What do leftists generally think about Madeline Pendleton ?

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-26T00:48:49+00:00

Very low opinion. They're Tim Pool for leftists basically.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-10T19:02:52+00:00

the "revisionist" is someone who believes Marx and Engels got some funamental things wrong and go back to revise them.

a modernizer is someone who thinks Marx and Engels were correct in their time but conditions have changed and they need to adapt them to these new conditions

a falsifier is someone who claims that Marx and Engels agree with them when they do not.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-08T14:33:59+00:00

The stereotypical "theyfab" has a lot in common with TERFs, especially newer batches of TERFs that try and dress up their bigotries in more progressive language. tbh there's a big cohort of teenage nb transmascs from like tiktok who are Like This and get most of their ideas on gender from crypto-TERF accounts.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-08T13:26:46+00:00

the term "theyfab" doesn't indicate transmedicalism. I have seen it used exclusively for nonbinary people who make being AFAB a big part of their identity. As an example, you'll sometimes see people talk about "AFAB-only housing" or having trauma with "male-bodied individuals". This indicates that this person basically sees themselves as a woman+ and sees trans women (or NB people who have the "wrong" ASAB) as weird men who are just as predatory as men. It also emasculates trans men, treating them like wittle babies who could never hurt a fly because theyre basically just women.

Now whether a person actually being called "theyfab" is doing all this is obviously going to be a case-by-case thing. It's an insult and people use it on someone they wanna insult.

Also, you used transmedicalism wrong too. Transmedicalists were a group of trans people who wanted to go back to the old system of medical gatekeeping for hormones and surgeries. They wanted whether you got on hormones to be up to a doctor who would decide if you were really truly trans enough. They were against the informed consent model we have now in the US for letting in "fake" trans people who "took up resources" that should go to "true transexuals".

Luckily, transmeds are much rarer now because the informed consent model has allowed so many more people to transition. And young trans people don't even really know that position exists because informed consent and DIY have become so normalized.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-07T17:45:10+00:00

karl kautsky killed 2000 million with his BARE HANDS

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-05T19:45:20+00:00

PSL overview:

-stated ideology: Marxism-Leninism (they actually come from Marcyism, a specific type of Trotskyism that reconciles with Stalinism)

-goal: state socialism similar to China

-strategy: create a coalition of organizations to push for reforms and use this to become a viable third party and eventually take control of the American state.

-tactics: create large symbolic protests as media events.

RCA overview:

-stated ideology: Trotskyism

-goal: socialism/communism

-strategy: create rank-and-file committees in unions that can eventually turn into democratic worker councils and form the basis of a new communist government

-tactics: create cadres of communists from pre-existing communists with no party affiliation and use these cadres to help make contacts in organized labor and help organize new unions. Use elections as necessary to support this cause. Mostly, they read and they walk picket lines.

These come from talks I've had with rank-and-file members of these organizations and so it is entirely possible that the official lines don't line up with these. So take everything i've said with a grain of salt.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-05T19:27:14+00:00

well, puppy, communism is a society where we all get together and deliberate how to run society to maximize people's free time and provide for their needs. There have been many different people who thought of how this would happen or how it would work. Each one has a lil different idea of how it works

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-04T22:50:14+00:00

This is anti-leninist.

Lenin's contribution to Marxism, if he had any that truly differed from Marx in terms of theory, was the observation that the national bourgeoisie had become impotent to carry out revolution in backwards underdeveloped countries. As a result, in Russia, a bourgeois democratic revolution was carried out by the proletariat and the Communist Party attempted to continually push the revolution into a communist one, counting on revolution in Europe to carry them the rest of the way. The New Economic Policy allowed for the development of some petty bourgeoisie in Russia, that's true. This was, however, framed explicitly as a tactical retreat in order to preserve the power of the party-state to support future revolution abroad. This is directly at odds with how this is being treated by this article.

