cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2331989
I don’t really think he knows this site’s culture at all. No one is dissuading people from reading theory lol
Yey or ney for him?
As someone said in the post
As far as I can tell, he's a guy who spends all his time posting about how all leftists do is post.
~~And this ain't the first time, Roderick's a bit terminally online, arguing against other progressives like JT (Second Thought) and Michael Hudson....~~
Edit:
Ok I've made a right-deviationist mistake in saying that Michael Hudson is a progressive, and indirectly agreeing with the views of the former....
I've not investigated into JT's MMT videos nor looked carefully into Hudson (I thought he was also against capitalism, turns out, only finance and feudalism..., just cares for industrial capitalism)
I think he expects too much from what at its foundation is a link aggregation website.
What he expects is for the western left to take itself more seriously if it's to have any success at all, and dodging critique by hiding behind "it's a site for memes" isn't doing any good to anyone that actually wants change.
Not "expecting too much" from a link aggregation site is like not expecting too much from any western communists. The masses are online and online spaces are not separated from "real" life like that. No one is saying we can't have any fun, but at the end of the day If we don't take ourselves seriously why should anyone else take us seriously.
While I do find lemmygrad a bit better than hexbear in regards to this, it also still has an abundance of low effort meme posts and a lack of serious discussion.
i mean i think you can compare the thread hosted on a hexbear comm vs a thread hosted on the lemmygrad comm, i think we are much much closer to this level of seriousness desired. I still don't quite get why having less serious (silly, if you want) comms is a problem because you can just block those comms and never see posts from them again.
It's not about individual comms, and there is, of course, a place for being silly. The problem is that the "silliness" "spreads" to the entire site. Look at how people are "arguing" against Roderic's point on the hexbear thread about it, in what's supposedly a comm for critiquing bad takes. Most of the comments are random jokes, and most of the actual written out ones are blatant lies, strawman arguments, or similar (some of the really bad ones did get removed as far as I can tell). The same exact tactics anti-communists regularly use to shit on AES states or our ideology in general.
The actual origin of it is western anti-intellectualism which we have to overcome in our organizing. Of course hexbear won't be a vanguard, but we're not doing our job as communists if don't fight against these tendencies.
my point was more to defend grad. i've always thought this was the more serious site, and i think the difference between the 2 threads reflects that.
Lemmygrad is a more serious site, I agree, and that's why I use it instead of hexbear. However, I do still think we can improve. I've noticed a decline in the frequency of the type of theory discussion posts that I really liked when first coming to lemmygrad, and an increase in low effort posts, probably coinciding with the reddit exodus last year.
One thing I really like here is that certain matters are considered settled in the lemmygrad community. For example, each time a new "is Russia imperialist?" thread pops up, prople quickly link to past threads with excellent answers or post another version of those answers. I just think we could do that sort of thing - debate, come to a conclusion, adopt it as our stance backed by our arguments and proper sources, and present it when asked - with many more topics which still just "hang in the air" somewhat.