Leftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations

I stand ten motherfucking toes down on what I said to Cantaloupe Ass and Ghost of Faso; any plague rat motherfucker who wants to take issue with how I feel about people who won’t mask can catch the same cases my partners and my family caught. It’s a whole lot of you motherfuckers that are so unserious, so emphatically not my comrades that it sickens me seeing you call yourselves so.

To address this, at no point have I ever said that people should not mask, I advocated for masking alongside infection rates rising and not masking when the current infection levels are low enough (like less than 10 cases country wide) and at that point masking in clinical settings or around more vulernable people.

I took issue with you wishing death/disablity on another poster, and I stand by that.

Edit:

To people bandstanding about how in the coming revolution they dont understand how people like me would be able to contribute.

I was in the COVID trenches, I was working in a hospital helping manage my cities infection response to COVID. I alone probably helped vaccinate and give mask/isolation/money advice to over 20,000 people and managed a team that facilaited my entire city getting that.

A year in after threatining to strike I managed to convince our managers manager to let us work from home. I have been a tireless advocate for worker centric policies and responses and changed and effected as much as I could to protect as many people as I could.

I would have to get a bus to the hospital everyday, when I realized most people on the bus to hospital where not masking, I literally just got off the bus and walked, I biked everyday (2 hours) after that, even in the winter, on xmas day and new years eve I was working. I would often have to pass piles of dead bodies, sobbing carers ect to get there.

This is all to say, have some goddam empathy, most of us are exhausted, I did all of this while managing my own schizophrenia and recent enstrangement from both of my biological parents over there fascist politics.

I understand you're in the same position Pharoh and rightfully angry and pissed off, but please pick your battles more carefully.

Masks, just like the "litterbug" campaign, are a way to offload responsibility and blame onto the working class, responsibility that should fall to the government and companies.

Case: a person is sick, maybe covid maybe not. Instead of telling the person to stay home (cutting productivity, therefore cutting profits), they just tell the person to wear a mask.

Case: a person works from home, and is sick. Instead of the government providing groceries and ensuring the person doesn't have to go out during the 4-5 days they are contagious, they tell them to mask up and go grocery shopping.

People don't even know how to wear a mask. I have seen so many people wear a mask under their nose, or have a mask on that is used and wet from sweat (ineffective). I also see many people have gaps on the sides, or under their chin, might as well not wear a mask at that point. Don't even get me started on those visors...

The media lied to people. First they said masks don't work, told people not to buy, but then couple of months later there was a mask mandate.

Their mask rules were ridiculous. When the restaurants opened (for example), the rules were that you had to wear a mask while not seated, walking between tables, but then you could take it off once you're at the table. LMAO

Those thin masks don't offer much protection. The ones that do are the N95 and surgical ones, yet people were allowed to wear homemade knitted masks, cloth masks, novelty masks, etc. There was no enforcing of a standard. Masks other than N95 or surgical simply don't work.

"Well, what's the alternative??!!"

• when sick, people should stay home (they should have paid sick leave)
• covid tests should have been free and people should have been testing themselves every few days, I'd much rather that everyone around me had been tested in the last 24-48h, than everyone wearing a mask (improperly) while not knowing whether they have covid or not
• ventilation, UV lights (like others have said)
• hand sanitisers everywhere, plus free hand sanitisers given out (this has been done for the most part)
• quick, population-wide vaccination, no dilly-dallying, no vaccinating this group, then this group, then this group

If you'd like to talk about your temp ban we can talk about it. The way they're structured means they're instantaneous and cut all contact for the duration, but we've explained them before to users after they asked for a follow-up.

Nobody likes getting banned, neither do I, but if we wanted to silence someone we'd give them a permaban and refuse all their new account requests. You received a 48 hours ban for wishing covid on someone else from Lemmygrad, despite you yourself having been through covid and arguing for methods to minimize it so that others wouldn't catch it. Do you feel that comment was productive?

As @[email protected] stated here, the reason you received a temp ban was because you told someone (from a comrade server) that you hope they get covid. That is completely innappropriate, and its almost unbelievable that you'd wish that pain on someone else. The point of these temp bans is to give people a chance to cool off, and that's a very minor thing considering.

