TL;DR: Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We’re moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything Ruud!
I’m excited to announce some big changes for our Vegan Home Cooks. As many of you know, Lemmy has been our platform of choice and we are hosted on the largest Lemmy instance lemmy.world. However, it’s time for us to evolve and move to our own instance. Let me explain why.
Lemmy.world, while a significant player in the Lemmy universe, has diverged in its vision and management from what we seek in a platform. The admins there have different political and operational views that don’t align with our goals. This is no slight against them; it’s just a matter of different paths.
It’s important to recognize that Lemmy is, at its heart, a passion project. Developed by talented individuals driven by their ideals rather than corporate goals, it operates on a scale that’s more hobbyist than mass-market. This has its charms, but it also means that development isn’t as rapid as one might expect in a more commercial environment.
The thing is, this approach works for many in the Lemmy community. The developers, supported by donations, have been content with this pace and scale. Even major instances have been okay with this grassroots, community-oriented approach. For a platform born out of a communal ethos rather than a corporate one, this isn’t surprising.
However, things started shifting when Reddit made some API changes. Suddenly, Lemmy was thrust into the spotlight as a potential drop-in replacement for Reddit. This influx of users, many with expectations shaped by the slick efficiency of corporate tech, put an unprecedented strain on the platform and its developers. Imagine, a small, community-funded team suddenly dealing with the demands of 50,000 new users. It was a clash of cultures and expectations.
Lemmy.world stepped up during this influx. Run by volunteers, they took a more corporate approach to manage the surge. Their rapid growth brought them under the spotlight, attracting both hackers who exposed major flaws and users who demanded rapid scaling and development.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. There’s a growing rift between the Lemmy developers and the team at lemmy.world. The developers, whose political views differ significantly from many in the Western tech sphere, run lemmy.ml with a distinct set of principles. The arrival of a large number of new users, many with different viewpoints, led to tensions and even bans.
This situation has led to a split within the community. A group of developers, frustrated with the direction and pace of Lemmy, are creating Sublinks – a Lemmy-compatible platform. Their plan? To eventually replace Lemmy, particularly on large instances like lemmy.world, effectively outmoding the original platform.
So, where does this leave us? We’ve been observing these developments and have concluded that the best way forward for our community is to establish our own Lemmy instance. This move will allow us to build a space that aligns with our values and needs, free from the external pressures and conflicts affecting the larger Lemmy ecosystem.
This is a big step, but it’s one that opens up exciting opportunities. We’ll have more control over our platform’s direction and be able to create an environment that truly reflects our community’s spirit and needs. Please search and subscribe to !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org on your instance to cache it on your instance so we can get visibility. We’re moving to our own hosting. Thanks for everything @ruud@lemmy.world, you and your team have been a gracious host.
Yeah, the Left is dead in America. Most people here don’t understand basics about politics or history, and the language almost feels intentionally manipulated to prevent understanding. “Liberal” only means “the left” to most people, and the idea that liberal could mean anything else is suspicious and considered wrong. The idea that “conservatives” are also under the banner of liberalism is also not commonly understood here.
Anyway, interesting. Thanks for the articles!
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Yes, I’m also a “left of liberal” person, and also not a tankie (not a “Marxist-Leninist”, Maoist, etc.).
Generally I like labels like “libertarian socialist”, or what Lenin would have pejoratively called “left communist”. I find inspiration in Chomsky, Bookchin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, etc.
In the U.S. I get the sense that most vegans are liberals (in the American sense of generic social liberalism, rather than the broader global sense of seething reactionary capitalist, though they are often more similar than not), but it’s not uncommon to find a consistent radical niche among vegans in the U.S. (sorta like in the punk subculture, though less so with vegans).
Chomsky isn’t far from a “tankie” given his support for Putin’s narrative regarding the invasion of Ukraine.
Sorry, I haven’t heard about this; do you have a source where I could follow-up?
Generally I think of “tankie” as a pejorative for those supporting the Soviet Union in their authoritarianism (literally supporting the Soviet tanks that crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution). “Authoritarian” Marxism is rather broad, so maybe I would feel a Maoist, Leninist, or Trotskyist could be a tankie depending on how they relate to those views.
It is strange to me that tankies stan for Putin, considering Russia is no longer even pretending to be Marxist.
I have seen Chomsky provide some pretty bad arguments on various issues, and I don’t entirely agree with him on everything. I have noticed Chomsky consistently takes an antagonistic position against the U.S. and the West that I broadly agree with, and it’s a complicated position to take because in global conflict there is a notion that there are two sides and one of them is good and the other bad. To go against the U.S. is often to appear to be supporting the “wrong” side. In some interviews during the pandemic Chomsky condemned the U.S. and the West for hoarding vaccines and praised China for working to provide vaccines for the countries in the Periphery.
