u/Mildly_Frustrated

We hope that everyone is having a peaceful and safe evening. Given the date, the mod team wanted to create a post in memory of those taken from the Jewish community through violence and hatred on October 7, 2023 and since. Please consider this post a safe space for communal grief and discussion. We know that the world is heavy right now, but we remain here to fight for justice for all peoples, and to stand against the politicization of bigotry. While, particularly, antisemitism is on our minds in this moment, we also cannot condone violence against any innocent on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, and condone its excess where that happens in the West Bank and Gaza. With this being said, this is a Jewish space, and we are acutely aware of the way in which other, non-Jewish, leftist groups who have proclaimed their opposition to bigotry and allyship to minorities have failed to hold space for Jewish grief and have failed in their obligation to these ideas in general with regard to Jews. So, we ask our users to remain respectful of these realities and leave room for each other.

In closing, we wish the mercy of Hashem for all who suffer, for Him to bring peace and healing to all who mourn injustice, and for Him to break the chains of all who labor under oppression and tyranny.

Good evening, everyone. As always, we are immensely grateful to be mods of this fantastic community and to engage with and benefit from the ideological and intellectual work that happens here.

In response to a number of issues, we, the mod team, wanted to go ahead and make a post clarifying our position on a couple of, what we believe are, key issues and an announcement. We want, mainly, to re-iterate and clarify our mission here. Firstly, however, a slight change you should all be aware of. We realize that, since Oct. 7, 2023, what is happening in the Levant has been something difficult to escape. It is, perhaps, the preponderant issue within the Jewish community at-large. It is a source of immense anxiety and stress, to say nothing of the humanitarian concerns and their implications for anyone with empathy, let alone anyone on the left. In fact, we believe it may be a major driving factor in what is beginning to develop into the next major division between our people. With that in mind, we do not have any intention, at this time, of eliminating I-P related discourse. However, with this said, we are not, and never have been, an I-P debate sub. There are those who are deeply dissatisfied with our attitude in this regard, but it is not something that we are willing to waver on. We are here to bridge the gap between various strains of leftist thought and facilitate discussion and development within that sphere. And, as we have said before, we do not define adherence to leftism by one’s beliefs regarding Zionism or anti-Zionism, but, rather, the more traditional definition that leftism begins at anti-capitalism. I will explain that in more detail later in the post, but this is about our purpose and what we do to protect it. To that end, and in an effort to stimulate more posting related to leftism in general, rather than this singular issue, we are announcing that we will be collapsing individual I-P posting from the Wednesday Standard with individual posting that we have so far employed, into an I-P discussion megathread, which will allow users to post and comment throughout the week while still leaving space for other users to post otherwise. Additionally, this thread will refresh weekly to ensure that breaking news does not become swallowed by a post no one is paying attention to anymore.

Now, to clarify three rules, in particular:

-Rule One: Be Respectful of One Another- Since I began my journey with this sub, and it has been nearly half a decade, this has remained an issue. People who come here to fight, clap back, and recriminate against each other. We are sympathetic to the fact that, as leftists, we are inherently passionate and emotional people. That is a ready breeding ground for this kind of behavior when we find someone strongly disagreeing with us. As ever, our expectation is that you, the users, report the problem to us instead of engaging in the same. To quote a famous writer from my current state, “Never wrestle with a pig in mud; you just get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.” We would rather not have to ban people who have, hitherto, been productive members of the sub, and, if we do, we’d rather not ban two. To whit, we are altering our longstanding mod policy of deleting entire threads to stop the fire, and instead, we are going to remove the instigator’s comments and lock the thread, allowing the other person’s good work to stand, assuming they do not themselves engage in the mud-wrestling.

-Rule 6: Zionist Discussion Requires Nuance- We have become increasingly aware of the presence of liberal Zionists within this sub. While we continue to allow liberals to come here to learn, we want to stress that liberal Zionist ideas and perspectives should only be discussed within that category, to learn. If you are here to repeat the same Hasbara that excuses the inexcusable and fight with people over it, we do not want that here. We do, however, maintain the stance that true leftist Zionism has a place under the leftist umbrella. We understand that this is a view that is contradictory to many anti-Zionists’ conception of leftism. We are sympathetic to the contradiction. However, we expect, when you are dealing with fellow leftists, that you comport yourself as such. Your job here is to convince them of your view, not recriminate against them for being “Nazis”. Aside from the fact that we hold Holocaust Inversion to be wholly inappropriate, and with an immense degree of contempt, it doesn’t help your case. You are not convincing these people that they’re wrong by attacking them or, frankly, us. Our patience with people who are learning and deconstructing does not make the mods Zionists. We number two post-Zionists and an anti-Zionist. Zionists, I say exactly the same thing to you. And, for both of your benefit, we are not an echo chamber. As I said above, we are here to bridge the gap between different strains of leftism, not hold a daily referendum on Israel or Palestine. There are other spaces for that. If you are here, you are going to see and hear points of view that differ from your own. Moral superiority feels nice, but benefits nobody in a practical sense. If you cannot jive with that, no one is making you be here. Likewise, if you are being held to that same standard, and it is enforced evenly, we understand how that may appear biased in one direction or the other. It means that we are holding you equal to someone who, in your mind, can never be anything but the ideological enemy. We ask you to consider the question of whether such absolutism serves the intentions of this sub, or, rather, if the sacrifice made on the altar of ideological purity is not a potential ally and where, outside of that, they may agree with you.

-Rule 11: Bad Faith- We are going to re-iterate that this includes the kind of behavior that I have described in the two paragraphs above. In addition, we point out that abuse of the report system is still a bannable offense. If you have an issue, bring it to us, and we’ll have a conversation about it, at the very least. Similarly, hearing things you disagree with, including just criticism of your ideas or the people you are praising, is not abuse of your person, nor is it tantamount to the other person being a Zionist or an anti-Zionist. With a group of people as clearly intelligent as you all are, I find it bewildering that some apparently expect us to believe that you do not understand that criticism can come from within your own movements. I remind you, once again, of the purpose of the dialectical. And, again, a high-and-mighty air of moral superiority serves no-one but oneself. It makes people dislike you, instead of convincing them of your point, and it blinds you to ideas that will actually help you refine your beliefs and achieve success, while pushing people away from your causes. No revolution ever succeeded because it limited the number of people involved. And anyone who tells you that purity testing people who aren’t feds is a good thing is more interested in their own ego than they are in the good of the people. And, I have to tell you, I am immensely unimpressed by the fact that we are being informed of what we think and feel by groups of users that coordinate off-site to stew over the various injustices we have done them by simply enforcing the rules that come written on the box. We swore off drama. And we still lost a mod when someone got banned for repeat Rule 1 and Rule 11 violations and rallied the greatest assembly of keyboard warriors that has yet marched beneath the sun to soft-doxx them. You can, I’m sure, imagine how truthful they were about what happened, and about how often we still get the nonsense thrown back in our faces. So, quit doing it. If you think you’re being treated unjustly by us, we’re always willing to be told that and to reconsider what we’ve done. I won’t say we’ll always lift the ban, because sometimes it was justified, but we want even that to be a learning opportunity. That is our good faith to you. We’re human too. We make mistakes. We learn from the exercise of our own accountability.

Now that I’m good and sure that I’ve pissed everyone off evenly, I will wish you all a good day, or, if, indeed, you are in a different timezone, day. It remains my immense privilege and pleasure to be a moderator here, and a servant to those who labor against the wheel of justice and healing in this world. On a personal note, I know that I am somewhat quiet and unknown ideologically. I would beg the excuse of school and work, and affirm my intention to remedy that forthwith.