u/GrapplingHooks_

A classic longpost from yours, truly.

I do think there is a bit of a "voting does literally nothing" that anarchists do which annoys me because it's factually untrue, but doing very little is still in fact doing something. Anarchists doing this, however, pales in comparison to how much liberals overstate the value of a vote. Also, depending on where you are and what you're voting on, an individual vote can in fact have greater policy impact. The larger scale a vote is the more its outcomes are abstracted from policy. But at the same time... in the places where voting is most effective, public policy campaigning and petitioning is often more effective, while in the places where voting is least effective, public policy campaigning and petitioning is still far more effective. As a matter of tactical resource management, you are simply wasting time diverting resources towards voting. Even if you are not an anarchist, even if you are literally just a social democrat who likes vaguely progressive policy, you are still more likely to get those things through public policy campaigning, petitioning, meeting directly with politicians, holding public rallies and getting media attention, etc.

The reason conservatives in the US get so many book bans through schools is not because of who gets elected senator or appointed governor, it's because evangelical moms are showing up to every single city council meeting and school board meeting. They literally have coordinated campaigns to try to shape local, mid-level, and high-level policy in ways socdems and progressives seem to just... not. They're not even good at effectively navigating the state apparatus they fucking support. The most you get is "write to your local congressman" and then you get a premade email template link to send an email with despite congressperson staff reporting that those emails pretty much do nothing, though they note that their daily/weekly reports on phone calls do actually seem to have a big of sway. They know nothing about their systems then blame people for not doing the least effective by the books way to effect change in said system.

This isn't even about January 6th, this is about fully above-the-board action from organizations like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty. I was only recently that liberals learned that you could be a nuisance to the conservative legal system by inundating it with lawsuits and actually manage to block ICE officers for like a month (technically better than nothing and probably has actually saved lives) and who fucking knows how long that trend will last once another democrat takes the white house.

So, even within the system, the most pragmatic political option is not the vote. Politicians are humans and are thus far more susceptible to human connection than data sheets. They can speculate endlessly about why their polls or voting numbers go up or down, but a special interest group or a rally getting media attention connect the political message directly to the action in a way voting simply never will, because voting dissociates your actions from the political goals you want to communicate.

Being an anarchist isn't about ignoring the systems that surround us. We do, in fact, have to navigate them. Don't kill yourself to vote, if you can't find people to watch your kids while you vote then their safety takes priority, if you're immunocompromised and can't go to the ballot box for fear of getting COVID, then stay home. Vote if you want, but don't hedge your bets on it. No matter what political action you take within a state apparatus, it can always be undone if they want to undo it, so even for the other non-voting actions, don't hedge your long-term bets on it, either. Harm reduction is important, but do so in a way that's efficient and saves your energy for the things and people in your life that actually matter, and it's certainly not a long-term fix. You can't count on the people oppressing you who stopped doing so not to start up again as soon as another election happens.

There are pragmatic things you can do even beyond this level of political engagement: stuff like community gardening and local housing accommodation (including opening your home to people in need of it), community kitchens, etc. reduce the amount that people rely on those systems and are thus less susceptible to collapsing if the state apparatus is taking a rightward shift. You can get into stuff like mesh networking and decentralized, less-traceable communication so that vulnerable people are less easy to track and target by the state. You can ensure that you always, always record all your interactions with any officer of the law to ensure that it's all public. You can engage in public communications as a propagandist (kinda dirty word but I just mean anyone communicating political messaging to the public) and the shift of public opinion makes it harder for fascists to get away with things.

Voting isn't inherently pragmatic. Pragmatism is about maximizing impact, minimizing collective drain, and preventing burnout to ensure sustainability. Election campaigns have disproportionate ratios of effort to impact, drain huge collective resources, and lead to major burnout for the most politically passionate participants. Don't fall for phony pragmatism.

Pretty sure we're all relatively aware of this by now, but a minority of people buying physical media simply isn't enough to outweigh how much better the margins and reliability of customers are for pure digital releases while minimizing logistics overhead. "Make our voices heard" doesn't really work when corporations have long since realized that people will buy anyway. Sony realized that, evidently.

