CriticalResist8

I recently cracked my 3ds (which is super easy to do now that they've stopped updating it) and you can use it to play any previous generation games (up to PS1). Wish I knew that before I bought a purpose-made console lol

I have a huge catalog of games but since I'm switching out my SD card for a bigger one, I'm looking to basically just download whatever seems interesting. What's your favorite 3ds and nds games? (Please don't say Pokémon)

Self-promotion is seen on the internet as underhanded and suspicious but I really don't mind it when it comes to creating links between communists. What's the difference between self-promotion and other promotion? Submitting a link to your own work is bad, but asking your friend to do it is good? That doesn't make any sense.

This is why I've been pro-self-promotion for years, and allow it in every community I've moderated as far back as antifastonetoss on Reddit. There we even worked with antifascist artists to promote their work on the subreddit.

The only limitation I would put on it is that you have to interact with the questions and comments to some extent. But that's about it. This creates trust and is the basis of social media: interaction (it it only went one way then you'd act more like a TV or radio channel).

Stamping down on self-promotion only shows that you're scared of being one-upped or eclipsed as a mod. We rarely have had issues with self-promotion, and if it helps other comrades boost their work, then that's great.

Reddit is terrible for this. Most subreddits hate self-promotion of any kind and will remove your posts over it, or even ban you from the start. Why? Your community doesn't care that someone posted their own work. They will open the post, comment and vote on it by themselves. Why do you need to be so controlling? It's ludicrous to remove a post that has say 15 upvotes, signalling people like it, just because you want to control the flow of information in your subreddit.

I've honestly rarely had excesses. Excesses are hard to define but like I said, I do expect you interact at least a little bit with the community. This lets us know a little bit more about you and vet you organically. I've had on Discord a person who only wanted to recruit for their party and never interacted with anything outside of that. They would only talk about their party and post links to their newspaper, ignoring any question pinged to them that wasn't about their party. That was fine for a long time and we didn't really moderate on it either, but eventually other members started feeling like they were just using us and weren't interested in the work we were doing. When we brought this up to them they simply stopped using the server but remained in it.

In this case yes it can feel suspicious, like you're just using an existing community. But it also allowed us to learn more about their party and their work.

And we've had self-promoters who didn't really interact on Lemmygrad too, but eventually the community organized to discuss what to do with them, forcing them to reply. Like I said the only limitation I would put on self-promotion is that you at least show you're not just spamming everywhere.

But even then people will end up discussing your posts regardless of mod involvement. They will ask questions under the post and others will reply. So what's the actual problem? That the OP is posting and not interacting? Why does that matter?

Really the only thing that should matter is why they are posting and where to. We had someone here who posted to a sort of incel blog if you remember and eventually took action against that. If it's a website I don't know then I might ask questions and need an answer from OP, but if it's a source I know then what's the harm?

Basically think of it this way. In lib spaces people willfully and readily post to the New York Times, Wikipedia, CNN, etc. We don't ask them if they're self-promoting. These organizations have a huge contingent of fans ready to post their links everywhere at a moment's notice. When you don't have that, you have to do it yourself. The first one is apparently not a problem, the second is almost always seen as one.

This is the contradiction most places, especially Reddit, find themselves in. They create large communities and it's super easy to get noticed on Reddit because the work of creating a following has already been done. But they are able to create this community because people post in it and interact with it, leading to more people joining it. Without these members posting, they would have nothing to moderate. It then leads to another contradiction between moderatorship and community as they have opposite interests.

This is also why we rely on community self-management on Lemmygrad and often take time to respond to controversies on the platform, to soften that contradiction. We can't make it disappear, but we can soften its effects.

When we think of "criticism and self-criticism", we often think of criticism we've been brought up to live with: the kind that simply seeks to destroy, or the kind that's naturally antagonistic.

It took me a while to truly understand what criticism means for communists; incidentally, working on ProleWiki helped me a lot with that.

Criticism is through other words the process of struggle (again a word that seems strong but that you might be more familiar with).

Criticism is not necessarily meant to be aggressive or even find faults. This, in my opinion, is actually counterproductive and even a deviation from what criticism is for us communists. You might know this better as constructive criticism.

Likewise, self-criticism is not necessarily you belittling yourself and listing all your bad traits.

I think we look at the pictures of struggle sessions in the early PRC, and we look inwardly at what the word "critique" means to us in late-stage capitalism, and we kinda form a nebulous idea of what that is and run with that. After all, "communists ruthlessly criticize all that exists", right?

I think however that criticism can be done with care, and is more productive that way. This is because the purpose of criticism isn't, like I said earlier, to necessarily find faults with what you did or what your org does.

A mistake I see often is to think of criticism as your chance to start blasting whatever woes you can think of, and the other party has to sit there and take it because you're doing it marxistly.

Criticism has to be productive and lead to action; it breaches from theory to practice. Practice then makes good on the criticism, changes the state of things (dialectics, if you are not at the stage you can tell readily yet), and then further criticism can happen.