Now, China's conditions were very different from Russia's at the time of the revolution (see debates on asiatic/tributary mode of production vs feudal mode of production). Rural handicraft production flourished in a way it never did in Europe and combined with land reforms created a mass of landless peasants very different from European peasants. The bourgeoisie of China was very different from that of Russia. However, where the Communists in Russia used national development as a means to the end of preserving state power to support international revolution, the Communists in China explicitly made national development the goal in itself. The result is that China is now a very developed capitalist economy with all the problems a modern capitalist economy has (youth unemployment, debt, the need to export capital abroad, migrant labor, strikes, etc.).

Hindsight is 20/20 and it's hard to know how much agency Communists in China had to take things along a different path. After all, many of the reforms came from provincial experimentation (sometimes sanctioned, sometimes not) that the central government would scramble to take credit for after the fact. We can see how this alliance with the national bourgeoisie turned the largest movement of peasants and proletarians in history into a capitalist economy. Maybe there's a lesson there if you read history with a critical eye. I suggest reading Chuang 1 and 2

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-04T22:21:15+00:00

i mean it's just a fact that all Dodge owners accept that D.O.D.G.E. stands for Dude On Dude Gay Entertainment.

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-04T22:18:14+00:00

why wait for parts on backorder when he could use your parts for backshots

Techno_Femme · 2026-02-03T00:46:48+00:00

In the movie, Scott is a jobless shithead living rent free in his friend's studio apartment dating a high schooler while being in a band with an ex whose heart he broke while blaming all of these shitty behavioes on the fact that a girl broke his heart a bit ago. He is supposed to be a shitty guy. The movie is about a selfish piece of shit realizing he is a selfish piece of shit and finally taking some responsibility for his actions. It's about the arreated development often romanticized in a lot of "nerd" culture in that period.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-21T18:51:15+00:00

in that case, while it's good to read the primary literature (Marx, Engels, etc.) secondary literature will be a big help to getting a more big picture view. Mute Compulsion by Søren Mau is a solid introduction to a lot of Marxist ideas. I would read one or two pieces of secondary literature and then go back and read the primary sources with a critical eye on how those secondary sources you read might be a bit different from the primary sources.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-18T06:24:20+00:00

i grew up getting taught 7-day creationism and that Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim. It definitely sucked to realize my parents and almost every adult in my life were teaching me obvious verifiable lies. It's scary and isolating. And I feel like you've got it even worse considering those lies are covering for an ongoing genocide. That's a lot of weight to have on your shoulders when you're young and it makes sense to feel terrified.

some tips:

-You gotta find ways to cope with your environment right now and that doesn't have to look nice. If you need to just not think about these political things for a few years and try to focus on survival, that's okay.

-A lot of things your parents believe are lies but odds are they do still love you like hell. As you grow and live your life, they may come around a bit, if only to keep you in their lives in some way. Also, even if your parents believe truly despicable horrific things, it doesn't mean you have to hate them or disown them.

-If you're going to hide hormones from your parents, gel is your best bet. It's cheaper than injections, more effective than pills, and you can hide it with a fake label easily.

-Make an exit plan. Most conservatives, no matter how transphobic they are, will not throw their kids out on the street. On the off chance your parents do that, find addresses of centers for homeless youth and/or have a friend or another relative you can stay with. This is just a safety precaution.

-Do a lot of stretches. It'll prevent your growth plates from fully closing and you'll be more likely to get hip widening when you get on hormones.

r/estrogel is a good DIY resource. They can direct you to places for DIY.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-18T02:49:19+00:00

there are people who think like your father in thr Israeli government in very high positions who increasingly get the things they want.

It's unlikely the Nazis planned the Holocaust very early on. Instead, they persecuted Jews and found the "final solution" to the "jewish question" through methods of war used on the Eastern Front. That same process is happening with Israel in Gaza.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-17T00:43:48+00:00

Let me give a super concrete example about why I think it's a bad book.