I'd wager that most of us on lemmygrad (including me) mask in public, and your temp ban had nothing to do with that. The only bannable offense w/ respect to masking here would be someone posting anti-science articles, or wishing that someone gets covid like you did. People can (and do) report those comments, so we can remove them as necessary.

I'm locking this as its trying to start a struggle session that's a distraction over your temp ban for saying you hope someone gets covid.

how is this even a discussion? wear a mask people

Even if we set aside the question of efficacy of masking in a society where few others do (and it is still efficacious to you and people you regularly interact with), any so-called communist who doesn't mask is a communist who is utterly failing at even the bare minimum of solidarity with their immunocompromised comrades. Do you consider yourself someone who is mindful and compassionate of other working people in your community? Then you should be masking.

I mostly recall posts qualifying as "anti-mask" coming across as a defeated, beaten down attitude about it, like "I give up", not something anti-science or the like. I understand some stuff got heated and removed though, so if there were posts going into detailed anti-mask stuff, I don't think I saw it. A lot of what I was there for to reply to people (that I can recall) was trying to commiserate and relate to people on reasoning they're dealing with and how hard it is dealing with the pressures of other people and the system as a whole, trying to be conscientious in spite of that. Some of us dealt with, or still deal with, family members who refuse to take it seriously now, or for some people, family members who never took it seriously. On top of living in places where virtually nobody else is doing it anymore, which can attract strange looks or worse, depending on the place. Which can be very isolating, trying to somehow overcome that and be principled while people are getting sick in spite of what we do. It can make a person feel helpless and demoralized. That was one of the sentiments I saw there and I know it well in certain forms myself.

you people

y'all

Who is your criticism pointed towards? The whole website? The ones you saw promoting not using masks? Try not to generalize a whole website because of a single post you saw 😉

go off, i still don't know why people are so mad about just wearing a mask.

If you’re really out here like “wuhhhh no one else is dealing with it so why should I”, if you’re really out here like “it’s a style choice at this point”, if you’re really out here like “but i need to see faces for 2% of my interactions in a day how dare you interfere with my liberty”, then how the FUCK am I supposed to trust that when the pigs are goosestepping down the street with M4s at port ready over their chests, that when there’s Humvees convoying down the streets of my hood, that when the Second Night of Long Knives happens, that ANY of you’d have the discipline to be of ANY FUCKING USE?

I felt, and still feel, very much the same way. The covid pandemic, which never ended no matter what propaganda says and in many ways is only getting worse and harder to even try to mitigate, demonstrated just how selfish far too many people really are, people that couldn't handle fucking inconveniences in their daily routines that nonetheless present themselves as the future's comrades in a conflict that would be far more fucking inconvenient than masking and social distancing while gobbling treats at a bar/whatever.

$10 says you don't have anything approaching this energy for people in real life, who actually pose a danger to you.

You will never meet anyone here in real life.

I hope this is cathartic, though.

I assume this is a US thing? In my country COVID cases have fallen so low that we are no longer keeping track of new cases in our statistics and the government has already declared a return to normalcy (hospitals included) more than a year ago. I'd like to ask for confirmation if this is the case because seeing infighting over this makes me feel like I am coming from another planet.

To date, the single worst post I've ever seen on Hexbear, the one that did the most overall damage, that drove away numerous people that I still haven't seen since because of the toxic assholish bullying that the poster and likely alts performed afterward, was a post titled "you need to go out" by "RonJeremyCorbyn" and seconded by numerous dubious probably-alt accounts. It had a slimy opener about "loving you all" that then went and called people "shut-ins" if they weren't going out on New Years to "kiss strangers" and otherwise be boomer-tier plague rats all for the sake of "normalcy" that would supposedly "stop embarrasing leftism."

That shit went on for days afterward, probably from that piece of shit's alt accounts. I still miss some of the people that were bullied off the site, and I still utterly loathe that piece of shit for that post.

Hexbear isn't exempt from treat hogs that have superficial leftist beliefs but also a whole lot of "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOO" selfish asshole attitude beneath that that goes off from even the suggestion of personal inconvenience for the sake of others. Such attitude has material consequences and can and will do actual harm to others in the offline world.