There is something to be said about Putin responding to U.S. violations of previous agreements and needless antagonizing of Russia that doesn’t require we agree fully with Putin’s narrative. This isn’t just a tankie position, as it is a position I have heard articulated in peace conferences by professional philosophers who were clearly critical of the Ukraine invasion but still wished to contextualize the conflict in the broader post Cold War world where the U.S. had a chance to sustain peace but choose needless provocation anyway. It seems unfair to not to call out the U.S. for those provocations, and the predictable resulting conflicts, but that’s not the same as saying Putin is justified or that his narrative is worth supporting.
I also admit I just have not done the kind of reading on the situation to be able to properly evaluate or defend these kinds of claims, so I apologize for not being able to speak with any real substance on the issue. I know it’s an important conflict, but a lot has been going on with me personally and there is only so much space I can dedicate to education, especially education on difficult topics such as war.
Either way, when I say Chomsky is an influence, I mean this broadly and not specifically that I endorse all of his viewpoints.
Chomsky has spoken against the gay rights movement as creating too much division among the working class, for example, while my life personally has been deeply impacted by the gay rights movement and I think his evaluation might be a bit off. I can be sympathetic to the point he makes, but I think he is too quick to dismiss the significance of these social movements.
I am an ethical vegan and Chomsky has responded to questions about ethical veganism with fallacious whataboutism reasoning, essentially arguing it’s not a cause worth engaging in critical consumerism and boycotts over because there are larger and more pressing issues. I used to be caught in that whataboutism thinking myself, but what I eventually realized is that being a vegan for me did not take away from any other cause or purpose, and was in most cases not even an inconvenience, and is something that increases enjoyment and health in my life as well as being a minimally better choice ethically. Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, since I already cooked most of my meals, but I can say being a vegan seemed most impossible right before becoming a vegan. After a month or two I realized veganism wasn’t much of a sacrifice at all, but to the contrary resulted in a kind of renaissance in my cooking (translating to more enjoyable meals, and much better health).
Authoritarianism is what it is no matter the label, so that’s what I meant by comparing him to the tankies. Putin’s views often revolve around the idea of the greatness of the Soviet Union, which also explains his intent to rebuild it by force. Chomsky’s position on Ukraine is easy to find with a simple search for “Chomsky Ukraine”. Personally, I like this response to his talking points which echo Putin’s.
As noted there, the agreements you mentioned are essentially made up. A dictator like him doesn’t need to be triggered to act. Look up the role of the Russian FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings that helped his rise to power, shortly followed by his hostile takeover of the independent media station NTV. Another highlight of those years was the inaction and censorship related to the Kursk disaster, clearly showing that from the very beginning, Putin cared only about power, not the people. We can go on and talk about the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow, the 2005 and 2006 killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya and others to no end, but let’s just focus on the first year. Would you argue that in the first year of Putin’s presidency or even before it, the US managed to somehow wrong him and turn him into a dictator? That would be wild, especially given that Yeltsin reportedly picked Putin as his successor specifically over his work in the KGB in order to protect himself and his family. Then if you really want to attribute any of it to the West, go farther back, into Putin’s own memories from his KGB work in Dresden and his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He expected order but that was ruined by the demonstrators, resulting in the revolution. Even from this event alone, it’s easy to explain his reaction to all the revolutions in the post-Soviet countries, be it Georgia or Ukraine, which were his first targets for the invasions.
Yes, I agree the heart of what it means to be a tankie is to be authoritarian socialist of some stripe; I think that’s precisely why I don’t find the label fitting to Chomsky, given the whole of his work and the kind of political advocacy he has engaged in.
Thank you for the link to the response to his talking points.
As I have said, previous to this discussion I have not known anything about Chomsky’s view on Ukraine.
I did find this, from April 2022, Noam Chomsky: A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
From this I get the broad sense that Chomsky does not side with Putin nor does he support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is hardly saying much, since seething reactionaries like Jordan Peterson have said similar things, decrying the invasion of Ukraine while defending and rationalizing Russian interests.
This has long been a problem with the Left since the main geopolitical opposition to the U.S. and Western Imperialist countries have been problematic Marxist-Leninist authoritarian countries like the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.
Though ironically Chomsky was also decried is an Imperialist and liberal for supporting U.S. intervention in Syria to support the Kurdish movement in Rojava, so he has committed sins in both directions (against Russian interests, and for, apparently).