So... what do we do about that when economic forces seem to suggest the death (or at least extreme financial infeasibility) of physical media? I don't have an answer, but I know as a musician that I'm gonna be doing my best to actually make and distribute CD copies as I release music, directly link to CD burning software on my online releases too. I'm currently in the process of teaching myself how to digitally remaster and upscale a DVD and author a Blu-Ray from it.

Edit: This is not a doom post. This is a "large corporations don't care about you but you have the power to actually create things on your own" post. There is nothing stopping you from buying a bunch of CD blanks as a musician and distributing your CD for like $10 a pop. There's nothing stopping you from learning how to author your own Blu-Rays if you're a small filmmaker. DIY is cool!

Yo! So there has been some rewording of rules, mostly just to make them more concise, but also to include a new rule on the sidebar called "research before you react".

It's mostly meant as a complementary thing to our positions on accessibility and debate. The overall philosophy is related to questioning the underlying impulses that lead people to react in knee jerk ways, and especially double down on them.

Yes, this includes a lot of anti-AI stuff too, such as talking about how AI writing feels "wrong" or "off". The disgust response that you experience towards communication that is rote, repetitive, highly structured, is built around social impulses that target neurodivergent communication and ESL speakers. A lot of "vibes" are just unaddressed ableism.

Mod post kinda infodumping about how "enforcement of rules" works on here, because I think it's an interesting topic... mostly because we don't really enforce rules here at all. I've seen complaints, often in mod mail, noting "enforcement of rules" seems rather arbitrary or questions asking which specific rule was broken to "deserve" a permaban. While other subreddits will typically work within a legalistic approach to rules where conformance to rules dictates moderator behavior, where moderation is a form of punishment, that's not exactly what we do here. A ban is usually treated more as a "separate this user from the rest of the space" measure than a "punishment" - we're Reddit mods, we have no power over anyone's lives to enforce any kind of punishment if we even wanted to. Oftentimes the way people respond leads to us just muting that person, but if people are receptive to talking things out I have been known to unban a few folks here or there.

The rules on the sidebar function more as points of unity. They're intended to give a broad overview of the general things we don't like. However, moderation actions are not based exclusively on the rules on the sidebar. We have a sort of underlying philosophy of how to approach building safer spaces that we (the community behind this subreddit) can enjoy being in. I'm less so acting like a cop enforcing the law and more so acting like a gatekeeper. That gatekeeping is oriented around ensuring that the people who typically need to suppress their discomfort in "spaces for everyone" around casual bigotries don't need to do so here. It's a give and take, because in a lot of ways all of us here are both the ones sensitive to those casual bigotries when at the receiving end of it and perpetrators of it at the same time. If there's behavior or a pattern of behavior that I simply do not want to deal with seeing in the space I enjoy or think it could in some way threaten the safety or comfort of others who like being here, I'm often gonna remove it or try to prod at it to figure out what exactly's going on.

When we talk about a "community", I don't just mean the subreddit, by the way. The subreddit can in a lot of ways feel impersonal. A lot of the more fun and active day to day conversation happens in the Matrix space. Most of the posts and contributions you see here are actually a team effort, even if they're usually posted by Rose. One of my projects right now is trying to look through the automod's responses to see how I can refine their wording to better explain why it activates for the things it does and why certain things just aren't for this sort of place.

Hope at least someone finds my philosophy on subreddit/community moderation a little bit interesting. I was having a conversation with my sibling just yesterday about philosophy of rules and how rules serve simultaneously as tools of control and pragmatic behavioral signals, and how a ruling class typically wants you to see their tools of control as pragmatic signalling so that you're less likely to question them. For example, a workplace may have a policy about routine 10-15 minute lateness by employees and frame that as a form of "wage theft" but so long as that company turns a profit based on the labor of said employees, the company is always expropriating far more value from its workers than any one worker could feasibly be "stealing" back. As such, that lateness policy is designed to have the appearance of a fair and pragmatic law when it in fact is used to maintain control over the behavior of its subjects.

