heresiarch

Many of my own comrades disagree with me on this, but from my experience and talking with others, I see the primary utility in socialists running for office to be gaining membership and increasing organizational capacity. Regardless of whether you win, you always gain new members from the campaign. And hey, if you keep it up you'll eventually have the muscle to actually win.

As a fellow grass-toucher, this post goes hard. I have never in my life been to a more libbed-up protest but I was happy to be there with my comrades. I think many armchair organizers are far more worried about appearing the same as liberals when instead they should be worried about making more socialists.

This is better than my previously held analysis of "damn nyc-dsa is annoying" lol

This is NOT very materialist of me, but my opinion of this guy has just gone way up

Protest where I'm at was much bigger than I was anticipating for a short notice action on a weekday.

I have a pet theory that a lot of Americans, including unorganized folks, really crave that sense of revolutionary freedom that was in the air during summer of 2020, and I think it's easy to see potential for that in LA. Though how far any of this goes is hard to judge from where we're standing now.

empty room creepy

Maoism is when I find intellectual ways to not directly say "We need to start hating trans people more," while ignoring calls to end genocide or institute free healthcare.

Data on this is based on polling, and varies a lot, which makes the data flawed. The usually cited figures in what I could find put self-reported participation at between 15 and 26 million.

Of course, people could be lying or exaggerating how much they "participated". But even if we half the low-end estimate, it still puts the George Floyd uprisings as the largest mass action in American history by a wide margin.

I mean, the answer is kind of in your post. 2020 BLM was the largest set of protests in the history of the country. There would be massive amounts of pushback from everyday people.

I actually think a lot of this stuff is best thought of through the lens of moral panic, in that the subject matter is almost arbitrary because it's being used as a vehicle to express a deep-set anxiety about society. Another helpful connection here is how "sissy hypno" porn has been latched onto by anti-trans fascists as a demonstration of how the internet is "corrupting" children or whatever.

I'm sure right-wing spaces have had their own weird debates about it, but when I see people panicking about gooning in leftist spaces, I assume it comes from a sense of unease about the easy accessibility of pornography and how it might affect us. I have a much longer rant about how I think that is picking the wrong target to critique, but I should probably stop posting about gooning lol

I cannot emphasize enough that you are 100% correct and that some of the people assuming that there are large groups of people actually living out this niche fetish are on this website with us.

goon (v):

1. to masturbate
2. to near orgasm while masturbating but delay climax. see edging
3. to practice a sexual fetish in which one consumes internet pornography that portrays the viewer as a "porn addict" who cannot stop themselves. see hypno