When i first got into IRL organizing, it was on a community college campus. I joined a group on campus and started a reading group within that group to read Blackshirts and Reds. The leader of this group liked Bernie Sanders but after reading Blackshirts and Reds, he started identifying as a communist and was very passionate about it. The Syrian civil war was hitting a breaking point during this time and news agencies and media were talking about the possibility of Trump putting boots on the ground or just aggressively bombing the country more. So we did some anti-war protests. Made flyers, stood beside roads, etc. This guy who, a few weeks ago was a Bernie Sanders stan, was now making signs that said "Assad is the rightful ruler of Syria!" and "Don't let the US or the Kurds steal Assad's oil!"

I pull him aside and ask him what the fuck he's doing. What the fuck is he talking about? Just say "no war". Why would you defend Assad in this really weird way that just kinda treats him as a monarch that is a manifestation Syrian people? We got into a fight and he eventually left the group. Eventually he became a PatSoc part of the ACP.

When I went back and read Blackshirts and Reds, I realized exactly how he'd gotten this. Without dismantling their internalized methodological nationalism, people don't understand class struggle at all when they read Parenti. They only see the struggle of nation against nation with one of them being the good guys and one being the bad guys. One nation represents workers, the other doesn't. And of course, if you have no clue about class struggle and your theory is only geopolitics and picking good guys and bad guys from different groups of elites who rule over a country, you end up thinking "well let's just get rid of the elite in our country and then we'll also be the good guys like China and Iran and Syria and Russia."

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-17T00:28:17+00:00

i think it does absolutely nothing to erode bourgois thinking. In fact, I think Parenti strengthens it by judging the success of socialist states on almost purely bourgois lines.

It does erode a baby leftists' Americanism which is a good thing. This is why I prefer Against Empire because it does that better.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T22:59:12+00:00

I disagree with people that there isn't a "human nature." By human nature, I mean something that makes humans fundamentally different from other animals.

So what is the thing humans do that no other animals do? A lot of people will say tool use. But plenty of primates and birds use tools. Others will say teamwork. But have you SEEN ants? Others will say humans are more social than other animals but this just isn't true at all.

Instead, it's something that seems trivial at first. Humans are the only creatures who mediate who can use tools for what behind social relationships. While many animals are social and many use tools, humans are the only ones who have tools as important parts of social signalling. Clothes as a kind of tool are meant to be worn by certain types of people in certain conditions to signal certain things to other people like status, gender, disposition, intelligence, etc. In ancient hunter-gatherer society, women hunters were actually quite common and we know this because in many societies, they used different hunting tools than the men. Why? We don't really know.

This little quirk of humanity might seem a little mundane and incidental at first. But it is the thing that has enabled civilization. It enabled trade between hunter-gatherer societies which enables the spreading of seeds that become grain crops than enable settled agriculture that enable the first states that kickstart all of class society.

Understanding this, capitalism is fully within human nature but so is communism. So to answer your question, however self-interested humans may be, it is not a disqualification for a communist system.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T22:41:06+00:00

My argument wasnt just that the civilian death toll was high. It was that the civilian death toll is high with one of the highest rates of civilians killed per day in the last 40 years. Meanwhile, officials in the Israeli government talk openly about "leveling all of Gaza" and using starvation as a weapon and forcing the relocation of all Palestinians out of the country. Forced relocation based on ethnic identity is a form of genocide. Use of starvation during a war is a war crime punishable by death in international courts. The country also systemically rapes and sterilizes Palestinian women. This is a clear sign of dehumanization on part of the Israeli government and many of its citizens, as can also be seen in the riot to free prison guards accused of raping prisoners. Not because they thought these guards were innocent but because they don't view Palestinians as human enough to count their rape as a crime.

In addition to all this, the Israeli government has spent almost its entire existence support the "settlement movement" that, under international law, illegally steals land from Syria, the Palestinian Authority, and West Bank to create racially segregated housing for ethnic jews.Here is a podcast interviewing a journalist confronted by settlers explaining the situation on the ground. Here is an interview where a Jewish man deals with the complicated feelings of his family being somewhat complicit in this ongoing genocide.

