InsurgentRat
pronouns: she/her is fine.
I am a conniving rat with plans of an international uprising against tyranny! I keep getting distracted by tasty food, gardening, gadgets, games, and books though.
Inside me are two wolves, I desperately need surgery.
I think you’re seeing backlash against being involuntarily exposed to (and often pushed to see) unbridled and deranged hatred and fear on traditional socmedia.
A conservative opinion like “I’m not sure communism is practical” is something that can be engaged with pretty cordially, “I think that education should focus on marketable skills” is an opinion I think is pretty misinformed but it’s not something that exhausts me.
Unfortunately a lot of online conservatism is stuff like “I think there’s a conspiracy by $minority to mind control us with vaccines” or “Should we be trying to make queer people afraid?” which aren’t positions you can engage with.
Not really. If someone says “I am a woodworker” but you never see anything they make from wood, they have no woodworking tools, they don’t know about woodworking techniques, they don’t attend a woodworking club or job or class they’re just… not a woodworker.
People who claim to be leftists without doing the required actions aren’t leftists. Liking the aesthetics isn’t enough.
Sorry I missed this.
I feel like this is potentially a bait post but if I steel man you for the sake of civility and learning:
I am not the most knowledgeable about the USSR, my grandparents came from occupied poland and thus had certain opinions, that’s a large part of my exposure and likely biases me. That said, the revolutionary movement and corresponding government seems to have gone through many phases, and have expressed various degrees of leftism at various times. Was assassinating lots of people, forcibly occupying people, collaborating with nazi germany, and engaging in genocide very leftist? I would say definitionally no. Even for the time there was considerable pushback from other leftist personalities and organisations.
On the other hand for many, many people there was massive increases in freedom, prosperity, and rights compared to tzarist russia. Including my grandmother, who was allowed to hold a technical office job! wow! (until she moved to Australia and was forced to work in a factory and be treated like an idiot. Not wow).
This seems like one of those situations where trying to fit something into a simplistic box will inevitably break down. I feel comfortable saying the USSR accomplished both wonderful and terrible things, that overall it was probably better than tsarist russia but it fell short of the ideals that founded it.
If I met someone who say volunteered to feed the homeless, agitated for unionism at work, volunteered to educate disadvantaged people, but also thought I should be executed as a social deviant (I’m mega queer) I would probably call them leftist even while I thought they were massively misguided and extremely dangerous. I’ll note I’ve never actually met anyone like that though.
Something I often need to keep in mind is that when I was growing up the home PC was pretty crude and mysterious. You had to learn what a command line was, you had to learn about data backups and file trees, you had to learn about navigation and discovery of the web.
Sure you might not have done any of this stuff for decades now, depending on how you engage with the infernal devices, but if you see a forum you know what that is, how it works, what you expect to find inside. If you see URLs with like foo.com/place@otherfoo you kinda intuitively grasp what that is saying.
But if you’re like 20 now probably the first computer you ever touched was a magic box where you just clicked things to open stuff and they managed their own little things. Clicked a thing to install other clicky things. You don’t know what a config file is, why would you? you don’t really use URLs much, you just click the internet and start typing and then click the right link etc.
To a lot of those people some of this stuff is as arcane as like arch linux is to your average millennial PC user. Despite fedi (and arch! I use arch btw) actually being really simple and obvious there’s a barrier of unfamiliarity and a lot of basic skills you need to learn first.
Yeah it’s just the result of progress. I’ve watched people my age get stunlocked by carburettor issues or the concept of a choke. It’s unfortunate but sleekness often trades off with user serviceability.
Rather than being all “hgngh grrr the damn kids with their geegaws and whimgets don’t know how to use a simple butter churn” we have to teach people how to feel confident learning different ways of doing things and most importantly why they should care to do so.