Anyways, cheers!

I really cannot believe I have to say this, but this is an anarchist space by anarchists for anarchists. This isn't the place for liberals and authoritarian leftists to ask us questions about the logistics of a hypothetical far off in the future anarchist society. At least once a week in a comment under one of our posts someone will post some question about a fundamental principle of liberty with the most liberal anti-freedom language and then get hostile in the modmail when they're inevitably removed for that. It's not really irritating so much as it is surprising that it keeps happening and that people seem surprised when it happens. You'd think the anarchist symbolism in the subreddit icon, the word "anarchy", and the subreddit description stating "we are anarchists doing anarchy" would make this clear. Just doesn't seem like a great use of time.

So, with my general goal as a moderator on this sub being to try to contribute to accessibility and safety, and with myself being an anarchist, I want to learn from folks here what they envision as an accessible and safe space. Please, reply with your thoughts and if you have any contextualizing information (identities, past experiences, etc.) those would also be cool! Also, if you have another thing to add that wasn't in your original comment, please do so in the form of a second comment so I get a notification for it because I don't get notified when people edit things. Thanks!

Basically every aspect of my experience gets essentialized under mainstream liberalism. Being autistic creates a certain narrative about me, as does being brown, as does being queer, as does being mentally ill, etc. Those narratives get particularly intense the further right people are, but the left and even "safe" marginalized spaces aren't free of this easier. We replace the biodeterminism with social determinism; because I am autistic I am "fundamentally socially incompatible with allistics" or the racial nationalist rhetoric that people "of different races" cannot cooperate with each other, neglecting that all these identities are imposed frameworks. Race is still a social construct, neurotypicality is a social construct.

My freedom, my liberation, stands in direct opposition to everything that tells me that because of my identities, because of my organs, that I am forever bound to a set of constrained outcomes. This essentializing fate is the final enemy of liberation. Capitalism and patriarchy must go, yes, but my freedom is not won simply by getting rid of the current systems, it's the product of killing the essentializing, reductionist ideologies that systems will sprout from.

Note: I'm oversimplifying my language for dramatic effect. I'm also playing up my attitudes towards neurotypicals for dramatic effect. I know the rules already indicate that this is a satirical and hyperbolic sub, but I feel the need to have this tone preface just to be extra clear because I know not every post on this sub is actually satirical.

What's become increasingly relevant to me throughout my graduate studies and experiences is that neurotypicals have no idea what the fuck is going on with us. Repeatedly, neurotypicals seem to be insistent that we simply do not have internal worlds despite us constantly telling them that we do. They trust their own observations of us more than our observations of ourselves. The problem with this is that neurotypicals are not us and cannot empathize with us in the ways that matter. Because they suck.

Why is every study about the observed effects of ABA on children and not how children actually feel about going through it and how adults feel about it after the fact? It's because fuck you, that's why. Depression therapies have qualitative and phenomenological research to guide the quantitative shit, anxiety therapies do, PTSD therapies do. Autism therapies (and also personality disorder therapies to be clear) focus almost entirely on therapeutic outcomes filtered through observer bias. Science has moved on in every other area of the therapeutic field, but because we are not people to them we cannot be trusted to have meaningful thoughts.

Neurotypicals think we can't experience empathy, can't have imaginations, can't experience certain emotions as intensely or at all. They think we take things too literally (that would be kleptomaniacs). They are content to generalize and categorize us for the purpose of our eradication. For every autistic person who experiences one of the prior, there is an autistic person who does it in excess. Our diversity is as massive as the ocean is. Our experiences are so paradigmatically divergent that their language can't accommodate us. If they can't put our experiences and behaviors into their words, it doesn't exist to them. But we know it exists. We have been feeling and living it this whole time.