Damn, glad I missed that thread. I've been self-isolating this whole time, it sucks not seeing the people I care about as frequently as I want to, but the alternative is seeing them sick, or devastated because their friends or family have died. I understand self-isolation isn't an option for a lot of people (I am lucky enough to work from home) but that kind of indifferent defeatist attitude is troubling. Western governments declared covid "over" and that was that apparently. Covid wasn't even "that" deadly. Another plague could legitimately wipe out humanity if we have a similar response to it as we did to covid.

I don't think the current anti-mask "back to normal" sentiment is in any way "western". It's very much global outside Japan (and maybe a few other countries). Not many ppl worry about covid anymore and unless there is state willingness and proper enforcement of masks that isn't going to change.

What a shit-show that thread was. For some strange reason, the warped mind runs sickeningly deep in every corner of the culture of the west. The inherent need for blood in exchange for justice that was designed through every facet of our media, our art, our relationships with each other in an fierce individualism that demands "justification" for why a person themselves should change or adjust to the conditions around them.

A design to slaughter Native-Americans, to separate the sick, the poor, the different. To make a culture where even if there is no divide, to create one. It's something that we all must fight every day. I wanted to ask, are you leaving? I appreciated your posts.

Uphold Amerikan Pharaoh thought.

The Western left, such as it is, has really shown their liberalism when it comes to COVID. What should have been a time for us to shine was dominated by a small liberal anti-mask sentiment, then a larger liberal anti-anti-mask reaction, and finally liberal normalization and a much higher anti-mask sentiment. We should be 100% top of caring for community, organizing in community, calling out liberal hypernormalization and building from it.

Instead, we have mostly seen opportunism. COVID-cautious folks (which is to say, correct folks) a minority in orgs, sometimes listened to at first. Orgs trying to say that wearing masks alienates you from the proletariat (lmao). And then people who are understandably tired of being the odd one out using this as justification to be massively inconsiderate, even dangerous.

There is still plenty to organize around, though the lightning strike moment has passed for now. Paxlovid is $1400 for the uninsured in the US. There's currently a wave. There's a new, seemingly better vaccine and we could organize around access to it. There are locales trying to ban masks in order to crack down on Palestinian solidarity protests. Public health aside, normalizing masks is good for our ability to safely carry out actions. It's not out of the cards for lightning to strike again and give us dual pandemics, as COVID damages immune systems and public health had adapted to a "fuck it" status quo, flirting with bird flu for no reason other than a poultry lobby. Will your org be ready to agitate? Or did it alienate the people with the most knowledge and investment in this topic?

Promote correct positions (COVID-safe) and reject dominant liberalism (nornalization), especially in our own spaces!

Honestly, after having six people agree with someone telling me they're "indifferent to what happens to me" and completely misinterpret what I said into standing up for anti-maskers, I feel you. Kind of realization to put energy and feel a kinship with people who don't feel the same.

Lurking on hexbear might be the better option for now, I guess.

Forever thankful my workplace encourages masking

I’ll say the same thing I said there: I don’t care how much of a struggle it is to mask in public anymore, because I do not get a choice. My immune system has been fucked up for the last 20 years due to biological lottery. I mask, or I die. You’re not saving the world by masking alone, but you are saving every sick person who has to go to the grocery store and brave the odds again for the 1500th day in a row (if they’re one of the lucky ones) from getting it from you, another potential risk vector. If your actions could swing the pendulum even slightly, if they could marginally tip the odds toward saving even one life in a tidal wave, why wouldn’t you do it? When you tell me your masking does nothing in the face of an apathetic society, when you tell me masking is “virtue signaling”, you tell me you are not serious. You tell me to my face that you are throwing your lot in with my enemy; you are ok with leaving me behind, for them. So I will treat you with the seriousness — and vitriol — you actually deserve, a grace not given to me or people like me as you kill us.

If you won't mask: tell me why not. I could meet you in the grocery store. I could meet you on the train. It could be anyone in that store or on that train that gives me the covid infection that kills me, but it is just as likely to be you. Tell me why you wouldn't wear a mask to prevent that possibility. Tell me in the same breath that you'd tell me you're a comrade at the PSL chapter meeting. Tell me.