in case anyone missed it over the weekend:

[Gast]

in case anyone missed it over the weekend:

the new, improved Fosstodon dot org platformed a fash mod again.

people had to raise the alarm over him again, and he stepped down of his own accord before he could be held accountable again.

the story in brief is that a couple of whistleblowers found that volunteer moderator Anachron had posted a... let's say, questionable entry on his personal blog. Anachron since deleted that post - but, well, thankfully for us (though perhaps not so for your psyche), nothing is ever truly deleted from the Internet.

an archive of the post can be found here: https://archive.is/vreBu

last night, instance owner Gina stated that, in response to the alarm raised over this post, Anachron had decided to step down. she further clarified that she had read the post before accepting his offer to volunteer(!) and thought that it was A-okay.

Anachron then posted a follow-up to his first blog post, the format of which I'm sure will surprise nobody who's used to how white-boy techbros behave when called out on their shit: painting himself as the victim of a harassment mob hell-bent on shoving "their political views" into "a platform full of... smart people with a lot of passion and amazing ideas."

you can read that second blog post here: https://blog.cron.world/article_13.html

[Gast]

those of us who have been around places on the Internet where we've had to interact with "enlightened, objective centrists" with any sort of regularity will recognize a whole bunch of dogwhistles from these posts.

in fact, my initial reaction when reading the first one was something along the lines of, "2013 called; they want their crypto-fascism back."

for whose who haven't, though, and who might be inclined to believe the fiction that someone actually can strike a balance between the "far left" and "far right," here's how this shit usually goes:

1) people whom Enlightened Centrist (EC) perceive to be "the far left" repeatedly demand the bare minimum of EC; for example, that he stop using slurs, or do the work to unlearn some bigotry or another.

2) EC complains about "the intolerant left" and how everyone on The Far Left is so mean to him.

3) EC goes running into the arms of the far right, who soothe his ego through informing him that, yes, he was in fact bullied by The Intolerant Left.

4) EC eventually takes the position of, "well, the Far Left bullied me with their woke political correctness, so I guess I'm far right now."

the above pipeline works as effectively as it does because, ultimately, "enlightened centrism" isn't about centrism - it's about validating the EC's (who is usually, but not always, an economically privileged cishet white boy) self-image that they're some sort of highly educated philosopher-king, rather than someone trying to shelter their own fragile internal narrative.

except these people always, without fail, end up allying with the fash, because the fash not only demand nothing of them, but also actively validate that internal narrative. they are special, they are a philosopher king, and their having been "bullied" is a demonstration of how the women, queers, and Black and brown folks keep people like them from true greatness.