Everything we tell them, they smile and nod and then fucking ignore while pouring money into therapies that drown autistic voices. They have a mountain of data that hinges on the fact that their observations of us at all match up with our actual internal realities. They don't. Oftentimes, they just pick a narrative and run with it. Every few decades some new bullshit theory of autism becomes popular as some grand unifying theory about how we're actually broken because we don't conform to some standard. The cold mother theory? Misogynistic bullshit. The mirror neuron hypothesis? Debunked! Synaptic pruning models? They rely entirely on the idea that the extra connections in autistic brains are "unnecessary" because they think autism is fucking unnecessary to human diversity. When we talk about monotropism or double empathy, they ignore us because those theories do not paint our existence as inherently inferior.

The idea that we can be just as good, even better than them, scares the fuck out of them. Good. It should.

Making this post to discuss a thing that a lot of folks take for granted. This is not exclusively an Anglophone problem, but I experience it most often from Anglophones. When it comes up, it often makes spaces feel inaccessible and unsafe to me as a trans and brown person.

I am a trans person and I am of Indian descent. Growing up, I always believed I strongly identified with my birthname because of how upset I would get over people not putting effort into pronouncing it. My birthname contains consonants literally impossible to pronounce for most English speakers, but I understood that and did not mind that part. The real problem was people not letting themselves be corrected on the vowels in that name, which definitely do exist in almost every dialect of English. Time and time again I would remind people and they would simply not listen. Then, as a teenager, something changed. The "polite" liberal (not always white, but most commonly in my interactions) way to interact with my name was to deprive me of one. They would cite their desire to not want to embarrass themselves or offend me as a reason to not allow me a name. Sure, this name is one I did not identify with, but it was a piece of my ethnolinguistic background I carried with me nonetheless.

Now, as a trans person, I place even greater importance on being named. To be named in society is to be permitted to exist socially. My new name, again, is from my ethnolinguistic background. It is part of me and I will not take on a European name on transition just to be palatable to others. I am met, again, with the refrain of "I am not even gonna try to pronounce that". Denied a name once more. Denied not only my ability to exist in social spaces as myself (a brown person) but also denied my agency as a trans person. To me, a name is only a name when other people call it, otherwise it's just a collection of sounds that makes me personally happy that no one else uses.

Everyone has their own accents and clusters of sounds they can and can't pronounce. I accept that. Many people from non-Anglophonic cultures do get very frustrated in Anglophone countries when their name isn't pronounced with full authentic phonemic reproduction. I think this is not only inconsistent and hypocritical, but often ableist towards those with auditory processing atypicalities and other language-related disabilities. The goal is not perfection or total, 1:1 culturally authentic pronunciation. I want to be socially personed, I want to exist around other people with my own name (or at least an acceptable variant of it in the accents that surround me).

Social communication calls for compassion. Compassion for the limits of authentic pronunciation, yes, but also compassion for the people whose names are denied them.

Some helpful, actionable tips for people with names interacting with people with different accents:
- Try to settle on a close approximation of your name that would work for their accent or other speech needs.
- When correcting the pronunciation (which you are certainly in your rights to do), provide it slowly and "accentized" to the person you're talking to.

Helpful, actionable tips for trying to pronounce names with unfamiliar sounds:
- Try to sound it out or look it up if you came across it while reading.
- For in-person or voice call interactions, ask how to pronounce their name. If they use sounds you literally cannot pronounce, request that they help you find a way to say it that suits your accent or other speaking needs.

"Do this thing. Do that thing. Answer that email. Finish that assignment. Prepare this thing. Cook for yourself. Go out to get groceries. Pay this bill. Pay that subscription. Answer this phone call. Reply to that text. Show empathy to people. Remember to switch tasks. Take care of your health. Get enough sleep. Do all your work. Make time for yourself. Make time for your friends. Reach out to friends and family. Be authentic".