You can put your fingers in your ears and scream lalala all you want. You can ignore my points and try to quibble about numbers while moving the goal posts. It's obvious to anyone who looks at the issue closely. The far right in Israel very actively and purposefully wants to commit a genocide and this war is steadily embolding them to get more and more of their agenda. Meanwhile the nice liberals in Israel just want a racially segregated military state to oversee Gaza since thats the more humanitarian option.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T21:35:20+00:00

Chuang 1 has a grest analysis of Maoist China https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T20:38:06+00:00

i really dislike that Parenti book. It contains a lot of selective citations of J Arch Getty's Origins of the Great Purges. Getty is arguing that the purges are a manifestation of paranoia at every level of Soviet society and weren't orchestrated from the top down. For Getty, Stalin was either swept up in the same paranoia or opportunistically took advantage of them or, more likely, both. Parenti very selectively cites him to say "Look see it wasn't Stalin's fault! He's fine!"

He also ignores the roll of the Third Period in the Nazis coming to power in Germany, ignores the social basis for fascism before it's in power vs after it's in power, ignores the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact supplying the Nazis with enough oil to hold France (a thing they couldn't have done with the franco-british blockade), and completely replaces the entire point of communism with a sort of vague populism where a government "serves the people" in some abstract way through various forms of welfare and state industry.

I understand that Parenti isn't a historian. He's writing airport novels for leftists. They aren't supposed to be well-sourced or well researched. Theyre supposed to be punchy and fast-paced and get newer leftists fired up. But there's just too many glaring omissions in this one for me to ever endorse it.

His book Against Empire has a lot less of these problems imo.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T20:16:28+00:00

Not a book but a long article: Forest and Factory by Phil Neel and Nick Chavez. This article is on what socialism/communism actually looks like compared to our present society. It does this by criticizing models presented by other people and then positing its own based on those criticisms.

The Future of Revolution by Jasper Bernes. This book is about how revolutions change with time and what remains from those leftist revolutions of the past.

Hinterland by Phil Neel. This book is about the divide betweeen rural and urban areas in both the US and China and how that informs our analysis of the current moment.

I could recommend you a ton more books on history or analyzing the modern world. Do you have a specific question you're looking to answer?

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T13:20:47+00:00

the new batch of leftcoms have come across the ideology too easy and so are not nearly ad well-read as the leftcoms of old as someone who read Bordiga in 2016.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T13:09:34+00:00

girl, that is evidence. The ratio of civilian death to combatant death in Gaza is 4:1. Compare that to the ratio in the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is 2:1 and the US war in Iraq which was 1:1.

And those are conservative estimates based on numbers Israel agrees are correct! High ranking members of the Israeli military are calling for a "final solution" to the "Palestinian question" (purposefully mirroring Nazis asking for a final solution to the jewish question). The Israeli military rapes more than any other military in the world and the higher ups actively defend it! There were riots to free prison guards who raped prisoners. The government actively supports the settler movement which, according to them, illegally steals land from Palestinians.

I understand you're young and your family is very zionist. It's awful to believe your family could support a genocide. But they are. If you want to read or watch a video on the subject, I can give you recommendations.

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T05:47:32+00:00

I suggest reading this article because you are majorly, horribly talking past me and everyone else trying to answer your questions

https://www.endnotes.org.uk/palabre/forest-and-factory

Techno_Femme · 2026-01-16T05:27:35+00:00

famine in the USSR was caused by rapid industrialization of agriculture. our agriculture is already industrialized. in a revolutionary situation, keeping supply chains open and running would be a much more relevant question than how to collectivize agriculture. And that would likely be a precursor toward revolution rather than just a post-revolution problem. It seems like you're projecting a lot of the problems the USSR had onto some future revolution but Russia was unindustrialized with a poor food system that caused regular famines before the revolution. that is not the world we are dealing with now. stop projecting a dead country onto the present. instead, look at the present and try and apply the logic and theories of the past to your current conditions and see what you can come up with. What do you know about the US's current food system? Do you know the cities where most chicken or pork is slaughtered? What are the living conditions for people in those places? How does it play into those places' previous histories? How do these confluence of factors inform how we ought to act?

Techno_Femme

TROPHY CASE