The point of criticism, the whole reason we are doing struggle sessions in the first place is precisely to enact the best praxis we can, and do so quickly. We are not in a position right now as communists that we can build a party in a hundred years. We need to build it now, and for that we need effective praxis. This is the whole point of doing struggle sessions and crit and self-crit.

This is something both parties in a struggle session must first understand and mutually acknowledge. The critic is not here to disparage your efforts, but to help them reach their higher potential. You are not here either to shield yourself from all criticism on the basis that you're too proud to hear it or that your successes outweigh your shortcomings -- I prefer *shortcomings * to "faults" or "issues". I also prefer challenges instead of saying something is impossible; a challenge can be overcome.

Some criticisms we've dealt with on ProleWiki for example was super simple. It wasn't even a disagreement, which can happen sometimes and doesn't mean your idea is necessarily wrong or misguided, just that it's perhaps not fully realized.

Sometimes, we offer up ideas and then debate them in what I think is the ideal struggle session. Nobody necessarily disagrees or thinks "it's a stupid idea, why did you even bring that up, this'll never work": that would not be criticism, that would be cathartic bashing. A criticism has to offer a solution or, at the very least, seek improvement selflessly.

I myself have often debated ideas editors proposed not because I thought they wouldn't fit or we shouldn't follow up on them, but just trying to help them make sure they've covered all their bases and have thought about all questions before they proceed.

Thus the goal is to reach the full potential of our ideas so that we issue the best praxis once we get down to work, saving time and effort.

I'm talking about very practical critic self-crit here because that's mostly where I employ it, but this works also in more theoretically grounded struggle sessions, where you discuss strictly theory and which line is correct. By my own conclusion of what criticism is however, criticizing a party line that the party refuses to change (and calling attention to that fact) would not be criticism, but I think it is -- it is the most important criticism we can make as marxists, in fact. So remember that this is a model and not the final analysis.

The process of criticism acknowledges, weighs, analyzes, and then **acts. **

Acknowledge criticism that applies. The point is to make you stronger, even if it hurts to hear (it shouldn't if you follow the basis that it's done in good faith).

Then, weigh it: is this something we were aware of? How dangerous is it? How difficult would it be to overcome, and is there something more urgent we need to look at first?

Analyze before acting: what can we do about it with our current resources? Is it realistic to? Propose some solutions to the problem that was brought up.

And finally, deploy all of that to act on the criticism and improve. I guarantee you in one year, you'll have forgotten people made the criticism, but you'll remember forever that you did improve with it, and that you are in a much better position after it than before.

The dialectic between teacher and learner is one of great importance but is often misunderstood or, perhaps in more weighted terms, is not brought to its full potential by the teachers.

This permeates in the marxist environment, which is the only one I'm concerned with currently, where teachers do not realize their role and full capabilities as such. It remains by and large -- in my experience only -- as not a dialectic, but a unidirectional conveyance.

The teacher speaks, and the learner listens. This is the metaphysical model.

But are we not all being taught, and thus learning, at any time? From discussions I've had where I started in this metaphysical "authority" role of the teacher (a role most people, me included, subordinate themselves to rather easily as what they think a learner should be) and ended up learning more than I taught.

I may know dialectics well. But I may not know economics well. A learner is a fluid thing, it goes through stages back and forth. I teach dialectics to someone, and I learn economics from them. By asking their questions, they help me refine my understanding -- and capabilities to teach -- of dialectics further.

The teacher should explain, promote, make considerations. The learner should retain, evaluate and analyze.

This requires for the learner to understand that their role is not simply to nod along and retain everything from the authority, and for the teacher to be open to changing their mind and methods.

The dialectic (contradiction) is resolved when the session gives birth to a new third thing, in this case similarly to the "original" Ancient Greek dialectic, and both parties come out with a third new idea that did not exist previously. The learner has learned and taught, and the teacher has taught and learned in a way they both further their understanding of the topic.

It can then repeat with the learner being able to become a teacher (in any capacity) and the teacher having refined what they will say (and how) to the next learner.

I see the complete opposite too often; marxists that would rather confirm their biases, eschewing their own capabilities as teachers (and learners -- many think of themselves too highly to still be "learners") and completely smothering any potential their interactions may have had as a teaching opportunity, at least dialectically.

You see this most often on social media, where the order of the day is to make cheap jokes, quick "stream of consciousness" quips, and confirming one's own already formed beliefs.

In this role, they are being metaphysical (or at the very least undialectic). It's not bad for the sake of it and me being able to use the jargon; it's a malformed process because dialectic cannot take place, and cannot make things advance. Thus they remain stuck where they were exactly before: further confirming their belief that their tendency/ideas are the best, and working not to advance that tendency or idea, but to disprove that any other is good.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5045414

Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5045414

Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.

Follow-up to last week's article about how feudalism is misrepresented in a certain game.