This shit is exhausting.

it is a common urge on the internet to engage in contrarianism to any post that feels implicitly "wrong". this tends to mix with neurodiversity to bad results. neurodiverse populations and multicultural populations are likely to articulate things in different ways. people on the internet tend to, in discussions, already not subscribe to the principle of charity (interpreting something someone says in the most agreeable way), and I'm not saying that this is necessarily incorrect. you don't really owe charitable interpretation to fascists. the least charitable interpretation is often against autistic people to silence autistic voices, used against people of color by white people to silence their voices. what this manifests in online is demands for emotional labor from neurodivergent people, second-language speakers, people who speak non-mainstream dialects of languages, whose quirks of communication such as bluntness, directness, different word and syntax choices lead to people automatically interpreting the post in the least charitable way.

as someone pursuing the cause of liberation, I understand the urge to want to "call out" what you perceive as potentially problematic. however, as a disabled person, this impulse ends up being disproportionately applied to people who do not fit a normative way to communicate and you end up with people policing how someone said something instead of what they actually meant.

it is a common response, again, to double down. to say "you implied it" or "your post implied", but to talk about implicit meanings when someone is trying to clarify and directly telling you what they mean, then doubling down on the misinterpretation only serves to exhaust disabled people and waste our time. kill the cop in you before you engage with anything in this community. and with marginalized communities and people in general. a community where people take the worst possible interpretation of what you say and criticize you for it, forcing you to explain yourself is an ableist community. it feels hostile to exist in such a space.

it's important to note that being marginalized does not make you immune to this impulse. we are all subjects of hierarchy and internalize its communication attitudes. autistic people can be ableist to the ways other autistic people communicate, for example.

there is a tactic used by bad faith actors online known as "sealioning" which consists of misinterpretations and asking questions in a way designed to waste peoples' time and energy. it's hard to tell the difference between this and sealioning in many cases, and oftentimes the difference doesn't matter. they both end up in wasted time and energy needing to re-explain our existences over and over again, stopping us from doing more meaningful things. disabled folks already have less time and energy to devote to building things and this just adds strain and stress. things of this nature kind of fit into multiple rules and so this is an expansion clarification of a moderation consideration as opposed to a rule change.

what I am talking about: policing of the way people communicate based on tone, syntax, phrasing, and treating them as if what they said is incorrect without anything they said actually being wrong.

what I am not talking about: calling out bigoted language, pointing out fascist dogwhistles, pointing out actual inaccuracies that aren't based on misinterpretation or misrepresentation, requesting people make language more accessible.

as a point of moderation, we're gonna be watching out for this, because it makes it less fun to be in spaces online where people aren't checking their policing impulses. I don't want to post something only to have to worry about how people will interpret me in the worst possible way and make me have to overexplain things that I wouldn't have had to if the person on the other end of the screen didn't treat me like I ain't human. you shouldn't have to worry about that either, at least in this space.

We recently removed a comment containing the word. While we agree that carceral behavior in not only queer communities but online and offline communities is a problem, and a rising one at that, the language used to evoke the word "genderQueer" is alienating to genderQueer members of out community. On top of that, it's not exactly conducive to our reclamation of queer identity to be weaponizing a word containing "queer". While those who use the term are correctly pointing to a very carceral mentality that's been growing in queer spaces, it is also pretty conservative to blame that mentality on "youth fragility" as opposed to acknowledging that this behavior is community policing, the problem is not that young people are too sensitive, it's that our oppressive systems train us all to be cops in our communities.

Clarify: When I use the term "carceral", I am referring to the fact that the use of the term "tenderQueer" is a derogatory and problematic way to refer to a real rise in carceral behavior in queer communities. I am not saying that exclusion from a space from using the term is being called carceral, that's just free association, we're not seeking "punishment" here.

We're gonna be removing comments containing that word as a pejorative and potentially banning users on that basis going forward.

Not all forms of hate are equal. Hatred levying the force of oppression is not the same as interpersonal hatred. I don't feel safe in environments that can't recognize that difference, in environments that will ostracize me for antipathy towards my oppressors by framing that as "hatred" and equivocate that with the same hatred my oppressors will often have for me.

We should all agree that neurotypicals aren't subject to neuroableism, that there isn't "neurotypicalphobia" even if individual neurodivergent people can often be rather uncharitable or antagonistic towards neurotypicals. This is the entire premise of the sub! We are evil because we do not pretend to disguise our anger at ableism through respectability. Let's not turn around and hold people marginalized by other systems to a different standard.