Hello guys, I hope that you’re all doing well, I found out about this place through my friend, you might know him as Kirby so let’s just call him that. We all know that the internet is a wasteland as far as leftist spaces go and that’s the reason he was on this website for years in the first place.
As far as I know he was banned many months ago for some reason(he didn’t tell me, he just told he was banned and gave up on it), but since then he doesn’t have a leftist space to go since reddit pretty much purged those some time ago and the same thing on other social media, left is dead in real life here and not to mention constant western oriented content, comments and news, it got particularly intense lately.
During the recent events in the past few months, Kirby is on downward spiral and his sanity is worrying me. Almost every time we met he had unhinged rants about western white people, how he wants Yellowstone to explode and destroy United States after every non-western is evacuated, how he wants to watch cartels execute white Americans, especially republicans, how he personally wants to kill every western and western-aligned leader starting with American presidents and Erdogan and is cheering on NATO infighting over Greenland. Being a leftist, I also heavily dislike the west, but I wouldn’t want a nuclear war or volcanic cataclysm to take place because of it, he was always hating on west, but never said stuff this unhinged, stuff that I wrote isn’t even scratching the surface of everything he said. When he’s on PC and not on the internet, he’s playing GTA V and constantly killing cops and in the past few weeks downloaded probably every single game where you can kill American soldiers.
His most recent rant which I had to listen to was 3 days ago and it was about how ‘‘westerners destroyed/ruined Godzilla’’, it went on and on for an entire hour however unbelievable that sounds and it was… interesting to say the least… Certainly more so than his usual constant rants about vampires in western media. I’m not into Godzilla and I just casually watched a couple of movies some years ago and so I didn’t understand more than half the stuff he said.
He has a brother and sister, I’ve been hanging around with his brother almost just as much as with him during school and he’s pretty much the same in opinions except he’s level headed and doesn’t have bursts of anger. His older sister also shares same opinions, is extremely LGBT phobic, goes on rants and introduced him to Terrifier movies, so that’s all you need to know about her sanity. So family isn’t going to help in this in any way.
I know him since 2012, we grew up together and am extremely saddened to see him go from a silly guy with dark humor to this… Since he’s been here for years, you probably know how he was online unlike me, so please, If you have some advice or any way to help, to bring him back and talk to him, tell me, why did this happen to him all of a sudden.
Thank you in advance.
I agree. Although his idea of sex was questionable, a permanent ban is too long for a user who has made plenty of fine contributions; I think that five months is long enough for him to learn his lesson. I wouldn’t trust him with moderator privileges again, but as an ordinary user we should give him a second chance. Undo the ban.
He definitely deserves a respite from this. And from what I’ve read in reasons he was banned, I can say that even though he said all the stuff I stated and can be intense, he isn’t and was never transphobic nor LGBT phobic in general.
I don’t want this thread to turn into a fight, but I feel I have to address one piece of your comment here: yes, Kirby has some trans- and intersex-phobic beliefs. You are not in a position to say he doesn’t, when his own words show so clearly that he does.
Let me make a slightly broader point: people who are not themselves marginalized have huge blindspots about the marginalization they do not themselves experience.
As a white person, I’m sure I have blindspots regarding race, much as I’ve tried to learn and be better about racial issues than I was raised to be. If a comrade told me I had said something racist, the correct response from me isn’t “nuh-uh, I’m not a racist”, it’s “oops, I have some brainworms to unlearn, thanks for pointing that out to me”.
Same thing with Kirby here. He, his brother, and now you have all said “Kirby isn’t transphobic”. But he sure does have some trans- and intersex-phobic beliefs that he is apparently unwilling to examine.
Honestly, I’ve seen people get away with saying far, far worse things on other social media.
Just because people can be bigoted shitheads without consequence on other social media does not mean Lemmygrad should allow bigotry from its users!
In fact I would say it’s the opposite, Lemmygrad should (and almost always does) hold itself to a much, much higher standard than other social media, because as Marxist-Leninists we want our analysis to be correct and we want marginalized comrades to feel comfortable in this space. If queerphobia goes unchallenged here, queer people will leave. So I’m quite glad that queerphobia isn’t tolerated here.
(But I’m fine with Kirby being allowed to come back, as long as he is able to shut the fuck up about queer and intersex people. See my other comment in this thread)
I was not arguing that there should be no consequences for bigotry, only that a permanent ban might be a little too long in this case. Even so, I am tempted to delete my reply anyway because I’m embarrassed that I annoyed innocent people with my poorly thought out comment.
Especially Twitter, vile stuff is happening there since Elon Musk brought it a couple years back.