From the May 2022 Open Letter responding to Chomsky’s position there are many claims of positions Chomsky takes in his interviews, but the only quote they provide is about Crimea. Sure, maybe he is wrong about the people of Crimea supporting Russian annexation considering the claims made by the Ukrainians that dispute the Crimean referendum that Chomsky may have been alluding to by his comment. Hard to say, but I at least understand why people might bristle when Chomsky says “Crimeans apparently do like [being off the table].”
It seems to me there is a lot of work to do to sort through all the claims and counter-claims and evaluate evidence and so on.
I can suspect Chomsky is not likely to come out of that entirely clean, and I can understand to a Ukrainian that anything less than full, uncritical support is betrayal enough. War creates a stark psychological reality for the victims; it is for Ukrainians an issue of survival and all this hemming and hawing about larger geopolitical issues and Leftist ideological commitments will just come across as hypocritical to supposed Leftist values, and compromising to the pragmatic goals of resisting the Russian invasion which is pressing, immediate, and traumatizing. It reminds me of Che Guevera who summarily executed a suspected traitor, and was surprised when people were shaken by this. His reality had adjusted to war-time, and he had become so pragmatic he had stopped caring about due process or rights. This is the reality the Ukrainains are in, and we should understand this and be sympathetic to the on-going genocide.
I don’t have the time or space to educate myself on this issue, and I am sorry for that. It may be that Chomsky is like other famous leftists who have taken compromising positions in the past.
Coming to mind for me is Howard Zinn who was so bent on criticizing the U.S. that he amplified Nazi propaganda about the Dresden fire-bombings. I don’t think that made Zinn a Nazi or a Nazi collaborator, nor do I think it undermines his humanistic principles or overall project as a historian. I do think it is unfortunate, that it weakened him as a figure, and so on. I see Chomsky similarly. In his attempt to attack the U.S. he can come too close to defending authoritarian regimes. (I don’t know whether that’s true with Ukraine, it’s just sounding like it from what you are telling me; I’ve had the thought previously about his support of China.) Still, I think in the context of his ideological commitments those compromises make sense even if they are flawed, problematic, or simply built on lies that are convenient to authoritarians. The politics are messy and none of the sides are morally righteous even though that’s not how it feels.
I do not expect figures like Chomsky to be right about everything. We could be having a similar discussion right now about how Kropotkin is a whatever-disparaging-term-you-wish because he supported Western entry into World War I.
Some figures might be more compromised by others, but I don’t think Chomsky or Kropotkin are compromised to the point of figures like Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin who each proclaimed ideals of communism and did much more to destroy those ideals.
Still, I am sympathetic to criticizing Chomsky where he is wrong, I just don’t have the time to figure out exactly what sins he has committed with regards to Ukraine, as plentiful as those sins may be.
What I get from it is the same thing as enlightened centrism. The Trump-style position of “very fine people on both sides”. The kind of spineless response that only enables the fascists, as they’re the ones to force their views on everybody unless clearly and consistently opposed. Another example? “I’m not racist but”, because that’s exactly the structure of his response at your link. He spent just a bit on criticizing the invasion only to spend 95% of the time on echoing Putin’s narrative of it being related to the expansion of NATO, the US, and some made-up promises (most recently reiterated in Putin’s interview to Tucker Carlson). Also worth noting that for Putin, the kind of wishy-washy “all sides bad” response is precisely the goal of the many years of influence operations, as exemplified by the trolls from Olgino posing and organizing US demonstrations as both Blue Lives Matter and BLM, pro- and anti-Muslim activists, among other things (documented at the same link with reliable sources like The Washington Post).
Hey, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but maybe I can come back another time when I can respond properly? I already compared Chomsky’s response to right-wing responses, and I feel like parts of my response are getting ignored and the claims being made are getting a bit out of hand given the context. At this point it feels like communication isn’t happening between us, and usually that’s a sign that this isn’t going anywhere helpful, for either of us.
I want our time together to be mutually useful. I’m not here to defend Chomsky, I don’t even agree with Chomsky on many points, as I’ve already tried to communicate. I just can’t spend the time unpacking claims that he’s a tankie, an enlightened centrist, committing “both-sides” errors, etc. I feel like I mentioned casually that I’m a leftist and a libertarian socialist and now we’ve gone down this rabbit-hole about how Chomsky is actually maybe kinda like a tankie or like Trump or Tucker Carlson because he criticizes the U.S. and NATO handling of the situation with Russia (and maybe worse things than that, to be charitable to your view).
I hear what you’re saying, and I’m not really saying you’re wrong, I just don’t want either of us to keep wasting our time on communication that is not working.
At this point I can’t tell how you are trying to relate to me or what you think my position is in all of this.
EDIT: I’m saying this because I assume you and I have no major disagreement, just want to make sure you’re not feeling hostility towards me and that we’re good.