the same luxury to gather together, to speculate, to debate, to exist, without being broken up violently by the right and their cronies. This is nothing like what TheDonald is doing because they’re creating an escapist echo chamber to jerk each other off and clap each other on the back for being well-off white dipshits.

We are creating a space to safely interact with each other, a rarity that has not been afforded, especially in such volume, for the left.

Just read any thread about China, about electoralism, about anything. You’re having higher level discussions because you don’t have to drag down the discourse to 101 level horseshit just to make your point. This is hardly an echo chamber. Your thoughts here do not go unchallenged. Our ideology is not that of fear.

So stop worrying and post already, Jesus.

lib take tbh, fascists are bad because fascism is a genocidal ideology of capitalism, not because they insulate themselves. Think the distinction of form vs content is something you should definitely look into.

The ideological gap between the various left wing ideologies is far wider than that within liberalism and between liberalism and the far right.

And that’s without consider how much people here love telling each other to ‘read theory.’ A term which encompasses an ever larger number of books.

From a sociological perspective, society is being siloed and fractured/polarized by… the internet. It’s a function of being able to choose your own media, all the time. During the Age of Spoken Word, you only heard what there was to hear. For much of the history of empire, this has been stories told by bards, paid by kings. In the modern era, state propaganda and corporate media reigned, and their narratives were the only ones you heard on your radio and in your newspaper.

Bam. The internet. We choose every little story we see. And we choose them largley through social media agreggators: and we choose those too.

Suddenly you’re a lot less likely to think like your next door neighbour does. This isn’t inherently good or bad, and neither is participating in online communities. But is does have effects, whether left or ‘right’, and you’re right to point them out.

It’s harder to disagree now; we’re used to only agreeing, or disagreeing over minute differences. This has real, measurable impacts on social trust and societal cohesion.

But probably the biggest impact, that scares me the most: we can’t even agree on a basic, shared set of facts right now.

Talking to 5 random people on the street now is now likely to reveal 5 fundamentally different understandings of reality, and epistemology (how we know what to believe). It’s hard when half the people think that 5g is aliens who invented corona to put on the facemask blah blah blah.

That’s the scary piece to me: siloing in communities has made us extremely vulnerable to having our worldview divorced from material reality. This has, of course, always been true; hence the materialist focus of Marxism.

But I think it’s increasing, and I don’t know what’s gonna stop it. One point of optimism: communtiies like this exist that are materialist and rational, which self-correct beliefs and can actually get people more in tune with reality, even if much of the internet is doing the opposite.

Thanks for the food for thought, comrade, and much love :red-fist: