i'm feeling bad for any of the poor souls who are getting their hopes up over the election. i did that once, long ago and i have learned my lesson and am now old and bitter. and particularly given the participants in this election i'm genuinely just so checked out. not even my country. but the whole world goes insane each time.

i think the last of the storm passed late last night. we seem to have escaped relatively unscathed considering everything. but unfortunately today is the day i must dig my car out of the mud and go find out if it's still possible to drive to town.

but you have a bunch of nonbinary people saying we feel alienated by not having a space to talk about the things we'd like to talk about. for all we know it might lead to more enby participation in the mega because we feel more confident knowing we're not the only ones. i certainly don't see an enby comm as an alternative to participation in the unified community.

i'd consider volunteering to mod it (tho not alone) if it would help with moderation issues.

i v much agree with the way u lay out how the communities should work. the feminist and deconstruction comms should never have been made to "match". and the enby one is a completely different kind of space, in my mind. we're not exactly trying to make a gender comm for each of the 3 genders.

also please please can we have a neutral community. i've always felt v alienated by most trans communities because of this kinda thing and it would be so nice to have an enby community that isn't divided by birth assignment. don't get me wrong i appreciate that the trans community as a whole isn't segregated here but it's hard to feel at home sometimes when it just seems like everyone approaches things so diifferently to me.

in continuation of my previous comment about people asking to be educated in this thread, specifically over the cheating thread. previous comment here. i realised i forgot to add this earlier

i genuinely find it kinda disturbing that people who presumably consider themselves feminists, in a very leftist space like this, need to have this explained to them. yeah it's much better to ask (in the right context, not this thread) than not to know. but i can't help see it as a significant failure in empathising with women and others marginalised by patriarchy, and understanding how the violence of patriarchy affects our existence. so maybe you need to work on developing that empathy, and i mean this regardless of the gender of the posters in question. people of any gender can make that mistake.

in the context of the cheating thread, the question is not about whether cheating is okay, or whether the husband deserved to know. yeah, if you're gonna be monogamous that's a commitment you should take seriously like any other you make in a relationship. but it has nothing to do with that, not really. the question is,

i've seen several comments on this thread to the effect of "pls explain to me why the cheating thread was bad so i can self crit"

and i have misgivings about this. this is not the place for it. i'm glad they're open to reconsidering their perspective and the poorly named comm for deconstructing this shit has been resurrected and that's probably a good place to start. but reopening it in the post about the misogyny purge just kinda derails the actual discussion and expects the people misgyny is directed at to do all the work of educating them.

yeah this has kinda been a problem for me my whole life tbh. i've spent like 15+ years in trans communities and reinventing the gender binary is something i've seen happen repeatedly, with enbies just kind of expected to go along with whatever is the opposite of their assigned gender. tho these comms aren't trans exclusive they do kind of have the same effect of just recreating the gender binary, and splitting up the enby community along birth assignment lines.

i also think it misunderstands the reason to make a group for women and enbies - to be clear i think this comm in particular is fine. it's just somewhat undermined by the existence of c/menby. given that we live in a patriarchy, women and nonbinary people have legitimate reason to organise with each other against patriarchy n misogyny. such a group for men and enbies just doesn't make sense. we should not exactly be organising against women. and yeah, i know c/menby is not (supposed to be) anti-woman, it's (supposed to be) for them to educate themselves. but in that context, enbies are politically aligned with women and should be actively included in the space rather than just passively jammed in.

we should keep c/womenby, change c/menby to just like ~~c/men~~(i've reconsidered my name recommendation, see edit) or something to that effect, if it can be maintained as a space for deconstructing patriarchy rather than generating toxic masculinity, and maybe a nonbinary space of our own.

EDIT: I think the community should be called c/deconstructing_masculinity to make it harder for it to turn into a breeding ground for misogyny.

kitty!!!!

(i will die if i ever meet a big cat)

there are usually spots that the cameras don't reach. just small little blind spots, where at least they can perhaps only see you from one angle. you can wander calmly around the shop, take those things to the area you have scoped out and stash them.

and yes, buy things for real as well, as others have suggested

and don't steal from ur local shop. if ur caught u are more likely to get banned than have them call the cops on u. then u can't go into ur local shop and buy things when u have to.

not all shops have people actively monitoring the cameras. they are mostly for deterrence. try not to get caught on camera but it's not the end of the world if you do.

avoid shops with security guards if possible. at least in my neck of poor europe, most shops don't have them. mostly shop workers won't stop you, and if they try to they mostly won't do anything other than ask you to turn back. when i worked in a shop we were actually told not to engage anyone physically. be very nice to everyone who works in the shops u pick, since workers who like you are less likely to do anything to stop you. and yk be nice to workers generally.

avoid shops in commercial districts where there are likely to be cops patrolling outside. the one time i got caught it was cuz there were cops on the street outside.

I lived in the UK for years. I went to oppose fascist marches many times. It was violent, like seriously fucking dangerous. I have been hurt. I hurt fash. I wore a fucking helmet and they threw rocks and bottles at us, my helmet was hit and fucking saved my life. After the marches the fash would break up into smaller groups to roam the streets and attack minorities. We did our best to protect people. I'm not saying this to look cool. Truth was I was scared out of my mind and I don't know if I can ever go back to that kind of thing. I'm saying it because I absolutely believe that what is going on now must be like that, but so much worse. That place has only gotten worse in the 4 years since I left.

This has been brewing for literal decades at this point. There was a contingent of anti-europe people in the conservative party, way back before brexit. they were a small voice calling for it. but even then, more subtly, they had been putting their fingers into the culture and brewing anti-immigrant, anti-muslim, and anti-EU sentiment. When this group got loud enough to threaten the integrity of the conservative party, Pigfucker David Cameron called the brexit referendum, expecting it to fail, as a way to shut up the rightwing of the party. But instead that proved to be the catalyst for the fascist sentiments in the UK to be brought into the mainstream. This was when the tactics I associate with fascism truly started to feel like they were integrated into british society. Facts stopped mattering to people. Hate crime went up. Hell I got violently attacked.

As far as I know, there was some russian influence on Brexit. I don't mean that russia caused this current situation - absolutely not, they only have the utter disaster of the past few decades to blame. They utterly failed to contain the rise of fascism. But I believe a nuanced and fact-based take is that Russia thought that Brexit would be politically useful to them, and used social media to support that. It probably would have happened anyway, the force from this didn't come from russia but from some scheming british fascists.

This has been waiting to happen for fucking years.

I also wanna say that I'm not saying the EU is a good thing. It's an inherently white supremacist institution "protecting" fortress europe against the desperate people at the borders. But the way british culture and politics work, and indeed this is true of a bunch of countries' far right, opposing EU membership was a predominantly fascist position, and considering everything that has happened in that hellhole of a country since brexit, i do think it would be better if it had never left.

edit: thank u to those who have thanked me for what i used to do. but i was just doing my job as a human being, among many others, resisting people who have forgotten their humanity. maybe one day i will be able to, or have to, do it again.

Tesla "full self-crashing" mode